The best books about "new" histories

I had the privilege of interviewing Tony Birch at Perth Festival 2020, just before COVID struck with force. I was deeply moved by The White Girl and felt so much for the characters, especially the matriarch, Odette, and her love for her granddaughter. Seeing the world through Odette’s eyes was a powerful way of exposing how prejudice, policing laws and the removal of children impacted Aboriginal communities throughout Australia. Tony spoke beautifully in our interview about the strength of the Aboriginal women in his family and how those experiences inspired the award-winning novel.

Kate Grenville explores colonisation and its impact on indigenous people through the eyes of settlers who are at times blind to their missteps – such as the removal of food crops that were important to the local Aboriginal population, the Dharug people of the Hawkesbury region. The vivid way Grenville exposes the brutality of the removal of Aboriginal people from their land will stay with me always. Grenville draws on her own family’s settler history to tell the story; aware of not being able to speak for the Aboriginal people’s experience, she includes only a few words of Aboriginal dialogue, with Long Jack, a massacre survivor, saying simply "My place" to communicate, in no uncertain terms, that the land belongs to him, not the settler he is talking to. The novel points to the silences in a family, and in a nation.

The Yield and my book came out about the same time. I loved reading this work by an Aboriginal author about a character whose name reminded me of a place where I spent much of my childhood, on a relative’s farm at Goondiwindi in western Queensland. The Yield is a beautifully written novel, with language at its heart. The way the reader is encouraged to feel the indigenous words, to roll them around in their mouth, and feel them with their tongue, is very powerful. There is a scene in this book of a tree falling over and exposing its roots, plus the bones of a massacre site. I will not forget this scene. 

I have just started reading this book (actually listening to it as an audiobook) and already it is one of my favourites. De Kretser is such an incredible writer. I found myself ‘rewinding’ the audiobook to hear sentences again and again. I lived with my young family in France in 2012 for the year, and De Kretser’s observations of French life are so (at times) cuttingly on point. I particularly loved the repetition of whether or not something was deemed interessant. "What is interesting about potatoes?" she asks. Her exposure of the historical French treatment of Algerians is woven into the Parisian narrative seamlessly, and at times shockingly. De Kretser is a very powerful, clever, and generous writer. 

The book provided instructive reading when I was researching my book. In particular, I was interested in Malouf’s way of approaching the story of colonisation in Australia through an ‘in-between’ character, Gemmy, modelled on a real-life ship’s boy cast ashore in northern Australia in the early nineteenth century. The boy is raised by Aboriginal people. He loses his mother tongue and, when confronted with white settlers, is treated as a ‘savage,' a theme the book explores through a range of points of view. Who are the true savages in the story was a question I was interested to pose in my own book.