'A foreigner’s criticism provides the impetus for Amanda Webster to embark on a long-intended search for two former school friends – Aboriginal kids from the Kurrawang Mission near where she grew up in Kalgoorlie. As a child, Webster supposed Mission kids were well-cared for orphans, however growing awareness forced her to think otherwise. Over the years her questions accumulated: were her friends members of the Stolen Generations? What was life at Kurrawang really like? What are her responsibilities as a non-Indigenous Australian whose family’s privilege was built on stolen land? For an institution that existed for over two decades, Webster finds that Kurrawang was strangely undocumented. Nor can she find any trace of her former friends, including a young Aboriginal girl who went on a beach holiday with Amanda’s family. Then in 2012, Webster meets Gregory Ugle, an older brother of her former friend Tony. After a four-decade absence, Webster returns to her hometown with Ugle to reconnect with her former friends, and to piece together Kurrawang’s story through oral histories and local newspaper archives. Over several trips, a sometimes uneasy tension emerges with Ugle as both he and Webster inch towards a fragile reconciliation.' (Source: Publisher's website)
A Tear in the Soul is a fine example of creative non-fiction that unfolds a personal story but also advances our knowledge of Australian society, past and present. It is a nuanced contribution to the growing body of literature in which contemporary non-Indigenous Australians attempt to make sense of the history of white settlement and take responsibility for our own complicity in the past and current treatment of Indigenous peoples. In combining a personal quest to reconnect to her past with an exploration of 1960s Kalgoorlie and a moral self-examination, Webster has written a book in which story and idea interweave to engage and move us, even while we are forced to confront disturbing material.
(Introduction)
A Tear in the Soul is a fine example of creative non-fiction that unfolds a personal story but also advances our knowledge of Australian society, past and present. It is a nuanced contribution to the growing body of literature in which contemporary non-Indigenous Australians attempt to make sense of the history of white settlement and take responsibility for our own complicity in the past and current treatment of Indigenous peoples. In combining a personal quest to reconnect to her past with an exploration of 1960s Kalgoorlie and a moral self-examination, Webster has written a book in which story and idea interweave to engage and move us, even while we are forced to confront disturbing material.
(Introduction)
