An insight into the treatment and interactions of black, Aboriginal and other women with white society. The narrator highlights her and her fathers life as an Aboriginal sheep shearer. It also highlights the hardships they faced as a single parent family and Claire's experience of being taken away as an Aboriginal child by the policies of the day. The novel also describes her involvement in politics and working towards a better life for all Aboriginal people. (Published posthumously)
'Stories—fictional, biographical, and autobiographical—are one way in which we can imagine what it has been like to experience foster care in Australia. In this paper I look at the trends in stories told about foster care from the nineteenth century, across the twentieth, and into the early twenty-first century. While exploring these trends, I make some observations about the shift from fictional accounts where foster parents and foster children were heroic characters to often searing tales of hurt and trauma inflicted on children in foster care by violent women and men.'
Source: Abstract.
'Emerging in the second half of the twentieth century from the traditions of the oldest living cultures on earth - the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Australia - the Indigenous Australian novel makes a unique contribution to the history of the novel in its contemporary phase...' (Introduction)
