'When Ruby Langford Ginibi was eight years old, her father collected his daughters from the Box Ridge mission and drove them to safety out of reach of the white authorities and the policy of removing Aboriginal children from their families. Today an established author and Aboriginal activist, Ruby travels back to her home in Bundjalung country to trace and record the history of her community, her roots. The reader is taken aboard on the journey home, down the backroads of northern New South Wales into the homes and conversations of cousins, aunties, and tribal elders. The experience is direct and the feelings are shared. Ruby Langford Ginibi writes with the humour, exuberance and unbending truth for which her first book, Don't Take Your Love to Town, won such renown.' (Source: UQP website: www.uqp.uq.edu.au)
'Travel has always been an important trope of settler literature, central not only to colonial displacement and dispossession but to postcolonial reimaginings of identity, gender, and place. However, it was not until the early twentieth century, after the rise of literary nationalism, that a nativist form of travel writing emerged in Australia. By mid-century, there was a more established tradition due to the introduction of motor touring and a post-war boom in mass migration and tourism. In the 1970s and 1980s, Australian travel writing was chiefly preoccupied with road stories, and with narratives of risk and adventure, while in the 1990s, Indigenous writers imagined new possibilities for healing through travel writing that sought to recover ancestral connections to language and land. Today, Australian travel writing is a burgeoning subject of academic enquiry, and in Australia, as elsewhere, there is a broadening rather than narrowing perspective of what constitutes ‘travel’ writing. Recently, an upsurgence of interest in mobility studies has raised new questions, not only about the experience of moving (and being moved), but about how different theories of im/mobility are central to the way travel is practised and prohibited, and sometimes undertaken reluctantly.'
Source: Abstract
In this paper, Ruby Langford 'Ginibi' talks about the many reasons as to why she wrote her autobiography.