From the award-winning author of Benang, and his Aunty Hazel, comes this monumental history of the south coast Noongar people of Western Australia. Kayang - meaning, respectfully, Old Lady - was born in 1925. Through her candid voice comes the story of her people and her country, interwoven with traditional tales.
Award-winning novelist Kim Scott and his elder, Hazel Brown, have created a monumental family history of the Wilomin Noongar people. Kayang & Me is a powerful story of community and belonging, revealing the deep and enduring connections between family, country, culture and history that lie at the heart of Indigenous identity.' (Source: Publishers website)
Reckoning with the Past : Family Historiographies in Postcolonial Australian Literature
Abingdon
:
Routledge
,
2018
17218286
2018
single work
criticism
'This is the first book to examine how Australian fiction writers draw on family histories to reckon with the nation's colonial past. Located at the intersection of literature, history, and sociology, it explores the relationships between family storytelling, memory, and postcolonial identity. With attention to the political potential of family histories, Reckoning with the Past argues that authors' often autobiographical works enable us to uncover, confront, and revise national mythologies. An important contribution to the emerging global conversation about multidirectional memory and the need to attend to the effects of colonisation, this book will appeal to an interdisciplinary field of scholarly readers. '
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'Jessica White examines eco-memoir in two examples: Tim Winton's Island Home (2015) and Kim Scott's and Hazel Brown's Kayang and Me (2005). She explores how memory can describe the loss of an environ-ment but also promote its recovery, and the implications for each writer's identity. Her chapter argues that, alongside science, literary expressions of memory have an important role to play in raising awareness of the sustainable use and protection of our environment.'
Source: Introduction (p.6).
'A young man - scarcely more than a boy - stands on a rock beside the deep sea. A whale surfaces next to him, almost within reach. I can't say if the boy knows the whale, but he knows of the whale: all his life he's watched families of them travel along this coast. Recently, he learned the words of one such journey.' (Publication abstract)
