Cirrus@Austlit

'Geoff Page's Freehold: Verse Novel attempts to negotiate the different modes in which white and Aboriginal Australians connect to land and country and to counteract the forgetting of historical wrongs perpetrated against Aboriginal communities and 'justified' by white understandings of land ownership. Despite the back cover's claim that 'nothing is black and white', Page reveals that, like the Clarence river which repeatedly cuts into the novel, a sharp divide exists between black and white cultural understandings of land use. This divide in turn, serves to make Aboriginal culture transparent and invisible to white Australia. Page's verse novel attempts to narrow the gap a little.' (Introduction)