When I first picked up a copy of Jackson’s Track: A memoir of a Dreamtime place (Daryl Tonkin and Carolyn Landon, Viking 1999), I expected to find the life story of an Aboriginal woman. The striking cover photograph the 1940s of Euphemia Mullett in high-heeled shoes and light summer dress, standing beside a white man and his horse in a forest clearing suggested it, as did the reference to the dr ... (read more)
Alison Ravenscroft
Alison Ravenscroft is an academic whose work focuses on Australian neo-colonialism and gender in reading and writing practices as well as a practising Lacanian psychoanalyst. She is the author of The Postcolonial Eye (Routledge, 2016) and a co-founder of the National Indigenous Story Awards and Indigenous Story, an online Indigenous arts project.
Readers of Kayang and Me should not be lulled by the beauty of its prose or by its seemingly easy location within the now-familiar genre of indigenous life story. This book dislodges its white readers from positions of quietude or certainty, and takes us into a world marked by irredeemable loss – our own as well as Noongars’. Among other things, Kayang and Me points to the crucial things that ... (read more)