AustLit

'Aboriginal Australian author Kim Scott's True Country first novel, reveals the author's grappling with his Aboriginal identity amidst a community that has been deracinated, impoverished of its culture, thriving on reciprocity demanding welfare system and subjected to abominating ghettoization. The obvious reason being the corrosive assimilative workings of the white Australian nation-state. Driven by the zeal to unearth the spiritual truth/identity about this community and his self, Billy—the narrator sets out for a rummaging and recovers the meaning of true Aboriginal identity both at individual and community level. At the same time, as identity is internally heterogeneous, slippery, unstable and situational, true Aboriginal identity reclaiming remains a matter of strategic and subversive cultural resistance. While resisting white deracinating practices, the author discovers a 'true country'—a true Aboriginal identity— that could be realized beyond the modern truths in the world of 'Dreamtime reality'. It is this strategized cultural resistance to the assimilative white Australian nation-state, as is evident in the invective writing style of Scott, which I will highlight in this paper.' (Author's abstract)