AustLit

'Talking Sideways was composed from conversations which unfolded over several years between Abrunna elder Reg Dodd, and artist and writer Malcolm McKinnon, on Dodd’s ancestral land on Lake Eyre in South Australia. Told episodically in alternating voices, it is about this land, Finniss Springs, and its complex, turbulent history. Familiar episodes of white incursions into Aboriginal country—explorers, anthropologists, missionaries, pastoralists, miners, land battles, grog and associated violence—entwine with exceptions and twists particular to this place and its people. Most notable among these exceptions are Dodd’s grandparents, his Abrunna grandmother Nora Beralda, ‘a proper tribal woman,’ and Scottish pastoralist grandfather, Francis Dunbar Warren, who went to Finniss Springs in 1918. Their long and strong marriage created there for a time a rare and respectful exchange between the traditional owners and newcomers to this land. It is also an intricate mapping of this land by a traditional owner versed in its character and law, and a whitefella seduced by its beauty and its ways which have drawn him back for three decades.' (Introduction)