AustLit

'Indigenous literature has played a vital role in the reconstruction of Australia’s colonial and postcolonial history, contributing to the perspective of those who were dispossessed of their land and culture. The new century has also been generous with captivating voices that have continued and refigured the tradition, giving it new and inexhaustible political and poetic strength. This essay focusses on Kim Scott’s Taboo, a text which gives physical space, and its emotional and collective implications, a central value. This value is preserved in the following pages of the novel where the physicality of places and the materiality of objects have intrinsic emotional value, articulating a real narrative function, capable of catalyzing the forces at play in the text. The evocative vigour of the images endowed with this special ‘materiality’ becomes one of the significant features of the novel, and one of the bases for its poetic power in terms of empathy and healing.'

Source: Abstract.