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Notes
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Dedication: For Robert Unghango and Mary Pandilow, who let me listen.
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Epigraph: We carry in our hearts the true country / And that cannot be stolen / We follow in the steps of our ancestry / And that cannot be broken. 'The Dead Heart' - Midnight Oil
(then why) ... this sense / of gain and loss, the now I am / not there, then, despite the giveaway / smile? I am born exile, or they / are tokens of infinity; and distance / like love is a necessary fiction. 'Distances' - Charles Boyle
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Other Formats
- Sound recording.
- Large print.
Works about this Work
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y
Polities and Poetics : Race Relations and Reconciliation in Australian Literature
Oxford
:
Peter Lang
,
2022
24390199
2022
multi chapter work
criticism
'A reconciliation movement spread across Australia during the 1990s, bringing significant marches, speeches, and policies across the country. Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians began imagining race relations in new ways and articulations of place, belonging, and being together began informing literature of a unique new genre. This book explores the political and poetic paradigms of reconciliation represented in Australian writing of this period. The author brings together textual evidence of themes and a vernacular contributing to the emergent genre of reconciliatory literature. The nexus between resistance and reconciliation is explored as a complex process to understanding sovereignty, colonial history, and the future of society. Moreover, this book argues it is creative writing that is most necessary for a deeper understanding of each other and of place, because it is writing that calls one to witness, to feel, and to imagine all at the same time.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
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Kim Scott's True Country as Aboriginal Bildungsroman
2016
single work
criticism
— Appears in: A Companion to the Works of Kim Scott 2016; (p. 25-36) -
The Form and Function of Narrative Perspective in Kim Scott’s True Country
2015
single work
essay
— Appears in: NEW : Emerging Scholars in Australian Indigenous Studies , vol. 1 no. 1 2015;'The floating, shifting narrative of Kim Scott’s first novel True Country (1993) is one of the most captivating elements of the text that explores contemporary modes of Aboriginality. The narrative of True Country does not simply move the story from event to event; it underpins the moral of the text itself. With shifting perspectives and an unwavering sense of hope, the narrative embodies Billy’s acceptance into the community of Karnama, the home of his grandmother.' (Publication abstract)
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Finding a Place in Story : Kim Scott’s Writing and the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project
2014
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 14 no. 3 2014;'In True Country, the narrator draws the reader close and says, “You listen to me. We’re gunna make a story, true story. You might find it’s here you belong. A place like this.” (15) Although the narrator speaks of ‘(a) place like this’ as “a beautiful place (…). Call it our country, our country all ‘round here” (15), belonging, for the reader, for the characters in each of Scott’s novels, and for Scott himself, is more than settling into a physical environment, belonging is finding a place in the story.
'Mamang, Noongar Mambara Bakitj, Dwoort Baal Kaat, and Yira Boornak Nyininy are major achievements in Scott and The Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project’s process of returning, restoring and rejuvenating language and story within the Noongar community and for an ever-widening public. In their form, content and intent, the stories renegotiate ideas of place and placement, confronting personal, cultural and linguistic dislocations in Noongar lives as well as an ambivalent narrative landscape in which language and story are central to both a lingering colonialism and the process of decolonisation.' (Publication abstract)
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Resisting Deracination, Reviving Identity : Re-reading Kim Scott’s True Country
2012
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities , vol. 4 no. 2 2012; (p. 144-152) '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)
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El arte de pronunciar - Mandawuy Yunupingu
1993
single work
review
— Appears in: Hontanar , March no. 18 1993; (p. 5)
— Review of True Country 1993 single work novel -
Strange Shadows on the Page
1993
single work
review
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 20 February 1993; (p. 44)
— Review of A Road from Damascus 1992 single work novel ; True Country 1993 single work novel -
Forecasts
1992
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Bookseller & Publisher , December-January (1992-1993) vol. 72 no. 1033 1992; (p. 30)
— Review of True Country 1993 single work novel -
Life on an Aboriginal Settlement
1993
single work
review
— Appears in: The Courier-Mail , 30 January 1993; (p. wkd 6)
— Review of True Country 1993 single work novel -
Talent with a Mission
1993
single work
review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 13-14 February 1993; (p. rev 6)
— Review of True Country 1993 single work novel ; The Common Rat 1993 selected work short story prose autobiography essay ; Harbour : Stories by Australian Writers 1993 anthology short story -
Shouting Back : Kathryn Trees Talks to Kim Scott about His Writing
Kathryn Trees
(interviewer),
1995
single work
interview
— Appears in: Fremantle Arts Review , August/September vol. 10 no. 1 1995; (p. 20-21) -
(Re)constructing Aboriginality : Scripting Ecological Poetics in Kim Scott's True Country
2004
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Cultural Interfaces 2004; (p. 60-69) Anand argues that Kim Scott's True Country 'offers a rich scope to initiate an eco-aesthetical study aimed at reconstructing the virtually extinct paradigms of aboriginal life.' -
Singing Our Place Little Bit New : Aboriginal Narrativity and Nation Building in Kim Scott's 'True Country'
2004
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Critique : Studies in Contemporary Fiction , Fall vol. 46 no. 1 2004; (p. 3-11) -
Listening to Indigenous Voices : The Ethics of Reading in the Teaching of Australian Indigenous Oral Narrative
2005
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Transcultural Graffiti : Diasporic Writing and the Teaching of Literary Studies 2005; (p. 155-170) -
Elder Tells Her People's Story
2005
single work
column
— Appears in: Koori Mail , 10 August no. 357 2005; (p. 27)
Awards
- 2012 shortlisted The National Year of Reading 2012 Our Story Collection — Western Australia
- Kimberley area, North Western Australia, Western Australia,