"Shadow Lines" by Stephen Kinnane

"Shadow Lines" by Stephen Kinnane was a book on my compulsory reading list for Historicising the Colonial Past, so I thought I would give it a quick review.

"Shadow Lines" is a memoir written by Kinnane on his grandparents life. It is part family history, part Aboriginal history, part history of the oppression of Aboriginal people in the early twentieth century. I'll admit it sounds daunting and it is a tome of a book, but his style of writing is very easy to read, small chapters and pictures break up the text as well so you do find yourself half way through without realising you've read quite that much.
Kinnane starts with the government removal of his grandmother; Jessie Argyle. Taken from her family in 1906 as a result of the Aborigines Act of 1905, Jessie is renamed after the area she was taken from; Argyle, and sent away to a mission. His grandfather, Edward Smith, was born in 1891 and emigrated to Australia in 1909 at the age of 18. Kinnane in effect is writing the story of how these two ancestors met, married and lived together under the ever watchful eye of Aborigines Department controller A.O.Neville.
What strikes me with this text is that, although it's based on historical fact and Kinnane is sensible enough to reference all his sources at the end of the book, there is also a lot of imaginative input on his behalf. In the opening lines Kinnane talks about the shadowlines that connect us all; "inflexible boundaries that are laid down by narrow definitions of race, nationalism and religion". It's these shadowlines that inadvertently connect Jessie and Edward, Neville and Jessie (to the point where they are buried in the same graveyard), Neville to Edward and of course all of them to their daughter. These lines "shift and change, break and re-form, swell and divide" across Kinnane's charting of Edward and Jessie's lives, through historical fact or imaginative interpretation.
This book, and I call it book because I genuinely do not know whether to class it biography, fiction or history, brings to life two of Kinnane's ancestors, both of whom are exceptionally brave in their own ways, facing the Aborigines Department's constant opposition. As a reader you learn of the huge oppression of Aboriginal people that was happening right through to the 1950s. Kinnane's story seems to be an attempt at releasing the spirits of his grandparents. In textualising and writing about them however, he is also bringing them back for everyone who reads the novel. This then also works for A.O.Neville and Kinnane's revival of the man shows him as the "dictator carving out his empire". I'm not going to deny that at times this book does make you wonder how this could ever happen, ever be allowed to happen, and it is quite upsetting, but Edward and Jessie are heroic figures of this text and you find yourself inwardly cheering every time they achieve something against the Aborigines Department or Neville.
"Shadow Lines" is not a book that can be summed up or reviewed easily, it's a text that shows a small but perfect part of twentieth century history and it sheds a huge amount of documented light onto the treatment of Aborigines under the "care" of A.O.Neville. It's Kinnane's way of doing justice to his ancestors, a justice that is forceful, elegant and upsetting.