"True Country" by Kim Scott.

This book is one of my pre-dissertation readings, so thought I would review it as a way of getting my ideas together and giving you guys a little idea of what the book is about as well.

Billy is a school teacher posted to a remote Aboriginal community called Kanarma in Australia. He is struggling to find an identity for himself, particularly in light of his ancestral Aboriginality challenging his perceived white Australian heritage. What Billy finds instead through his placement is a society that is slowly breaking down through alcohol, drugs, violence and government handouts. Billy's narration charts the social problems facing the people of Kanarma, to which Billy is effectively placed as a middle man. 

Kim Scott's writing is subtle, placing the narrative of self discovery against the Aboriginal mode of being and knowing. Scott couldn't write this novel as a single person self-discovery narration because that would in effect make it a colonial text, the colonizer discovers their Western selves through the "other". Instead Scott challenges the Western ideas of knowing and being, making the Westerner the "other" against the Aborigines of Kanarma. In this sense then Billy discovers himself through the realization that he is the other, but that through his ancestry he can reject that label to become one of the group. 

Early in the book Billy decides to try and transcribe the history of the people of Kanarma by listening to their tales and writing them down. However, instead of taking what they tell him as a truth, their truth, and leaving it at that, Billy instead has to find a reference within his Western text books. He automatically takes on the condescending role of attempting to categorize the stories he is told in an attempt to assimilate the tribe's truths with his textual truths. Interestingly it is this transcribing that connects Billy with the Aborigines of the area and he becomes implicated in their lives as much as they his. In terms of oral storytelling then, Scott seems to suggest that through the telling of the stories, these united memories, one can access an ancestral past and therefore claim an identity through that. When Fatima retells her life stories to Billy, he becomes part of her stories and as a result creates for himself a place within the group. 

Scott shows through Billy that by transcribing, or attempting to transcribe, Aboriginal history he is in effect trying to answer his own problems with ethical and cultural accountability. "True Country" is a novel about the cultural culpability that is accorded through the writing of histories that go against the colonial Western view and the effect that this has on both the writer and the written tale. 

This book is perhaps one of the best ones I have read in a long time and would recommend it to anyone wanting to get an idea about the issues around white Australia and Aboriginal Australia.