Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} True Country by Kim Scott Jud's Creative Writing Medley. Artwork, Haiku, Poetry, Stories, Novels, Literary Essays & Thesis. KIM SCOTT – TRUE COUNTRY. Roland Barthes once asked the question “Who is speaking thus” (‘The Death of the Author’). In Post-modernist style, True Country was written with multiple narrative voices. In Part I, Billy narrated in first person, Kim Scott, the author, narrated in omniscient third person, while the unidentified (though possibly Sebastian’s) indigenous voice narrated in first, second and third person. In Part II, apart from one brief comment to a taxi driver in Darwin: “I am a white boy, I am a good white boy, safe.” (p. 160), and his final comment “I felt it.” (p. 255) on the last page, Billy was denied his first person voice role. His story was told by the authorial and indigenous voices. The function of these various voices is to intimately identify, through the shifting language and structure, the different types of white Australians – teachers, builders, maintenance men, nuns, priests – and the multi-facetted nature of the Aboriginal society at the settlement. The reader is granted entry into the lives of all the characters to varying degrees, by the nature of realistic dialogue of the narrators. The narrative is seen from within each character as he/she speaks. As a Post Colonial work, in which fiction gives voice to fact, it is a multi-vocal, polyphonic narrative, which promotes otherness, privileging the marginalised indigenous people. The complex narration constantly changes, slipping from simple indigenous language: Call it our country, our country all ‘round here. We got river, we got sea. Got creek, rock, hill, waterfall. We got bush tucker: apple, potato, sugarbag, bush turkey, kangaroo, barramundi, dugong, turtle … every kind. (p. 13) back to standard articulate English: One tall boy leapt into the air, hovered, and tossed a basketball toward the backboard. The orange ball gently arced and descended through the hoop without touching it. (p. 15) Language, through voice, separates people into those with education and those without. But in this secluded society the uneducated were not necessarily ignorant. They had environmental knowledge that ensured their survival, albeit eroded by the introduced evils of alcohol, petrol, and ‘white’ expectations. The significance of these speaking voices is to reveal the limitations, constricts, and definitional confines of the written word. The oral culture of the Aboriginals is fluid and changing, putting life into a tangible form for them. The old people, they couldn’t read or write, but they had their stories in their mouths and they had them in their hands. They danced and they sang all their stories (p. 247) …. We gotta be moving, remembering, singing our place little bit new, little bit special, all the time. (p. 255) As Aboriginal voices deal in the inconclusive, with ‘perhaps’, truth is not important. It is the same with time – the Aboriginals were not bound to the clock as were the white teachers and missionaries. By attempting to record Fatima’s oral stories, Billy discovered that the written words were only a representation of her spoken words. He found that he edited the stories as he transcribed them from the tapes. And when he did he lost their essence. While he “wanted to be … a teller of tales, the one who gives meaning, and weaves the … threads of [their] lives” (p. 169), Billy was complying with the Aboriginal elders wishes. They wanted these things written down: that they worked hard to help build up the mission, that they were clever and proud, that they still knew some of the old ways, and the old ways were good. The old people wanted … the young ones [to get] power in the white man’s way also, and … not drink or fight so much, and … be proud. (p.170) This urge to write things down is white rather than ethnic. Ethnicity, including aboriginality – culture, language, laws – violence, drunkenness, and reciprocated racial aspersions, is constructed honestly by Scott, conveyed to us in the voices. His role of ethnographer Billy soon realised was unnecessary as he discovered his own aboriginality. The culture he was learning was not only theirs, but his. With his death/rebirth, Billy gained a new cultural identity, his own speaking voice between formally educated ‘white’ construction and instinctive Aboriginal deconstruction. At the foot of the bed, his long-dead father in work clothes. …. Grandmother too, white hair and dark skin…. Sebastian, Fatima, Gabriella there also. Billy feels Walanguh beside him …. And he knew who he was… (p. 254) As an Aboriginal person moving into and out of the isolated community to gain a ‘white’ education at University, Gabriella’s voice is significantly important. Upon her return each time she saw the living conditions through ‘white’ eyes – the alcohol, petrol, wife and child abuse; the squalor, the rubbish, the lack of hygiene. I think it’s sad here really, pathetic even maybe…. They don’t know what they can do, or believe in. Little bit of this, little it of that. But in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney, Aboriginal people don’t necessarily think like me either …. you, I, we, don’t now quite who we are these days … (pp. 82 & 83) In her go-between role she felt the futility of their battle with white society to maintain their own Aboriginal cultural identity. By his use of multiple narrative voices, Scott gave to his novel flexibility, integrity and honesty. Rather than creating confusion, the fact that there were more than one narrator supplied a depth to the narrative, of a story told from within, that leaves no doubt about its credible reality – its truth. (C) Jud House 16/11/1997. BIBLIOGRAPHY. Scott, K. (1993) True Country . South Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press. True Country by Kim Scott ISBN 13: 9781863680387. Try adding this search to your want list. Millions of books are added to our site everyday and when we find one that matches your search, we'll send you an e-mail. Best of all, it's free. Are you a frequent reader or book collector? Join the Bibliophile's Club and save 10% on every purchase, every day — up to $25 savings per order! Social Responsibility. Did you know that since 2004, Biblio has used its profits to build 16 public libraries in rural villages of South America? Hang on… we're fetching the requested page. Can you guess which first edition cover the image above comes from? What was Dr. Seuss’s first published book? Take a stab at guessing and be entered to win a $50 Biblio gift certificate! Read the rules here. This website uses cookies. We use cookies to remember your preferences such as preferred shipping country and currency, to save items placed in your shopping cart, to track website visits referred from our advertising partners, and to analyze our website traffic. Privacy Details. ISBN 13: 9781863680387. Examining ideas of belonging and being an outsider, this story follows Billy, a young school teacher and drifter who arrives in Australia's remote far north in search of his past, his Aboriginal roots, and his future. Through masterful language and metaphor, as well as a sophisticated tone that is both subtle and spirited, the novel finds Billy in a region not only of abundance and beauty but also of conflict, dispossession, and dislocation. On the frontier between cultures, Billy must find where he belongs in what is ultimately a powerful portrayal of the discovery of self and a sensitive exploration of race and culture. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. Kim Scott is the award-winning author of Benang: From the Heart , The Dredgersaurus , and Kayang and Me . "A superb novel, original in conception and wonderfully evocative." — Australian. "This vital, often lyrical and always uncompromising novel marks an impressive debut." — Australian Book Review. "A timeless Australian novel . . . Rich in language, and ultimately uplifting, True Country explores issues of cultural heritage and identity that are [still] relevant today." — West Australian , Perth. Musings of a Literary Dilettante's Blog. Wandering the pages of literary fiction … with the occasional biography & page-turner thrown in! True Country by Kim Scott. Part of the joy of discovering authors later in their career is the ability to go back and read their earliest work. In doing so you get a different perspective on the writer-to-be, what intrigues them, drives them; what tools they like to use in framing their narratives; their ethos. After greatly admiring Kim Scott’s Miles Franklin-winning That Deadman Dance (my review) I had this opportunity with his evocative debut True Country , read for Indigenous Literature Week (hosted by Lisa Hill at ANZ Litlovers — a list of all the reviews submitted by readers for ILW can be found here.) Scott’s themes include Aboriginal culture, landscape, displacement, belonging, home. His tone mixes despair and hope. We see the narrative traits of later works here too, such as fragmented structuring, and shifting voices and perspectives. Though fictional, True Country is very autobiographical, as is common with many debut novels. It commences with Billy arriving into Karnama, a (fictional) remote Kimberly Aboriginal community, by airplane with his wife Liz. He’s coming to teach at the local school. He’s also searching for something in himself, though we’re not sure of what this is until near the end of the novel’s first section (at one-third distance). This first chapter, of only two pages, is written in an intriguing second person. Here’s the opening lines: You might stay that way, maybe forever, with no world to belong to and belong to you. You in your many high places, looking over looking over, waiting for a sign. You’re nearly ready, nearly there. You’re trying to read a flat pattern, like the sea, the land from high above. Or you might see your shadow falling upon this page. And maybe that’s all you’ll see and understand. Or you might drift in. Fall or dive in. Enter. Wind drift, rain fall, river rush. The air, the sea all around. And the storming. You alight on higher ground, gather, sing. It may be. You listen to me. We’re gunna make a story, true story. You might find it’s here you belong. A place like this. The narrator here is the collective voice of the landscape and its people, speaking to Billy as he arrives into this place on his plane. Note the delightful duality in the words ‘your many high places’, how they cover both the manner of his arrival and the notion that, as a man from the big smoke, he might carry an elevated view of himself, as perhaps do we, us readers who are also entering this landscape as outsiders. And there is also the lovely sense of us diving beyond our shadows on the page and into the story alongside Billy, a notion that books can change us, a forerunner of the lovely passage in That Deadman Dance that highlights the same sense of diving into a book and coming up out of it changed. After the beautiful use of the single-word sentence ‘Enter’, we get a sense of what might happen to Billy if he does dive in, if he enters fully into the landscape. He will be subjected to elemental forces of a unique and lasting landscape, one that (‘it may be’) changes him, giving him a sense of the belonging he seeks. Apart from the occasional use of what I’ll call the communal voice, much of the novel’s first section is told by Billy in first person. It reinforces the notion of him as an outsider, separate from the people he finds himself living amongst. And what of this place? This, too, from the opening page: And it is a beautiful place, this place. Call it our country, our country all ‘round here. We got river, we got sea. Got creek, rock, hill, waterfall. We got bush tucker: apple, potato, sugarbag, bush turkey, kangaroo, barramundi, dugong, turtle … every kind. Sweet mango and coconut too. As he lands, the chapter ends on another short sentence: ‘Welcome to you.’ What we have is an invitation, to Billy, to us as well in a way. But although it’s a beautiful landscape, Karnama is not a perfect community, oh no. It’s not long before Billy and Liz hear and witness some of its many intractable problems, such as alcohol abuse, gambling, petrol sniffing, lack of parental care, violence (particularly against women, but also women against other women), as well as a general malaise, loss of culture and fading observance of Law. Each morning Billy has to round up the children for school. Faced with all the problems, Billy wants to do something. Fatima, one of the older Aboriginal women, offers to tell him stories about the ‘old ways’, to record them so he can transcribe them for permanent record. He also wants to tell them to the children in class, so their culture is not lost. Fatima was the first born on the Mission. She and another girl were later tricked by the Missionaries into getting on a boat that took them to a school far away from home. They didn’t have the chance to say goodbye to their families, and only returned as grownups. By that stage ‘we didn’t know how to speak the language. … We talk in English.’ Fatima also speaks of breakdowns in the cultural norms of the community, such as which women are allowed to be with which men. It’s only in looking back on the events he is narrating that Billy sees how inept he was at being a listener. He and Fatima talk about the community’s history as set down by the Missionaries. In the Mission’s journals is an account of Fatima’s birth, how it was troublesome for her mother, how her mother applied some ‘old way’ care to get her through. The journal entry makes Fatima weep. She’d not heard it before. There is a lovely truth there, but elsewhere the journals can’t be trusted. When Fatima begins to tell him another story, about the shooting of an Aborigine, he is so bound up in finding the original account in the Missionary’s journal he doesn’t listen to Fatima’s version of the story, which, troublingly, diverges from the official one. It’s only much later, when he listens back to the tape that he realises his error. He writes, ‘It’s a bad recording. They all were. There’s a loud rumbling in the background in all of them.’ This is lovely writing. The rumbling is more than a poor recording. It’s the thundering of a people wanting to be heard. All the more reason, we think, to get the true stories recorded. So they can indeed be heard. But even here, as the summer wet season’s downpours commence, Billy is struggling to find the time to transcribe the recordings. Throughout this first part of the book there are hints about Billy’s own background, with his slightly darker shade of skin, the way he can dance like the elders. Is he part Aboriginal himself, we wonder. He tapes some of the old men too. These stories are inserted within the narrative, without introduction. Some readers might feel jolted by this, maybe even a little lost. This is a criticism of Scott’s later writing too, but one I don’t share myself. I think he shows us how in matching the narrative form to the story, a writer elevates their work, shows their craft. The elder voices want to be heard. They are thrust into the rest of the narrative and we must listen. The sense of dislocation is important. And what great stories men like Sebastian tell Billy! About the old black magic. Of men who can fly, make themselves invisible. However, the magic has been lost. He laments, ‘Some of the young people start not believing. Then they do anything, have nothing.’ The younger generation don’t have it easy, and Scott deftly has Billy note the reaction to Sebastian’s worries from one of the younger women, Gabriella. She has been to Melbourne to attend university, and is back in the community on holidays. She is lifting herself up as we non-Indigenous might say, as she herself might say. Her jaw clenches at Sebastian’s comments. Does she have nothing? Like Billy she is now part outsider. Poor Gabriella! She feels her displacement keenly: …each time she came back to Karnama after a time away she was happy, because she missed the people and the country so much. But she was sad too. … it was like going backwards sometimes, and even further backwards each time she met up with old friends. The bridging courses she did at uni didn’t connect these two worlds. So it seemed. So she said. This is one of the pitfalls current Aborigines face. I have heard experiences of Aboriginal people who have left country communities as the first to go to university, and have been ostracised because of it. They are getting too big for their boots, is the criticism levelled at them when they return. (Of course, this problem is not confined to Aborigines.) We hear Sebastian, but we also see Gabriella. A few pages later we see why she might clench her jaw, for she is one of the ones who does see the magic. She helps in the school, teaching painting, and talks about her love of it to Billy and Liz thus: ‘I like it… At uni too, I can do painting. It’s like this. I get sucked in, and I forget time and where I am. You know, one day I might paint me a little island, a little place for me to live in there. Fly down into it, just go off the end of my brush, and stay there, eh?’ It’s a wonderful echo of Billy’s own challenge of not seeing the community from above, of getting beyond his shadow on the page and diving into it. And Gabriella is one of the success stories. What’s particularly troubling are the children who neither believe the old magic nor want to become educated like her. If only their inability to write their own names was the sole problem. They are sniffing petrol, wearing ‘bracelets made from the rubber sealing rings of opened fuel drums’. They are tellingly said to be not drinking, ‘yet’. They are the ones who observe their father’s violence toward his wives and say he is teaching her a good lesson. ‘Tiny children threw rocks through windows, and knives at teachers who follow them home hurling feeble reprimands.’ What hope is there for them? In discussing the Mission’s old journals Gabriella asks Billy why he has come to Karnama. His spluttering response tells us what we have suspected, that he is seeking to find part of his own Aboriginality, trying to discover what it means to him. (Like Scott, Billy is Noongar (spelt Nyungar in this 1993 novel)). He replies: ‘Because I wanted to. I think I wanted, I’m of… my grandmother… My great grandmother must have been Aboriginal, like you, dark. My grandmother is part … my father told me, but no one…’ … ‘So, maybe that’s a part. But I don’t feel Aboriginal, I can’t say that. I don’t understand. Does it mean you feel lost, displaced? But doesn’t everyone? And I just wanted to come to a place like this, where some things that happened a long time ago, where I come from, that I have only heard of or read of, are still happening here, maybe.’ The first section of the novel ends with Billy receiving the terrible news that his part-Aboriginal grandmother has died. There’s no chance to ask her all the questions he’d been building towards. Now all he can do is help Gabriella, who suggests they try to rediscover the old ways, ‘Put the little bits together. … there’s something there, that’s what I reckon. Should we try to put it all together and believe in it?’ The first section ends in the communal voice thus: So Billy is doing it with us now, and Gabriella too. We might be all writing together, really. This signals a shift. Entering the second section, we lose the first person narration and have both a third-person omniscient communal narrator and occasional first-person elder stories. The shift is significant. We lose some things here, which I’ll come to later, but again it’s Scott marrying form to story. Billy has admitted his Aboriginal roots, and is now part of something. It’s appropriate to relinquish the first-person narration and move into a more encompassing voice. The move also allows Scott to include discussions between characters when Billy is not in present, such as when Liz talks to another white woman about the community’s problems. The challenge for Billy after acknowledging his roots, is that although he finds himself more and more part of things, he still is searching for the secret of what it means to be part Aboriginal. And faced with so many social problems, can he find the old magic? How can he when even the supposed accomplishment of the community in performing corroboree dances to tourists ends mostly in disarray and disaster? How can he when one of the children he teaches is murdered by a white man who escapes punishment under the white man’s law? It’s tempting to say Scott offers no solutions, but perhaps in Billy’s search for the old ways there is an answer, or an approach to try at least. It is a measure of Scott’s even-handedness that Billy sees all the horrors but also experiences many joys, like swimming in rushing rivers with the kids, seeing manta rays leaping out of the water when fishing, and a hundred other things. There is despair here, but also great joy, great life. This is the wet season: We’d sit inside, looking out the windows at the afternoon rain, the red mud and the intense green, the thin bodies of semi-naked children skimming and spraying through the puddles and sheets of water, their black skins glistening and their cries thin in the thunder. The coconut palms and mango trees in our yard writhed against a great sky split by lightning. And the solid rain, and the clearing of the air just before darkness. … What perhaps is lacking somewhat is an exploration between Billy and Liz of what it all means to him, and what effect, if any, finding himself has upon them. In moving from the first person to omniscient, we lose a little of the close connection to Billy’s view of things, and the potential to explore the relationship with his wife in this way. True Country is twenty years old. But it feels fresh, both in the story sense, with the disturbing lack of progress in Aboriginal health and the loss of cultu re and Law to mention just a couple of problems, and also in a stylistic sens e, with the edgy use of various and shifting narrative voices. There’s a timelessness in the Kimberley, and the same thing is present in Scott’s voice. The ideas and themes and style that characterise his later work are there from the start. (There’s even a little hint of whaling.) Long may he speak for himself, his people, and all Australians. True Country. Billy, a young school teacher, arrives in Karnama, a remote settlement in Australia’s far north, in search of his own history, his Aboriginality, and his future. Gradually the outsider is drawn in, and finds himself engaging deeply, irrevocably, not only with the moments of desolation and despair, but also with the great heart and spirit of the people. Finally the exile enters the true country. PRAISE FOR THE BOOK. Kim Scott captures the ambiguities, the troubles and the rewards which accompany the brutal and delicate nuances of relations when particles of one culture pass, as if through a fine sieve, into the heart of another culture. Elizabeth Jolley. ‘ True Country , Kim Scott’s first novel, is superb’ Sydney Morning Herald. ‘This vital, often lyrical and always uncompromising novel marks an impressive debut’ Australian Book Review. ‘… a superb novel, original in conception and wonderfully evocative’ The Australian. Properties. ISBN 9781921361524 (Paperback) 9781760991043 (Paperback) Formats B Format (198 x 130mm) (Paperback) B+ Format (208 x 140mm) (Paperback) Categories Indigenous Writing Current Affairs, Culture & Social History Fiction ebooks Pages 304 Publication Year 1993, 2009 Edition 2nd Publisher Fremantle Press. Kim Scott. Kim Scott is a descendant of people living along the south coast of Western Australia prior to colonisation, and is proud to be one among those who call themselves Noongar.  He began writing for publication when he became a teacher of English. He is currently based at Curtin University in Western Australia as Professor of Writing, in the School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts. 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