Deborah Bird Rose

Deborah Rose Bird had me hooked from the moment she quoted Hobbles Danaiyarri:

I’m speaking about now. We can come together, join in, make it more better out of that big trouble. You know, before, Captain Cook bin making a lot of cruel, you know. Now these day, these day, we’ll be friendly, we’ll be love meself [one another], we’ll be mates. That be better. Better for make that trouble.

She uses a lot of big words and impressive scholarly apparatus, her arguments are sometimes tenuous, but I was riveted as I follow her struggle to define an ethical approach to decolonisation, to taking on the burden of the past. I bought the book on the basis of Will Owen’s discussion of it, here, and he didn’t mislead. It’s a book that clearly hopes to make a difference, and I hope it does. It’s a book that made me want to read slabs of it aloud to whoever happened to be to hand – that is, usually to Penny. Here’s a bit from towards the end, which provides something of a context for my ruminations about Mrs Williams and my mother:

Reconciliation draws our attention to the war against Indigenous people, and shows us the legacy of conquest: this great divide on one side of which are the survivors of this undeclared and untreatied war, and on the other side of which are the descendants of those who waged the war …

This great divide is both profoundly present, and yet strangely non-existent. It constitutes much of our history, and it continues to tell us more about ourselves than we really want to know. But at the same time the lives of many of us are enmeshed in tangled webs of connection that undermine the idea and the experiences of the clear divide. … The project of reconciliation demands of us that we acknowledge the divide and the violence, but it simultaneously demands that we explore the entanglements of memory, connection, and commitment.… (mehr)