Though it deals with Australia’s Indigenous peoples, this book had me thinking about Canada’s First Nations people.

Jasmine, an idealistic Indigenous lawyer, takes her mother Della on a literary tour of England. Della, recently widowed, is no stranger to tragedy: 25 years earlier, her eldest daughter Brittany disappeared. Jasmine thinks of the trip as an opportunity to reconnect with her mother with whom she hasn’t been close after she left for university.

The literary tour is the framing device. Each chapter, devoted to one day of the tour, has two sections giving alternating first person perspectives of Jasmine and Della. Della, fairly uneducated, has never left her small town, whereas Jasmine is university-educated and worldly. Reading their thoughts about what they think is significant about what they see is interesting.

This structure can be somewhat repetitive but there are distinct differences in Della and Jasmine’s reactions to what they see. Della lacks literary knowledge but is intelligent and observant. She always compares what she sees and learns to her experiences back home, and questions the wisdom of the British when compared to the knowledge and achievements of her Indigenous ancestors. Jasmine, on the other hand, is familiar with British writers and focuses on how the life experiences of authors influenced their writing. This leads to considering the effect of childhood trauma and abuse on one of her clients. Only later does she give thought to the impact of past events on her mother.

The characters are authentic and relatable. Jasmine’s attempts to escape the small world of her childhood and to prove that she is more than the stereotypes of her people are perfectly understandable. Likewise, Della’s observations about how her people have been misjudged and mistreated are grounded in her experiences. She is more interested in the daily lives of people in the past, lives with which she can identify, than in the writings of literary figures.

I enjoyed seeing the growth of a closer mother-daughter relationship. Della comes to think about her daughter and what she experienced: “I’d never thought much about what a big change and adjustment it must have been for her to go to such a new place like a university.” And Jasmine learns about the trauma her mother suffered as a child. There is also more self-reflection so Jasmine concludes, “I’d rejected too much of who I was in trying to prove others wrong.”

What bothered me is the book’s tone which often becomes didactic. The ever-so-frequent comparisons between Indigenous and western culture seem contrived. Here are some examples of the preachy tone intended to educate the reader: “An old druid stone impresses people but most don’t even know about the things Aboriginal people built” and “We lasted generation after generation so we must have been doing something right. And we’re still going – unlike the Romans who made it here, where everything now is buried ruins” and “we were the world’s oldest living culture so ours is a pretty impressive inheritance” and “It was true that Aboriginal people didn’t have pottery but is that the only thing you should judge by? The Romans had crucifixions and watched people kill each other for sport and had slaves. Aboriginal people didn’t have any of that and they didn’t go around invading other countries and conquering people.”

As I mentioned, the treatment of Indigenous Australians is similar to that of Canada’s First Nations. Reference is made to “the government practice of removing Aboriginal children from their families.” Della mentions that “Aboriginal stories across Australia record events from over seven thousand years ago when the sea levels rose, faithfully handing down the stories for over three hundred generations.” This comment reminded me of how the Inuit have passed down stories from one generation to the next about the Franklin expedition and the resulting tragedy. These stories directed the Parks Canada team of explorers and archaeologists in their search for the wreckage, leading to the discovery of Erebus in 2014.

As a booklover, I found myself wishing to do such a literary tour. But I learned more about intergenerational trauma and racist colonialist behaviour than I did about literature. I don’t mind having my view of the world and history expanded and challenged, but I wish the novel had been less heavy-handed in its attempt to do so.

Note: Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski). ( )

“And that’s the most awful kind of terrible to have to hope.”

This gently told tale deals with some horrible events in a family’s past. As such, it deals with loss, grief, colonial impact on Aboriginal life and guilt.

A daughter who leads a busy city life as a lawyer in Sydney takes her mother, still living in rural Frog Hollow, on a literary trip to England. Through that tour, we are given both the mother’s and the daughter’s view of the trip and what they think about as they travel. Gently, the family’s history is revealed and its hidden pains are exposed and faced. Highly recommended. ( )

Larissa Behrendt began her writing career in non-fiction, publishing texts that relate to her work as a lawyer and advocate for Indigenous people, but her most recent non-fiction was the ground-breaking Finding Eliza, Power and colonial storytelling (2016, see my review). She is also the author of three novels: Home (2004, see my review); Legacy (2009, see my review) and now After Story (2021).

Ostensibly a mother-daughter story about literary travel in the UK, After Story is much more than that.

When Jasmine's plans for a trip with her BFF Bex fall through, she asks her mother Della to come with her instead, and the story is narrated in alternating chapters by these two. They don't have a great relationship: Della stayed in her home town all her life while Jasmine was on the bus to Sydney as soon as she received an early offer to study law. The family dynamics are complicated by the abduction of Jasmine's seven-year-old sister Brittany from their bedroom 25 years ago when Jasmine was only three. She has no memory of her family before this tragedy, and she has only ever known her mother as traumatised by it. Jasmine has coped with the gossip and innuendo by being diligent at school and unobtrusive, always trying to be 'good' to disprove the stereotypes of Aborigines that cripple her spirit, while her sister Leigh-Anne confronts racism head-on.

Not long before the trip takes place, Della has suffered further bereavement. The matriarch of the family, Aunty Elaine has died, and so has Della's husband Jimmy, who lived a few doors down and was still a big part of her life even though they had separated. Della has had a drinking problem for a long time, and the disappearance of a child on Hampstead Heath triggers memories that exacerbate a trauma that has never gone away.

This is not a story about the Stolen Generations: an historic criminal abduction of an Indigenous child is one element in a more complex story—but it shows with heartbreaking clarity how the loss of a child in any circumstances is a trauma that never goes away and persists into ensuing generations. Reading between the lines, we see how in Indigenous communities such losses were a different kind of crime. They were due to racist child removal policies and programs which affected not only the extended families of the stolen children but entire communities where the loss was not a rare and remarkable disappearance like that of the child on Hampstead Heath, but was something that happened to numerous families, and repeatedly, sometimes one child after another and sometimes all the children at once. We see also from the backstory that the abduction of Brittany from her Indigenous family was treated with little urgency and hurtful suspicion whereas the missing child in England arouses public sympathy across the country.

While persisting intergenerational trauma is a thread that runs through the novel, After Story is also a marvellous evocation of travel that takes the form of literary pilgrimage.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/08/10/after-story-by-larissa-behrendt/ ( )