Description
Temporarily out of stock
Title: Wakuwal (Dream)
Author: BOTSMAN PETER
Format: PAPERBACK
Imprint: Valentine Press
Price: $30.00
Publishing status: Active
Wakuwal (Dream) is an intercultural history of Australia. It is a story that tracks five generations of descendants of an Irish woman sent to Van Diemen’s land for stealing a sheep. It contrasts this with the events that unfolded for Australia’s first peoples and of the inter-connections and blockages between new and old Australian cultures. The story follows characters within the European invasion of Australia and ponders whether anything is recoverable from the original carnage.
The narrator is alternately a spirit being from Éire, an eagle, an octopus, fire, a willy-willy, a sacred dog bounding across the continent and bäru the crocodile. The story is a wild imagining of how things were, and how they got to be, now.
Yolngu creation stories of North East Arnhem land embedded in sacred designs as well as Aboriginal stories from the Pilbara, Kimberley and Cape York Peninsula are interspersed with modern narratives of Homer, Christ, Yeats and Joyce.
Wakuwal is a book of hope: how faith kept ancient knowledge alive, how optimism endures in the face of ignorance and destruction, and how today’s descendants of both the newcomers and the first peoples are beginning a conversation, many generations overdue.
“This is a book unlike any I have read – an audacious dreamweaving of Indigenous and settler identity, a narrative that fuses Yol?u and Irish story-telling…” Prof. Glyn Davis, Melbourne University
“Dhuwala djorra’ gu?ga’yunamirri balandawu ga yolnguwa. This book will help you all balanda and yol?u.” Batumbil Burarrwanga, Mata Mata, Arnhem Land
“Peter Botsman has long been one of this country’s best and most adventurous social thinkers. This might be his biggest – and best – adventure yet.” Don Watson, author and speechwriter
ISBN: 9780994515711