The third is a series of letters from Reverend Greenleaf of German background who set up a Mission for Aborigines in the late 1800’s. She’s embraced by her grandmother and aunties and must confront the reasons for running away. August flies home from England for Pop’s funeral and faces the family she ran from many years earlier. The second story is from his granddaughter’s point of view.
He peppers the meanings with stories of his family, his past and his culture in the hope that none of it will be lost. Pop (Albert Goondiwindi) composes a dictionary of Wiradjuri words. There are actually three stories all cleverly constructed to relate to each other: Agent: Pamela Malpas, Jennifer Lyons Literary Agency.This highly awarded book is an evocative and eye-opening read from Australian (Wiradjuri) author Tara June Winch. While the shifts in narrator interrupt the flow, Winch succeeds at contextualizing August’s story with cultural history. The strongest chapters are from Albert, in narratives framed as dictionary entries of his ancestors and their disappearing culture. Albert, Greenleaf, and August narrate alternating sections: Greenleaf’s long letter describing mission history is heavily expository, while August’s section is where the plot lives, and it’s enlivened by dialogue with her family. Meanwhile, the reader learns that Wiradjuri artifacts have long since been excavated and removed, along with other brutal details chronicled in letters written by Reverend Greenleaf, the missionary who started the school in the late 19th century. After August learns the family’s home, an old mission station, will be destroyed to make way for a mine, she decides to stay, determined to save the home and land around it.
Upon his death, his granddaughter August, who had moved to England to get away from the town, returns for the funeral. Albert Gondiwindi, facing a terminal illness, begins writing the story of his Wiradjuri family in the town of Massacre Plains. This angry, elegiac tale of an aboriginal family from Indigenous Australian writer Winch ( After the Carnage) explores the charged meaning of the word Ngurambang, meaning country or home in the Wiradjuri language.
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