Eve Vincent

Follow the western coastline north from Broome, along the Lurujarri Heritage Trail: trudging across sandy beaches, passing dinosaur prints, through mud and mangroves.

Dispossession was hardwired into this ambitious housing program, at both the household and community level. Enter the anthropologist, Tess Lea. Darwin-born, Lea is an acute observer of the everyday practices that characterise the wild, disorderly, and strange cultural world of the interventionist settler-colonial state. This involves committed and forensic analysis of documentary hulk, reading and deciphering pages and pages of detailed policy paperwork that repel close attention. And it also involves fieldwork: immersion in the everyday ways under study.

So I am wondering where things stand in this ‘nation of meat-eaters’…

Birch’s fiction confronts the reader with rural and urban landscapes of abandonment, scenes of decay and decline. The Promise deals with late modernity’s wastelands and the lives our society is willing to lay to waste. The landscapes are sometimes those left behind after factory work has disappeared from established working class neighbourhoods.

It seems to me that Lucashenko writes both with and against the perception that authentic Aboriginality is derived from the maintenance of land-based cultural practices and spiritual beliefs.