Latest news with #MyallCreekMassacre
The Age
20-05-2025
- The Age
This truth-telling book unsettled me, both mentally and physically
But this had to be a consideration through the land itself, to see if it could speak to her, not in any mystical way or intricate pilgrimage but through a simple road trip. Grenville decided to walk on the places her ancestors settled, on the country itself. It might say something. There are roads, she has a car, there are places she can stay. She sets out, neither a pioneer nor a pilgrim, just a woman on a quest. With a car, not a gun. She begins at Wisemans Ferry, a place about an hour's drive from Sydney and named after her ancestor Solomon Wiseman who came as a convict, transported for stealing wood in 1805. In London Wiseman was a man at the bottom of the heap, a man who would never dream of being 'the possessor and master of a piece of earth.' But Wiseman's dreams did, in fact, come true; he took up land, started the ferry, built a pub, made a lot of money. There is a swirl of stories here and Solomon's descendant is sceptical of them all. What? He 'took up' land? Took. Grenville defines the relationship First Peoples had to the land in cool, legal terms: '…the landscape was, and is, the embodiment of a vast and timeless spiritual reality. The identity and meaning of any individual human life is profoundly connected to a particular tract of country and the stories it features. It's more than living on it, more than knowing it, more than being sustained by it, more than loving it, though it's all of those. It's an inextricable, inseparable, existentially vital part of who a person is and where they fit in the cosmos.' For a week Grenville walks through, or across all the places in country NSW she knows are connected to her family; in each place she silently names it as stolen. She doesn't know what to expect, she doesn't in fact, expect anything and often thinks of turning back. She doesn't because something is taking shape, although it could be just the intensifying of her despair. Loading Towards the end of her journey she turns the wheel in the direction of Bingara, nothing to do with her ancestors but everything to do with her journey. Bingara is the town closest to the site of the 1938 Myall Creek Massacre. Descendants of the white men who did the killing and descendants of some of the survivors of those massacred still live here. Grenville finds evidence of something here, could it be openess, on both sides? Or a similar uneasiness that Kim Scott explored in Taboo and Lia Hills in The Desert Knows Her Name? I could have written thousands of words, every one inadequate, about Unsettled. Grenville's pages are streaked with light, with the desire to reach some understanding of the weight of real history as opposed to narrated stories as she walks on and through 'hard places of the spirit' and I thank her for every one of them. She is, like Kim Scott and Lia Hills here and Percival Everett in the US, turning our faces towards the two dazzlingly contemporary questions central to all of us, Colonisation and Race.
Sydney Morning Herald
20-05-2025
- Sydney Morning Herald
This truth-telling book unsettled me, both mentally and physically
But this had to be a consideration through the land itself, to see if it could speak to her, not in any mystical way or intricate pilgrimage but through a simple road trip. Grenville decided to walk on the places her ancestors settled, on the country itself. It might say something. There are roads, she has a car, there are places she can stay. She sets out, neither a pioneer nor a pilgrim, just a woman on a quest. With a car, not a gun. She begins at Wisemans Ferry, a place about an hour's drive from Sydney and named after her ancestor Solomon Wiseman who came as a convict, transported for stealing wood in 1805. In London Wiseman was a man at the bottom of the heap, a man who would never dream of being 'the possessor and master of a piece of earth.' But Wiseman's dreams did, in fact, come true; he took up land, started the ferry, built a pub, made a lot of money. There is a swirl of stories here and Solomon's descendant is sceptical of them all. What? He 'took up' land? Took. Grenville defines the relationship First Peoples had to the land in cool, legal terms: '…the landscape was, and is, the embodiment of a vast and timeless spiritual reality. The identity and meaning of any individual human life is profoundly connected to a particular tract of country and the stories it features. It's more than living on it, more than knowing it, more than being sustained by it, more than loving it, though it's all of those. It's an inextricable, inseparable, existentially vital part of who a person is and where they fit in the cosmos.' For a week Grenville walks through, or across all the places in country NSW she knows are connected to her family; in each place she silently names it as stolen. She doesn't know what to expect, she doesn't in fact, expect anything and often thinks of turning back. She doesn't because something is taking shape, although it could be just the intensifying of her despair. Loading Towards the end of her journey she turns the wheel in the direction of Bingara, nothing to do with her ancestors but everything to do with her journey. Bingara is the town closest to the site of the 1938 Myall Creek Massacre. Descendants of the white men who did the killing and descendants of some of the survivors of those massacred still live here. Grenville finds evidence of something here, could it be openess, on both sides? Or a similar uneasiness that Kim Scott explored in Taboo and Lia Hills in The Desert Knows Her Name? I could have written thousands of words, every one inadequate, about Unsettled. Grenville's pages are streaked with light, with the desire to reach some understanding of the weight of real history as opposed to narrated stories as she walks on and through 'hard places of the spirit' and I thank her for every one of them. She is, like Kim Scott and Lia Hills here and Percival Everett in the US, turning our faces towards the two dazzlingly contemporary questions central to all of us, Colonisation and Race.
