Image source Audible
Narrated by the author on Audible
Reading Reflection written September 2020
I wish I had read this sooner. I wish this was one of my bedtime stories read to me when I was a little girl.
I wish that my exposure to the actual history of Australia, the physical land and Aboriginal Peoples that have called it home for thousands and thousands of years wasn’t white-washed. What a beautiful breath of fresh air to contrast the previous accounts of bloodshed I've found when learning about so-called ‘Aboriginal history’, more accurately Australia’s-European history/ the shock waves of colonialism. I feel as if I’ve been stopped in my tracks, at a roundabout of shock-disbelief-disgust-gratitude-sorrow. I’m grateful that Aboriginal agricultural methods are documented through this book, preserved for my son to read.
Dark Emu is written and spoken with such endearing-sophistication by Bruce, I wish to meet him and hear his warm voice in the flesh one day. Dark Emu evokes a gut wrenching sadness in me, the kind you feel when there’s an injustice so close to you and you feel helpless, like when someone in your family is physically and emotionally traumatised. I also feel frustrated that the imagery of Aboriginal people that I was presented with growing up, was not only gross misrepresentations, they were part of an intricate blanket of lies designed to suffocate those not in the decision making hierarchies.
Read this book when you want to feel small, not in a way that you don’t matter, small as in young, as if you have been away from home too long and are being read a bedtime story. Read again and again when you wish that history was not filled with nightmares and you need to awaken rejuvenated.