These paper boats of mine are meant to dance on the ripples of hours, and not reach any destination... Rabindranath Tagore

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past...F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.
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On the way to the river are the old dormitories, used for something else now, with their fairy-tale turrets, painted white and gold and blue. When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
--from Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.
- Joyce Carol Oates

Sunday, June 27, 2021

Truganini...

TruganiniTruganini by Cassandra Pybus
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Truganini, by Cassandra Pybus, represents an intriguing dive into the awkward perils that fractured colonial Tasmania. There is self-made missionary George Robinson trying to connect European and aboriginal cultures. He tries to offer some measure of safety and security to the aboriginal groups scattered round Tasmania who face a European 'round up'. He barely leaves the pages of this historical biography. Names, many names fleetingly buzz around him and by him, but he is always there, soldiering on. Even though Truganini was in Robinson's life for 13 years, sadly, she remains one of those many names. Truganini loved water, loved to swim, loved to fish and was high-spirited. She had a marriage or two. She may be with Robinson at times, helping his mission, but seems distant from him. In short, we get to know Truganini's world, according to Europeans, but we still are far from getting to know Truganini. The blinkered records of the day deny us that longed-for understanding. So, Pybus offers us descriptive, detailed insights into the challenges of colonial days, but hardly turns the spotlight on Truganini. A mistitled book I feel.

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I am pleased to report
I am still treading
my own songlines

only those
who really knew me
in my own lifetime
know how
and why
I am

I am Truganini
and always will be

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