ext_13406 ([identity profile] sweet-adelheid.livejournal.com) wrote in [community profile] 50books_poc2009-04-02 09:12 pm

#12: "Doreen Kartinyeri: My Ngarrindjeri Calling" by Doreen Kartinyeri and Sue Anderson

Doreen Kartinyeri: My Ngarrindjeri Calling by Doreen Kartinyeri and Sue Anderson (2008, Aboriginal Studies Press)

"This book is not a comprehensive account of Dr Doreen Kartinyeri's life, and particularly not of the Kumarangk affair. It is the way Doreen saw it; they way shee remembers or doesn't remember it. Certain issues and evens were simply not important to her and so don't feature strongly in her account, if at all. It is Doreen's personal recollection of events in her life, and some episodes may be remembered differently by others."


This quote - from the first paragraph of Sue Anderson's "Afterword" to the book, co-authored with Kartinyeri but published after her death - sums up what might be considered the second in a series of "questioned history" reads. Only in neither case (the other being Show Way, so far) am I questioning anything.

I remember the day the High Court judgement in Kartinyeri v Commonwealth was handed down. I took the copy of The Age to the bench where my friend Pennie and I generally met for lunch, and we cried together as we read that all the judges except Kirby and Gaudron JJ had rejected Kartinyeri's arguments. And we railed at the system together, too.

This book tugged at the heartstrings. There was little in this book that I didn't know, intellectually. But what hurt was sometimes Kartinyeri's own... naivete? Trustingness? Her faith in whitefella law actually hurt. Probably because we really hadn't and probably never will live up to it. And knowing that if it had been Men's Business rather than Women's Business there might have been a chance…

I ended up changing the order of the authors listed on GoodReads because to me it sounded much more like Kartinyeri's voice. It is from her point of view, but even more importantly, it is in her voice. For the greater part of this book, I've been reading it while at other times of the day listening to a Mosely audiobook, and the connections between the two have been a little startling to me. One of those connections was about language. I'll admit I found the first few chapters of the Kartinyeri book extremely hard going, in part because of the tendency of Kartinyeri to jump around a bit in her thoughts. As I read further I grew to apprecieate what she was doing, and how the narrative reflected her thought processes.

For anyone who even vaguely remembers the Hindmarsh Island Bridge Case, I'd recommend getting your hands on a copy of this book. I had already decided that if I was ever nearby, I would *not* travel over that bridge: my parents (who *have* been to Goolwa) made the same decision. Reading this book has only strengthened that resolves.

We have a hard-headed whitefella culture, worshipping money over all else. For my own sake as much as for Kartinyeri and her people's, I wish and pray that it were otherwise. And I pray that Kartinyeri now rests in her own conception of peace.

[identity profile] ailsaek.livejournal.com 2009-04-02 01:14 pm (UTC)(link)
Any chance of some expansion on this. I've been reasearching on the web for the last few and I'm still baffled.

[identity profile] niamh-sage.livejournal.com 2009-04-02 02:29 pm (UTC)(link)
Here, check this out to get a rough idea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindmarsh_Island_bridge_controversy

and then this for the chronology:

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/AboriginalLB/1996/64.html

[identity profile] b-writes.livejournal.com 2009-04-05 07:17 pm (UTC)(link)
Thank you.