It begins with Stan Grant taking his son back to his ancestral homelands a place now named Poison Waterholes Creek. Talking to My Country is a memoir and meditation that serves to empower a history. But it confirmed to me how closely we are all woven into the invasion. I don't know if this "cleaning up" of a tribe ever made it into any history, or if it lingers only in white memoirs in south-eastern Victoria. That the saving of one small boy is worthy of mention assumes the killing of other children. He came to Orbost as Black Harry, a stockman …"Īs Grant predicted, a casual account of a massacre. One small boy was saved, taken to Buchan and reared. There, in six pages of memoirs narrated by my great, great uncle, Alec Cameron, when he was 94, was this: "When the blacks speared Dan the cook, and many people said he was the offender, a gathering of cattlemen cleaned up a lot of the tribe down the back flat. A reading of frontier accounts of meeting the Aborigines is replete with casual accounts of utter barbarity." These sentences sent me immediately to a manila folder of family photos, notes, letters and other historical scraps. Early in Talking to My Country, Stan Grant writes: "This is the history untold in my childhood.
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