First Nations people are advised that this post contains the names of deceased people.

It has been my reading group’s tradition for some years now to read a book by a First Nations writer in July, the month in which NAIDOC Week occurs. Coincidentally, NAIDOC Week’s 2023 theme was “For our elders”, which worked beautifully with our chosen book, Debra Dank’s We come with this place, because a large part of it is about the value and importance of elders and ancestors.

This was not, however, why we chose Dank’s book from the options before us. Its subject matter intrigued us, about which more anon, but we were also influenced by the fact that, at the time we were choosing, it had just won a record number of four awards in the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards: the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction, the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing, the Indigenous Writers’ prize, and the overall Book of the Year. It was also shortlisted for this year’s Stella Prize, and, after we scheduled it, it won the ALS Gold Medal. These are significant awards and, for most of us, the book lived up to its advance publicity.

I mentioned the subject matter above, but We come with this place is one of those books that is tricky to categorise. It’s a sort of multigenerational memoir that is also a guide to her culture and a community history of her people, before and after colonisation. It grew out of her PhD in Narrative Theory and Semiotics. Dank describes it in her Preface as a:

strange kind of letter written to my place – a recording of events and activities that I and my family have experienced, in order to tell Garranjini that I remember, and I know. It is all based on real events. Some parts have been reimagined, because they happened outside my presence, and several names have been changed. Our relationship with our place, however, is genuine and lives in ways that not easily told in English words or western ways.

She goes on to say that she wanted to show “how story works in my community, and how it has contributed to our living with country for so long”. It also felt imperative, she says, to talk about the “voices, human and non-human, who guided the Gudanji for centuries before anyone else stepped onto this land”. This is a truly generous thing to do, and my group loved that, loved how Dank shared her story, and particularly how she helped us whitefellas “see” how First Nations people understand and relate to Country. I knew much of this from all I’ve read and heard, but this book really grew my understanding.

The other special thing about this book for me is that it is set in an area I know. I spent three formative late-childhood years in Mount Isa, close to Camooweal where Dank’s mother’s family were based. I visited Camooweal several times, and traversed parts of the Barkly Tableland which encompasses her Country. The first First Nations people I heard of were the Kalkadoons, whom Dank mentions in her book. Dank herself, though, is a Gudanji/Wakaja woman, the former through her mother and the latter, her father.

“to see the pain as it lies in the landscape”

We come with this place is a confronting book, from its perfect and defiant title to its chronicling of the atrocities that her people faced. The fear of children being taken away pervades the book. There are stories of massacres, and other appalling brutalities including a rape of her father’s mother. Lucy’s “choices were both dire – a drover’s boy or a special girl. The same, just in different clothes”. There is intergenerational trauma, which Dank exemplifies through her father, Soda. Hardworking and loving, he bears traumas, which she characterises as “newer stories … that pushed and jostled with the older stories” and sometimes “pushed their way out with a violence” that was often directed at her mother, and sometimes herself.

Dank doesn’t hold back; the way she tells it is strong, speaking her truths and segueing between past and present, between brutal history and rejuvenating story, between people and ancestors. Amongst the tough stories are warm-hearted anecdotes about family life. An example is Dank telling of being on country with her grandfather Bimbo and her surprise and joy in learning how to catch fish in arid land. The stories speaking of deep love sit alongside the hard ones, and together convey that the people, their ancestors, and Country are interconnected. This idea is mirrored in the structure.

However, I admit that I did, initially, find the structure a bit confusing, but as I read on, I started to sense an overriding arc similar to that of Bangarra Dance Theatre’s recent offering, Yuldea. Both start with origin stories, then move through colonial history, and conclude with the power of kinship and connection to Country. But it’s not as linear as this sounds. For example, starting the book, and threading through Dank’s narrative are the three Water-women who came from sea in the Gulf of Carpentaria, and travel far to create “the freshwater and hill country” of the Gudanji. They also end the book, giving it an overall cyclical structure which, I think, reflects First Nations’ understanding of life. Other cycles occur within this structure, so there is a continuous sense of moving forwards and back in time, as experiences and stories build on each other to create “Gudanji memory” – for us, and for her people to whom she is writing. This idea of building “memory” from stories, from lines between places and the things that have happened there, is strange to western ways of thinking, but Dank makes it make sense. She shows us how stories are made and passed on through Country.

I’ve been trying to decide how to end this post, and then it came to me that the best way might be with some words from Dr Tyson Yunkaporta’s Introduction to the book. He is a First Nations scholar, founder of the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Deakin University in Melbourne, and the author of Sand talk. He admits to not being able to face “the through line of history from the savagery of the frontier wars to the interventionist policies of today”. Dank, though, has. He writes:

She hurts us, digs bullets out of old wounds that never healed properly, sucks out the poison and then begins our healing with love and laughter. She does this for everybody, no matter which side of the rifle you’re on.

Dank, in other words, doesn’t pull any punches, but neither does she ram them down your gullet. Her aim is to tell the truth, proud and clear, but to do it in order for healing to take place. Isn’t that what we all want?

Kim (Reading Matters) also loved this book.

Debra Dank
We come with this place
London: Echo, 2022
252pp.
ISBN: 9781760687397