Tomorrow, July 5, is the start of this year’s NAIDOC Week in Australia. This year’s theme is 50 Years of Deadly, commemorating 50 years of NAIDOC, but I’ll do more on that in my traditional NAIDOC Week Monday Musings. Meanwhile, I have decided to dedicate this month’s #SixDegrees to First Nations writing. If you don’t know what #SixDegrees is and how it works, please check Kate’s blog – booksaremyfavouriteandbest.

The first rule is that Kate sets our starting book. This month, she nominated a book that is apparently all the rage at the moment, but I hadn’t heard of it until she told me about it, Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear. This is, I understand, a dual timeline, time-slip story in which a “tradwife” influencer suddenly finds herself in the real 1855.

My first link is another dual timeline (but not time-slip) story, in which one of the timelines is set primarily in the 1850s. The book is Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie (my review), set in southeast Queensland around Moreton Bay. It is a strong story which interrogates the early years of colonisation, asking whether, given the settlers were here, it could have been made to work.

Next, we are staying with the early colonisation of Australia, but moving south to Nerrm (Port Phillip), and Tasma Walton’s I am Nannertgarrook (my review). I am claiming a double link here, because both novels won the ARA Historical Fiction Prize in their respective years. Walton’s starts in 1833, and follows a young woman snatched from the beach and sold to a sealer with whom she is forced to live as he moves increasingly further away from her country. It tells of her struggles to retain her culture and her dignity, though years of brutality.

My third book is also set in the 19th century, in the second half, and is about another young woman taken from her country, this one being when her farmer employer decides to move to a new place and refuses to let her stay with her people. The book is Anita Heiss’s Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray (my review) and her young protagonist is bound, she is told, by the Master and Servants Act of 1840. She has no agency in this world.

From Walton’s and Heiss’s young women who have little or no agency in their lives, I am moving to another novel by Anita Heiss. This is one of her “choc-lit” books in which she presents contemporary young professional First Nations women who do have a say in their lives and the directions they take. The book is her Paris dreaming (my review).

Agency is something many of us take for granted, but for First Nations people, it is not a given. For my next book, I am choosing a book about American First Nations people (or Native Americans), Louise Erdrich’s The night watchman (my review). This novel is about the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa people’s fight in the 1950s against a legislation that would end their tribal sovereignty. Its two main characters – the older Thomas, the titular night watchman, and Patrice, a young woman factory worker – are determined to retain agency over their lives and that of their community.

For my final link, I am returning to Australia, because we are talking NAIDOC Week. The book is Tony Birch’s The white girl (my review) which is set in a fictional rural town in the 1960s, fictional rural town and tells the story of Odette who is determined to save her granddaughter from being removed, against the backdrop of the egregious restrictions of the Aboriginal Protection Act are in force. In this case, Odette does not fight a proposed law, but takes agency and finds ways of working around one to achieve her goal.

So, a different chain this month, because I have purposefully kept it to Australia, making one little foray to the USA to make at least a token recognition of First Nations peoples elsewhere. All my authors are Australian, but one, and all are women, but one (a different one!) Except for Heiss’s Paris dreaming, all are works of historical fiction.

And now, especially for NAIDOC, I have created a second chain, a little #Six Degrees title poem. (Links on titles are to my reviews).

Yesteryear

From Edenglassie to Carpentaria,
From Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray to Ghost River,
I saw, we saw, and we say:
We come with this place.

Have you read Yesteryear? And, whether or not you have, what would you link to?