Unsettled

“What does it mean to be on land that was taken from other people?  Now that we know how the taking was done, what do we do with that knowledge?”

I’m not the only person to be unsettled by those questions.  But mostly I think we look away from them – they’re too hard and confronting to deal with. 

In all my novels set in colonial Australia I’ve been circling that unsettledness, and used my own family stories as a way into those questions.   This time the impulse was to come out from behind the screen of fiction.  

I decided to do a road trip – a kind of pilgrimage – to all the places mentioned in the family stories. I’d re-run the stories in my mind one more time, but this time I’d be standing where they happened – right on the land that was taken – and I’d widen the frame to include the people who were there when my forebears took it. I’d try to see the whole picture and understand what it meant.  Not to condemn, not to accuse.  And not to wallow in guilt. Just to let myself really look, and see where that might lead.