![]() By showing how a white family falls apart by fighting over land, I was trying to get readers to understand how it might be for Indigenous people. This family breakdown is something I tried to demonstrate in my novel, Entitlement. The dugai don’t have to lift a finger anymore – they’ve outsourced it to us’ (233). First cousins not talking after fifty years, brothers bashing brothers, its Colonisation 4.0. Later, her sister Kym elaborates: ‘Shitfights everywhere you look. ![]() This requires extensive archival research to prove an unbroken attachment to his country, a process which to me has always seemed ridiculous, as Indigenous culture is a predominantly oral culture, passed down through spoken stories, not through written documentation.Īmidst the developing romance between Jo and Twoboy, and Jo’s turbulent relationship with her teenage daughter, the reader sees the family in-fighting prompted by claiming Native Title, as Jo puts it, ‘Years of hard yakka and fuck all at the end of it, except a community in ruins’ (171). As a foil to – and interwoven with – Jo’s means of acquiring land is the attempt of her boyfriend Twoboy, to lodge a native title claim. ![]() ![]() It’s the story of Jo Breen who, with her divorce settlement, buys a farm in the Byron Bay hinterland, in the hope of connecting to the land of her Aboriginal ancestors. This novel, Melissa Lucashenko’s fifth, is a rollicking good read. ![]()
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