Talking to My Country
STAN GRANT
HARPERCOLLINS, $29.99
Early in Talking to My Country, Stan Grant writes: "This is the history untold in my childhood. 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.
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. One small boy was saved, taken to Buchan and reared. He came to Orbost as Black Harry, a stockman ..." 
As Grant predicted, a casual account of a massacre. That the saving of one small boy is worthy of mention assumes the killing of other children. 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. But it confirmed to me how closely we are all woven into the invasion.
Talking to My Country is a memoir and meditation that serves to empower a history. It begins with Stan Grant taking his son back to his ancestral homelands, a place now named Poison Waterholes Creek. From there we move into the past and meet Stan's mother and father: "I would watch my mother gently brush her hand on the back of my father's neck and see the hardness of his body soften, a yearning form in his eyes and a smile ..."
Black, in white Australia, the family moved from town to town with all they owned in a car. His father taught Stan to fight, "how never to grab another man's shirt and lose the advantage of two hands ... my father couldn't refine my golf swing or show me how to set a sail or strengthen my backhand; he had no need of these things."
His family lived in a constant state of mourning. He tells of a friend who died young. "This boy I played football with and laughed with; this boy made one false move. He listened when the principal told us to leave school." When they were 15 the Aboriginal kids had been called to the principal's office and told they no longer had to attend school and invited to find other options. Your skin was your fate.
The invasion, the frontier, the marginalisation and institutionalised racism, the casual racism, the Great Silence; the cast of all these stories is Stan Grant's family, such laughing, stoically dignified people they empower the truth and sadness of what happened, what is still happening, in this country.
The story of Australia is an infernal paradox; a story of simultaneous invasion and settlement. The whole world has been stolen by dead people from dead people. What is to be done about that?
Grant answers: "Being good and great does not absolve you from a terrible sin and a pain inflicted on a people who did nothing to deserve it. Remember that: the first people of this land who have suffered for your greatness did nothing to deserve it. A truly great country - if we truly believe that - should be held to great account."
Years ago I wrote a novel in the voice of an Indigenous boy. It was not met well by Indigenous writers. I thought, then, anybody could speak for anyone else. They didn't think this. And they were right. Some stories are so cruelly intimate they can only be told by the people in them.
The story of black Australia, told from the white side, lacks the blood and violin notes that are essential for the truth. Sometimes a story must be told by the victim to be told truly. This is why victim impact statements are now included in criminal trials.
Stan Grant's book has the disquieting timbre of a victim impact statement. It is a story so essential and salutary to this place that it should be given out free at the ballot box.
Anson Cameron's memoir, Boyhoodlum, is published by Vintage.