Alice's Dreaming

Alice's dreaming was an unexpected, lovely and bittersweet book, a chapter of the long and painful history of interactions between Australian First Nations people and colonisers which for once left me with a feeling of hope. Distinguished historian Tom Griffiths tells the story of Alice Duncan-Kemp, brought up on an outback station on south Queensland's Channel Country in the early years of last century. As a child, she had an extraordinary education from the original inhabitants -- 'the landlords' as her father called them -- and shared in (some) cultural and environmental knowledge, which she drew on in later life when writing memoirs of her childhood and the history of the region.

Alice felt a deep connection to the country and its people, and ironically her books, diaries and papers have proved an invaluable record of cultural practices, stories and even language that might otherwise have been lost. However, charges of plaigarism tarnished her legacy -- I actually groaned aloud when I came to this section of the book -- and her books, though lauded at the time, have fallen into obscurity. Griffiths delicately explores questions of authenticity, memory, and multi-sided truth as he looks at Alice's history in parallel with the life of an Aboriginal boy of the same age in the same area, Bill Gorringe.

At the end of Alice's dreaming, Alice's descendants and First Nations people come together to assess and share the mass of material left behind by Alice and members of the Gorringe family, and share a ceremony on Country. It's such a beautiful moment, and sadly an unusual collaboration. But it opens a window to other possible close relationships between First Nations people and the invaders who also came to love the land -- I really hope that there are other stories like this waiting to be told.