A subversive memoir of the Stolen Generations

Abstract

A subversive memoir of the Stolen Generations Per Henningsgaard (bio) God, the Devil and Me. Alf Taylor. Broome: Magabala Books Aboriginal Corporation, 2021. 289 pp. A$29.99. ISBN 978-1-925936-39-1 Many books have been written about Australia's Stolen Generations. There have been books of history and scholarship, of course, but among the most powerful and affecting books are the numerous works of life writing. Certainly, the best-known book about the Stolen Generations would have to [End Page 390] be Doris Pilkington's Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, published in 1996 and adapted as a film in 2002. Pilkington was a member of the Stolen Generations, but Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence tells the story of her mother's and aunts' escape from the Moore River Native Settlement, where they had been taken after being removed from their families. It is, therefore, an unusual book for being a secondhand account but told by a member of the Stolen Generations. It is also unusual for being Pilkington's second book; her first was a novel titled Caprice: A Stockman's Daughter (1991), which won the 1990 David Unaipon Award for an emerging Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander writer. Among the many other works of life writing on the subject of the Stolen Generations, it is more typical for these books to be an author's first—or even their only—book. The first Aboriginal writer to have a book published was David Unaipon in 1929. Kath Walker's book of poetry We Are Going (1964) is arguably the next major milestone in the publishing history of Aboriginal literature. Nonetheless, as Anita M. Heiss writes in her seminal book on the subject, Dhuuluu-Yala—To Talk Straight: Publishing Indigenous Literature (2003), "Aboriginal written literature did not fully develop into a distinct genre until the 1970s, 80s and 90s" (25). It was also in the 1970s that some of the earliest works of life writing on the subject of the Stolen Generations began to appear. Margaret Tucker's If Everyone Cared: Autobiography of Margaret Tucker (1977) was one of these early standout books. The 1980s saw an even greater number of these books published, including such notable titles as Glenyse Ward's Wandering Girl (1987) and Ruby Langford Ginibi's Don't Take Your Love to Town (1988). All three of these books, and many more like them, describe their authors' firsthand experience as members of the Stolen Generations, and all of them were debut books for those authors. Jump forward more than thirty years, and Alf Taylor has added an important new book to the long list of works of life writing on the subject of the Stolen Generations. In God, the Devil and Me, Taylor proves that this subject is far from exhausted, even as the individuals with firsthand experience as members of the Stolen Generations grow older and many of them pass away (Taylor himself is seventy-four years old). Indeed, Taylor addresses in his book the very topic of the death of his peers: "I'd run into a few of the boys I went to school with, ask for such and such. Sadly I'd get the same response: 'Oh, he died through alcohol,' or, 'The piss has killed him and only in his late thirties or early forties, or a drug overdose.' I mean, after going through New Norcia Mission, was death the only salvation for these young warriors of yesterday?" (210–11). Clearly, Taylor does not shy away from difficult subjects. However, confronting the hard stuff—like floggings and meals of "sheep-head broth and weevils" (56)—is not what distinguishes God, the Devil and Me from previous works of life writing on the subject of the Stolen Generations; most of them are similarly unforgiving. Rather, one thing that distinguishes Taylor's memoir is that it combines the firsthand experience of books like Wandering Girl and Don't Take Your Love to Town with the finely honed craft found in a book like Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, which can be achieved only when a book is produced in an advanced stage of that writer's career. Like Pilkington, Taylor...