What Book to Read?

Tara Winch is a young Australian writer of Wiradjuri, Afghan and English heritage. This is her first novel, published in 2006, when she was twenty-three years old. It is ‘for all of us attempting to make sense of the world’.

The book is made up of twenty short chapters, each of which could be considered a short story, though they tell a sequential narrative. Each deals with the attempt of May Gibson, a fifteen year old girl of Wiradjuri and English heritage living in Wollongong on the NSW coast, to make sense of her world. Her Aboriginal mother commits suicide, and May and her brother Billy go to live with their Auntie. Drunkenness and domestic violence drive them away, and May journeys first to Sydney, then to outback NSW in search of her Aboriginal family. On the way she meets interesting people, some kindness and assistance, and a lot of pain and misery. It is a classic coming of age story; whatever the outcome of her search for family, May learns more about herself.

The story is told in the first person present, and sounds autobiographical. It isn’t, strictly speaking, though almost certainly Winch is drawing on some of her own experience, and doubtless that of other Aboriginal men and women. There is an admirable matter-of-factness in her accounts of the racism, the drinking, gambling, substance abuse and violence that she sees around her: the poppies, the goon, the bongs, the yarndi, the chroming, the petrol. This suggests to me the familiarity of personal experience but also a capacity for detachment: ‘Billy got a job on the milk run and Auntie got pissed to celebrate’ is a wonderful example of this. But Winch also sees beauty – in the fall of light on water, in the ocean, the beach and the clouds. Her acceptance of it as an equally important reality rescues her – and the story – from the sort of pessimism evoked by detailing the destructive aspects of Aboriginal experience in Australia.

Winch’s use of an unusual mixture of colloquial and metaphoric language is key to the impact of the book. All her language is informal: evicted from a squat, it was the fifth time that week ‘the pigs came to clear us out’. Sometimes the language goes beyond the colloquial to an Aboriginal vernacular, as in Joyce’s first meeting with May: ‘Well watcha doin up ere anyway, May Gibson? Get down ere and talk to ya auntie girl, what ya doin sleepin round ere, bloody moguls ere.’ The structure of the language may be simple, but there is a liberal use of imagery. The title, ‘Swallow the Air’, is, I think, itself a metaphor for becoming conscious of the world. May’s brother Billy was born with a hole in the heart: ‘His heart was bleeding before the world had even got to him, before he could even swallow air, Mum had said.’ This consciousness is often expressed metaphorically, as in: ‘Sunsets were for staring at across the long sweep of disorder, over rooftops where the day would snigger and slowly hide its semi-circle of tangerine’. Or ‘The house wheezed, jammed between the new motorway and the train line, alongside the lapping sidewalk that rose and fell like undulating limbs.’ Or ‘Bones cracked under the fighter’s grated ribs, his oars of the dinghy swinging – slipping to the ground’. She has a thing about eyes; perhaps your eyes become what you see. A taxi driver has ‘night-shift eyes’, a drugged girl has ‘no eyes’, her equally drugged friends have eyes that were ‘all sunken brown and yellow stones, cold.’ Her own eyes become ‘hardened, like honeycomb, like toffee. Brittle, crumbling sugar’. This sort of language is risky; does it illuminate or obscure? I find it a bit overdone, but then I am of a prosaic turn of mind. Other readers have obviously responded much more warmly to it.

May’s search for identity is central to the book. ‘I felt Aboriginal’, she says, ‘because Mum made me proud to be, told me I got magic and courage from Gundyarri, the spirit man. It was then I felt Aboriginal, I felt like I belonged, but when Mum left, I stopped being Aboriginal, I stopped feeling like I belonged. Anywhere.’ I don’t think this issue is resolved, and because of this, and perhaps partly because of the linked-short-story structure of the book, the plot loses force and focus. The book stands, therefore, on the strength of its writing. Clearly this is not ‘literary’ in any traditional sense, but maybe some new definition of what is literary needs to be arrived at for novels such as this.

Winch has won a number of prizes for Indigenous writing, and Swallow the Air was runner up for the Age Book of the Year in 2007. You can read an interview with her here, on the occasion of her winning the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, a year-long scheme which pairs creative young writers with well-known practitioners.