Steppin' Out and Speakin' UpSydney Morning HeraldMay 15, 2004This is a collection with all the immediacy and intimacy of an absorbing conversation. Each story is told without preamble, as if the reader were being instantly and generously invited into the writer's world. The vividness of the language with its musical rhythms belongs to an oral tradition which, as Ruby Langford Ginibi explains, is important: "We've had great difficulty with white editors, gub editors, because they tend to cut our oral way of talking and use the Queen's English which is again denying us a voice."
These stories, brought together by the Older Women's Network Aboriginal Support Circle - a feisty group who spent "a long and intricate process with indigenous and non-indigenous women side by side editing each story to the satisfaction of each individual" - won't lose their freshness or relevance to insensitive editing.The Dickensian hardships most of the women endured are almost unbearably poignant. Many were taken from their families as children and forced into servitude and humiliation in girls' homes, beaten, raped and ridiculed. They were often poorly clad and hungry.These 15 women are leaders who went on to make a difference in their communities, working to change the injustices and racism that blighted their own childhoods. Each has made history, and each is immersed in a lifelong engagement with the forces that shaped them - poverty, sexism, racism and the humour, richness and generosity of their own culture. Their urgent
desire to set the record straight, their knowledge of the system they work to change, their startling lack of bitterness, make this book compelling reading.The contributors are artists, politicians, poets, community workers, administrators, teachers and nurses from many nations: Wiradjuri, Yorta Yorta, Kamilaroi and Bundjalung. Common themes recur: the importance of education, land rights, love of family and country, the need to connect to
the past, the salvation of humour. As Shirley Murphy puts it, "One of the saving graces of this community is the larrikin element. We like to have a laugh at ourselves. We need our laughter - it saves us."There is also recognition of the need for assertiveness after years of humiliation. Nancy de Vries describes her graduation ceremony, when she said to the dean: "I hope you don't mind, but I refuse to curtsey to you, thank you, I am not bowing at any white man this year."At a time when indigenous issues have been so neglected that we have just seen one of the worst riots in decades in Redfern, the knowledge these women have of their own communities and their strength, courage, intelligence and determination are resources we ignore at our peril.Rosie Scott's latest novel is Faith Singer (Sceptre). *Available from Older Women's Network NSW, 87 Lower Fort Street, Millers Point, NSW 2000Media articles are posted for the purpose of criticism, comment, scholarship and research under "fair use" provisions and may not be distributed further without permission of the copyright owners, except for "fair use."
