- Swallow the Air is Tara June Winch's first novel and was written when she was just 21. It was published in 2006 and won numerous literary awards. After reading and reviewing her latest novel The Yield, I felt compelled to read it.
- Simply put, it's a magnificent achievement. Besides being beautifully written, virtually every sentence arrested me and demanded a re-read. It's about a proud people persecuted, imprisoned, stranded and forgotten, and a young Indigenous woman’s journey to her spiritual home, the Wiradjuri nation in central NSW.
- Winch has written a powerful hand grenade of a novel, lobbed at colonial ignorance and complacency, and clothed in thrilling, poetic prose.
- The ugliness of young May Gibson's home life is confronting - her father was a violent abuser, and her mother dies young. May and her brother Billy are offered a new home by her Aunt, whose boyfriend Craig is also violent. Billy suffers severely and leaves.
- May leaves too, months later, and catches up with Billy who has become a druggie and a dealer.
- She ends up in the Redfern Block in Sydney for a year, and finds a friend in Johnny. But life on the margin is hard. The racist police pigs were always after them. ‘I knew I had to leave this place...I needed to listen to the dreams...I’m going to country, I’m going to find family’.
- She hitchhikes her way to reconnect with her ancestral community in central NSW and to find her family the Gibson’s, and her mob. On a Mission she meets Uncle Graham who laments the plight of the Indigenous people: ‘They still tryin to do it, kill off us fellas, that always been they plan, now they do it quiet, crush em, slow....us fellas still seen as second-rate person, still treated like they don’t matter’.
- At Lake Cargelligo, May comes to Country and is told by a Gibson cousin: ‘There is a big missing hole between this place and the place you’re looking for. That place, that people. That something you’re looking for. It’s gone. It was taken away. We weren’t told, love; we weren’t allowed to be Aboriginal.’ She realises she can't stay.
- On her return to the coast she learns Johnny has died in a police chase.
- One of the final chapters is called The Jacaranda Tree, which is just sublime. Beautiful, poetic, unlocking memories of her mother.
- I find it hard to believe that this glorious gem of a book was written by an author so young.
- It's a stunning achievement that will be read and re-read for generations to come.
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