Review #10 - Through Silent Country
Review #10
This is kind of a cheat, but my tenth book is *Through Silent Country*. Not all of it, just the middle section which consists of transcriptions of interviews with Wongatha people from the Western Australian Goldfields.
The author - Carolyn Wadley Dowley - became interested in an obscure incident in Western Australian history. She read a record of Wongatha people being sent to Moore River native settlement in the 1920s (Mogumber, where the most difficult Aboriginal people from across the state were sent). This happened all the time, but these people managed to escape.
They made it back to Laverton, a journey of about 800 kilometres. Google tells me that this is the same as zipping back and forth between New York and Washington a couple of times. Including a blind man who got left by himself!
*Through Silent Country* gives a narrative for this, and, perhaps more interestingly, the central section of the book gives the Wongatha perspective. This section consists of descriptions of what Wongatha people heard about the 1921 escape, stories of other escapes from the Police, of attempts to hide children, of children's lighthearted attempts to run away from the missions, of very serious adult efforts. It is the history of Wongatha resistance to the mission and Police mechanisms of control.
Carolyn Wadley Dowley, Through Silent Country (2000)
This is kind of a cheat, but my tenth book is *Through Silent Country*. Not all of it, just the middle section which consists of transcriptions of interviews with Wongatha people from the Western Australian Goldfields.
The author - Carolyn Wadley Dowley - became interested in an obscure incident in Western Australian history. She read a record of Wongatha people being sent to Moore River native settlement in the 1920s (Mogumber, where the most difficult Aboriginal people from across the state were sent). This happened all the time, but these people managed to escape.
They made it back to Laverton, a journey of about 800 kilometres. Google tells me that this is the same as zipping back and forth between New York and Washington a couple of times. Including a blind man who got left by himself!
*Through Silent Country* gives a narrative for this, and, perhaps more interestingly, the central section of the book gives the Wongatha perspective. This section consists of descriptions of what Wongatha people heard about the 1921 escape, stories of other escapes from the Police, of attempts to hide children, of children's lighthearted attempts to run away from the missions, of very serious adult efforts. It is the history of Wongatha resistance to the mission and Police mechanisms of control.
Carolyn Wadley Dowley, Through Silent Country (2000)