‘God, The Devil and Me’ by Alf Taylor

Kaya everyone, welcome to #DeadlyWABookClub! Over the next three months I’ll be analysing and celebrate the writing of Aboriginal authors from Western Australia. I’ll also be sharing some essays published in the journal JASAL, to raise awareness of the big thinkers of today who are discussing and critiquing Australian literature. This is all thanks to my writer’s fellowship from ASAL/Copyright Agency - thank you! Find out more at ASAL.

Today we’re talking about Uncle Alf Taylor and his memoir ‘God, The Devil and Me (2021)’, as well as his short story and poetry collection, ‘Cartwarra or what? (2022)’. Cartwarra can be interpreted as ‘stupid/bad in the head’ in Nyungar. As you may have noticed by these titles, Taylor’s best weapon is his humour, and often he stretches his talents in the face of grim, very unhumorous realities. Both books were published by Mabagala Books, the leading Indigenous publishing house in Australia.

Growing up in the New Norcia Mission as a young Nyungar boy, Taylor’s memoir ‘God, The Devil and Me’ shares stories from his childhood under the ruthless strap and hateful eyes of the god-fearing priests and nuns, hellbent on a mission to reform and assimilate ‘us little black devils’ (as Taylor calls himself and the other children) into white Australia. Yet through all the terror and suffering, Taylor recalls with love and admiration his friendships with the boys, nights spent longing for the girls, and pure joy at discovering Shakespeare and the power of the pen. This memoir had me at times laughing out loud to his stinging rebukes of Jesus, rewritten verses of the Holy Bible and takedowns of Captain Cook, before shaking my head at the daily injustices this young boy had to endure in a cruel world seeking to solve ‘the Aboriginal problem’, as it was openly called in those days. Taylor was just one of many young Aboriginal children who were stolen, kidnapped or kept in the dark about the loving parents who wanted them back, in a government-enforced policy seeking to wipe out any traces of Aboriginal culture, pride, and so-called “race”.

What do you do when you experience attempted genocide by the government? What do you do when the world tells you that everything about you is wrong? In Taylor’s own words, writing probably saved his life: “Little did I know then, while writing and creating, that it would enable me in later years to rise up against the odds of God, the Devil, the strap, mass, the altar, booze, and all the monks, nuns and brothers put together (p. 21).” This memoir is a testament to Taylor’s Nyungar strength and pride in the face of a system that tried to take all of that away from him – it is a truth-telling must-read for all Australians willing to face up to our nation’s past. 

Extract from ‘God, The Devil and Me’ by Alf Taylor.

Taylor’s other compendium of storytelling, ‘Cartwarra or what?’ is a lyrical continuation of his experiences from the mission days, and also from his later years. Once again, he blends gut-punching truth with wit, irony and good old blackfella comedy. Having heard Taylor read one of his short stories aloud at a live event, I don’t know if the text can compare to his hilarious spoken word readings, however the book will more than suffice for most. I highly recommend you read both the memoir and novella, starting with the memoir.

In ‘’Paper talk,’ Testimony and Forgetting in South-West Western Australia (2017)’, Jessica White writes about how the dominant colonial settler discourse about our shared Australian history lied, covered over or curiously forgot key events of the story of colonisation and its impact on Indigenous Australians. This has led to a privileging of European perspectives, and what is referred to in the field of Indigenous studies as ‘the great Australian silence’ – a shared forgetting, ignorance of and unwillingness to discuss the injustices of the past. However, White also argues that Aboriginal literature and critics, like Taylor, can flip this narrative through truth-telling.

In her essay, ‘I pity the poor immigrant (2017)’, Goorie author Melissa Lucashenko shares her frustration with non-Indigenous authors who write about Aboriginal people as if they are still belonging to that old Darwinian philosophy of belonging to ‘a dying race’. As an act of rebuttal to this phenomenon, Lucashenko decides to write her next novel with Aboriginal characters full of ‘power, beauty, humour and land (p. 8)’, to state adamantly – we are still here, we never went away.

I think this act of self-proclamation of survival and pride is exactly what Taylor does so beautifully in his own writing. He himself is imbued with power, beauty, humour and a love for and connection to Country that ultimately sees him through the darkest period of his life. His act of truth-telling is itself a shattering of ‘the great Australian silence’. While retelling moments from his past – and in fact at times, re-writing the very myths and lies he was told about his own culture – Taylor offers all of us readers a light and a way forward out of the dark. 

~

Question for your next book club: What effect does Taylor’s poetry and prose that re-imagines the Bible and characters like Jesus and the Virgin Mary have on the overall themes of the book? How does it re-position Taylor himself?

Extract from ‘God, The Devil and Me’ by Alf Taylor.

Note: If you’re interested in reading more regular book reviews for books by Aboriginal writers, I highly recommend you follow @blackfulla_bookclub on Instagram, they are fantastic!