‘Shadow Lines’ by Stephen Kinnane
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.
Shadow Lines (2020, Fremantle Press) by Marda Marda author Stephen Kinnane, from Mirriwong country, is a family retelling like no other. Lyrical, vulnerable, and imbued with deep time sensibilities, Kinnane shares the story of how his grandparents, Mirriwong woman Jessie Argyle, and Englishman Edward Smith, fell in love and raised a family, despite the racist government of the time trying to prevent their relationship succeeding every step of the way.
More than just a story of boy meets girl, Kinnane also charts his own personal journey travelling to different parts of country his family lived on and knew well, from the vast beauty of the Kimberley, to a cruel and painful mission at Swan Mission in Guildford, to bustling and biting London city. This is a journey of one man’s attempt to not only connect with his ancestors, but his reflections on how his family refused to be labelled or put in boxes – that their identities, relationships and understandings of the world can be messy, complex, traumatic, loving and non-linear.
The title of this book refers to the shadowy lines we draw for our own lives, for who we chart ourselves to be, and in defiance of the national, racial or religious lines that are drawn for us by others. This is particularly relevant in the structured, caged world that Kinnane’s family lived in, where Aboriginal people’s lives were controlled to the nth degree by the “protective” government policies put in place from the 1905 Aborigines Act, and where segregation and racism meant most white people stayed clear of Aboriginal people.
Or as artist Richard Bell describes with a bit more flair, Aboriginal people were and are ‘the most studied creatures on earth … They [whitefellas] are stuck so far up our arses that they on first name terms with sphincters, colons and any intestinal parasites.’
Shadow Lines is one of those stories that makes reality seem stranger than fiction. How could one man’s (Chief Protector A.O Neville) insane personal crusade to control Aboriginal people’s lives so completely be allowed to run wild with its paternal malice and hurt so many innocents, the impacts of which are still being felt today? How could a black woman and a white man fall so quickly and deeply in love, and fight to stay together, despite the very different worlds they inhabited – and more importantly, the different ways the world viewed them? How could rare moments of kindness from strangers be few and far between, but so precious and life-altering?
This book also captures a different time and atmosphere in Perth city that I think all West Australians should know about; it definitely challenged the way I saw the city. Kinnane’s poetic etchings of the cityscape, its busy, communal burrows, and frog-filled swamps beneath expanding concrete pilings, made me long for a past I never knew about while bemoaning the present industrial invasion.
In Melissa Lucashenko’s essay, ‘Not quite white in the head (2006)’, she discusses the term ‘earthspeaking’: a concept where Indigenous people talk about their place, their home, and their community’s stories – not just one person’s story, but the story of the land, spirits and people connected to it.
‘Western culture lives in people,’ writes Lucashenko, ‘influenced by their environment, which they conceive as more or less separate to themselves. Indigenous culture lives in the more porous space, the relationship, between humans, landscape and animal life. Identity becomes far more diffused and democratic than it is for industrial people. With the merging of the self and the environs, a particular form of human arrogance simply falls away.’
And so Shadow Lines is Kinnane’s act of humbly earthspeaking: bringing together place, himself, his ancestors, Country, and their relations and care for each other, into one beautiful yarn that I deeply enjoyed.
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Question for your next book club: How do you think Kinnane ‘earthspeaks’? Provide examples and describe how it made you feel.
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!
