Kim Scott

An American friend recently asked me to define the Australian short story. Despite misgivings, I muttered something about birth, landscape and setting, vernacular, diversity, then retreated. The Best Australian Stories 2013 provides a viable answer. Short stories don’t want to be defined; they are much too subversive for that. They only want to be read. The best ones will want to be read again, and will offer up something new each time.

Mamang and Noongar Mambara Bakitj are retellings of traditional Noongar narratives by the Miles Franklin Award-winning author Kim Scott, in collaboration with a team of others. The books are part of a broader Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories reclamation and revitalisation project currently under way in the south-western coastal region of Western Australia, an area roughly traversing Albany to Esperance. Like many other Australian languages today, Noongar is barely hanging on. These modest diglot books, charmingly illustrated by Noongar people in simple, unaffected, and direct style, therefore represent a timely intervention into the continuing post-colonial destruction of this critically (and globally) endangered language.

Kim Scott noted in 2001 that the biographical notes accompanying his first two novels (True Country, 1993, and Benang: From the Heart, 1999) changed ...

Readers of Kayang and Me should not be lulled by the beauty of its prose or by its seemingly easy location within the now-familiar genre of indigenous life story. This book dislodges its white readers from positions of quietude or certainty, and takes us into a world marked by irredeemable loss – our own as well as Noongars’. Among other things, Kayang and Me points to the crucial things that settler-colonisers have lost or forsaken in the mistaken pursuit of the bounties of colonisation, and it calls for nothing less than a radical remaking of the Australian nation-state. Significantly, it installs writing and reading as practices through which the past, present and future might come to be differently known and newly imagined. The white reader is shown to be implicated in the story she holds in her hands, in its vision of another future as well as in its tragic present and past.

Kim Scott is described on the inside cover of Benang, his second novel, as ‘a descendant of  people who have always lived along the south-east coast of Western Australia and is glad to be living in times when it is possible to explore the significance of that fact and be one among those who call themselves Nyoongar ...