Warra Warra Wai (Darren Rix & Craig Cormick, S&S)

Warra Warra Wai visits the sites that James Cook’s crew irrevocably changed by hand, flag, pen or presence. Gazing at the Endeavour from the land and vice versa, Darren Rix and Craig Cormick tread the dual pathways of First Nations and Western ways of knowing. Ambitious in scope, the book affords each site only a brief introductory glance before moving up the coast. This may disappoint some, but is suitable for readers looking for an accessible account of this continent’s complicated and contested storying of place. Cleverly, Rix and Cormick focus on in-community and First Nations voices to evaluate settler records, subverting typical methods of Australian history writing, while tracing knowledge held by First Peoples over countless generations. Each chapter opens with in-language poetry: a demonstration of resilience against ongoing colonisation. Readers are carefully guided through events marked by slaughter, desecration and destruction, balanced by the joys of culture and survival: story, song, dance, diet, trade, craft and technology—inheritances of timeless tradition. Necessarily, Rix and Cormick stress the English language’s inadequacy in conveying First Nations culture, or as Guggandji man Alfred ‘Touché’ Grey expresses it: ‘A book don’t talk or dance to you.’ But with dispossession comes knowledge destruction, and I think Warra Warra Wai successfully creates a keeping place for the stories that everyone must know for walking on Country to be a meaningful experience.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Adam Novaldy Anderson is an Australian-Indonesian writer and commissioning editor at Sweatshop Literacy Movement. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

Category: Friday Unlocked reviews Reviews