View article

Though clearly written, Australianama (‘The Book of Australia’) takes time to read, for it is dense and operates on several levels at once, telling many stories and offering frequent reflections on the form such stories take. As an Australian historian, I brought my own baggage to this book. It begins in Broken Hill, a mining town in western New South Wales that now markets itself as ‘the accessible Outback’, where I spent most of the first seven years of my life, my father a lecturer at the local technical college and my mother, with two small children, an activist establishing the town’s first pre-school kindergarten. In this book, though, Broken Hill is not the radical working-class mining town of my 1950s childhood but rather a desert town where there is a little red mosque that marks ‘where the desert begins’ and provides ‘a peaceful place of retreat from the gritty dust storms and brilliant sunlight’. My mind instantly wanders to …