Reviewed by Ian Lipke
The book, Alice’s Dreaming, is a composite production consisting of seventy-seven pages written by Alice Moncton Duncan-Kemp while still in her thirties, and Tom Griffiths, Emeritus Professor of History at the Australian National University in Canberra. Kemp’s work is exceptionally lucid allowing for the heavy hand of an editor prior to publishing. The book has been described as an “elegantly written and deeply researched book [that] offers a respectful yet searching examination of Alice Duncan-Kemp’s extraordinary life and work” (cover). Tom Griffith’s prose is a fitting tribute to a wonderful exposition of Alice Duncan-Kemp’s introduction.
Alice Duncan-Kemp reveals her ability to write sensitively even though her formal education was limited in scope. She lived the life of an aborigine from the time she mixed with them, a white child accepted by the various tribes she encountered. It helped that she was seen as specially chosen following her rise unhurt from the branches of a tree that had fallen on her (58). However, her writings constitute on their own (with no support from a magical event such as her escape from a falling tree) an evocation of rich storytelling and love for her fellow man.
Alice had a special relationship with the reigning spirits. She was a favourite of Yammacoona, the recognised mother and medicine woman to the tribe. Alice was given a secret name, whose bestowal she describes in some detail (59). At the age of five, she was riding with her father, when they came upon a secret squad, the nooradimma guard. Alice was struck into silence and experienced a vision that told her that she must learn from these people, and about them, before it is too late. (A third distinguishing feature, visited on the young girl, is identified as travelling into history). Bogie and Moses (two workers on the station) believed they had known her before she was born. Her ‘specialness’ is revealed when Alice mentions that she could speak thirteen dialects as a child and knew fifty of the sixty-eight dialects spoken by the aborigines around the station. Moreover, Alice, tutored primarily by the women, came to an understanding of the Dreaming and relied for protection on the Droonooda.
The aboriginal understanding of the Milky Way (the Mubalara) was quaint but real. It mirrored bounded territories on the earth and was fully populated. Alice soon learned that while the most fearsome of the Sky people was a male called Malkuri, women ruled the heavens. The adult Alice remembered seeing rings and rows of white stones about waterholes, placed there she believed by Yammacoona following a quarrel with Malkuri.
Alice’s story bursts with legends of the aboriginal culture, of which these I have described fill only a miniscule portion. The interest generated by both Alice’s story and the stories from another culture that she brings to us grow their own attractiveness. Her life as a young girl among the aborigines on a property holds us spellbound. It is cast into the shade only by the intrinsic interest of the aborigines. She knew them all on an intimate level and kept their secrets as one of them.
Tom Griffiths supplies an amplification of Duncan-Kemp’s story. The book is structured to allow the reader to grasp his knowledge of early twentieth century aboriginal life within parameters set by Griffiths. The professor needed to extend Alice’s text, and the pages that follow her section do just that. This section of the book is divided into three segments the first being called war and peace, made up of chapters called invasion, treaty and rebellion. Another section is entitled stranger than fiction, populated by chapters on writing, tracking and reading. The final part is called the way home and contains information on ‘family and ‘country. It becomes very clear that Griffiths has provided information that Duncan-Kemp has not.
How difficult must it have been to expand an earlier writer’s work with page after page of original thinking. This is creativity at its finest. Yet even the strength of this powerful writer must be questioned when we consider the usefulness of spending any further time on Pascoe and his ravings and, more seriously, an anomaly that tells me that all the aborigines had disappeared from the local area but were available to welcome Griffiths home.
The chapters on invasion-treaty-rebellion were infinitely more detailed, and therefore, more interesting than those on writing-tracking-reading. The suggestion appeared that the latter chapters were fill-in material. Tom Griffihs needs no ancillary platform.
The book is a delight to read.
Alice’s dreaming
(2026)
by Tom Griffiths
Black Inc
ISBN: 978 1 7606 4624 0
$36.99; 384 pp