A small story about the childhood of May Gibson, a half aboriginal girl whose traumatizing up-bring is hazily recounted through a mixture of dreamtime legends and heroin induced fantasies. With a father who abandoned her at a young age, a mother who took her life from grief, a Aunty who finds comfort in a bottle as a means of escaping her boyfriends fists and a brother who goes half-mad from it all, one easily sympathies with May in all her innocent beauty as she wanders the continent in search for home. Perhaps then it is her unbelievable purity in amongst tragedy and corruption which stops the novel from being a straight memoir, but rather a dreamlike exploration of finding one’s place in the world after suffering accumulative loss; ‘it was then I felt Aboriginal, I felt like I belonged, but when Mum left, I stopped being Aboriginal. I stopped feeling like I belonged. Anywhere.’
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‘I didn’t know it then, but the man would no longer be there and the mangoes would’ve all been packed and sent away in dusty oversized trucks. They would all be bought and eaten, the skin and seed rotted, the yellow dew leather chewed through by worms. Fruit flies would have flown to new flesh. And the dark finger leaves would’ve grown over in pink wax scale, the hibiscus turned black and sweating fragrance of caustic sap and sugar long been buried with the season.’
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