Wakuwal (Dream) is an intercultural history of Australia. It is a story that tracks five generations of descendants of an Irish woman sent to Van Diemen's land for stealing a sheep. It contrasts this with the events that unfolded for Australia's first peoples and of the inter-connections and blockages between new and old Australian cultures. The story follows characters within the European invasion of Australia and ponders whether anything is recoverable from the original and ongoing carnage.
The story is a wild imagining of how things were, and how they got to be, now. The narrator is alternately a spirit being from Éire, an eagle, an octopus, fire, a willy-willy, a sacred dog bounding across the continent, and bäru the crocodile.
Yolŋu creation stories of North East Arnhem land embedded in sacred designs as well as Aboriginal stories from the Pilbara, Kimberley and Cape York Peninsula are interspersed with modern narratives of Homer, Christ, Yeats and Joyce.
Wakuwal is a book of hope: how faith and resilience kept ancient knowledge alive, how optimism endures in the face of ignorance and destruction, and how today's descendants of both the newcomers and the first peoples are beginning a conversation, many generations overdue.
About the Author :
Peter Botsman is one of Australia's most creative public intellectuals. For the last 20 years he has lived at Eramboo Farm in Kangaroo Valley on the NSW south coast where he raises Scottish Highland cattle. He has been voluntary national secretary of the Indigenous Stock Exchange (ISX) for the past 15 years and worked in many areas of Aboriginal economic development, in Cape York, the Pilbara, the Kimberley, Arnhem Land, Timor Leste, Shepparton and the NSW South Coast. Some of his earlier public policy work was carried out as Executive Director of the Evatt Foundation, Australia's premier left wing think tank of the nineties, and as Professor of Public Policy, University of Queensland and Executive Director of The Brisbane Institute. He was adopted into the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land. Peter Botsman currently divides his time between Kangaroo Valley and Arnhem Land, in the company of his three sons Chenier, Dashiel and Declan Moore, and his Yolngu family.
Review :
"This is a book unlike any I have read - an audacious dreamweaving of Indigenous and settler identity, a narrative that fuses Yolŋu and Irish story-telling. Five spirit beings reflect different streams in Peter Botsman's journey, a language both personal and deeply linked to traditions he values. There is a sadness too, a sense of landscapes and peoples lost to unthinking development, tenuous links through tenacious individuals who keep identity and place alive."
Professor Glyn Davis, Melbourne University, Vice-Chancellor & Professor of Political Science
"Dhuwala djorra' guŋga'yunamirri balandawu ga yolnguwa. This book will help you all balanda and yolŋu." Batumbil Burarrwanga, Mata Mata, Arnhem Land
"Peter Botsman has long been one of this country's best and most adventurous social thinkers. This might be his biggest - and best - adventure yet." Don Watson, Author and Speechwriter
