Stuart Martin (the glue) and Students of the Dawurr Boarding School (text) and Daydae Yunupingu (illustrator), Sweet Home: Stories of Country and Family, Indigenous Literacy Foundation, February 2025, 112 pp., RRP $17.99 (pbk), ISBN 9781922592972
This delightful book is a series of small prose passages about experiences and memories of home. Twenty-six boarding students originating from about a dozen Northern Territory remote communities have told their stories here, and after two years of work their stories have been gathered into this impressive little anthology.
It is not only a joyful book to read, but a significant document detailing the astonishing lifestyles of children in Australia’s remote and sometimes traditional Indigenous communities. In these snippets of life readers will discover that tasting the wildife of Australia’s outback, catching goanas by the tail, killing wild bullocks, stoning birds and lizards are activities almost taken for granted.
One child tells of running over wild bulls in the family car to kill them up near Timber Creek in the Northern Territory, then the pleasure of eating the heart of a cow. Without boomerangs or rifles the children learn to hurl car spanners at wild ducks. Killing buffalos is heart-stoppingly dangerous. There are fishing stories too, and the fishing happens often among crocodiles. It is just possible there is a bit of the usual fishing-story exaggeration going on.
Some children explain that they are struggling with their self esteem, temper or with a tendency to bully . For many of them family is their best and most called-upon support. These stories caught in book form will give the children who told them a lot of pleasure and pride, and good memories too. I hope that the anthology also finds its way into the hands of children who haven’t, as yet, been introduced to life in the deep north of Australia. The school has been courageous to publish these stories in their raw, inspired, and unpolished beauty.
Recommended for readers from 8 to 15 years, and well beyond.
Reviewed by Kevin Brophy
