Born Into This by Adam Thompson
“It took a while for the fury to find me, for it to settle like a cold bullet in the chambers of my heart. It’s still there. Most days, I can ignore it. But in the grip of a terrible hangover, when the black eye opens up, it comes to life within me. And I wonder, then, which old fella it was who I killed. I wonder how much of my life, after that day, was shaped by that action.”
Born into This (2021) is the debut collection from Adam Thompson, an emerging Aboriginal (pakana) writer from Tasmania. These sixteen short stories are wild, sharp and incredibly nuanced. Thompson writes boldly about the colonial Australia we live in now, with no margin left empty.
A gruff bushranger is startled to discover the land he believes to know so well is changed in ways he didn’t anticipate. The receptionist of an Aboriginal housing co-op takes restoring the land into her own hands - in a very real sense. A young man moves to solitude on a remote island, where he avoids the visits of the police when they come to deliver his mail and makes a surprising discovery with an uncle. Many of Thompson’s stories use the backdrop of homeland and Tasmania to build a strong sense of place, traversing land and sea. The Australia he writes about is set in the modern-day, but the historical and long-standing attachment to land are never far from many of his characters’ minds.
“Honey,” the second story in the collection and perhaps my favourite, builds on this idea, exposing the destruction and theft of cultural belonging that comes with stripping the physical place from a people. A young Aboriginal man, Nathan, is helping an older Australian white man, Sharkey, to move some beehives. The hives are being kept on fenced-off land where the bees have had access to kunzea flowers for pollination, but it’s uncertain whose land it is. Sharkey makes no secret of his contempt for both the land and its original owners, feeling secure in his white superiority and Nathan’s youth that he won’t contest him:
“Uncle Murray said the blackfellas used the stones to cut things because they weren’t smart enough to invent knives. He said that if Grandad and the other farmers found stone tools on their land, they’d bury ‘em or throw ‘em in the river so that your mob couldn’t come along and claim land rights.”
It’s a dark tale of comeuppance and one that I think every reader will finish reading with a similar faint smile to Nathan as he walks away from the scene and wonders: “‘What is the Aboriginal word for honey?’”
Some stories set the scene in the opening paragraphs, and like watching a car crash in slow motion, we can’t turn away. In “Kite,” a man is gifted a handmade kite by his nephew:
“I admired the kite, although it was a strange gift for an adult. It was well constructed, the fabric stretched taut across the frame, and it was in the colours of the Aboriginal flag, with the sun at its centre.”
To prevent the kite from breaking when it lands, the nephew has kept the middle stick longer and sharpened to a point. Sometime later, the man is living in his van, travelling the country and decides to take the kite for a flight on a nearby beach. It happens to be Australia Day, and the beach is crowded with white Australians enjoying the day, unhappy to see an Aboriginal among them. One family, with a small white dog in tow, calls out to him:
“‘Yeah, fuck off with your Abo flag,’ came an assured voice. And I felt fear. Not because of the threat - I’d been bracing myself for that - but because the voice belonged to a woman.”
He flies the kite. Loses control. The white dog is running loose along the beach. The moment we read about the kite’s sharpened point, we know what’s going to happen - just as we know how such an event will be reported in the media - but we can’t stop reading.
“Honey” is not the only story to focus on deliverance to the white man for racist and colonial actions, but Thompson is conscious not to paint (pardon the pun) a completely black and white picture of Australia. His Aboriginal characters are rich, varied, expressive and authentic. They deal with the hands they’re dealt, battling pseudo-politics in the classroom and the pressures of masculinity in a world they’re unsure how to be a part of - a world they’ve been born into - that doesn’t yet offer them a clear and concrete place.
Thompson knows what he’s doing, and with the subject matter he tackles, this collection could have easily slipped into a dark and depressing place. Instead, Thompson expertly uses wit and a healthy dash of humour to keep the reader invested - and he succeeds. This was one of the most compelling collections I’ve read in a long time.
Elaine Mead is a freelance writer and book reviewer, currently residing in Hobart, Tasmania. She is passionate about the ways we can use literature to learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her online at www.wordswithelaine.com.
