Swallow The Air by Tara June Winch
“Sometimes, people stand in the way of other people’s eyes. I wasn’t waiting for change; I wasn’t waiting anymore for things to get better. I took the mango in my mouth, my teeth traced in yellow stringy sweetness.”
Ahead of reading Tara June Winch’s Miles Franklin winning new novel, The Yield (2019), I decided to go back to her early literary beginnings and read Swallow the Air (2003). This is a book that received its own list of literary acclaims and awards when it was first published, and yet has several scathing reviews across Goodreads; I was intrigued.
Swallow the Air follows the path of May Gibson, a teenage Aboriginal girl with mixed heritage - assumed European on her dad’s side. Through a series of short, vignette-style stories that form a novella, we follow May in a search for her people, her history, connection to place, and attempts to find where she ultimately belongs.
While this is an Aboriginal story, it is not the sort of Aboriginal story most white Australians are comfortable with. Winch focuses on the lingering fallout of the Stolen Generation, the abuse and displacement of an entire people, as well as the inherent racism still prevalent today towards the custodians of the land we live on. May’s life is one clouded by “grog,” drugs, and scraping by.
After the loss of her “head sick” mum, May and her brother Billy go to live with their Aunt, an arrangement that starts hopeful but soon sinks into the despair that plagues May and Billy’s lives. After a violent altercation between Billy and their Aunt’s boyfriend, Billy leaves in the night, leaving May behind. May’s connection to her brother is strong, and it is the loss of this link that leads her to set out on her journey to find her mob.
Hitchhiking from the east coast to the Northern Territory, May traces the footsteps she believes to be her family’s, based on her memory of stories and landmarks her mother told them about as children. Remembering and forgetting are strong themes throughout and Winch weaves prose in profoundly lucid ways, conjuring up moments of clarity and making others murky. A scene where May is assaulted is still vivid in my mind:
“The popping buttons over my back take me elsewhere. Bubble wrap. Lemonade burps as Billy and me push each plastic blister between finger and thumb, choking on each other’s laughter. Popping giggles silence violent grunts.”
The effect of this on the reader is immediate. I felt swept up in May’s youth, and her confused yet determined march to find her father and family. The brevity of the book as a whole belies the tightly constructed chapters and honed, poetic language. Visceral details slice most pages, and I found it difficult not to underline entire paragraphs. In Sydney, May finds herself living in The Block with an elder named Joyce:
“I went in like a buttery cake and came out like a shotgun or a Monaro or a gaol sentence. Came out like a steel wall adorned in black tar.”
As May’s journey progresses, I found myself emotionally invested in her plight: after so much heartache and yearning to exist in at least one of the places that form her bloodline, it’s difficult not to be hanging on for a hopeful outcome for her. She eventually finds her way to the house of her cousin, who is “the spitting image of Mum. All skin and hard face.” But the moment she has been dragging herself towards is sadly, although perhaps realistically, not the ending she (and I) have been longing for. May quickly realises there is nothing for her and tries to leave, but not before her cousin mocks her naivety:
“The thing is, we weren’t allowed to be what you’re looking for, and we weren’t told what was right, we weren’t taught by anyone. There is a big hole missing between this place and the place you’re looking for. That place, that people, that something you’re looking for. It’s gone. It was taken away. We weren’t told, love; we weren’t allowed to be aboriginal.”
May begins to reverse her footsteps, finding her way back to both her Aunty and her brother, as their world is quite literally torn down around them. While we are left with no real answers for the ongoing plight, May will no doubt be fighting her entire life. A small shared moment of joy between the three of them (in the form of a new tablecloth) offers a slither of hope, even if that slither might only be for the reader.
An unflinching account of the ongoing rift across Australia and of what happens when you try to remove the identity of people through degradation, Swallow the Air is an intensely relevant and compelling book.
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 under @wordswithelaine.
