Aboriginal Mother

by Elsie R. Labumore

Elsie Roughsey was member of the Lardil tribe of Aborigines from Mornington Island or Goonana, in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria. She tells of Aboriginal life soon after the first missionaries arrived in the tribe.

Cover art by the author's artist husband, Dick Roughsey.

Genres: Memoir

245 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1985

Reviews

[Christyne]

I am glad I read this book but it was tough. The author tells her own story, in her own words. Her English, completely understandably, is not 100% up to par. The editors left it that way. I am glad they did. It is more authentic and more her story but it makes it a bit more challenging to read.

[mr. chad]

I have tried twice to read this book. There is great difficulty in wrapping my North American brain around it. The language/story is just to...um...disjointed, maybe. I think that the koori (Aboriginal) story telling method is better understood orally.

[Rhonda · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took awhile to get through this very valuable book as the way the voice of the natrator and the English language intersect turned my sense of sentence and meaning inside out. The voice is strong and experiencing it bought me closer to the difference between First Nation Australia and my 3rd generation Australian self. It was both worlds painfully seperate but also deeply close because it is about being Australian. I stopped constantly to read sections out loud as I could not grasp exact meaning by an effort of thought alone but when reading them as spoken, at the pace of speech, meaning would come. The author is talking to me and maybe saying the words out loud allowed another sort of sharing to take place. It is a generous and unjudging work, sad but also happy. It is also one of the very, very few works I will read again as I know doing so will give me even more.

[Jess]

DNF. I respect this book for what it is but the writing was too hard for me to get through. Definitely a subject I want to read more about, but I think I'll have more success with something more modern.