Katey Flowers’s Reviews > Dear Son: Letters and Reflections from First Nations Fathers and Sons > Status Update

“Lastly my boys, let us always respect and thank our old people for taking the brunt of the despair, suffering and mental and physical abuse, and surviving. And remember that before them, before the white man ever came, we lived a peaceful and happy existence. An existence that with perseverance, hard work, love and respect for each other, we can recreate.”

“Perhaps in heaven there is no unwritten law against showing each other affection - two men - and even if there is, like down here, some laws need to be broken.”

“Yet in my lifetime, the neck chains were swapped for handcuffs. First Nations people still die in police custody with no justice; Australia’s grossly disproportionate incarceration rates do the colonising work that the massacres once did.”

“Pop has got scars all over his body: scars of survival. Scars from the boxing tents; scars from the sawmills; scars from the coppers. Then there are scars we don’t see; scars that he keeps hidden. Scars of the soul that don’t heal. You Pop is scarred from Australia.”

“With each page we wrote, we Indigenous men, have built a vessel. With the strength of our ancestors, we pull the oars of truth against a tide of ignorance and toxic masculinity. And with our words, bright as the stars on a moonless night, we offer our children shining points of guidance. We have done it for our people and our Country…”

How has the foreword already got me crying?!
‘Within these pages are the words of sculptors… These men have taken the clay material of the past - all that trauma of colonial weight - and with it, all that water of community - thousands and thousands of years of culture, family, Country - and have made… something solid out of all the materials we’ve been bestowed with.’