Not Just Black and White (Lesley & Tammy Williams, UQP)

This is a most unusual, and very welcome, addition to the growing number of memoirs of Indigenous Australians. Unusual in that it is in the form of a ‘conversation in print’ between a mother and daughter, each reflecting on the life experience of the other and their shared bond. Lesley Williams, raised on Queensland’s Cherbourg Aboriginal Reserve in the 1950s and early 1960s, has the tragic history of dispossession in her family, and she recalls it in a direct, personal way that can’t fail to touch. Forced into domestic servitude at 15, she struggles to forge a life of her own, made immeasurably more difficult by her husband’s suicide, which leaves her with three small children in very straitened circumstances. The first-person narrative is mostly Lesley’s, centred around that struggle, and telescoping as time moves on into a quest for justice as she seeks reparation for wages kept back by the government during her years of domestic service. Lesley’s strength to stand up for herself in a just cause is a mighty example to her children. Her daughter Tammy’s winning entry in an essay-writing competition takes both of them on a life-changing trip to Michael Jackson’s Neverland, and the UN in Geneva. Tammy’s space in the narrative grows in size and significance as she matures, and we are left with a wholly satisfying sense of the strength of the family bond, and positive generational change. This is a book to inspire, and educate, in its own quite original way.

David Gaunt is co-owner of Gleebooks