Family: Stories of Belonging

Aliana Gougoulls and Ian See (Eds)

Penguin Random House

Otago Daily Times, July 8th 2023

The stories in this Australian collection explore the complicated and multifaceted nature of family, both natal and created. For each of these writers the word has a different meaning – mothers, grandmothers, neighbours, teachers, communities, stories, places – and their writing reveals as much about the author as the subject they address.

As interesting and diverse as these conceptions are, it is the points of commonality that I found most interesting. Many of those who find family outside the home are immigrants and refugees, perhaps not surprising in situations where, as Ruby Hamad writes in ‘A Tempe Tale’, parents stuck in fight-or-flight mode do not have the emotional or mental bandwidth to recognise their children’s needs. Others are left in an interstitial space, suspended between two countries, neither of which is fully home.

For Aboriginal authors Daniel James and Daniel Browning, connections flow through the land, while for J.P. Pomare, the sole Māori contributor, it is story itself: “your culture is spoken, your culture is sound…we all believe in things that never happened but are true nonetheless. And, more importantly, we build our we build our identity on the foundations of these stories”.