Interesting story collection featuring Aboriginal characters from Tasmania. Some funny, some sad, some shocking. ( )

The author is Aboriginal Tasmanian (known as pakana) and his 16 stories are all about and of the life of the Aboriginal Tasmanian population. As it turns out, Tasmania is just the biggest of the islands populated and used by the blackfellas (a term you will see more than once in these stories). The language is raw and occasionally crude but it works for this collection.

The 16 stories are grounded in the here and now - from the alcoholism to the Australia Day protests; from the inane government plans to the locals trying to survive. It is an honest look - not everyone is good, not everyone does things for the greater good. There is romance but there is no romanticism in the book - life is hard, no point sugarcoating it. So the questions of identity and belonging become the important ones - both for the Aboriginal population and for the rest of the inhabitants. And there is something extremely uncomfortable in realizing that the people who were there first do not seem to belong anymore; that the island seems to be moving towards modernity, leaving its native children behind. And they have nowhere to go back to. ( )