Swallow the Air

Swallow the Air is a 2006 novel by the Wiradjuri author Tara June Winch, told in twenty lyrical vignettes by May Gibson, a young Aboriginal woman searching for family, culture and Country after her mother's death. It is studied in HSC English Standard Module A: Language, Identity and Culture.

Tara June Winch is a Wiradjuri writer, born in Wollongong in 1983, and Swallow the Air, published in 2006, was her debut, winning the David Unaipon Award before it appeared. The novel is not autobiography, but it draws on the Wiradjuri heritage Winch shares with her narrator, May Gibson, and on the lived reality of contemporary Aboriginal Australia. It is built as twenty short, lyrical vignettes, each almost a prose poem, told in the first person and moving by memory and association rather than straight chronology - a fragmented form that is itself an argument, since a self shattered by grief and a culture broken by dispossession cannot be told as a smooth, rising story.

The novel opens on its central wound: May recalls the day her mother took her own life beneath the jacaranda tree, and the family begins to come apart. Aunty sinks into gambling, an abusive man moves in, and May's brother Billy flees into drugs. May, herself the victim of a racist assault, leaves too, and the middle chapters follow her into the city - a squat, the Aboriginal community of the Block in Redfern where the elder Joyce takes her in, and friendships that sustain her.

The turn comes when May stops running toward her absent father and starts moving toward her mother's people. At Lake Cowal she finds Wiradjuri land being torn open by a mine and meets the elder Issy, who tells her to walk the river to find her family. At Euabalong her cousin Percy tells her the stories are gone - "we weren't allowed to be Aboriginal". Out of that apparent defeat comes the novel's epiphany, "this land is belonging", and May returns home to a grieving Aunty and a drug-free Billy to reclaim, in the plural, "our people".

The novel's deepest subject is an Aboriginal identity that has been broken and must be relearned. May does not experience her Aboriginality as a stable fact - "I felt Aboriginal because Mum had made me proud to be." - and when her mother dies the loss is an unnaming as much as a bereavement: "when Mum left, I stopped being Aboriginal." Winch represents identity as something held in relationships, language and Country, which dispossession can sever and only a return to community and place can restore.

For May, to belong is to belong to Country, and Country is above all water. The elder Issy hands her a grammar of restored pride - "our people are born from quartz crystal, hard water. We are powerful people, strong people." - and by the novel's end May claims that language as her own: "we are of the Wiradjuri nation, hard water. We are of the river country, and we have flowed down the rivers to estuaries to oceans." The motif resolves into the book's most portable belonging: "at the water I am always home."

Beneath every chapter runs colonisation as a present, ongoing violence. Percy makes cultural loss a shape with edges - "There is a big missing hole between this place and the place you're looking for." - and names its cause in one unadorned sentence, "we weren't allowed to be Aboriginal." The excavator tearing open Aunty's backyard collapses personal grief and colonial history into the same patch of earth: "if they stop digging up Aunty's backyard, stop digging up a mother's memory, stop digging up our people, maybe then, we'll all stop crying."

Winch's language choices carry the argument. May's intensely lyrical first-person voice is itself an act of reclamation - a culture colonisation tried to silence speaking fluently in the coloniser's language - while the speech of Joyce, Percy and Issy is rendered in Aboriginal English and left uncorrected on the page: "May, you got people that you gotta find, things you gotta learn. You will learn them ere, but I don't want you to." The community's idiom stands as a living language, not one needing translation.

The ending refuses easy restoration - the stories are not returned - but builds a real belonging from Country, elders and family, closing on the epiphany "This land is belonging, all of it for all of us." and the plain sentence that turns grief into connection across death: "I give them to my mother."