A television news and political journalist and a member of the Wiradjuri tribe of Indigenous Australians, Stan Grant offers a painfully insightful look at the tragic history of Indigenous people in Australia since the British arrived in the 18th century and started colonizing the continent.
Originally published as Talking to My Country in 2016, the book began as a response to the racist humiliation of Indigenous footballer Adam Goodes. Published in the U.S. for the first time as Tell It to the World, this is a transparent look at the full history of Australia and the historic efforts to marginalize and erase Indigenous people.
Grant's family is a microcosm of the horrors of early settlement. John Grant, a forebear, was an Irish Catholic who rose up against the English. He was convicted and sent to the penal colony, "a man in chains, hounded by tyranny, banished from the soil of Tipperary.... He died the wealthiest Irish Catholic in the colonies." As a white man he thrived, while the Indigenous, including his relations, were slaughtered at places now named for their atrocities, such as Poison Waterholes Creek and Murdering Island.
And still today in Australia, Indigenous people are disproportionately suicidal, imprisoned and "trapped by the tyranny of low expectations." In this memoir of a boy, his family and their land, Grant puts lyrical words and truth to the idea that "a truly great country... should be held to great account." --Lauren O'Brien of Malcolm Avenue Review