This collection of short stories begins by introducing us to the Tweed, Bundjalung Country, “until recently … green and wet and teaming with all sorts of life”. This is the land where the Tweed River flows through the remnants of the enormous volcano that now sits on the border of Queensland and New South Wales, centred on the pinnacle of Wollumbin. It’s land that’s “in pretty good nick … because the Gooris are still here.” Note that idea, it’s the connective tissue of the collection. In these stories, Mykaela Saunders, who did her doctorate in Indigenous speculative fiction and recently edited the spectacular anthology This All Come Back Now, imagines the futures of the Tweed and her people.
They start with one of the highlights of the collection, Taking Our Time, which retells how the Goori people found an ingeniously practical solution to the problem of colonial time. When the colonisers arrived, they brought clocks and concepts like “no-good and lazy — insults that only made sense within shallow time”. “More foreigners came back, ticking and ticking,” until the old woman, who “kept the seasons in her body”, went to sleep it out in the mountains of the Tweed. It’s an amusing tale that unsettles and reveals the possibility of better ways of living with the land.
The next four follow a mother who’s gone off-grid in the hills, a young man who has just got out of prison, a daughter visiting her dying mother, and a teenage boy learning the power of fire. These are not immediately apparently speculative. Maybe it’s the drones used for communication, or the Gold Coast “ooz[ing] its way south” until the whole coast is one big city in No Country For Old Women, swallowing her beloved Tweed, but that’s a process already well underway. Certainly these are the near future. But as far as I can tell there is no such thing as the Bundjalung Fire Authority that teaches culture and law to kids in Fire Bug, and you wonder if the program of mentoring recently incarcerated men in A Guided Meditation For Motivation and Metamorphosis exists either. That they should seems absurdly commonsense; to label them speculative is to expose the colonial violence that savaged cultural connections and institutions.
Blood And Soils marks a kind of departure point, with Goori people taking back the land and reinstating culture and law. Tweed Sanctuary Tour is just that, a tour of the land coming back to life and an offer to stay in the titular sanctuary; the tension is whether you will accept the rules and responsibilities that come with it. Cultural Immersion Program and The Girls Home see virtual reality used to revive culture and teach young people. Saunders’ Terranora, published first in Against Disappearance and a standout here, sees Gooris offering refuge to survivors of the outside apocalypse, and from there the collection leaps off into visions of the future variously enticing and worrying. The run of stories from Terranora to Cold Coast is outstanding, a passage of time that sees Gooris head for the stars and the planet frozen, and throw a big wave surf comp among the ruins of the city for good measure, Day After Tomorrow if it were fun.
If the characters and narration in these stories are sometimes a little expository, the ideas are thrilling and, often, incredibly moving. Take Our Future In The Stars, which sees a Maori man and his Goori boyfriend who have loved each other for decades revisit a sentimental spot for the last time, unfolding as a conversation in which they express their love for each other and country but also argue about the place of land in culture. They discuss reading sci-fi for its possibilities, a way of imagining “what might be next for us”. But, the Goori man counters:
I couldn’t ever understand people pissing off to outer space without a thought for what they left behind … Some of those stories felt more like horror stories to me — especially the ones where humans go off to explore distant galaxies, far from the sun.
“People like us were never in those stories,” his partner responds. In Always Will Be, a title, Saunders explains, derived from Barkindji land rights activist Uncle Jim Bates’ slogan, now heard in protests and acknowledgements across the country, they write their people back into these stories, properly, with land and culture at the centre. Saunders’ writing sings when it describes country. Even the mozzies are an expression of the vibrancy of the land in Terranora:
They’ve been making love to each other and conducting their birthing rites using the last few days’ fresh rainwater, which is pooled inside the buttress rootes of all the figs and in the nooks and crannies of every mangrove. The air is riddled with them. They come dancing around us, hypnotised, sniffing out our rich and salty blood that’s pulsating around our bodies from all this exterion. We are irresistible. They give us as many love bites as they can get away with.
Or deeper into the future, after pumping stuff into space to cool Earth:
Today the washed-out sky is all grey with shades of black and white. From clouds, yes, but the hazy atmosphere between our planet and the sun has also erased all the blue from our world. We wouldn’t know what that colour looked like if it weren’t for the blue eyes of some of our people … they say the same colour once stretched across the heavens.
That every story takes place on the same country feels like an innovation in a genre that casts its horizons galactically. The world might change and become unrecognisable, but culture remains — that’s survival, in fact in these stories it’s what enables survival. Australia the colony, the illegal nation, seems to quickly fall away, become a half-remembered bad dream. Saunders doesn’t linger on the details — there are plenty of end-of-the-world scenarios elsewhere to scare the pants of us white folks. Instead they concentrate on what goes on, on the continuity that extends forwards but also, critically, backwards through the thousands of generations of people who took care of this place, learning how to live with it, passing through apocalypses like ice ages and colonisation. As far distant in the future these stories are set, they are really about now, when us settlers’ relationship to the land is broken — Saunders offers a vision in which it is not irredeemably so — and when Aboriginal people are fighting tooth and nail to restore it.
Gay rating: 3/5 for queer characters, including numerous nonbinary characters, and relationships.
The Library Is Open 