Ros Moriarty: Listening to Country. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2010. ISBN 9781741753806
The author offers her readers a window into the lives of some women of Borroloola in the Northern Territory as they travel to a desert location to conduct a women's ceremony.
Ros Moriarty gained access to these experiences through her husband, John, who was born at Borroloola, but was removed from his mother when he was four years old. Like many of the Stolen Generations, John had a white father and an Aboriginal mother; in the eyes of the authorities, this was enough to justify his removal from his young mother. John's story is very much at the core of his wife's account.
Nine of the book's ten chapters begin with a diary entry from Ros' journey with John's classificatory mother and other Yanyuwa women from Borroloola to a ceremonial ground in the Tanami Desert. These entries convey a sense of the excitement and the logistical and other practical aspects as the women travel from their remote community to an equally remote place to gather with others from several other far-flung communities.
The women assemble to sing, dance, tell stories; thus the elders induct younger women, including the author, into some of the religious knowledge and rituals that are shared across a wide area.
However, the bulk of the book is about the author's life and that of her husband, her love and admiration for whom comes through in every chapter. She writes about his Irish father as well as his mother and the Borroloola family. She devotes attention to their children, and to her own background. She provides detail about the vicissitudes of setting up a business, Balarinji design company, and its success in Australia and abroad.
The diary entries, written in the present tense and chronologically, tell the women's bush story, while there is a more wide-ranging account, in past tense, of the Moriartys' lives, including Ros' introduction to John's family and many subsequent trips to Borroloola. These parts of the book seem like random musings, switching back and forth over her life and more than 20 years' connection to Borroloola; there is a fair amount of repetition.
For readers unfamiliar with Aboriginal people and with outback communities, the book provides a gentle introduction. Moriarty paints vivid word pictures of the landscape, the people and their situation. In economical language and with a personal touch, she conveys information about living conditions,