Stuart Rintoul
Autor(a) de The wailing: A national black oral history
About the Author
Image credit: Stuart Rintoul
Obras por Stuart Rintoul
Associated Works
Etiquetado
Conhecimento Comum
- Data de nascimento
- 1956
- Sexo
- male
- Nacionalidade
- Australia
- Locais de residência
- Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Educação
- Monash University
- Ocupações
- journalist
media officer
writer
editor - Organizações
- World Vision Australia
The Australian
Membros
Críticas
The interesting thing about this books is the author's approach to the topic. Written in 1987, Rintoul attempts to give Australian Vietnam veterans a chance to voice their experience of combat. But with scarcely any written context or attempt at analysis, Rintoul instead selects his interviewees and edits their recollections to emphasise the savagry and arbitrariness of the war and the psychic pains of war memories. His subtext is blatantly obvious: in one case, a veteran snorts speed before an interview, another is interviewed in a mental hospital. The inclusion of horrific photographs of Australian landmine casualties on the mortuary slab and images of dead Viet Cong extends this gruesome portrayal of war. Rintoul is clearly tailoring his image of Vietnam veterans to confirm the one portrayed in the mass media before 1987 when he contends that 'many veterans have retreated into a world of almost hysterical bitterness, disillusionment, anger, grief and sickness'. A piece of sensationalised journalism which does nothing but marginalise the experiences of those who fought the war.… (mais)
Prémios
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Associated Authors
Estatísticas
- Obras
- 4
- Also by
- 1
- Membros
- 52
- Popularidade
- #307,430
- Avaliação
- 3.3
- Críticas
- 2
- ISBN
- 11
- Línguas
- 1
Stuart Rintoul's biography traces the story of this remarkable woman's life, tracked alongside significant events in Australia's Black History, rendering the biography also a refresher course for those who lived through these events and an education for younger readers who did not. The book begins in 1979 with the desert burial of Lowitja's mother Lily, who was Anangu, a Yankunytjatjara and Pitjantjatjara woman. Lowitja barely knew her, because in 1934 at the age of two, she and her sisters and brother were taken to a mission at Oodnadatta by her white father Tom O'Donoghue, who subsequently left the area and married a white woman. Rintoul spends 29 pages on this man, but fails to shed light on what kind of father could do such a thing. Ultimately, he seems wholly irrelevant. Lowitja has no memory of him at all.
So Lowitja grew up separated from her family, her culture and her language, and when she was finally reunited with her mother thirty years later, they could not communicate.
By the time they met, in an awkward reunion where the gulf was wide, Lowitja had become a fully qualified and respected nurse and an activist. At sixteen, she had left the loveless Colebrook Home, not allowed to continue her education but dispatched instead to domestic service as a nanny to the Swincer family. However, it was when she was attending church that there was a life-changing moment:
It wasn't that simple of course, and there were hurdles to overcome. When she went to withdraw her wages held in trust at the United Aborigines Mission office, where she had £40 to buy new black shoes and stockings, she was told she couldn't have it. She had to wait until she was 21, they said, and in the meantime a preacher would escort her to the shops to buy what she needed. At sixteen she stood on her dignity and refused to submit to that.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/09/22/lowitja-the-authorised-biography-of-lowitja-...… (mais)