Book recommendations from Nardi Simpson!

Nardi Simpson is a Yuwaalaraay writer, musician, composer and educator from North West NSW freshwater plains. A founding member of Indigenous folk duo Stiff Gins, Nardi has been performing nationally and internationally for 20 years. Her debut novel, Song of the Crocodile was a 2018 winner of a black&write! writing fellowship.

Today, Nardi is on the blog to tell us about Song of the Crocodile and to share with us her favourite reads from First Nations authors. Read on!

Nardi Simpson

Why I wrote Song of the Crocodile

‘The idea for Song of the Crocodile was a coming together of many things; a transition in my own practice away from music and towards long-form storytelling; a passion for Yuwaalaraay language and the written, English word; a love of a homeland, and a responsibility towards place. It was also an experiment, a statement and exploration of difficult things – things that affect Black people and white people in turn.

In the beginning I had three questions in mind. My goal was not to answer them but to find ways to ask them in the book: What is the ‘spirit’ of place? What effect does this spirit have on the people who live atop it? What effect do the actions of others have on the construction of this spirit? I wanted to explore both Black and white responses to these questions in Song of the Crocodile.

I lay the questions onto the page and a gateway appeared – Darnmoor, the Campgrounds – characters formed and Garriya rose.’

Buy it here

Book Recommendations from Nardi Simpson

Songspirals: Sharing women’s wisdom of Country through Songlines

by the Gay’wu Group of Women

Aboriginal Australian cultures are the oldest living cultures on earth and at the heart of Aboriginal cultures is song. These ancient narratives of landscape have often been described as a means of navigating across vast distances without a map, but they are much, much more than this. Songspirals are sung by Aboriginal people to awaken Country, to make and remake the life-giving connections between people and place. Songspirals are radically different ways of understanding the relationship people can have with the landscape.

Buy it here

That Dead Man Dance

by Kim Scott

Big-hearted, moving and richly rewarding, That Deadman Dance is set in the first decades of the 19th century in the area around what is now Albany, Western Australia. In playful, musical prose, the book explores the early contact between the Aboriginal Noongar people and the first European settlers.

Buy it here

Treading Lightly: The Hidden Wisdom of the World’s Oldest People

by Karl Sveiby and Tex Skuthorpe

Australian Aboriginals taught themselves thousands of years ago how to build a sustainable society in our fragile landscape. In a unique collaboration, a Swedish knowledge management professor finds out from an Aboriginal cultural custodian how they did it, and what we can learn from them.

Buy it here

Aboriginal Women’s Heritage: Walgett and Collarenabri

by NSW Dept. Environment and Conservation

Twenty three women from the Walgett and Collarenebri districts of New South Wales contributed to this publication, taking part in an ongoing Department of Environment and Conservation project designed to raise the profile of the historical experiences of Aboriginal women in NSW.

Home

by Larissa Behrendt

A story of homecoming, this engrossing novel opens with a young, city-based lawyer setting out on her first visit to ancestral country. Candice arrives at ‘the place where the rivers meet’, the camp of the Eualeyai where in 1918 her grandmother Garibooli was abducted. As Garibooli takes up the story of Candice’s Aboriginal family, the twentieth century falls away.

My People’s Dreaming: An Aboriginal Elder Speaks on Life, Land, Spirit and Forgiveness

by Max Harrison

A rare, personal insight into the traditional teachings of an Aboriginal elder of the Yuin people (South Coast, NSW) and a photographic tour through his country.

Post Me to The Prime Minister

by Romaine Moreton

This first-ever comprehensive collection of the forward-looking poems of Romaine Moreton includes reflections on origins, dispossession, dislocation and identity, on mudcrabs, love and petrol-sniffing.

—Song of the Crocodile by Nardi Simpson (Hachette Books Australia) is out now.

Song of the Crocodile

by Nardi Simpson

Darnmoor, The Gateway to Happiness. The sign taunts a fool into feeling some sense of achievement, some kind of end- that you have reached a destination in the very least. Yet as the sign states, Darnmoor is merely a gateway, a waypoint on the road to where you really want to be.

Darnmoor is the home of the Billymil family, three generations who have lived in this 'gateway town'. Race relations between Indigenous and settler families are fraught, though the rigid status quo is upheld through threats and soft power rather than the overt violence of yesteryear...

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