Convincing Ground
Learning to fall in love with your country
Convincing Ground pulses with love of country. In this powerful, lyrical and passionate new work Bruce Pascoe asks us to fully acknowledge our past and the way those actions continue to influence our nation today, both physically and intellectually. Convincing Ground resonates with ongoing debates about identity, dispossession, memory and community.
Pascoe draws on the past through a critical examination of major historical works and witness accounts and finds uncanny parallels between the techniques and language used there to today’s national political stage. He has written Convincing Ground for all Australians, as an antidote to the great Australian inability to deal respectfully with the nation’s constructed Indigenous past.
For Pascoe, the Australian character was not forged at Gallipoli, Eureka and the back of Bourke, but in the furnace of Murdering Flat, Convincing Ground and Werribee. He knows we can’t reverse the past, but believes we can bring in our soul from the fog of delusion. Pascoe proposes a way forward, beyond shady intellectual argument and immature nationalism, with our strengths enhanced and our weaknesses acknowledged and addressed.
Production Details
- Paperback
- 230mm x 155mm x 20mm
- 304pp
- Released April 2007
- ISBN 9780855755492
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction
Chapter One: Franks is Dead
Chapter two: History, How it Starts
Chapter three: The Lakes
Chapter four: Lady Macbeth’s Clean Hands
Chapter five: The Lie of the Land
Chapter six: The Psychology of the Frontier
Chapter seven: Brave Explorers
Chapter eight: Lake Corangamite
Chapter nine: The Raised Sword
Chapter ten: The Great Australian Forge
Chapter eleven: The Great Australian Face
Chapter twelve: Golden Boy
Chapter thirteen: Don’t Mention the War
Chapter fourteen: The Language of War
Chapter fifteen: The Language of Resistance
Chapter sixteen: Native Born
Chapter seventeen: True Hunter
Chapter eighteen: Germaine to the Problem
Chapter nineteen: The Whispering Land
Chapter twenty: Elbows on the Bar
Appendices
I Wathaurong Language Sample and map
II Place Names of the Geelong–Ballarat Region
III Jillong Timeline
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About The Author
Bruce Pascoe is a widely published and award-winning writer, editor and anthologist, whose books include Shark, Ruby-eyed Coucal, Earth, Nightjar, Dark Emu and Loving Country.
About The Cover
Front cover image: woorrkgnan- moorraka (birthplace- burial place), Vicki Couzens 2004, acrylic and paper on canvas. Tattered possum skin cloak with skeletal figure overlaid. The figure is symbolic of both how we were buried in the old days, and the resting places of our Ancestors- in the earth. The markings on the possum skin panels tells a story of the Land, the Laws, the Dance, the Songs. It is about how we are born of, and belong to, the land. We return to the Land; it is who we are.