Convincing Ground

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

Excerpt

Contents

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.