To read or not to read? Australian Indigenous Fiction

A Miles Franklin Award winning novel by an Australian indigenous author. This is an epic, portraying life in a fictional    coastal town, dealing with the clashes of culture found there. 







Read the opening paragraphs of this book, and decide whether to read or not to read the rest of the book!



The ancestral serpent, a creature larger than storm clouds, came down from the stars, laden with its own creative enormity. It moved graciously- if you had been watching with the eyes of a bird hovering in the sky far above the ground. Looking down at the serpents wet body, glistening from the ancient sunlight,  long before man was a creature who could contemplate the next moment in time. It came down those billions of years ago, to crawl on its heavy belly, all around the wet clay soils in the Gulf of Carpentaria. 
PIcture the creative serpent- scoring deep into -scouring down through-the slippery underground of the mudflats, leaving in its wake the thunder of tunnels collapsing to form deep sunken valleys. 

The sea water following in the serpents wake, swarming in a frenzy of tidal waves, soon changed colour from ocean blue to the yellow of mud. The water filled the swarming tracks to form the mighty bending rivers spread across the vast plains of the Gulf country. The serpent travelled over the marine plains, over the salt flats, through the salt dunes, past the mangrove forests and crawled inland. Then it went back to the sea. And it came out at another spot in the coastline and crawled inland and back again. When it finished creating the many rivers in its wake, it created one last river, no larger or smaller than the others, a river which offers no apologies for its discontent with people who do not know it. This is where the serpent continues to live deep down underground in a vast network of limestone aquifers. they say its being is porous; it permeates everything. It is all around in the atmosphere and is attached to the lives of the river people like skin. 

This tidal river snake of flowing mud takes in breaths of a size that is difficult to comprehend. Imagine the serpents breathing rhythms as the tide flows inland, edging towards the spring waters nestled deeply in the gorges of an ancient limestone plateau covered with rattling grasses dried yellow from the prevailing winds. Then with the outward breath, the tide turns and the serpent flows back to its own circulating mass of shallow waters in the giant water basin in a crook of the mainland whose sides separate it from the open sea. 

To keep reading this book request it from the Library.