Can you tell us a bit about Louise’s art on the cover?
The painting on the cover of the book was one that my mother did, and it hangs in my mother’s house. In Smashing Serendipity she describes the painting this way:
This painting tells the story of my parents’ respective birth countries. The top orange half depicts Dad’s Palyku land in the Pilbara in its original state before mining. It has all natural vegetation and food sources, uncleared with fresh water and rivers running through it. It is a beautiful but harsh land. The bottom half shows Mum’s Nyoongar country and how, since colonisation, it has been cleared of nearly all its virgin bushland. It is fenced off. It too is quite beautiful but our people can no longer access areas that used to contain our songlines and stories, or any that may have had significance to us. We cannot hunt there anymore. It is now used for farming, with rows and rows of planted crops and trees. The land is very green, organised and structured to accommodate eventual harvesting. In the top half of the painting there are two circles, one dark brown with a red centre and one white with a red centre. The dark brown one represents my Dad’s mother – my grandmother. The white one represents my Irish grandfather. They fell in love. And their skin may have been different but they had at least one thing in common. Both had red blood.
As Louise’s daughter, what do you hope people will take away from this book?
I hope that this book will help people find their own determination, and that they will be inspired by one woman’s yarn. This is a book about a person who struggled but came out of it. Mum wrote this story because she wanted to share it with her kids and grandkids and great-grandkids. Even though we lived it with her, there were lots of things she kept from us growing up, to protect us, and so we wouldn’t think badly about some of the people in our life. She didn’t want us to have this knowledge until we were adult enough.
My mother broke so many barriers in writing this book, and telling the truth, describing life as it really was for her and Aboriginal women like her.
My mother was a survivor of homelessness, racism, and segregation, and of the way land is denied to Aboriginal people. She fought for land rights too because private property ownership meant that she couldn’t go with her father to access his country, like visiting important watering holes. My mother broke so many barriers in writing this book, and telling the truth, describing life as it really was for her and Aboriginal women like her. She was my mentor, my role model and my idol.
Smashing Serendipity is available now from your local independent bookseller.
