Leonie Norrington

This is a wonderfully entertaining gardening book. It's written with humour and charm, which makes the advice much easier to take on. I live in a subtropical area, rather than the tropics, but there is plenty of good advice for growing things in our summer.

A Piece of Red Cloth is said to be a ground-breaking work of historical fiction for two reasons: partly because of the way it has been written and partly because it is a story based on Australia's pre-colonial history.

The novel was written collaboratively by Leonie Norrington, best-known for her award-winning children's picture story books, and Yolngu cultural custodians Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Djawa Burarrwanga and Djawundil Maymuru. (Merrkiyawuy and Djawundil have collaborated with show more Norrington before, to co-author Welcome to My Country and Songspirals.)

But, as explained in the Author's Note, the novel was inspired by Leanie Norrington's mentor Clare Bush (deceased) — who adopted Norrington, not in the Western sense, but took charge of the Norrington family's Yolngu cultural education when they were growing up in the 1960s in a remote community in southern Arnhem Land. It was subsequently Clare Bush who worked with Norrington to help her create numerous children's books set in remote northern Australia featuring Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal kids.

Clare, keen to redress the negative and patronising depiction of traditional Aboriginal people and lifestyles in the media, also...

... wanted Australian fiction to include narratives that presented Aboriginal people as they saw themselves, from a point of view that enacted their motives, ambition and philosophy. (p.369)

Together, they worked on an outline for the book, based on pre-colonial oral history about the kidnapping of a Yolngu girl by Makassan traders, but Clare Bush* died before the novel could progress. Never very confident about making the transition to writing for adults, Norrington let the story lapse until some years later when she was asked to finish it by Clare's family, and encouragement and guidance was provided by book's co-authors and Yolngu knowledge holders, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Djawa Burarrwanga and Djawundil Maymuru.

As you can see from the Non-Fiction and Memoir page of my First Nations Reading List, there are other examples of collaborative First Nations writing but I have not come across a fictional narrative before.

The other distinctive feature of A Piece of Red Cloth is that it's historical fiction based on oral history and a culture unfamiliar to most of us. As teachers of Indonesian or Australian history know, there is plenty of empirical evidence about Makassan trepang traders making contact with coastal Aborigines — and since at least 2007 there has been a Wikipedia page 'Makassan Contact with Australia' which provides information about physical evidence of Makassan contact, including rock art, archaeological evidence from plants to pottery, written accounts in Indonesia, language exchange and technology borrowings from the Makassans such as the dug-out canoe.

But —as portrayed in this novel — the relationship with the land, the patriarchal nature of Yolngu society and the kinship system with its complex rules and protocols, is as unfamiliar as is their hunter-gatherer lifestyle, their diet, their cooking methods, their tool-making, their ceremonies and rituals, and their beliefs.

To read the rest of my review, please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2025/07/21/a-piece-of-red-cloth-2025-by-leonie-norringt... show less

At the edge of a northern Australian city, where river and mangroves reach the sea, two young boys joinUncle Tobias for a day of fishing and hunting. Leonie Norrington's beautiful text and Dee Huxley's lush, vibrant illustrations create a world in which the old and new cultures exist comfortably together and children move easily between them. [Aboriginal Education Library Hobart]

Brigid Lucy describes a young girl full of imagination, written from the point of view of a young imp. Getting in trouble for no reason! etc.