Author(s): Hinkson Melinda

Australian

In See How We Roll Melinda Hinkson follows the experiences of Nungarrayi, a Warlpiri woman from the Central Australian desert, as she struggles to establish a new life for herself in the city of Adelaide. Banished from her hometown, Nungarrayi energetically navigates promises of transformation as well as sedimented racialized expectations on the urban streets. Drawing on a decades-long friendship, Hinkson explores these circumstances through Nungarrayi’s relationships: those between her country and kin that sustain and confound life beyond the desert, those that regulate her marginalized citizenship, and the new friendships called out by displacement and metropolitan life. An intimate ethnography, See How We Roll provides great insight into the enduring violence of the settler colonial state while illuminating the efforts of Indigenous people to create lives of dignity and shared purpose in the face of turbulence, grief, and tightening governmental controls.

Staff review by Finley Japp

"Melinda Hinkson’s research is informed by an astute awareness of place and an evident care for the communities she studies. Hinkson is alert to the status of outsider and its ambiguous power - she writes of the fraught relationship she has to her subjects, the competing demands of friendship and anthropology."

Full review available:

#57 Reflections on Mildura Writers Festival - In Praise of Books We Love (mailchi.mp)