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    Swallow the Air
    Swallow the Air
    Swallow the Air
    Ebook133 pages1 hour

    Swallow the Air

    By Tara June Winch

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    In 2006, Tara June Winch's startling debut Swallow the Air was published to acclaim. Its poetic yet visceral style announced the arrival a fresh and exciting new talent. This 10th anniversary edition celebrates its important contribution to Australian literature. When May's mother dies suddenly, she and her brother Billy are taken in by Aunty. However, their loss leaves them both searching for their place in a world that doesn't seem to want them. While Billy takes his own destructive path, May sets out to find her father and her Aboriginal identity. Her journey leads her from the Australian east coast to the far north, but it is the people she meets, not the destinations, that teach her what it is to belong. Swallow the Air is an unforgettable story of living in a torn world and finding the thread to help sew it back together.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Queensland Press
    Release dateAug 1, 2012
    ISBN9780702250569
    Swallow the Air
    Author

    Tara June Winch

    Tara June Winch is the Wiradjuri author of two novels and a short story collection. For her first novel, Swallow the Air, she was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist and received mentorship from Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka as part of the prestigious Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. Her second novel, The Yield, won Australia's highest accolade, the Miles Franklin Literary Award. She was born in Australia in 1983 and currently lives in France with her family.

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    Reviews for Swallow the Air

    4/5

    32 ratings4 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Beautifully poetic. A tragic, sweet story of May, finding her way back home, the long way round. An incredibly honest narrative, which reveals the painful truths that aboriginal youths experience on a daily basis in modern Australia. Tara June Winch manages to inject some youth and nativity into her writing so that you can really feel like you are there with the protagonist, experiencing the journey the way May might have done.
    • 3/5
      After such a big read last month, I think we all found Tara June Winch's Swallow the Air more like a breath of fresh air!After the loss of her mother, May begins a search for herself and her Aboriginal identity. With her head full of family stories,she seeks relatives in the city and country, trying to piece together what it means - this culture of hers, in today's Australia.Swallow the Air is a first novel from a young local writer that has won praise around the country. Our club was both moved and disturbed by what, at times, seemed a futile existence for Aboriginals. Domestic violence, alcohol, drugs and financial struggle dogs the family. But we found humour too, and some beautiful poetic prose from what is obviously a developing, yet talented young writer.Our discussion centred around our personal experiences with Aboriginals and whether this story rang true and how typical was May's family in today's society?Denise liked the fact that the author did not idolize aboriginals or their culture, but simply made them human. Joan commented that in her experiences with our first people, she has found them courageous, especially the women. Heads nodded around the table and we all found this thread in the book. It is always exciting finding a novel set in your local area. Tara grew up in the Northern suburbs of the Illawarra and as you read, you can watch May scamper through her childhood on the beach at Bellambi or climb through the rainforest of the escarpment.What I liked most about this book is the beautiful, simple heart May sees her world with. Before the hurt, the anger and the deliverance, she has something only young children possess ... an innocence that knows unconditional love.Tell Me This ... "What does the title Swallow the Air mean?"This is a great title that could mean any number of things. Not only is it poetic, it encompasses a vast portrait of what it means to be human. But Viti had a wonderful thought that impressed everyone and, on the whole, we agreed with. On the beach May comes across a struggling stingray that is swallowing air. The sight moves her, becoming etched in her mind along with many other memories. Viti feels that stingrays's struggle out of water could be a metaphor for Aboriginal Australia struggling without their culture. They are a fish out of water, fighting to survive in a world that does not want them. We suggest you read the book and see what you think.
    • 3/5
      My book club has devoured some pretty large reads in the last few years, with John Irving and Peter Carey leaving their indelible mark among our ranks. So Tara June Winch’s trim novel, Swallow the Air was like a breath of fresh air for all of us.After the loss of her mother, young May and her brother Billy are taken in by Aunty. As Billy takes his own path of destruction, May begins a search for herself, and her Aboriginal identity. With her head full of family stories, she seeks relatives in the city and country, trying to piece together what it means - this culture of hers - in today’s Australia. Swallow the Air is a first novel from a young local (NSW South Coast) writer that has won praise around the country. My club was both moved and disturbed by what, at times, seemed a futile existence for aboriginals. Domestic violence, alcohol, drugs and financial struggle dogs the family. But we found humour too, and some beautiful poetic prose from what is obviously a developing, yet talented young writer. Our discussion centred around our personal experience with Aboriginals and whether this story rang true and how typical was May’s family in today’s society. We liked the fact that the author did not idolize aboriginals or their culture, but simply made them human. Others commented that in their experiences with our first people, they found them courageous, especially the women. Heads nodded around the table as we all found this thread in the book. It is always exciting finding a book set in your local area. Tara grew up in the Northern suburbs of the Illawarra and as you read, you can watch May scamper through her childhood on the beach at Bellambi or climb through the rainforest of the escarpment.But what I liked most about this book is the beautiful, simple heart May sees her world with. Before the hurt, the anger and the deliverance, she has something only young children possess … an innocence that only knows unconditional love. Winch is a real talent worth watching … maybe a female Tim Winton? Who knows, but I for one, am willing to give her the time to develop into one of our best creative writers.
    • 4/5
      Tara June Winch is a talented young indigenous writer who won the David Unaipon Award with this story of a young girl on a journey of self discovery. May gradually works out where she really needs to go, only to discover different, harder truths than she had imagined. The triumph of this story is that May does make the journey and eventually comes home.Not a children’s story, nor suited to the fainthearted reader for its sometimes confronting content, this book is a poetic piece which demands something of the reader and displays the talent of this promising author.

    Book preview

    Swallow the Air - Tara June Winch

    Praise for Swallow the Air

    ‘I love the restraint with language and her control, and the way she makes small observations count. It’s spare, thoughtful writing, clever but never about showing off.’ Weekend Australian

    ‘Her writing is raw and sparky, her prose so charged with energy that it bursts, Melville-like, into occasional poetic firestorms …’ The Age

    ‘Tara June Winch’s heartfelt Swallow the Air (UQP) is the work of a writer blessed with great natural talent and a good ear for dialect.’ The Sydney Morning Herald

    ‘… Tara June Winch’s writing is startling: visceral, fresh and poetic.’ Vogue Australia

    ‘… her grasp of language and the pictures she draws with words are livid and uncompromising.’ Townsville Bulletin

    ‘Winch’s prose is gloriously idiosyncratic … it works triumphantly.’ Adelaide Advertiser

    ‘Sometimes in life you are lucky enough to stumble upon a book that irrevocably changes you and profoundly changes how you experience the world. Tara June Winch’s Swallow the Air is one of those rare books.’ The Courier-Mail

    ‘Extraordinary, too, is her economy of language and her ability to take the reader to the heart of a matter swiftly on the wing of simple words – I was weeping by page nine …’ The Sunday Telegraph

    Tara June Winch is a Wiradjuri author, born in Australia in 1983 and based in France. Her first novel, Swallow the Air, was critically acclaimed and she was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist, and has won numerous literary awards. A tenth anniversary edition was published in 2016. In 2008, Tara was mentored by Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka as part of the prestigious Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. Her second book, the story collection After the Carnage, was published in 2016. It was longlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction, and shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Award Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, and the Queensland Literary Award for a story collection. Her most recent novel, The Yield, won the 2020 Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.

    In loving memory of my brother Billy Joe

    1979–2018

    Contents

    Swallow the Air

    Grab

    Cloud Busting

    My Bleeding Palm

    Bushfire

    Leaving Paradise

    To Run

    Territory

    The Block

    Chocolate

    Wantok

    Painted Dreaming

    Mapping Waterglass

    Just Dust

    Cocoon

    Bila Snake

    Mission

    Country

    The Jacaranda Tree

    Home

    In 1996, Chinese artist Song Dong travelled to the sacred Lhasa River in Tibet to conduct a performance. Song sat in the river for an hour, ritualistically stamping the surface with an old wooden seal carved with the character for water.

    Of course the seal left no trace. The impact of the work resides instead with the artist’s gesture. Futile and heroic, it recalls those manifest small acts through which an individual attempts to make sense of the world.

    And for all of us, attempting to make sense of the world.

    Swallow the Air

    I remember the day I found out my mother was head sick. She wore worry on her wrists as she tied the remaining piece of elastic to the base of the old ice-cream container. Placing her soft hands under my jaw so as to get a better look at me, Mum’s sad emerald eyes bled through her black canvas and tortured willow hair. She had a face that only smiled in photographs. She finished fixing my brother, Billy, also in an ice-cream tub helmet and sent us fishing. Puncturing the fear that magpies would swoop down and peck out the tops of our heads.

    She shuffled us out like two jokers in her cards, reminding us to go to Aunty’s house before dark, and telling us again that she loved us. The screen door swung back on its rusted, coastal hinges and slammed under the tension. When I looked back down the driveway she was gone.

    Billy rode fast, his rod suspended in the distance like a radio antenna. My reel thread over my handlebars – attached with a small bag of bread mix, a flip knife and some extra hooks and sinkers that I’d got from school as a trade for Monopoly money. All was swaying with my slackened momentum.

    The sand was stewing. I threw my bike with Billy’s below the dunes of spinifex and headed for the point. From there I knew that I’d have the best view of the beach, deep into the surging breakers and practically standing on the locals’ surfboards. Last summer I’d seen a turtle from the same spot; he immersed half his body – just to spit. Only a few moments he’d stayed, but it was long enough to remember his beauty.

    Mungi was his name, the first turtle ever. They said he was a tribesman who was speared in the neck while protecting himself under a hollowed-out tree. But the ancestor spirit was watching and decided to let him live by reincarnation or something. ‘Anyway, using the empty tree trunk as his shell, he was allowed to live peacefully forever as a turtle.’ Or so Mum would say. She had some pretty crazy ideas and some pretty strange stories about other worlds and the government and the ‘conspiracies’. But the story about Mungi was my favourite. It was what she’d really wanted to say, she wasn’t paranoid about a turtle.

    I crept over the rock pools; the edges were sharp so you had to walk softly. Gazing down at every shale shape, contorting each footstep onto its smoothness. At the furthest rock pool, searching the ledge for my usual spot, I saw something strange. Draped over the verge was a silvery mould, like a plastic raincoat sleeping on the stone.

    Sheltering over the eagled remains, I inhaled its salty flesh burning under the afternoon sky. The stingray’s overturned body looked more like a caricature of a ghost than a sleeping raincoat. I stepped back, imagining its tiny frowning mouth screaming in pain. It’d not long been dead and I wondered if it had suffocated in the air or if this was only its mortuary. Either way it had swallowed its struggle.

    I pulled it onto the rock ledge by its wing; the leathery shields made a slapping sound at my feet. I wanted someone to see my prize but Billy was way back on the shoreline, too far to hear a girlish call. There were three short cuts on either side of its body – where a rib cage would be. They were like fish gills, I guessed, for special breathing underwater. My forefinger slid down its stomach and stinging tail to the tip, tracing around the two thorns that stuck out at the end. In my mind I saw the tail whip across like a garden hose and poison me with a quick and fatal sweep. I sat further away, just to be safe, and thought for a long time about throwing it back in, though I decided it was best kept away from the living, best kept up here in the air.

    Pain had boiled up under its swollen body; I could feel the stingray’s fight in its last moments of life. It looked exhausted, like a fat man in a tight suit after a greedy meal. But I had pity for the ray; I saw only the release of the dead inside. Stabbing my flip blade through its thick skin, I drew a long gape down the underbelly. An orange sack split open, pierced in the cutting. Oozing paint like liquid, the colour of temple chimes, over its pale torso.

    An angel fallen, lying on its back, was now opened to the sky. I was no longer intrigued by cause of death, loss of life. It had died long before I had cut it open, but only blood made dying real. No longer whole and helpless, the stingray was spilling at the sides – it was free.

    I took up my bag, blew a loving kiss to what remained and returned to my brother, taking care not to step on the sharp-edged stones.

    I remember the beach that day, still scattered with people; the sand had cooled with the falling sun. Blankets with babies and families in those half-domed, tent things. It was that time of the afternoon where mums and dads were getting tired and bodies could

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