Talking To My Country by Stan Grant: book review

Talking To My Country (2016) is a memoir, a ‘personal meditation’ on race and identity of an Australian man of Wiradjura and Irish heritage. Stan Grant, Wiradjura man and journalist since 1987, is better known as an international reporter with CNN from 2001-2012.

Grant begins his memoir with his son – taking him to the place he was raised, where his journey began – Poison Waterholes Creek. He then retraces his beginnings that commence with his grandfather in Belabula near Bathurst in Australia, and simultaneously in Moyne, County Tipperary in Ireland in 1810 with 17-year-old John Grant who is sent to Australia as a convict. Families eventually come together – a ‘forbidden love’ partnership of a Wiradjura man with a white woman.

He tells of his parents’ move to Canberra in the 1970s where he began his working life. He discusses his influences – the book that changed his life – the 1953 book, Go Tell It On The Mountain by American James Baldwin, as well as the American Civil Rights Movement, and Fred Schepisi’s 1978 film The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith based on Thomas Keneally’s book – a true story about a Wiradjura man ‘like me’.

While ‘nothing was expected of me and I expected nothing of myself’ Stan Grant moved into journalism in 1981: ‘Journalism has been my salvation.’ He talks of his obsession with time, and working himself to the point of collapse until his ‘moment of reckoning.’ Although ‘liberated by the world’ he resigned from CNN and headed back home to Australia.

He discusses the Australian government policy of absorption and assimilation, of First Nations children being ‘christianised’ and ‘civilised’ and the notion of ‘self-determination.’ But moreover, he questions what determines identity – ‘identity is forever in flux’ – and what impacts the land, the family, and the traditions of culture have on a person’s identity.

He ends in 2015 in which he pens a message to Australia in an attempt to answer his own questions about race and identity.

Grant writes, not in anger or moral outrage, but with honesty and directness in his search for equilibrium and the factors that unify people. He writes about blood and bone, about kinship, his deep connection to country, of leaving home to find himself, and of coming home. But while he addresses his writing to ‘his country’ he is also writing to himslf, but most of all, to all of us. And we should all read it.

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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