Book review. Tripping over feathers: scenes in the life of Joy Janaka Wiradjuri Williams

The history of the forcible removal of Indigenous children was cast into the public arena by the publication of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s Bringing Them Home Report in 1997. Much has been written since then about the practices, policies and experiences of child removal in Australia. Academics, journalists, public commentators, politicians, filmmakers and those who were themselves removed from their families as children have all made contributions to public knowledge and discussion of this history, although not always in productive or well informed ways. Peter Read has been an instrumental figure in the investigation of this past, and Tripping over Feathers is his latest, and perhaps most interesting, contribution. Read’s book is a biography of Joy Janaka Wiradjuri Williams, although it is not a biography in the conventional sense. Instead, Read makes use of welfare documents, case notes, newspaper accounts, oral interviews, educational curricula, poetry, testimony and his own memories to ‘imaginatively reconstruct’ Joy’s life. He does so through the narration of what he calls a series of ‘scenes’ from Joy’s life: imaginative vignettes outlining the ‘key moments’ that are based on substantial and substantive research, albeit research that is largely invisible in conventional historical terms.