A few excerpts

Featured

This is the first three paragraphs of the first chapter for your perusal and reading time.

Bones. Cleaned by time years of time, by rasping wind blown sand, by winter rain, and by burning heat of summer, they lay scattered, some of them half buried, Grey against the red of earth. Malloonkai, squatting, eye half closed against the glare of midday, felt confusion wash over him. Since he had been here before, in the cold time of the winds from the saltlike country eastward, when he had been travelling as a Mallaloo, being prepared buy his elders for his first great initiation, he had thought occasionally of these bones. Who and what had they been, the five strange men?

What had their beasts been, the five beasts taller than a tree by the pool at Wirrworree? They had come, the men and the mysterious beasts, from far eastward, from some unknown land long journeyings beyond the saltlike country, travelling slowly, haphazardly, foolishly, thirsting, poor stupid men, when water was near at hand, blundering on, five strange toeless men, men f many colours, with their five tall four legged beasts, moving across the country always at the wrong slant, until a proper man had been sent to meet them and make them welcome in the Land, among the people.

His own father. He had not known him, he had no true memory of him, but he had been told of him. His father had gone to meet the strange new men and had not returned to his party of proper men. His friends had waited, in doubt and uncertainty until they had made a mind to follow him. They had found him, his tracks were plain. He was finished, a malgarri, already bloated, with a hole between his eyes, a spear throw and more from the startled tracks of the strange men and their stranger beasts. No spear had made the hole ; there was a mystery. No tracks led from the new mens tracks to the body lying on the slope of sand, no spear had been thrown, some great new terrible thing had happened that had never before been known.

Let me know if you would like the first chapter in full or maybe I will do a chapter of “The Driven” in the next blog post. Please comment below your thoughts, or questions about the book or writer.

The writer, Donald Stuart, was my grandmothers husband.

Emmalisa Tilli

Featured

The life of Donald Stuart

Donald Stuart (13 September 1913 – 25 August 1983) was an Australian novelist whose works include stories with Aboriginal backgrounds, and a series recounting his experience as a prisoner of war in Burma in World War II.
Works written: Yandy: By Donald Stuart, Ilbara…
Born: 13 September 1913, Cottesloe
Died: 25 August 1983, Broome
Father: Julian Stuart

Early career

Donald Robert Stuart was born in Cottesloe, Western Australia[1] and apart from his time spent overseas during World War II, he lived all his life in that state. His father was Julian Stuart, a poet and activist, and he was the brother of Lyndall Hadow, also a writer. Stuart left home at age 14 and began a career as a swagman (an itinerant who wandered the roads seeking casual work). He travelled through much of northern Western Australia finding work on cattle stations and it was during these years that he came into close contact with Aborigines.

War Years

Stuart volunteered at the start of World War II for the 2nd Australian Imperial Force. He saw service in the Middle East as a 2/3rd Machine Gunner and then in Java, Indonesia, where he was captured by the Japanese. He then spent three and a half years as a POW. Along with Weary Dunlop, he was sent to work on the Burma Railway,[2] a purgatory from which many did not return. In Stuart’s own words:

“We built a railway from near Bangkok to near Rangoon—thousands of us POWs starved, scourged, racked with malaria, dysentery, beri-beri, pellagra and stinking tropical ulcers that ate a leg to the bone.”

A little bit of information on Donald’s sister… Lyndall Hadow

Born: Kalgoorlie, Australia 
Died: June 02, 1976
Genre:Short Stories


“(1903-76), born Kalgoorlie, was the sister of the novelist Donald Stuart, and daughter of Julian Stuart, 1891 shearers’ strike prisoner, and Florence Collings, one of WA’s first women journalists. Long-time editor of the magazine Our Women, she was a prolific writer of short stories, reviews and critical articles. Her collection of short fiction, Full Cycle and Other Stories (1969), deals with the State’s wheat belt, its far north-west and the assimilation of non-British migrants into the more settled southwest. She edited a book of her father’s writings, Part of the Glory (1967). The WA branch of the FAW created the Lyndall Hadow Annual Award for short stories in 1977; it also published She Too Is ‘Part of the Glory’: Lyndall Hadow 1903-1976 (1976)

Published by Emmalisa Tilli, grand daughter of Dawn Crabb, She married Donald Stuart at the age of 50 and Julian Start’s poem An Easter Thought is at the back of the book Rainbow’s End published by Albany Advertiser. The poem means a lot to me even though I never met Donald Stuart but have photos of their wedding in the 70’s in old fashioned photos in colour. I never met Julian Stuart. I knew Dawn Crabb nee Egerton Warburton (GRANNY) at the age of 5-6 when she was living in Emu Point in Albany, and she passed in 1997 when I was 11 living in Altona Meadows, MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA.

Love Emmalisa Tilli