Taboo

a novel

Kim Scott

• Publisher: Small Beer Press
• ISBN:
  9781618731708
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Littérature générale

From Kim Scott, two-times winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, comes a work charged with ambition and poetry, in equal parts brutal, mysterious and idealistic, about a young woman cast into a drama that has been playing for over two hundred years...

Taboo takes place in the present day, in the rural South-West of Western Australia, and tells the story of a group of Noongar people who revisit, for the first time in many decades, a taboo place: the site of a massacre that followed the assassination, by these Noongar's descendants, of a white man who had stolen a black woman. They come at the invitation of Dan Horton, the elderly owner of the farm on which the massacres unfolded. He hopes that by hosting the group he will satisfy his wife's dying wishes and cleanse some moral stain from the ground on which he and his family have lived for generations.

But the sins of the past will not be so easily expunged.

We walk with the ragtag group through this taboo country and note in them glimmers of re-connection with language, lore, country. We learn alongside them how countless generations of Noongar may have lived in ideal rapport with the land. Taboo won four literary awards, was longlisted for four and shortlisted for three more. It is a novel of survival and renewal, as much as destruction; and, ultimately, of hope as much as despair.

Also by Kim Scott

TRUE COUNTRY

BENANG: FROM THE HEART

KAYANG AND ME (with Hazel Brown)

THAT DEADMAN DANCE

Small Beer Press

Easthampton, MA

This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are either fictitious or used fictitiously.

Taboo copyright © 2017 by Kim Scott. All rights reserved. The moral right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted. First published 2017 in Picador by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd., 1 Market Street, Sydney, NSW, Australia, 2000. First Small Beer Press edition 2019.

The author would like to acknowledge that early draft extracts from this work were first published as ‘Collision’, Kenyon Review, March/April 2017. Gambier, Ohio: Finn House, Kenyon College; and ‘Departure’, Review of Australian Fiction, Zutiste, Inc., 2015.

Small Beer Press

150 Pleasant Street #306

Easthampton, MA 01027

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[email protected]

Distributed to the trade by Consortium.

Names: Scott, Kim, 1957- author.

Title: Taboo / Kim Scott.

Description: First American edition. | Easthampton, MA : Small Beer Press,

2019.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019016455 (print) | LCCN 2019017048 (ebook) | ISBN

9781618731708 | ISBN 9781618731692 (alk. paper)

Classification: LCC PR9619.3.S373 (ebook) | LCC PR9619.3.S373 T33 2019

(print) | DDC 823/.914--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019016455

First edition 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

Set in Sabon LT Pro. Original typesetting by Post Pre-press Group.

Paper edition printed on 30% PCR recycled paper by the Versa Press in East Peoria, IL.

Cover design: Sandy Cull, gogoGingko. All rights reserved.

Cover image: Sandy Cull. Skull from Shutterstock.

To Ryan Brown, ngan ngoon

I

OLD HAUNTS

Our hometown was a massacre place. People called it taboo. They said it is haunted and you will get sick if you go there. Others just bragged: we shot you and poisoned the waterholes so you never come back.

We had heard all this, and we heard it again as we lifted ourselves from the riverbed and went back up the hill into town. Some of you may wish to imagine our decaying flesh, our shuffling tread and a collective moan emanating from our slack jaws – as if we were the undead, indeed. It was never like that, and we are hardly alone in having been clumsy, in having stumbled and struggled to properly speak and breathe and find our place again. But we were never hungry for human flesh or revenge of any kind.

Our people gave up on that Payback stuff a long time ago, because we always knew death is only one part of a story that is forever beginning . . .

*

And so this story will start here, where the wind has suddenly dropped and the sun glowers in the eerie red light of a dying sandstorm. The many falling sand grains whisper, thunder crashes and rumbles down the rocky river valley and lightning glitters on the chrome of a semitrailer cresting where the highway chokes to become the plummeting main street of this little town in Western Australia’s Great Southern: Kepalup.

The old name means ‘place of water’ or, perhaps, ‘welling’, but the signpost points to a cluster of buildings either side of a dry, old creek emerging from a low, near-barren range on Western Australia’s southern coastal plain.

The truck driver, surprised by the sudden descent, touches the brake. His foot goes flat to the floor. Tries to change gear; cogs clash and grate.

The truck’s chrome glints, tarpaulins tremble, wheels roll faster and faster.

Propelled by tons of wheat, freewheeling down the street, the driver’s bowels loosen, his gear stick flops about. The poor man leans on the horn and he, passenger and truck make a wailing chorus.

In the pub, frothy heads of beer shiver with the truck’s passing.

The numbers on the speedometer continue to rise.

A little group of people have gathered on a patch of grass beside the Local History Museum. They are here for the opening of a Peace Park.

A large, bald and well-dressed man leaving the edge of the group suddenly sees the charging truck and scurries from its path, arms flailing and little feet a blur. An older man, refusing to be distracted by the tons of glass and metal rushing between them, stares after the bald one but all the other faces, like flowers following the sun, track the vehicle as it thunders by:

Museum

Town Hall

Café

Supermarket

School . . .

No child is harmed. Also unharmed, drunks fall out of the top pub, their gaze (along with that of the Peace Park attendees) trained upon the truck’s dusty, wagging tailgate. It seems the runaway vehicle has created a void that vision is obliged to fill.

The driver’s eyes, by contrast, dart here and there seeking an exi...

Table of contents

• OLD HAUNTS