Unconventional Means by Anne Richardson Williams is a compilation of diary entries, starting with April 1, 1963. Richardson Williams turned sixteen and her father took her to get her driver’s license. He wore a suit, and even in the few brief sentences of this entry, it’s clear the author loves him. The second entry is June 24, 1963. It reads:
My father is dead; he killed himself. The rest of us aren’t doing so good either.
The third entry picks up in July. Richardson Williams has obviously had a traumatic summer, but she begins reading On the Beach by Australian author Nevil Shute, a book that is on a summer reading list. She explains the plot:
In the book, atomic fallout has killed everybody in the world except a few people in Australia who are just waiting for their turn.
When school beings in the fall, Richardson Williams is drawn to another Shute novel for reasons she can’t explain. A Town Called Like Alice is set in Australia, though the protagonist is an Englishwoman. After being taken prisoner by the Japanese, the woman meets another prison from Alice Springs, Australia. These novels with characters who experience trauma speak to Richardson Williams, and she decides that when she grows up, she will visit Australia.
The diary cuts ahead to 1989, when Richardson Williams finds her old diary from 1963, reminding her of her determination to visit Australia, which she has not yet done. Enough time has passed that Richardson Williams is thinking, “What have I done with my life??” As she regains interest in visiting Australia, she picks up a book called Ancient Voices, Current Affairs: The Legend of the Rainbow Warriors. One Aboriginal elder from the Bundjalung clan introduced in the book is Lorraine Mafi-Williams, who explains in her entry the story of Wollumbin. (Click the link to see a photo a brief story Lorraine tells).
It isn’t until 1993 that Richardson Williams finlly makes plans to visit Australia, just as she’s approaching fifty. Her reignited spiritual connection to Lorraine Mafi-Williams serves as the catalyst:
Today, in meditation, I was holding a large crystal, a five-sided crystal, and asked to be connected to the heart of the Earth. With my inner sight I saw the energy of the crystal streak downwards, bounce like a satellite beam off something at the center of the earth and POW — I “ran” into Lorraine Mafi Williams, the Aboriginal elder I had read about.
From here, Richardson Williams gets to Australia, where it seems like it will never stop raining and flooding, preventing the author from traveling. She tries to track down Lorraine Mafi-Williams, and in the process feels a bit like a Nancy Drew-type, but also a stalker. During her search, Richardson Willimans can’t help but notice that Australia feels divided, that white towns and Aboriginal spaces, like Mparntwe and Alice Springs, abut but don’t connect.
After the author finds the Lorraine Mafi-Williams, she is told stories that Lorraine wants her to share in Unconventional Means: “Lorraine had said that she liked what I had written — in her words, a truthful book, a woman’s book about women.” Lorraine’s stories are separate from Richardson Williams’s writing, told verbatim from tape recordings that have a different rhythm and vocabulary than the rest of the book. Lorraine’s stories are about Aboriginal slavery (Lorraine was twelve when she was stolen), not knowing how to use use electrical appliances, songlines, sacred places, The Dreamtime, Goanna, and the Rainbow Serpent.
Because both Anne Richardson Williams and Lorraine Mafi-Williams have their own voices in Unconventional Means, it never felt like the white American author was speaking for the Aboriginal elder. Both had equal space and added to my understanding of Australia from two perspectives: 1) the tourist who is open to dreams as messages, meditation, crystals, Native American culture, and looking for signs. 2) the elder who lived through slavery, teaches at conferences and gatherings, and is the “custodian for Wollumbin.” Getting two perspectives allowed me to enter the book as an American and feel like I was reading a genuine oral telling from an Australian.
Although the diary format gives a good sense of how Richardson Williams was thinking at the time, there were places where I wanted more. It’s unclear to what extent the diary pages were edited after initially written, but there were moments when I needed explanation. The Dreamtime, for example, was unclear to me. As Lorraine talked about it, I kept getting science fiction vibes. However, at the back of the book is a glossary that explains the Rainbow Serpent, Dreamtime, and double-terminated crystals, for example. What if that information had been woven into the main part of the book? I can see the problem: to include an explanation would be to interrupt Lorraine’s story, which would upset the rhythm of her storytelling.
Unconventional Means: The Dream Down Under is an engaging look into a one woman who is a seeker and a dreamer, and one woman’s stories about the land and her cultural connection to it, giving the book a vibe like Zora Neale Hurston’s anthropological work with Cudjo Lewis in Barracoon.
This does sound interesting and it’s great that the author found a way to give both voices equal weight and importance in that way. I’m not sure about all the crystally stuff, though – is there a lot of that?
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It’s part of the culture of the Aboriginal elder whom Richardson Williams interviews, so yes, Lorraine talks about it. The author investigated crystals before she went to Australia, but there’s not a lot about her before Australia.
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Ah, that’s OK then, I’d misunderstood that part.
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Australians hear a lot about ‘Dreaming’ and ‘Rainbow Serpents’ but, like crystals, they’re not part of my belief system and I don’t pay them any attention (and would prefer not to see them explained). I was going to write that I would prefer not to see an Aboriginal voice enclosed within a White space but one of my favourite books of the past few years, Two Sisters, is exactly that so I will have to reconsider what I think. This is certainly one way to present Indigenous Australian culture to Americans, though I do think equal billing might have been better.
Anyway good on you for finding and reviewing it. We have a whole batch of exciting, young Aboriginal women authors for you to read next.
(Neville Shute was a popular author who migrated to Australia from England after WWII. On The Beach became a 1959 American movie. Its star, Ava Gardner was unimpressed by Australia and famously said Melbourne was an excellent place to make a movie about the end of the world)
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Lorraine Mafi-Williams’s name does appear on the cover of the book, though I think Anne Richardson Williams gets top billing, so to speak, because the journey was from her perspective, and Lorraine liked that Richardson Williams captured her story with a voice recorder. Although I don’t believe in crystals as anything more than fancy rocks, I will say this book gave me some context for what I’m reading in Too Much Lip. The main character mentions several of the stories Lorraine described.
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This sounds like an interesting read. She could have easily visited Australia and never attempted to track down Lorraine and written more of a conventional travel memoir.
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That’s true! The two women spent about a week together. I wonder just how many books Lorraine appears in. There’s this one, but Anne Richardson Williams also learned about Lorraine from another book.
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I really like this idea of weaving two women and their stories together. How wonderful to have both perspectives, because they are both different, but equally important, and they gain so much more significance when read together, one after the other. I’d love to see more books like this, especially in Canada where we have such a breadth of talented Indigenous writing. Do you think it encourages a healthy dialogue, or am I just being naive?
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Because the book is a diary, I didn’t see much in the way of Richadrson Williams and Mafi-Williams having a dialogue, but in terms of readers engaging in dialogue….Hmmmm. I think that collaborative creation is really cool and we should do more of it. When the authors then do book tours or speak on panels, they can give different perspectives to the questions people ask.
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I confess that I had not heard of Lorraine, but I found her Obituary from 2001, that I thought you might be interested in too:
Lorraine Mafi Williams, an Aboriginal activist often at the centre of local controversy, died last Tuesday aged 60. Ms Mafi Williams was the daughter of Bandjalang man Rev. Bob Turnbull, an activist in the 30s and 40s, and her family was from the Woodenbong area. She was born at the Purfleet Mission at Kempsey. Like many of her generation, Lorraine Mafi Williams was taken from her parents at a young age.
During the 70s and 80s she became part of a powerful activist group in Sydney. With her cousin Mum Shirl and her niece Isabel Coe she was instrumental in helping care for over 4,000 troubled children of many ethnic backgrounds. She helped found the Black Theatre in Newtown that started many people such as Eddie Mabo and Brian Brown in acting and political careers.
Ms Mafi Williams was a film maker and her short film Eelemarni won the Erwin Rado Award For Best Australian Film, Melbourne Film Festival, 1988. She was also a writer and story-teller, and edited Spirit Song, the first anthology of Aboriginal poetry, published by Omnibus Books in 1993. Ms Mafi Williams undertook a great deal of Aboriginal women’s business. Leavers Lake, a small tea-tree lake near Suffolk Park, was of particular importance to her. Her occupation of land at Suffolk Park, where she wanted to establish a cultural sanctuary, was strongly opposed by the Arakwal people.
Her friend Bob Cummins said, “She was a brilliant person, but Byron Bay turned on her and she was reduced to the status of a charlatan by people ignorant of her knowledge. These pressures contributed to her death.” Ms Mafi Williams had been seriously ill over the past three years, suffering two heart attacks and being diagnosed with diabetes. She had spent many months in and out of hospital, and died peacefully in her sleep.
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I’m surprised how much of what she did in life as listed in her obituary was also mentioned in Unconventional Means. I didn’t know about her work with over 4,000 children, though, or her theater! I would have enjoyed learning more about that.
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I don’t know if I would want to read this. Wouldn’t it be far better to have books written by Indigenous people about their own culture, rather than having their culture filtered through a white lens with all of its added biases. These kinds of books written about Indigenous cultures by non-indigenous people could never be comprehensive or accurate for this reason.
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I don’t know that I can attest to what is far better for other people to do. Lorraine Mafi-Williams also created movies and poetry, so she also told her own story through different media in addition to this diary/memoir. I can see what you’re saying and appreciate the comment, though it seems inaccurate to call Lorraine’s story filtered, given what I’ve shared about Richardson Williams recording and transcribing what Mafi-Williams said.
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