Bridge of Triangles

Posted in Books, Media Archive, Novels, Oceania on 2019-08-15 19:52Z by Steven

Bridge of Triangles

University of Queensland Press
1994
140 pages
ISBN: 978 0 7022 2639 7

John Muk Muk Burke

Bridge Of Triangles

1993 David Unaipon award-winning novel about exile and longing in a mixed-race community. It explores identity issues in an inner-city environment devoid of values and family heritage. Inevitable conflict as the protagonist must cross the bridge into the landscape of his Wiradjuri ancestors. This striking new edition features a haunting cover photograph symbolising the loneliness and single-mindedness of the central character’s plight.

Chris Leeton is tormented but also sustained by his growing need to cross over into the landscape of his aboriginal ancestors. After the night of the flood, his Wiradjuri mother resolves to take her four children away from their riverbank home and her unhappy life with Chris’s white father. In the struggle to keep the family together in Sydney’s grim commission housing, schoolboy Chris is tender witness to poverty and despair. In time he comes to understand that they are exiles in their own land. He senses that it is his generation which must cross the bridge back to that landscape which defines his people’s existence.

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