The passage in Question 7 where Flanagan excoriates the British empire (and Oxford) is very arresting “‘White Australians still struggle to come to terms with their colonial past,’ the English Independent—a Martian newspaper—declared in 2009, its Harrow needles beginning their work, inescapable as a man trap, as if the genocide was our invention and not theirs, as though the totalitarian slave system was our choice and not their gulag. How marvellous, to have an empire, reap its robbed riches, and yet etch its colonial failings on the colonised, to write on our bodies that we were the vulgar arriviste, the barbarian, the savage, that their judgement was our crime.”
Yes indeed Danielle - Tasmania and that genocide is another powerful thread in a book of so many threads. It contributes substantially to the edginess and anger of a book which is not quietly reflective later in life, but voices so many disturbances.
The passage in Question 7 where Flanagan excoriates the British empire (and Oxford) is very arresting “‘White Australians still struggle to come to terms with their colonial past,’ the English Independent—a Martian newspaper—declared in 2009, its Harrow needles beginning their work, inescapable as a man trap, as if the genocide was our invention and not theirs, as though the totalitarian slave system was our choice and not their gulag. How marvellous, to have an empire, reap its robbed riches, and yet etch its colonial failings on the colonised, to write on our bodies that we were the vulgar arriviste, the barbarian, the savage, that their judgement was our crime.”
Yes indeed Danielle - Tasmania and that genocide is another powerful thread in a book of so many threads. It contributes substantially to the edginess and anger of a book which is not quietly reflective later in life, but voices so many disturbances.