Synopsis
The book I have chosen “Nanberry” is about parallel stories of different people during the period of the first settlers. There are about five main characters which follow the storyline in alternating chapters. The book opens to the year 1788, where Nanberry a young Indigenous Australian also the main character is playing by the sea watching strange ships arriving in the cove. More than a year later, Surgeon John White saves a sick and dying Nanberry from a rapid spread of small-pox in the indigenous people. Nanberry survives the sickness with medication from the doctor but is then orphaned after watching his parents die. The boy, Nanberry grows close to the lonely Surgeon White and with no-one left to care for him he is adopted for use a translator and much need company.
The book gives insight into the lives of aboriginal people, it also focuses on the impacts that the first settlers from England had on them, which is still evident today in this day and age. The book has helped me to have a greater understanding of the hardships that the aboriginals went through in these bleak times, sickness, violence, racism and loss of their land. Now have
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Nanberry is lying next to the sea trying to cool himself from the fever, he sees white people they come trying to communicate to him, but no such luck. This scene shows the strong cultural divide between the English and the Aboriginals, all the indigenous people are sick and dying, the English immune. Also, the aboriginal people couldn’t communicate for help and medication or for the rights of their land because they were already half dead or on the verge of dying. It reveals how unexposed the aboriginals were to the rest of the world, they still had spears not guns and they hadn't had been exposed to a number of different diseases from