Book Review - Other People's Country

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Before starting on the books from the Writers Festival I wanted to read a book written by Maureen Helen, who has presented at the Book Length Project Group and attends on occasions.

So glad I did! My take on the book is below:

Other People’s Country Maureen-Helen ABC Books, 2008.

First published in April 2008, Other People’s Country is a Memoir that tracks a short period in the author’s life when she found herself working as a nurse (or, for a period of time, the nurse) with the predominantly Martu population at Jigalong.

Jigalong is an isolated Aboriginal settlement in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, in the North-east of the state. It is desert country, hot, dry, largely treeless, and sometimes very cold at night. The housing conditions are very poor and the health conditions of the people are such that the mortality rate is much, much higher than that of the wider Australian community.

It took me about twenty pages to settle into this book, but by then I was well and truly hooked and found the story hard to put away. For me, the authenticity with which the author tracks her experiences, her ability to elicit the sensations and images of the environment, and to trace her changing responses to it, was all done with considerable skill and sensitivity. The experience is not sugar-coated, and the author is not always kind to herself (at times unfairly, I think), but I think this humility is necessary when discussing contact with a culture that is complex, many thousands of years old, and largely unknown by outsiders. In the past, the destructive colonialist tendency was to label, denigrate and destroy what was not easily understood.  Maureen Helen’s understanding of this is shared in an early chapter and provides a context for her interpretation and sometimes awkward responses to the situation in which she finds herself.

The book is easy to read, a transparently personal account, and includes all the joys and dramas that one would expect in a close, isolated community. If you are interested in the effects of culture shock, in what it might feel like to volunteer in a remote community, in the health issues that unfortunately have not significantly improved since the time in which the book was set (1990s), or if you just want a satisfying read that takes you somewhere you are unlikely to ever go otherwise, read it! It’s a good one, and easy to see why it was shortlisted for the Premier’s Award (History) in 2008, and on the long list for the prestigious Walkley Award in the same year.