Swallow+the+Air

__ **Swallow the Air** __ __Swallow the Air__ is a collection of interlinked short stories written by Tara June Winch, which describes the journey of protagonist **May Gibson,** a half-Aboriginal (of the Wiradjuri tribe) half-white teenage girl. May leaves home in search of her ancestral family following her mother's suicide and a breakdown in her home life with her brother, Billy, and her Aunt. The narrative follows her journey from Wollongong to Sydney, to Darwin and to her traditional homeland along the Lachlan River.

=__Important Belonging Quotes__=
 * Chapter 1:** //Swallow the Air//
 * She shuffle us out like two jokers in her car, reminding us to go to Auntie’s house before dark, and telling us again she moved us.
 * No longer whole and helpless, the stingray was spilling at the sides – it was free.
 * All I knew it was all right not to forget.
 * Chapter 2:** //Grab//
 * “Tip Top Bread Grocery Grab” - Consumerism and how unnatural this is. How it does not belong to the common Indigenous Australian ideologies.
 * “We’re gonna have a bloody Christmas turkey this year, my loves”
 * I suppose that when those clinking dollars chimed in the shiny metal gutter, all those bills and red-letter promises disappeared. And it was just another bonus, another incentive, a quiet celebration for her luck. Another drink.
 * Chapter 3:** //Cloud Busting//
 * “Somewhere far away, a Goulburn that doesn’t exist anymore”.
 * “but most of them were messed up, climbing those walls, trying to forget. It wasn’t a good time for those women, losing their children”. -24
 * ”And when Mum passed, she gave the pots to me”. - 24
 * Chapter 4:** //My Bleeding Palm//
 * “We were happy when Aunty was happy, laughing and yarning and dancing around the yard”.
 * “We were like the morning ladies, doing tai chi: out with the black clouds, in with the white.”
 * “I began to hide my skin from the other beach, from this stretch of cycleway.”
 * “Oy, ya little coon bit*h, what tha f8*k do ya think ya doin?”
 * “This gunna show ya where ya don’t belong dumb black bit*h.”
 * Chapter 5:** //Bushfire//
 * “That summer, just after Mum left, the fires started.”
 * “there were no leeches anymore; they left when Mum left”
 * “He might as well have never left. I wondered how I could ever have thought he did, how I could’ve allowed the memory of my father to pass me by, to cease existing”
 * Chapter 6:** //Leaving Paradise//
 * "Course you d**k-h**d, what are bro's for?"
 * "Yeah, this is my brothers, the best brother in the world." - 56
 * "Billy and me were like shadows, we could merge into the walls without being noticed."
 * "It wasn't in our eyes, or our voices, or what we said. It was just there, that understanding, that sameness - it slicked our pores, our skin." - 60
 * "And the more he wasn't there, the more I realised too, we were all gone." - 60
 * Chapter 7:** //To Run//
 * "I would be the mango that breaks off the stem into my dad's fingers, the apple of his eye before I slide into the picking bag." - Wants to be related to father. - 63
 * "Come back and stay anytime, sister."
 * Constant recognition from Sheepa - "Hey girl! I know you, don't I?"
 * "Welcome. This is my room, but I don't mind sharing."
 * "Community, he kept saying" - 66
 * Chapter 8:** //Territory//
 * "If I could make it through this, I knew I wouldn't miss this feeling again." - 80
 * "You don't look like an Abo" - 81
 * "Black men and white men, separated by only skin, only by skin until it rips open and the red blood and red dirt become the same, same red brute." - 84
 * "The world ceased to be real, to be able to be understood, so I had left it behind."- 86
 * "We don't huddle together, Billy and me - we are separated by the violence." - 87
 * Chapter 10:** //Chocolate//
 * "And it was then I thought Charlie could have been my father, or wished he was secretly, looking up for his approval, hoping he'd lean over against my forehead with his and tell me softly, as if I'd known all along, that I was his child." – 111,112.
 * "our ritual" - 109
 * "His past, that someday, revisited, would become his home again" - 111
 * "Hey, trouble" - Nickname has belonging connotations
 * "A couple of fellas" - 113, Aboriginal connotations
 * "Sista" - Familial term
 * "Trying to round the edges" - 116, speech more similar to Joyce's.
 * "He never asked me where I was from either - it was an unspoken understanding." -111
 * "I thought about those blue suits, taking away the people I love." - 113
 * Chapter 11:** //Wantok//
 * “Johnny takes me away, together we run the white-sanded beaches, and we eat mangoes and pick coconuts and wade through swamps to pull up lily roots and eat them as sugar rhubarb” – 119, creates rhythmic, nostalgic tone.
 * “He says Waiben is his real home, where his father lives.” – 119
 * “We know we are just best friends” - 121
 * “We dance with palm branches and deri flowers, like we are spirit people” – 121
 * “…to go to our homelands for our people, for ourselves.” – 123
 * “Johnny says I am his wantok, his black girl ally. I tell him that he reminds me of my brother. And he says he is my brother, always.” – 123
 * Chapter 12:** //Painted Dreaming//
 * “All of us did.” – page 127
 * “I had to get out of the city, get out of boxes they put you in.” – 129
 * “You one of us now” – 131
 * “I’m leaving… I’m goin to find family” – 131
 * “Nobodies don’t need no one either!” – 132
 * Chapter 13:** //Mapping Waterglass//
 * “Long, straight, flat, sea of black, its end a blur of hazy refuge” – 135
 * “The land a basin of scorched anguish” - 135
 * “…knowing the impermanence of our company…’ – 137
 * “Where’s all the water?” - 140
 * “Mum’s stories would always come back to this place, to the lake, where all the Wiradjuri would stop to drink.” – 141
 * “Footprints of your ancestors…” – 141
 * “Forty thousand years is a long time, forty thousand years still on my mind…” – 141
 * Chapter 14:** //Just Dust//
 * “Her people” – 145
 * “Everything I part of the heart, everything is water… they want to dig up the hearts” – 148
 * Chapter 15:** //Cocoon//
 * “We’re sitting around the pit in the backyard, the fire burning out shins and toes. Baking taut red skin.” – page 151
 * “We’d try to distract her all night, so she’d forget, ask her to tell us more stories, on and on until she’d start to doze off in the warm womb of the fire.” – 153
 * “They were the best times, the three of us at the fire, laughing and talking over the top of the things we never talked about.” – 153
 * “About the ocean, about the gifts, how happy he was. How happy he was. And I knew it too, he was. We were.” – 154
 * Chapter 16:** //Bila Snake//
 * “I think of it as a shared stubbornness or some nature of knowing. It leaks from her that once she too was lost.” – 158
 * “Each day I asked the voices, why I’m here? What I’m doing?” – 160
 * “Eating the last of the money with the hope of a family dinner. I knew my mother’s mob would give me a feed when I get there.” – 161
 * “Peeling back my skin, my blood against theirs. Family. My people. My mob”- 161
 * Chapter 17:** //Mission//
 * “Other people don’t understand, when that bad spirit happens to family, when we born we got all our past peoples pain too.” – 170
 * Chapter 19:** //Jacaranda Tree//
 * “I could burrow into another time.”
 * “The purple-belled loveliness” (relates it to her mother)
 * “It’s milky coffee skin”
 * “A sacred bloody pest”
 * Chapter 20:** //Home//
 * “When it draws in across the purple slate beds of the point through the rain and across the grip sand, soaking under my feet, salt bubbles burst at my shins. Then, I know that I am home. – 195
 * They are part of this place; I know now that I need to find them. – 194
 * We don’t need words. I can smell it. I can feel it. – 194
 * I could run away again, I could run away from the pain my family holds. I could take the yarndi, the paint, the poppies, and all the grog in the world but I couldn’t run from the pain and I couldn’t run from my family either. – 195
 * When Billy and me lost our mother, we lost ourselves. -195
 * The house, even through wall plaster that crumbles with the absence, it’s still home. – 196
 * It feels good. It feels right for the first time in a long time to be home. – 196
 * And I wonder, if we stand here, if we stay, if they digging up Aunty’s back yard, stop digging up a mother’s memory, stop digging up our people, maybe then we’ll all stop crying. - 198

__**Suggested Practice and Study Questions:**__

 * 1) What do each of the above quotes have to say about belonging?
 * 2) Do any of these quotes offer new and interesting insights into the nature of belonging?
 * 3) "You can't choose to belong, you simply do." To what extent is this true/untrue? In your answer, refer to ~5-to-10 quotes from //a variety of chapters//.