The annual David Unaipon Award for Indigenous literature has produced some excellent books in recent years and Gayle Kennedy’s Me, Antman and Fleabag continues the tradition. This book has been publicised as a kind of road story, but it is rather a collection of bush yarns told in the great Australian tradition, tied together by the appearance of Me (the narrator), Antman (her partner) and Fleabag (their dog) as they travel the country, staying with family and friends. The yarns are immediately charming, told in a colloquial voice peppered with Indigenous slang. Some of the stories are told for gags and are laugh-out-loud funny, and some are told with genuine sadness and grief, charting a broad and sometimes surprising range of Indigenous experience. No-one will fail to laugh at Aunty Pearlie and her poshness or Cousin Moodle and her strange behaviour at funerals. And no-one will fail to be moved by stories like ‘Grandfather’s Medals’, ‘The Golden Wedding Anniversary’, or ‘Bringin the Old Ones Home’. This book does the difficult thing of being a good, accessible read while maintaining depth and opening up Indigenous experience to non-Indigenous readers. I highly recommend it.

Shane Strange is a bookseller at Riverbend Books, Australian Independent Bookshop of the Year 2006

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

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