Read an extract from Homecoming by Elfie Shiosaki

Elfie Shiosaki is a Noongar and Yawuru writer. She is a Lecturer in Indigenous Rights at the School of Indigenous Studies at the University of Western Australia. She was the Editor of Indigenous Writing at Westerly from 2017 to 2021. Homecoming is Elfie’s new poetry and prose collection, piecing together fragments of stories about four generations of Noongar women and exploring how they navigated the changing landscapes of colonisation, protectionism, and assimilation to hold their families together.

Today, you can read an extract from Homecoming of a piece called ‘Venus’. Read on …

Elfie Shiosaki

Venus

My grandmother’s eyes dance as she tells me this story.

When her mother was a young woman, she would meet her white friends at Cottesloe Beach. She was a cosmopolitan young woman, seemingly at ease in the many worlds she moved in and out of. Cottesloe was the playground of bright young things in the 1920s. In the evenings, the Indiana Tea House would host dances, cabarets with live jazz bands, or silent films on its lawns. They would picnic in the shade of the Norfolk Island Pines and swim in the turquoise waters of the Indian Ocean. Her friends called her ‘Venus’ in her swimsuit, my grandmother tells me. Venus is the Roman goddess of love and beauty – and victory. These were moments of great happiness and excitement, she tells me. Listening to her story, I remember the special kind of excitement only girls on the cusp of womanhood feel. When her body can no longer contain her elation, and she feels like she might just burst.

I do not find this story about my great-grandmother enjoying the excitement of her youth in the archive. A story that makes my grandmother’s eyes dance when she tells it to me. These are some of the years of my great-grandmother’s life when she evaded the surveillance of the government.

When she cannot be found in the archive.

This story tells me something about the way my great- grandmother represented herself. That she was a cosmopolitan woman. That she was confident. That she was daring. That she was admired by her friends.

The archive could never hold the beauty of a daring Noongar woman.

—Homecoming by Elfie Shiosaki (Magabala Books) is out now.

Homecoming

by Elfie Shiosaki

Homecoming pieces together fragments of stories about four generations of Noongar women and explores how they navigated the changing landscapes of colonisation, protectionism, and assimilation to hold their families together.

This seminal collection of poetry, prose and historical colonial archives, tells First Nations truths of unending love for children those that were present, those taken, those hidden and those that ultimately stood in the light...

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