Ngarigo

Ngarigo is the people whose enduring relationship to the alpine Country stands in sharp contrast to the settlers’ claims of ownership and development. In the novel, their knowledge of the land, their community life, and their laws are not remnants of a vanished past: they are living sources of belonging and continuity, repeatedly placed under pressure by colonial expansion and racialized authority.

Country and First Encounters

The Ngarigo have ancient connections to the high country, described as reaching back to the beginning of time. When Charles Edwards and other settlers arrive seeking grazing land in the early 1820s, they depend on local knowledge to find their way. The Ngarigo elder King Jimmy shows the men hidden tracks that an untrained eye cannot see. The exchange reveals both the settlers’ dependence on Indigenous knowledge and the Ngarigo capacity to assess newcomers on their own terms.

The first encounters are marked by curiosity, not by a simple acceptance of the settlers’ account of themselves. The Ngarigo have heard stories about pale-skinned people through gatherings with other nations, where visitors bring accounts, songs, and dances about encounters with them. Some had first imagined the newcomers as lost relatives returning from the clouds; experience has already taught that they cannot be trusted and should be approached cautiously. When King Jimmy sees the settlers, he examines their appearance and clothing with astonishment and amusement. This perspective unsettles the hierarchy assumed by the newcomers: the Ngarigo are observers and interpreters, not merely the objects of colonial observation.

Dispossession and Colonial Authority

That early contact gives way to an accelerating struggle over land. More settlers arrive, fences divide Country, and Indigenous people are driven from their homelands. Seasonal movement becomes harder, while survival increasingly depends on staying out of sight. The novel presents this dispossession as a transformation of everyday life as well as a seizure of territory: the Ngarigo and neighbouring peoples can no longer live with the changing seasons as before.

Colonial authority is also described as permitting violence beyond ordinary legal protection. The narrative says white men have unofficial permission to shoot Aboriginal people on sight, under a policy framed as dispersal or the removal of obstacles to nation-building. Charles Edwards participates in district meetings and proposes developing the outpost of Cresthill into a town. He argues that the stock route and arriving settlers make the location promising, offers to help finance its development, and says Indigenous people must be managed. The meeting reaches agreement, and the decision is put into effect quickly. The juxtaposition makes clear that settlement planning and the coercion of the people already living on the land are interlinked.

Against this background, the Ngarigo are not only a community facing forceful displacement but also people whose presence colonial institutions continue to classify and constrain. When the wounded Yadaka fears that seeking a reward in town will bring troopers to Molly’s home, Molly recognizes that Aboriginal people nearby are blamed, arrested, imprisoned, moved on, or exposed to lethal violence. Yadaka names the injustice directly: his stated crime is simply existing while Black. The encounter links the Ngarigo’s broader dispossession to the immediate risks faced by individuals under colonial rule.

Kinship, Adoption, and Storykeeping

The novel also represents Ngarigo community through relationships that can be formed across separation. After escaping at twenty-five, Yadaka travels north through the mountains and reaches a gathering of nations and clans assembled for the bogong moth season. He keeps to the edge at first, approaches the hosts cautiously, and explains his situation to the elders. A woman in her early sixties takes an interest in him; the community permits him to stay, and she adopts him. He calls her Njadjan, meaning mother. The adoption gives Yadaka a place among people after a long absence from his own mother and people.

The new relationship also entrusts him with a story. Yadaka learns that his adoptive mother, Ginny May, has been forbidden to tell a tale of treachery, broken lore, and forbidden love because it is regarded within her clan as bad luck or a bad story. By adopting him, she can pass it on; he becomes responsible for keeping it alive. The story’s interrupted, fragmentary return to his memory emphasizes that transmission takes work: he must piece it together and seek guidance from the ancestors. Ngarigo continuity is carried not only through presence on Country but through obligations between generations and the careful keeping of knowledge.

When Yadaka later tells Molly that she belongs to the Ngarigo, he presents that identity as family rather than disgrace. He insists there is no shame in her connection to them and explains that sharing stories allows people to live on through what is remembered. Molly initially resists hearing the truth, but the disclosure changes how she understands her mother’s history and her own. Storykeeping becomes a bridge between Ngarigo kinship and a descendant separated from that inheritance.

Belonging Under Threat

The threat of separation becomes explicit when Miss Shirley calls Molly’s children octaroons and urges the judge to authorize their removal. Judge Eisenmangher signs the order, and the language of child safety gives bureaucratic form to racial classification. Danny carries the term back to Molly, who recognizes it from an earlier conversation about sending her away as a child because of her mixed ancestry. The recollection connects the present danger to the history of efforts to remove Molly herself from her family.

Molly destroys the signed order and leaves with her children, resisting the attempt to sever their family ties. Their flight does not undo the wider pressure on Ngarigo belonging, but it exposes how official authority can turn ancestry into grounds for separation. The children’s kinship with Molly and the Ngarigo is treated by the authorities as a problem to be administered rather than a relationship deserving recognition.

The novel’s final attention to oral history also has a real-world frame. In the author’s note, Leah Purcell describes seeking knowledge of her Aboriginality as a teenager after government policy had prevented her mother and grandparents from passing on their culture. She recounts filling gaps through research and listening to elders’ oral stories, which helped her find a spiritual connection and a cultural foundation. That account resonates with the novel’s emphasis on a story entrusted to Yadaka and carried forward: cultural continuity depends on the possibility of telling, hearing, and remembering what policies of separation have sought to interrupt.