The narrative draws on Pascoe’s long, revealing exploration of the foundations of Indigenous knowledge accumulated over tens of thousands of years and evident in the layered history and culturally infused ecology of the Australian continent. Pascoe’s wonder at the ingenuity, practicality, diversity, and intricacies of these inherently sustainable relationships with Country and between peoples is juxtaposed with his lament at the lack of respect for Indigenous knowledge, culture, and history.

Debates surrounding Australian history inform Salt. In ‘The Imperial Mind’, Pascoe introduces the Doctrine of Discovery by Pope Alexander VI in 1493 as a defining moment in Western history, whereby anthropocentric Abrahamic religions lay the foundations for hierarchies of privilege justifying war and the appropriation of Indigenous lands and waters in what he describes as ‘the allure of denial’. These debates are contextualised through an interrogation of the archives and the social, cultural, and political context of their making, juxtaposed with oral evidence of Aboriginal experience and Pascoe’s own journeys.

Bruce Pascoe (photograph by Lyn Harwood)

Pascoe moves back and forth across time, elaborating present journeying, witnessing, and debate. His questioning narratives act like a salt bath that gently strips back layers of myth and denial inherent in the colonial mindset, ingrained in the wood of the nation’s history. Pascoe’s more considered approach works on the complex layers of Indigenous and non-Indigenous histories to consider an Australian future in which Indigenous ingenuity, culture, ownership, belonging, and inclusiveness are not only valued and recognised but also embraced and experienced.

Exploration of identity is a central theme here, personally and collectively. Pascoe questions the choices Australians must make with respect to belonging and existence within diverse Indigenous countries of this continent. The responses to Pascoe’s decision to claim his Bunurong identity are respectfully, lovingly, and at times sardonically discussed. Reframing the colonial mentality that underpins these ongoing narratives of disconnection, denial, and self-interest is Pascoe’s aim, with neither blame nor anger but rather a considered appraisal of the bones of our shared histories and future possibilities as distinct peoples within a transformed nation.

In ‘An Enemy of the People’, Pascoe affirms: ‘if we can learn history we can embrace the past, and for many, it will be an embrace of family denied’. Linking reconnection across the divides of race and the knowledges that underpin thousands of years of living sustainably on Country, Pascoe writes: ‘We live in a seriously compromised country, but why have we let it become such a problem? We should relish the complexity, the depth – the length of the history. We should feel a tiny bit smug that we know we know things people from other countries don’t … Let’s share the guiltless embrace of true love.’

Pascoe stakes a claim as a gifted storyteller as well as a reader of history. Salt is layered with tender, ribald, and at times dark characterisations of people, place, memory, and belonging – deeply informed by Pascoe’s humanist values. These narratives are drawn from Pascoe’s writer’s eye and ear and from his personal experience of Australia and Australians over a lifetime of traversing Aboriginal countries spanning the continent. This tacit experience of peoples and country is the volume’s strength. The touch and feel for story are evident in Salt ’s visceral descriptions of living, working, hunting, loving, hoping, and struggling on country.

‘Embrasure’ unpicks the lives of colonists escaping their own pasts. Amazed by the country they have come to for refuge, they revel in the light, the possibilities, the fertility, all rendered with the intimacy and sensuality of their unfolding love and freedom. Their embrace of this country, their growing sense of belonging, are tempered by the realisation that it is not their land to claim or to till and that with each new construction or ploughed furrow they are interlopers, making a beachhead of invasion on other people’s land.

In ‘Thylacine’, Pascoe transports the reader into the world of the bush at night, the intensity of life lived in isolation from other people, intensely close to the ground. The sounds and smells of the bush, the majesty and wonder of trees set against the night sky, are haunted by a sense of something hidden, visceral, yet fragile – the Thylacine: ‘There are some things, the man knew, that could never be denied. A man’s spirit is built thus … To the tiger the man just became another night animal, and the man knew it and revelled in that pride.’

Gathering together works created over a long period is always challenging. With Salt, the editors have chosen well, enabling the stories to stand alone yet link across the volume, resonant with Pascoe’s voice, his eye for the intimate and the wondrous. There is much hopefulness in Salt – hope for understanding and for a better future for the nation based on reckoning with deep Indigenous knowledge and ownership. Pascoe wants us to achieve what he describes as ‘an awakening of the nation to the land itself’, in the belief that ‘we need non-Indigenous Australians to love the land’.