Kim Scott is described on the inside cover of Benang, his second novel, as ‘a descendant of  people who have always lived along the south-east coast of Western Australia and is glad to be living in times when it is possible to explore the significance of that fact and be one among those who call themselves Nyoongar’. This careful wording suggests a path of self-discovery illuminating the author’s fiction.

Scott’s first novel, True Country (1993), had as its central character a young school teacher posted to a remote Aboriginal community, who, through his experiences, addresses his own Aboriginality. In Benang, Scott further develops this exploration of Aboriginality, setting himself in the process a number of narrative challenges which he mostly succeeds in resolving.

At face value, Benang is the story of Harley, a young Nyoongar man who is staying with his European grandfather Ernest Solomon Scat – the name is not accidental – after a crippling car crash which killed his father, and who, through his rehabilitation, seeks to discover his family history, his place in the two cultures. But Scott wants more, through Harley crafting a recovered and imagined history from official correspondence and records of Aboriginal protection officers, police, and concerned citizens like Scat, offset with campfire yarns told Harley by his uncles as they travel together reading, if not singing, the land.

As I turned the last pages of Christos Tsiolkas’ new novel The Jesus Man, the news broke of the killings at Columbine High School. I had just noted that the novel reminded me of some feminist art from the 1970s in which a woman exhibited a series of used Modess, and that The Jesus Man was the literary and male equivalent – a series of used condoms. The Jesus Man will always exist between these two images for me. Tsiolkas makes a genuine effort to explore adolescent male sexuality and its connection to pornography and violence and how these relate to contemporary media and technologies, important issues certainly.

However, it seems to me to be riddled with unresolved adolescent guilt at his own masturbatory fantasies; doesn’t come to terms with the awful and confronting reality that human desire is perverse, disturbed, even psychotic; there is, finally, no acceptance of the truth of this desolate, lonely, arousing, intense, ghastly thoroughly human place we’ve got to get to know if we want to know ourselves.