Allan Baillie’s Songman is the story of a young Indigenous boy, Yukuwa, and his journey across the seas to foreign lands, new experiences and growing up.

Yukuwa is growing up in his traditional culture, part of a nomadic hunter-gatherer tribe.  Hunting and fishing form part of his daily life and Yukuwa’s people, the Yolngu tribe, are happy living their culture and lifestyle as they know it. 

Yukuwa gets a taste of the world outside the land of the Yolngu when the visiting Macassans return to their foreign homeland with Yukuwa and his ‘father’ Dawu, in order to teach them how to make canoes.  Yukuwa soon realises there is a whole other world outside his simple land as he encounters new cultures, traditions and general ways of life. 

Songman explores the influence of European settlers on society through analysis of simple elements such as modern weaponry in the form of cannons and knives, crime and punishment, fear, and friendship.  By taking elements so very familiar to European people and looking at them through the eyes of an Indigenous child, Baillie successfully forces the reader to consider the negative impact colonisation can have, and has had, on indigenous peoples. 

Yukuwa encounters murder, jail, hangings, hatred, racism, fear of the unknown, unlikely friendships and culture clash on his long journey.  The reader shares this all with him, witnessing first hand the negative effects settlement and colonisation can have on traditional societies.

There are many instances of European colonisation in the text, whether it be as simple as the introduction of modern weaponry and housing abodes or as complex and serious as the degradation and driving out of native peoples, as seen when Yukuwa and friend Jago encounter the Toala tribe who are being forced further and further off the land. 

Baillie presents the European characters as ‘wreckers’ of indigenous society - they have taken away the simplicity of life for the Macassan people; introduced their strange, foreign ideas and forced them upon the indigenous people; they have ‘acquired’ the land – and the settlers culture is beginning to impact on Yukuwa’s land and people.

While the text does, in effect, look at the possible historical events of Australian people pre-colonisation, it also deals with the negative aspects of the forthcoming colonisation, almost as a warning to the Yolngu people, through the eyes of Yukuwa.  Despite a solid effort to explain the effects of colonisation to younger readers, the text softens history somewhat.  There is some talk of a great battle between two tribes across the water, yet there is nothing of massacre, genocide, the harsh realities of colonisation.  While this is understandable as the text is aimed at children, I feel it is slightly irresponsible: our children need to know about these things (perhaps not in a graphic light, but they still need to know) because, whether we like it or not, it is part of our, and their, history. 

Other books by this author:
Little Brother (Nelson 1985)
The China Coin (Penguin 1990)
Drac and the Gremlin (Viking 1988)
Riverman (Nelson 1986)
Secrets of Walden Rising (Penguin 1996)
 

Review by Joanne Enever

This piece was originally submitted as part of the course work in Post-colonial Literature for Children.

© 2005 Joanne Enever