The land holds all things: Kim Scott\u27s Benang - a guide to postcolonial spatiality

The protagonist of Kim Scott\u27s 1999 novel Benang, Harley, insists that he is writing a simple family history, the most local of histories (10; see Slater, Kim Scott\u27s Benang, 147). Harley tells the story of four generations of the family Benang, who have been subjected to relentless colonial violence. Scott\u27s novel contests and disrupts national narratives of progress, heroic pioneers, and brave, entrepreneurial settlers by privileg-ing the memories and experiences of Noongar people.1 The simplicity of the story might lie with the fearlessness with which Scott approaches his material, but there is a simplicity to Scott\u27s determination, which gathers strength throughout the novel: he contests and complicates the British colonial spatial narrative. The colonial imaginary enfolds Aboriginal peo-ple into a narrative of European progress, but on the ground beneath our feet, as Scott writes, there are many stories (495). By weaving a novel from the fragments of colonial archives, Harley\u27s eugenicist grandfather\u27s diaries and jottings, family memories, the whispers of Noongar relatives, some long dead, and travels through ancestral country, Scott reinvests space with a multiplicity of stories