Tears of Strangers

Where do I belong? Who am I? The blood of my fathers links me to a much older place and time. I've walked in the footprints of my ancestors: I've sat by the riverbank at night and imagined them around me. I am all that they have made me.

Journalist Stan Grant was born in 1963, a son of the Wiradjuri people. By the early sixties, these once proud warriors were scattered onto mission camps and the fringes of rural towns. Growing up a Wiradjuri, a tribe ravaged by alcoholism, poverty, abuse and neglect, the young Stan was more familiar with broken glass and mangy dogs than with dot paintings and corroborees.

Yet, while acknowledging the clichéd bleakness that was part of his childhood, Grant celebrates the resilience of his family. He champions his sawmiller father—a man whose life is written on his body. A man who lumped logs three times his size at any mill where he could find work and whose missing fingers were a sign of escape, not carelessness. He proudly describes his mother—a wiry and tough woman who fell in love with a wild black man, had three children under three years old and who made sure her children's plates were full by keeping hers empty.

The Tears of Strangers takes us to a world of dusty roads, run-down sawmill shacks and rats so big they'd scrape the enamel off dinner plates. It is a world revealed as sad, courageous, joyous and humorous. Stan Grant has confronted the ugliness of his childhood, where violence became a habit, and embraced the good, where blood and love are intertwined, to paint a true picture of what it meant to be born into the Wiradjuri people and to grow up caught between two cultures—a boy who would try to scrub his skin white.