Internal and External Landscapes: On Adam Thompson's "Born Into This"

Adam Thompson | Born Into This | Two Dollar Radio | 2021 | 191 Pages

In the essay “Landscape and Narrative,” Barry Lopez describes two types of landscape: the exterior, which is “not only the line and color of the land… but also its plants and animals,” and the interior, which is how “the shape of the individual mind is affected by land and its genres.” In his debut collection of 16 short stories, Born Into This, Adam Thompson masterfully mines both of these landscapes as well as the various ways these internal and external worlds inform one another. Set against beautifully depicted physical backdrops of postcolonial Tasmania, from remote islands to busy cities, Thompson introduces the reader to similarly varied and complicated characters, all of whom are shaped indelibly by their surroundings.

Thompson, an Aboriginal (Pakana) writer from Tasmania, paints the natural world with a sense of wonder, imbued with history and a sense of place that works to configure a sense of self. This is shown in the titular story when Kara plants eucalyptus trees on forest service land, “fulfilling some cultural obligations in her own, small secret way.” Her vision of the landscape is described as, “mosses of brown, green and white clung to rocky overhangs and jagged branches, reminding her of her grandfather’s wispy beard.” However, Thompson also recognizes that the land is changing as the mining industry displaces Aboriginal people, or as the muttonbirds become scarce, or as old creeks dry up leaving “the glittery sparkle that comes from mica in river sand.” Each identity in this place, shaped by history and the landscape, is constantly put in jeopardy and displaced by industrialization and climate change.

While some of Thompson’s characters resist this change by isolating themselves and find some solace in refusing to be affected by the outside world (e.g. the stories “Jack’s Island,” “Aboriginal Alcatraz”), others fight against the systemic injustices of a colonial society. The first-person narrator in “Invasion Day” describes, in stream-of-conscious style, a protest on Australia’s national holiday: “Looming above, like a love sonnet to colonialism, stood the sandstone monstrosity of Parliament House. To us, it was the physical manifestation of Australia Day, an ongoing reminder—a memorial, really—of the European invasion and all we had lost.” Such characters are reinforced by a righteous anger that is often exacerbated by the political climate, and though in many of Thompson’s stories the main character’s frustration with the world never ends, sometimes, in stories such as “Honey,” a sort of karmic justice comes into play, defeating the antagonist and leaving the main character (and the reader) with a sense of relief. 

Kindly, Adam Thompson explains the origins of his Aboriginal characters’ anger to his uninitiated readers. In an interview with Lucy Cutting published in The Pin, Thompson says: “I was writing to the Tasmanian Aboriginal reader, but conscious that readership is quite limited, so it has to be universal as well, which I think it is.” Though much of Born Into This uses dialects and lexicons unfamiliar to a United States reader, the language is easy to parse out. And Thompson does not dive into didactic exposition in order to orient the reader, but often relays policies and history in more subtle ways, using dialogue or contextual details such as a news broadcast on the (fictitious) Sponsorship Bill in “Your Own Aborigine.” 

Thompson’s purpose is not merely to inform or teach the non-Aboriginal reader. These mostly first-person and close third-person narratives confront the reader with complicated and often very flawed characters in a way that makes it hard not to identify with them. Characters like Ben, the narrator in “The Old Tin Mine,” who gripes and smokes marijuana while leading a group of kids through an “Aboriginal Survival Camp,” can be grating on the surface, but the love and comfort Ben finds in the landscape, his old home, make it difficult not to root for him. Other examples include Dorothy’s unfiltered frustration in “Descendent,” (which deals with the policing of genealogical claims) and the narrator of “Sonny” (a white man) who, while attending his friend’s funeral, is racked with guilt over having called his friend a racial slur during a high school soccer match many years before. These deeply flawed, but no less empathetic characters are reminiscent of those in Jamel Brinkley’s 2018 collection A Lucky Man, or in Sam Lipsyte’s Venus Drive (a collection which Thompson also matches with splotches of dark humor). Thompson’s characters are unique, real, and impossible not to care for.

While this collection may read as more familiar to a Tasmanian reader, it is unfortunately no less relevant to readers in the United States or any other colonizing nation fraught with land-grabbing capitalists and racism against indigenous people. Even in Ohio, the Great Serpent Mound, a landmark dating back to Adena or Fort Ancient cultures, was abused by an offensive group during the last winter solstice. While this isn’t the most egregious attack on indigenous people and may barely register on the richter scale of anti-indigenous actions by colonist groups throughout the centuries, it does speak to the fact that the seizure of land and the subjugation of indigenous people is close to home as well as a global concern.

With this in mind, it is easy to place Adam Thompson’s Born Into This alongside other important and groundbreaking voices in contemporary writing such as Billy-Ray Belcourt, Tommy Orange, and Natalie Diaz. With similarly intimate language, sometimes flecked with humor or rage, Thompson’s is a fresh voice speaking for so many people who have been silenced or ignored by the hegemony. The 16 rather short stories of Born Into This span such a range of human experience that any reader may find a home in its pages.