Chapter 10 - Homecoming
I love, as a writer, that it was because of a work of literature, that the dark face of Truganini – heavy with history – came to be painted on a grey wall in Norway, staring down its many whitenesses – some beautiful; some less so. That it was a thoughtful American scholar, Jared Diamond, and his book Guns, Germs and Steel that inspired a young woman from the Basque county, living in Bergen, to recreate in paint and ink the image of the most famous Tasmanian aboriginal; to continue the story; to renew the story; to affirm this story as a global one. I love, as a designer and dabbler in drawing, that the image of Truganini carries through history (and history books) in ways that words never could. And there is something beautiful about the cyclic nature of words and images: the way pictures can inspire such prose and poetry; which inspire new images; which inspire new words; and on and on, in the perpetual motion of inspiration. As an amateur photographer trained in the 1990s in t...