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Richard Flanagan. Death of a River Guide. London. Picador. 1997. 326 pages. L6.99. ISBN 0-330-35282-2.
The wild rivers of southwestern Tasmania are the tears of Aboriginal women: the European invasion was so shocking that its violence has become part of the Dreaming, the spiritual dimension which forms and informs the native landscape. More specifically, the rivers that maps call the Gordon, the Franklin, and the Jane are formed in Death of a River Guide by the weeping of the protagonist's Aboriginal ancestor as she is raped by an English settler. Now, the river, rising to drown the character as he lies jammed in the rocks of a whitewater rapid, is the whole landscape of loss which the current Australia of benevolence and prosperity has been able to repress but...