Mazin Grace

Dylan Coleman

• Publisher: University of Queensland Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780702248689
• Edition: 0

With the powerful, rhythmic sounds of Aboriginal English and Kokatha language woven through the narrative, Mazin Grace is the inspirational story of a feisty girl who refuses to be told who she is, determined to uncover the truth for herself. Growing up on the Mission isn't easy for clever Grace Oldman. When her classmates tease her for not having a father, she doesn't know what to say. Pappa Neddy says her dad is the Lord God in Heaven, but that doesn't help when the Mission kids call her a bastard. As Grace slowly pieces together clues that might lead to answers, she struggles to find a place in a community that rejects her for reasons she doesn't understand. In this novel, author Dylan Coleman fictionalizes her mother's childhood at the Koonibba Lutheran Mission in South Australia in the 1940s and 1950s.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author biography
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Glossary
• 1 Minya wunyi wonganyi
• 2 If welfare get us, we finished
• 3 Where I belong?
• 4 Secret-pretty-things
• 5 Lookin’ for answers
• 6 Ngoonji bula: God, Jesus and Father Christmas
• 7 Goin’ away
• 8 Mumoo jumpin’ ’round
• 9 Walbiya gu minga: white man’s sickness
• 10 Healin’ jinna minga
• 11 Some things stay the same, some things change
• 12 Riddle solved
• 13 Lookin’ through new guru mooga
• 14 The sins of the father
• 15 Dolly gets a haircut
• 16 Goin’ back to country, in heaven
• 17 Goojarb: serves yourself right
• 18 Growing changes
• 19 Wash me away
• Author’s note
• Acknowledgments
• About the David Unaipon Award