Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%
Fiction

Enigma and Aboriginality

by Inez Baranay
August 1988, no. 103

Fox by Bruce Pascoe

McPhee Gribble, $11.95 pb, 167 pp

ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent.

It opens with an enigmatic statement – ‘It might take two hundred years’ – (what might?) – and then presents an enigmatic situation. Amidst Australian bush images and scraps of Aboriginal sounding stories, there is someone called Fox wandering around.

Fox, we soon learn, is a young chap called Jim Fox who is making a mysterious trip to Sydney from a farm he once lived on somewhere up the Murray.

He’d expected to be able to just go to places and remain anonymous, for people to just accept his presence as easily as he did theirs, with only the questions which could be answered by your own observations.

He was wrong, of course. People do ask him where he’s from and where he’s headed for and why he’s going there. Fox never says much, but no one minds; people only say affectionately ‘you’re a strange bugger, Fox’ and buy him beers, and give him rides, jobs, money, places to stay, and all the best advice they know.

 


Continue reading for only $10 per month.
Subscribe and gain full access to Australian Book Review.

Already a subscriber? .
If you need assistance, feel free to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..



Fox by Bruce Pascoe

McPhee Gribble, $11.95 pb, 167 pp

ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent.


From the New Issue

On Display: A story worth telling by Laura Couttie

by Julie Ewington

Apple in China: Apple in the world by Patrick McGee

by Stuart Kells

You May Also Like

North of the Moonlight Sonata by Kerryn Goldsworthy & The House Tibet by Georgia Savage

by Josephine Barcelon
by Stephen Mansfield

A Gap in the Records by Jan McKemmish

by Edmund Campion

Letters to the Editor

by Michael Halliwell, Ben Brooker, Antoinette Halloran, Helen Balzer, Katherine Vowles, Hayley Smith, Lara Stevens, Judith Thomas, Daniel Howard

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.

Submit comment