Their fight to preserve the past reveals scars, surprises, and secrets that will determine the path of the family’s future. As they work toward their common goal, Kerry and her family struggle with challenges both logistical and spiritual: money and racism, bureaucracy and grief, the corruption of local officials and trauma. The Salter family, however fractious, can unite around one thing: saving their ancestral land. It’s Kerry’s “native church…built right here of rock and sand and feather and bark and moss.” But she is horrified to discover that the land is being rezoned and sold to build a prison. The island holds the graves of several of her beloved ancestors, as well as her happiest childhood memories. While Kerry is close to her other brother, Black Superman, he too left Durrongo for Sydney, leaving Kerry without an ally.ĭuring her visit, Kerry retreats to Ava’s Island, a beautiful, wild place named for her great-grandmother who fled there to escape white violence. Her mother Pretty Mary thinks of Kerry as the “Great Abandoner” for her move away from home and her infrequent visits her brother Ken is an angry, abusive alcoholic her nephew Donny is troubled and withdrawn and her only sister Donna has been missing since Kerry was fourteen. Not only is her grandfather dying of cancer, relationships within her family are fraught. Although she is fleeing the heartbreak of a broken relationship with her newly-imprisoned girlfriend back in Brisbane and dodging several warrants for her own arrest, she is nevertheless reluctant to proceed to her destination: her dilapidated family home just outside of the small town of Durrongo. We meet Kerry Salter, a Bundjalung woman, as she sits on her Harley, idling at an empty intersection. Though these crimes are assigned to the past, their violent legacies – poverty, addiction, abuse, discrimination – still plague the Bundjalung Nation, an Aboriginal community whose ancestral homelands lie along the northern coast of New South Wales, Australia.īut this is not a story of suffering. Melissa Lucashenko’s novel Too Much Liptells the story of stolen land and stolen children.

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