Broometime

I've just finished Anne Coombs and Susan Varga's Broometime. I started it in Brrome and I've been stringing the reading of it out to stretched out that holiday feeling. Maryann worked on Adland with Anne when Mary was at Reed. I think I may have even done one of the proofreads, anyhow I remember reading it in proofs, and I was looking forward to Broometime but it was pulled off the market almost on release. Anne and Susan had mentioned the names of some Aborigines who had recently died and the Broome Aboriginal community were unhappy. The corrected edition seemed to just leak back on to the market. So the book was handicapped on release.; the publicity knee-capped. So maybe it has never done as well as it should have. I don't know how Anne and Susan resolved the problem with the community. People who are dying and have recently died are still mentioned in the revised edition. Have they changed the names? Used psuedonyms? It's an awkward issue to resolve graceful. It's given me a sense though, in a small way, of how different the Aboriginal approach can be and the challenges of this sort of writing and publishing where communities meet.