Setting

The story “Heart is Where the Home is” by Thea Astley takes place in the early days of the policy of removing Aboriginal children from their families to be raised and educated in Australian state institutions. This means the story is set in a real historical context, at the beginning of the 1900s (the removal of Aboriginal children began around 1905 and lasted until 1969).

Physical setting

The events in the story take place in the area of Cooktown, with the main physical settings being the Aboriginal camp, the rain forest, and the Laffey property. The rain forest which separates the camp from the Laffey house is depicted in detail, as the main character, Nelly, crosses it with her child:

She wormed her way into the thickest part of the rain forest, following the river, well away from the track up near the packers' road. Her baby held tightly against her chest, she stumbled through vine and over root, slashed by leaves and thorns... (p. 64, ll. 9-13)

Nelly dodged through wait-a-while, stinging-bush, still hearing the yells of the women back at the camp. Panting and gasping, she came down to the water where a sand strip ran half way across the river. (p. 64, ll. 28-30)

The forest and the river also have a symbolical function. The forest symbolises the labyrinth-like path to salvation while the river represents the boundary between white and black people in Australian society.

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Social setting

However, more important than the physical setting is the social setting which illustrates the injustices the Aboriginal population endured from the white government. The whites took their lands away, killed them, and even imposed a new religion (Christianity):

Everything gone. Land. Hunting-grounds. River. Fish, Gone. New god come. Old talk still about killings. The old ones remembering the killings.
‘Now they take our kids,’ Jackie Mumbler said to his father, Bidgi.(p. 63, ll. 34-36, p. 64, l. 1)

The above quote also suggests that the social setting is focused on men’s attitude to Aboriginal children being taken away by the government. The narrator notes that Aboriginal men found themselves in the impossibility to fight the authorities. Instead, they would take to drinking and lose control: “and the men so angry they jus drank when they could get it an their rage burn like scrub fire” (ll. 32-33).

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