cloudness
...ted to the fact that Australia is a colony. Winton particularly focuses on the issues regarding national identity such as Reconciliation. Winton sets the social milieu early in the novel by describing the history of the Cloudstreet house as symbolic of the cruelty of white Australians towards the indigenous population. The house was owned by a widow who at the request of the local Anglican priest, takes in and attempts to ‘domesticate’ a group of Aboriginal girls by forcibly imposing the ‘white’ way of living. The eventual suicide of one of the girls symbolises the trauma and suffering experienced by the stolen generation while the widow’s reaction of forcing the rest of the girls to stare at the “twisted death snarls of the poisoned girl’ shows the tyranny of the widow’s paternalistic brand of racism. By bestowing blame on both the selfish widow and the Church, Winton argues that the blame for the stolen generation must not only be placed on a group of individuals, but on the coloniser’s society as a whole. Postcolonial texts are aware of the fragmentation related to the colonising process. Cloudstreet explores the journey from fragmentation to unity on a number of levels. For example, after Quick Lamb pulls the body of the Nedland’s monster’s son out of the river, he realises that “that’s [the dead boy] Harry’s face, that’s my boyhood face… that’s Fish’s face.” This leads him to abandon the binary oppositions such as good and evil which he was b...