Summary

Convincing Ground: Learning to Fall in Love with Your Country pulses with love of country.

In this powerful, lyrical and passionate work, Bruce Pascoe asks us to fully acknowledge our past and the way those actions continue to influence our nation today, both physically and intellectually. Convincing Ground resonates with ongoing debates about identity, dispossession, memory and community.

Pascoe draws on the past through a critical examination of major historical works and witness accounts and finds uncanny parallels between the techniques and language used there to today's national political stage.

He has written the book for all Australians, as an antidote to the great Australian inability to deal respectfully with the nation's constructed Indigenous past. For Pascoe, the Australian character was not forged at Gallipoli, Eureka and the back of Bourke, but in the furnace of "Murdering Flat", "Convincing Ground" and "Werribee".

He knows we can't reverse the past, but believes we can bring in our soul from the fog of delusion. Pascoe proposes a way forward, beyond shady intellectual argument and immature nationalism, with our strengths enhanced and our weaknesses acknowledged and addressed.

In prose of lyrical clarity and uncompromising honesty, Bruce Pascoe invites readers to be awakened, enthralled by fresh and breath-taking truths about the story of Australia.

— Carmel Bird, writer