Janali Jones

You know, there's issues around that and her mother is the reliable one and that's, you know, what kind of keeps her, I guess, going.

I would say that he is, again, like Patrice, he's very loyal but in a different way.

He's definitely got the community in mind and he does a lot of things to self-improve himself.

You know, education for him was very important.

He tries to understand the people behind the, you know, the legislators in Washington, people behind them by saying,

researching into their religion to try and understand their motivation so he's you know a very intelligent man and you know he spends his nights as a on you know sort of security guard on night watch at this factory and you can see through a lot of the late nights all of the connections that he still has to his spirituality and and how that comes through and how that keeps him motivated and you know he does a lot of work towards trying to

get this be heard in washington which uh you know is difficult for native people generally let alone back in the 50s when you are coming from a community with such disadvantage but he's you know he's definitely an elder of the community and a lot of people look up to him and he's patrice's uncle and a reliable person so yeah he's he's a great character

I think particularly a lot of the characters have different encounters with the spiritual world and it often comes back to the personal or the self-reflective and it's often, you know, not randomly, oh, there's a ghost in my bedroom sort of thing.

I can't sleep.

It's often connected at a time when it's like almost like there's a message from the spiritual world.

Patrice sees her...

spoilers, dead father, you know, sort of lurking in the woods right after he's passed and she's coming to terms with his death.

And, you know, Thomas keeps seeing the ghost of this boy who died when they were young and who helps to sort of keep him motivated on his path.

That's one of the things I really enjoyed about this book was the humour that's kind of throughout it.

It's a very sort of subtle humour, but all the spiritual stuff, it read very organic to me and it reminded me.

a bit of Alexis Wright and how she interweaves spirituality.

For example, like in Carpentaria, it's very, you know, it doesn't feel out of place, despite like the rest of the work being very sort of realism.

And that's how I feel the Night Watchman tackles it as well.

Yeah, so I think the gist was that the federal government wanted to basically take the land back, acquire the land and sell it off and...

relocate everyone to the cities.