A coming-of-age story meets elements of eco-horror and Australian Gothic to explore questions related to Indigenous identity and the impact of colonisation in Borderland, the debut young-adult novel for readers aged 13-plus by First Nations writer Graham Akhurst. The story centres on Jono, an Indigenous teenager growing up in suburban Brisbane with his doting solo-parent mum and best friend Jenny, a fellow scholarship student at a prestigious private school who is far more certain both in her sense of self and of what she wants.
After the pair graduate and enrol at an Aboriginal performing arts college, the gaps in Jono’s knowledge about his identity and ancestral country — his sense that he has “no community, language, or tradition” — increasingly trouble him, as do the visions he begins to experience of a terrifying dog-man with a “pinched mouth . . . baring canines, and empty pitch-black eyes”. When he and Jenny head to the desert for jobs on a documentary about a proposed fracking project, Jono’s visions grow in frequency and violence as he starts to question not only what he’s seeing and who he is, but also the true impact of the project they’re ostensibly working to promote.
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