Family Theme Analysis

In Swallow the Air, families are usually unreliable and often violent. At the outset, they seem to be causes of distress rather than sources of strength. In fact, May’s dissatisfaction with Mum and Dad, who have abandoned her, and Aunty, who is an imperfect caretaker, drives her to leave home. May’s growing fascination with and long search for her Aboriginal tribe reflects a poignant desire to be situated in a family that is exempt from the flaws and struggles that characterize her actual relatives, while the anticlimactic end to this quest shows that such a family can’t exist in real life. However, by showing May returning to and embracing the relatives she left, the novel argues that even deeply flawed families can provide peace and fulfillment unavailable in other aspects of life.

Especially in her early life, May’s experience paints a picture of an unstable family that perpetuates cycles of violence and abandonment. May and Billy are born to different fathers, and both have abandoned them. At one point, May receives a postcard from her Dad apologizing halfheartedly that “it’s been a long time that you haven’t heard from your old man,” and saying that he “might send you some treasure.” Such a missive is a mockery of the serious obligations fatherhood entails. While Mum is loving and well-intentioned, her deteriorating mental health, culminating in suicide, prevents her from being an effective guardian. Mum’s sister Aunty takes in Billy and May, but she’s an alcoholic, and her boyfriend Craig abuses her and eventually attacks Billy as well. Billy feels betrayed by the fact that Aunty has allowed violence into their home rather than protecting her niece and nephew, and this drives him and eventually May to run away.

While the novel rarely discusses this explicitly, its many portraits of broken families reflect the damage inflicted by the Australian government’s policy of family separation, in which Aboriginal children (especially children of mixed-race heritage) were taken from their parents and raised in public institutions, in order to indoctrinate them with Anglo-Australian culture and values. Affecting many children of Mum’s generation, including some of her own siblings, this policy destroyed family structures and left its victims unable to form healthy, stable families of their own.

However, families—especially unconventional ones—can provide safety and strength in the midst of an otherwise unstable environment. While May can’t rely on her parents, she has an extremely close relationship with her brother, Billy. Remarking on their strong sense of unity, she says that “Billy and me were like shadows […] We’d move on the same tides.” When May is living on the streets of Sydney, a woman named Joyce takes her in and May assimilates into her family, an impoverished but loving clan that provides May with a model of family life unmarked by the violence she’s grown up with.

May’s disillusionment with both her biological parents and her adoptive one (Aunty) inspires her journey to the Wiradjuri lands, where she hopes she’ll find an intact tribal family that has escaped the ravages inflicted by the Australian government on most Aborigines. When it proves fruitless, this quest further emphasizes the tragic collapse of Aboriginal families under colonial rule. However, it also causes May to recommit to her existing, imperfect family. When she returns home, even though she still faces significant challenges, her renewed unity with Aunty and Billy gives her enough courage to face them.

By portraying families who love but can’t take care of each other, the novel highlights the effects of Anglo-Australian oppression on the character of Aboriginal families. Thus, the novel urges its readership to consider not just the behavior of individual families, but the extent to which that behavior is governed by political and cultural circumstances.