Books
Debra Dank
Ankami
The third of Debra Dank’s books, Ankami, rekindles the welcoming warmth of a familial camp fire. Calm, practical and mesmerising, the fire has a heart of blazing embers and flickers with the rhythmic flourish of oral storytelling. Like her record-breaking, award-winning We Come with This Place, this new volume illuminates the bonds of our inherited history. For as long as we call this continent home, Dank’s family stories are our family stories.
The narrative ignites via the arrival of a bundle of pastoral records from the National Archives, revealing gaps in Dank’s family history. Four of her grandmother’s babies were stolen and traded. Dank negotiates the cold cruelty of truth-claiming falsities and emerges cleansed: “populating the imagined family presence is an act of reclamation, a refusal to be defined by such a dehumanising act. I choose to see, hear and feel the invisible, to believe in connection beyond what is attempted to be broken. And in that belief, there is a kind of healing – a gentle, slow return to wholeness, one imagined embrace at a time, one story of ways to live at a time, one act of love at a time.”
Transformative stories and rituals throughout the narrative guide us towards gratitude and a good life. She shares Gudanji/Wakaja and Kalkadoon cultural stories that connect us to our Country and sky spirits. The celestial emu centres us on the land on which we live. As a seasonal calendar, it reminds us “to practise reciprocity and to act responsibly”.
Obligation and responsibility to Country and kin is “a way of belonging that ties us all into ownership with one another, between one another”. Dank also honours the Western tradition of Christmas through recipes that have travelled across cultures to connect generations past and present. The recipes are “not just a list of ingredients but the essence of lives lived in perseverance and humour and quiet dignity ... The dip at my waist is exactly the right shape for such a bowl, as it is for a coolomon”. The “pork crackling with Nanna’s gravy was as important as our gifts”.
Highlighting the value of investing in human moments that create enduring memories, Dank shows us ways to find home. The world exists through relationships and Ankami is an opportunity to read ourselves into belonging with respect, humility and acceptance of first and ongoing truths.
Echo Publishing, 208pp, $32.99
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on December 6, 2025 as "Ankami".
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