Compassion: The sequel to Benevolence by Julie Janson

‘You can’t enslave us all, Captain!’ I yelled into his face. ‘We will resist, and you will die a beaten man. Our Blackfellows will rise...’

From the acclaimed author of the Miles Franklin longlisted Madukka: The River Serpent (UWA) and the Barbara Jefferis Award shortlisted Benevolence, Compassion continues Julie Janson’s emotional and intense literary exploration of the complex and dangerous lives of Aboriginal women during the 1800s in colonial New South Wales, which she began in Benevolence as a counter narrative to colonial history in Australian literature.

Compassion is the dramatised life story of one of Julie Janson’s ancestors who went on trial for stealing livestock in New South Wales, and it is an exciting and violent story of anti-colonial revenge and roaming adventure. A gripping fictive account of Aboriginal life in the 1800s, Compassion follows the life of Duringah, AKA Nell James, the outlaw daughter of the Darug hero of Benevolence, Muraging.

Julie Janson is a Burruberongal woman of the Darug Aboriginal nation. She is a novelist, playwright, and poet. Her novels are: Madukka the River Serpent from UWA Publishing, an Indigenous crime novel published in 2022 and longlisted for the Miles Franklin Prize; Benevolence from Magabala Books, published in 2020 and acquired by Harper Collins in USA and UK August in 2022. Benevolence was shortlisted for the Barbara Jefferis Award in 2022; nominated for NIB Literary Award 2020, and the Voss Literary Award 2020. Julie is also the author of the Virtual Reality screenplay There Exists. Julie is co-recipient of the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Poetry Prize 2016 and the Judith Wright Poetry Prize 2019. She lives on the south coast of NSW with her husband Michael Fay.