Strange is a work of biographical fiction, memoir and critical interpretation divided into three parts: Strange Past, Strange Present and Strange Extrapolations.
Strange Past introduces the author’s ancestors and explores the ways in which they negotiated cultural and location change as new settlers and, later, as mixed-race identities within the dangerously unstable colonial-racial environment of the 19C Swan-River colony. Although the names belonged to real people and the text is based on facts drawn from public records and the author’s oral family history, the actions and dialogue in Strange Past are fictional.
In Strange Present the author introduces himself as memoir subject and, through his perspective as a descendant of the central Strange Past protagonists, the theme of mixed-race cultural negotiation continues within a late Twentieth-Century environment. The memoir also relies on fiction to tell the fundamentally factual stories.
Strange Past and Strange Present form the body text.
Strange Extrapolations is a critical interpretation of the body text structured around a research focus on cultural, textual and discursive/linguistic hybridity. Informed and supported by post-colonial, post-structural and post-modern discourse on identity and belonging within racial multiplicities, Strange Extrapolations attempts to illuminate the instability of static cultures, ideologies or notions of identity wherever hybridity exists. Indeed, Strange Extrapolations infers that hybridity exists everywhere in an infinite multitude of incarnations and thus remains as a permanently destabilising influence upon every human status quo.