We Come with This Place

On the 2026 VCE English and EAL text list. We Come with This Place is a List 1 non-fiction text for Reading and responding to texts and meets the Australian text requirement. 2026 is its first year on the list and it is also on the 2027 list. VCAA's reference edition is Echo Publishing (2022). VCAA advises that the book recounts historically verified accounts of rape, assault and domestic violence, and that stories of this time and place cannot be told in full without them. It also deals with massacres and racism; some readers may find it distressing.

The book in brief

We Come with This Place (2022) is Debra Dank's account of her family and of Gudanji Country, on the Barkly Tableland in the Northern Territory. VCAA's annotation stresses that it defies easy classification: it is neither memoir nor biography, and it has been called a collective narrative. Dank tells her own stories, her family's stories and the stories of her people, and also the stories of the land itself, its animals, plants and landforms. The book began as part of her doctoral research in narrative theory and semiotics.

Rather than running in chronological chapters, the book moves between interwoven stories from different generations. Creation stories of the water-women, who travelled from the Gulf of Carpentaria and grew the country, frame the book at its beginning and end. Between them come stories of Dank's father, Soda, who as a boy witnessed terrible violence, including the rape of his mother by white men, and who fled across the border into Queensland after being accused of stealing calves and pursued by white co-workers. He settled in Camooweal, in north-west Queensland, where he met Dank's mother. Dank grew up there and on remote Queensland cattle stations with her parents and sisters, learning Country from her family. The book is full of love, humour and ordinary family life, and it is also honest about how the trauma Soda carried sometimes broke out as violence at home. Later stories follow Dank's own adult life, including her marriage, raising her own children on Gudanji Country, her parents' deaths and taking her grandchildren back onto Country.

Author and context

Debra Dank is a Gudanji/Wakaja woman whose Country is on the Barkly Tableland. She grew up in Camooweal, away from her ancestral Country, and worked in education for about forty years, teaching in schools and universities in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and the Northern Territory. She completed her PhD at Deakin University, and wrote much of the book while camped on Gudanji Country over several months. In 2023 this debut won four prizes at the NSW Premier's Literary Awards, including Book of the Year, a record for one book, and the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, and it was shortlisted for the Stella Prize.

Context you can use (always linked to a topic):

• Country. For First Nations peoples, Country means land, waters, sky, ancestors, law and story together. Dank's title reflects this: people come with, and belong to, a place, rather than owning it.
• Colonisation on the frontier. Pastoral settlement of northern Australia brought massacres, dispossession and the exploitation of Aboriginal workers on cattle stations. The violence in Soda's story belongs to this history, which the book treats as recent and personal.
• Protection and removal. Laws that controlled Aboriginal people's movement, work and families, including the removal of children, shaped the lives of Dank's parents and grandparents; the fear of removal recurs in family memory.
• Station life. Aboriginal people's skilled work on cattle stations sustained the pastoral industry, often for little or no pay. The family's life on stations mixes hardship, racism and occasional kindness.
• Country under threat. Dank has used the book's success to speak out against gas fracking in the Beetaloo Basin, which she sees as a threat to her Country.

Structure and style

• Circular structure. VCAA's annotation points to a circular structure. The water-women stories at the beginning and end make time cyclical: the present returns to the oldest stories.
• Interwoven stories. Stories from different generations are placed side by side, as if time were irrelevant, as VCAA's annotation puts it. The reader must make the connections, which builds understanding the way oral storytelling does.
• Listening in order to see. VCAA's annotation highlights the book's instruction to listen in order to see. Dank asks readers to slow down and attend, rather than extract facts.
• Language. Gudanji and other words appear without a glossary, so meaning comes from context and relationship. VCAA's annotation notes that meaning in the book, as in Indigenous languages, depends on context and connection rather than on opposites.
• Imagery of Country. Rich sensory description of heat, dust, water, birds and plants makes Country a living presence, not a backdrop.
• Humour and warmth. Funny family stories sit alongside brutal history; the humour is part of how the family survives and part of Dank's refusal to be defined only by suffering.
• Voice. Dank moves between first-person memoir, retold family stories and the voice of the storyteller carrying older stories, so the individual and the collective are joined.

People in the book

• Debra Dank. Narrator and storyteller, daughter, teacher, wife, mother and grandmother. Her voice holds the stories together, and her role in passing them on is central.
• Soda. Dank's father. Hard-working, skilled on Country, loving, and carrying trauma from the violence he witnessed as a child. Dank's portrait of him is loving and unflinching at once.
• Dank's mother. Met Soda in Camooweal. She valued schooling and education for her children.
• Grandparents and elders. They pass on knowledge of Country and survive the violence of the frontier, including the sexual violence suffered by Soda's mother.
• Dank's children and grandchildren. Taken back onto Country and taught its knowledge, they carry the stories forward.
• The water-women. Ancestral beings whose travels created and grew the country, and whose story frames the book.

Ideas, concerns and values, and how they are built

Country and identity

VCAA's annotation describes a text about how identity is achieved within landscape and community. Dank shows identity as relational: who you are comes from your connections to Country, family and ancestors.

The power of story

Stories carry law, history and knowledge between generations. VCAA's annotation stresses the power of story and voice to create identity. Writing the book is itself an act of passing stories on.

Colonial violence and its legacy

Massacres, rape, dispossession and racism are presented as family history, not distant events. The trauma passes down the generations and appears in the violence of Soda's later life.

Love and pain in family

Dank refuses to simplify her father or her family. Love and harm exist together, and the book's honesty about both is part of its integrity.

Resilience and hope

VCAA's annotation describes the book as overwhelmingly optimistic about the power and future of the individual, family and Indigenous experience, and as showing how a shared future can be achieved.

Challenging individualism

VCAA's annotation notes that the book challenges the Western celebration of individualism. The self is always part of family, community and Country.

Key moments and why they matter

1. The water-women. The book opens and closes with creation, placing every later story inside a much older one.
2. Soda's flight. The violence he witnessed and the false accusation that drove him across the border show how frontier violence shaped the family's life.
3. Childhood on the stations. Learning Country from family, alongside racism and hardship, shows knowledge surviving under difficult conditions.
4. Violence at home. Dank's account of her father's violence is the book's hardest test of love and honesty.
5. Family humour. Comic stories of childhood and family life show joy as part of survival.
6. Back on Country with the next generations. Teaching her children and grandchildren closes the circle and points to the future.

How VCAA frames topics on this text

VCAA's 2024 and 2025 exam reports describe three topic types: a proposition followed by Discuss, Do you agree? or To what extent do you agree?; a quotation from the text followed by a proposition or question; and a direct question. Each text gets two narrow topics about specific ideas and values.

We Come with This Place had not been examined when this page was written: 2026 is its first year. Expect topics on Country and identity, the power of story and voice, family, colonial violence and its legacy, resilience and hope, and the relationship between past, present and future. Topics may test a relationship between two ideas (for example, love and pain, or past and future) or use absolute terms that invite you to qualify your agreement, as the 2025 report showed for other texts.

For non-fiction, remember that Dank is a writer making choices. Analyse how she constructs meaning (structure, voice, imagery, language) rather than treating the book as a record of events.

Practice topics (original, not from VCAA)

These are practice topics written for this page in the VCAA style. They are not past exam topics.

1. We Come with This Place shows that Country and identity cannot be separated. Discuss.
2. Dank suggests that listening is the beginning of understanding. Do you agree?
3. How does Dank's structure reflect her understanding of time and story?
4. We Come with This Place is ultimately a hopeful text. To what extent do you agree?
5. In We Come with This Place, love and violence are woven together in family life. Discuss.

Planning example

Topic (practice)

We Come with This Place is ultimately a hopeful text. To what extent do you agree?

Contention

Largely agree. Dank's hope is not naive: it is grounded in the continuity of Country, family and story, and it is earned by facing, not avoiding, the violence of colonisation and its legacy.

Paragraph 1: hope in the oldest stories

Analyse the water-women framing and the circular structure, which place present suffering inside a continuing story of creation and return.

Paragraph 2: facing the damage

Analyse the accounts of Soda's childhood and flight, and the violence that later surfaced at home. Dank's honesty prevents the book from becoming a sentimental celebration.

Paragraph 3: survival through family and humour

Analyse the warmth and comedy of family stories and the learning of Country on the stations as forms of resilience.

Paragraph 4: passing it on

Analyse Dank taking her children and grandchildren onto Country and the act of writing itself, as hope made practical: knowledge carried into the future.

Conclusion

VCAA's annotation calls the book overwhelmingly optimistic; the evidence supports that reading, provided the optimism is understood as resilience that has looked squarely at what was done.

Common pitfalls

• Treating it as a straightforward memoir. Dank tells collective stories; focusing only on her life story misses the book's design.
• Reading chronologically. The non-linear structure is deliberate. Analyse why stories are placed side by side.
• Ignoring the hope, or the harm. The book holds both. Strong essays keep them in tension.

Read the book

We Come with This Place is in copyright, so this page analyses it without quoting it. VCAA's reference edition is Echo Publishing (2022), available from your school or local library.

Sources

• VCE English and EAL Text List 2026 and Text List 2027, VCAA.
• VCE English 2025 examination report, VCAA.
• VCE English and EAL Study Design (version 1.4), VCAA.
• We Come with This Place, Echo Publishing.
• Indigenous author Debra Dank sweeps NSW Premier's Literary Awards, ABC News, 2023.