Mazin’ Grace

Winner of the 2011 David Unaipon Award for Indigenous Writing

Growing up on the Mission isn’t easy for clever Grace Oldman. When her classmates tease her for not having a father, she doesn’t know what to say. Papa Neddy says her father is the Lord God in Heaven, but that doesn’t help when the Mission kids call her a bastard. As Grace slowly pieces together clues that might lead to answers, she struggles to find a place in a community that rejects her for reasons she doesn’t understand.

In Mazin Grace, Dylan Coleman fictionalises her mother’s childhood at the Koonibba Lutheran Mission in South Australia in the 1940s and ’50s. Woven with the powerful, rhythmic sounds of Aboriginal English and Kokatha language, Mazin Grace is the inspirational story of a brave girl who refuses to be told who she is, determined to uncover the truth for herself.