Bertie’s Grandad Character Analysis

An elderly Aboriginal man who has lived all his life on his family’s ancestral land in New South Wales, he encourages his grandson Bertie to remember Indigenous people’s long fight against and suffering because of white settler colonialism, and to think twice about fighting in the war on behalf of “Australia,” an abstraction created by the white people who have stolen their land. At the end of the story, after Bertie’s return home, Grandad reminisces about how beautiful his land used to be, before white settlers destroyed it for irrigation, a metaphor for Bertie’s own destruction in the war.