A Man Called Yarra review: Stan Yarramunua's inspiring memoir

A Man Called Yarra

Stan Yarramunua with Robert Hillman

Nero, $32.99

This may be a written memoir, but Indigenous artist Stan Yarramunua has a plain-speaking, conversational style that comes across so clearly it's actually like listening to his story, which is a rites-of-passage tale of growing up tough and wild: his non-Indigenous father was an alcoholic, a drifter, a pool-table hustler, but Yarramunua speaks fondly of him and the lessons he passed on. Likewise, his mother, killed in a freak car accident (a moving section). Yarramunua married young, had children young (his wife later took her own life), but like his father became an alcoholic. Unlike his father he quit. During his troubled adolescence a policeman told him there was something special in him, and his achievements since in art and acting, as well as well as opening a gallery for Aboriginal art, confirm it. An inspiring tale of coming through.