In the Oxford Dictionary, the term belonging defines to be rightly put into a particular position or class, to fit or be accepted in a particular place or environment, belonging to a member of and to belong in the property or possession of. Belonging is acceptance, association, attachment, integration, closeness, fellow feeling and fellowship. These features can be seen in Tara June Winch’s Swallow the Air, Greenday’s popular song “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” and Judy Small’s “Stolen Gems”. All these texts convey different messages of how an individual can belong/not belong to the world
In Tara June Winch’s Swallow the Air the story focuses mainly on the main character of May Gibson, an Aboriginal teenager living in Paradise Parade, a town near Wollongong. May lives with her mother and her brother Billy. May had belonged to her family and her Aboriginal culture through the stories that her mother tells her, “I felt Aboriginal because mum had made me proud to be, told me I got magic and courage from Gundyarri, the spirit man… I felt like I belonged...” When May’s mother who “wore worry on her wrists” and “had a face that only smiled in photographs” commits suicide from domestic violence, May loses her sense of family belonging she once had. When May’s Aunty becomes an alcoholic and a gambler “we rarely saw Aunty those days, when we did, she’d just lie about winning, or where’d she been. Aunty drowned out, she faded from our safety”, her life becomes chaotic and troubled. May feels as though she has to leave this “place of grog and fists”. May’s brother Billy becomes a drug addicted to the point where May does not know him anymore, “I did not know my brother”. This is also significant in terms of belonging in the song “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” composed and sung by a rock group Greenday. The song expresses a person’s struggles in finding where they belong in the journey of life. In the lyrics “I walk a lonely road. The only one that I have ever known. Don't...