Indigenous Issue

ABR will launch its Indigenous issue at Readings Carlton on 6 October at 6.30 pm, with not so much as a backward glance to Zoom launches. Guest editors Professor Lynette Russell AM, Sir John Monash Distinguished Professor and ARC Laureate at the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre and ABR Assistant Editor and author Dr Georgina Arnott will be in conversation about the issue.

Everyone is most welcome. The event is free, but bookings are essential and can be made via the Readings Events page.

Prizes Galore

Poets from around the world have until midnight (AEST) on 9 October to submit their poems to the Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Now in its twentieth year, the Porter Prize is worth a total of AU$10,000 – with a first prize of $6,000. The five shortlisted poems will be published in the January–February 2024 issue, and the winner will be announced at a ceremony later that month.

The 2024 Calibre Essay Prize opens on 23 October, with a closing date of 22 January 2024 and total prize money of $10,000. This is the eighteenth time we have offered the Calibre Prize, now one of the world’s leading awards for a new essay written in English. We welcome non-fiction of between 2,000 and 5,000 words – on any subject.

All of the winning Calibre essays are available in our digital archive, to which ABR subscribers have full access.

This year we are able to offer a third prize, worth $2,000. (The winner will receive $5,000, the runner-up $3,000.)

Continuing thanks to founding Patrons Peter McLennan and Mary-Ruth Sindrey, whose generous support enables us to offer Calibre in this lucrative form.

The Indigenous Literacy Foundation

ABR is delighted to support the Indigenous Literacy Foundation in this issue, an organisation which provides books to remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. As well as distributing books from around the world, the ILF facilitates the publication of books created by these communities, many in First Languages and for children. To date, the ILF have published 109 books in thirty-one languages. For more details of the ILF’s impressive work, visit https://www.indigenousliteracyfoundation.org.au/

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The consequences of engaging

Dear Editor,

Bain Attwood’s article ‘A Referendum in Trouble’ and the responses to it from several historians (ABR, August and September 2023) raise important issues about the role of scholars in public debate. The stakes are high given the topic at hand – the upcoming constitutional referendum on the Indigenous Voice – and the fact that this is being argued about in good and bad faith.

I see an overarching issue of moral imperative: should scholars engage in public debates on matters of political significance? What are the consequences of not engaging in them?

First of all, it’s worth pointing out that all the correspondents to the ABR agree on the importance of Attwood’s essay, and none of them has questioned his reasoning or evidence. This is not a repetition of the History Wars of two decades ago, when matters of evidence were a central issue.

What does concern some are matters of timing and allyship. Clare Wright (ABR, August 2023) criticises Attwood for not being an ‘ally’ of Indigenous advocates of the Voice. She further argues that historians should wait until after the October referendum to present historical interpretations that may lead to different opinions. Following these proposals offers scholars the opportunity of maintaining a degree of cleanliness, rather than getting down ‘in the gutter’, as Wright puts it. Given that few historians do engage in public debates on such controversial topics, it would seem to be the preferred stance of many. However, those who make decisions otherwise might also be credited with incurring social costs, a calculus based on a sense that what they have to say might help to clarify a political issue. Their decision about timing can be respected without having to agree with the opinion offered.

This leads into a second issue concerning scholars as contributors to public debates. Peter Cochrane (ABR, September 2023) proposes a Janus-faced stance: the historical profession as a whole is to present a united position publicly, while debating issues ‘internally’. Yet for many academics, particularly those of us regularly teaching in the history classroom, the distinction frequently breaks down as students prod us for our thoughts and we strive to create spaces for them to express theirs. Moreover, we are incentivised by current university funding policies to demonstrate ‘public impact’. Beyond these realities, generations of historians have acted out of a sense of public duty: that is, of putting their expertise, knowledge, and skills to the test in public forums in ways they hope are beneficial for the wider community. This is a valuable tradition that we could seek to reactivate and support. Modelling civil debates in public may have tremendous value, even in a world now highly mediated by algorithms.

The question thus becomes: should a soundly argued and presented historical interpretation that leads to the expression of an opinion be made public at a fraught time, and on what basis should we make such a decision? One basis might be in terms of allegiance to a political side. However, as Wright implies, to do this will likely mean remaining silent if one’s scholarship is not to be criticised for partisanship or falling foul of disciplinary ethics, as in the History Wars. Yet remaining silent is not a value-free decision. There may be costs involved in not presenting information, knowledge, and sound interpretation to a wider public, which deserves the opportunity to assess it. Another option is to discuss these debates with our students, modelling a kind of public square for them in the context of the classroom, and encouraging them to engage in these debates at home or in their communities. A third option is to make one’s argument public to a wider audience, in good faith.

Each of these decisions is beset with difficulties and risks, as well as affording opportunities and benefits. There are good reasons why those who are more precarious – whether in terms of employment, social situation, or emotional and psychological context – are not bound by a moral imperative to make knowledge public. In certain contexts, cultural prohibitions also play a role in decision making about what may be brought to public attention. However, especially for those us with secure academic positions, assessing the risks and making decisions about public speech is a responsibility that comes with relative privilege. Indeed, this is a cornerstone of the principle of academic freedom, which is now challenged in many quarters. I believe it is critical for us – as scholars and citizens – to think through and discuss the implications of our decision making concerning how we contribute to the wider public good.

Miranda Johnson

Intemperate times

Dear Editor,

Joel Deane has written a fascinating and thoughtful essay (‘The Great Australian Intemperance’, September 2023). I particularly liked this comment: ‘Public health, in other words, operates like the Australian governments of the parental era defined by collectivism, yet many Australians – especially casual and gig workers – live in a neoliberal marketplace defined by individualism.’ We like to talk now, in the age of the Covid pandemic, about kindness. This is as it should be, but such talk – without due recognition of what is happening to the working class, with respect to economic conditions and rights – perpetuates the problem.

It is easy to talk about kindness, less so to actually make change to facilitate it in a real way. Governments working for people – ensuring proper wages and working conditions, affordable housing, medical care free at the point of service, and a focus on public education over private – is what we need to help us make our lives better (and kinder), but, increasingly, it is what we do not see. Robert Kennedy Jr is an interesting presidential candidate, though much maligned for his supposed ‘anti-vax’ views. As a lawyer, he has also fought for environmental causes, winning major cases against such environmental criminal corporations as Monsanto. Kennedy is undoubtedly complicated; I don’t support, for example, his views on the Israel–Palestine situation. But he should not be written off, for he has invigorating ideas about American empire.

Thinking about this brief response to Deane’s substantial essay, I am conscious of a previous online comment, from Patrick Hockey. It highlights, I think, a problem of ‘us’ and ‘them’, the ‘masses’ and their ‘ugly goings-on’. I don’t consider myself outside ‘the masses’, just one of that large group of people who are trying to get by in this increasingly hostile and neoliberal economic world.

Sue Bond (online comment)

No débutante

Dear Editor,

I would like to point out with the greatest respect that the appearance of Saioa Hernández in the Sydney concert performance of La Gioconda was not her Australian début, as claimed by Peter Rose in his excellent review (ABR, August 2023). Miss Hernández made her Australian début in Melbourne in 2014, in a concert performance of Norma by Victorian Opera.

Moreover, Pinchas Steinberg was active in Australia in 1978–79 as principal guest conductor of the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, and also gave a memorable Bruckner Eighth Symphony with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra around that time – way before he was even thought of by Opera Australia.

I would be grateful if this correction was recorded for the sake of Victorian Opera.

Richard Mills, Artistic Director, Victorian Opera

I have often spoken of trying to write in some meaningful way about what it means to belong to all times in this place that we call our traditional homeland. Aboriginal people know that we have been here since time immemorial. We have never lost track of the wisdom and knowledge that generations of our ancestors had developed over thousands of years about the powerful nature of this country. It was their knowledge that ensured the survival of our culture to this day.

We know that their wisdom, handed down through the ages, was essentially about keeping our interconnected and interrelated world strong. We continue to understand the power held within Country, and we know that the ancient laws governing our land are important for ensuring our continual survival on our traditional lands. We say that we belong to this place, and we say that we are Country, that Country is alive, that Country is within us, that if we care for Country, then Country will care for us. We belong to the all times on this oldest continent on Earth, and this means that all times will remain important for our survival, because no time has ever been resolved.

This was how we learnt about Country and how the powerful creative spiritual world must be looked after and kept strong. This enormous responsibility was always undertaken by our interrelated families through their spiritual connections to the story lines of Country. Aboriginal people have continued to work hard to hold their connections to the deep knowledge embedded in these powerful story lines of Aboriginal Law that, in total, essentially encompass all parts of the country. This enormous cultural responsibility has continued over sixty thousand years. In recent years, scientific research has demonstrated time and again that many of the ancient stories contain truths about events that had once occurred on this land, shaping it into what it is today.

Forty-three years ago, David Marr – journalist, broadcaster, biographer, political commentator, and public intellectual – published his first book, a sharp, memorable biography of Garfield Barwick, former Liberal attorney-general and chief justice of the High Court. After the appearance of Patrick White: A life in 1991, long considered one of the best biographies ever written in Australia, he might well have followed the more predictable path of the serial biographer. But Marr’s trajectory has proved to be anything but predictable.

As with the best writers, his work has always been driven by a restless curiosity and a readiness to go anywhere in pursuit of a story. As he explained in the introduction to My Country (2018), his collection of essays, articles, and speeches: ‘[Australia] is the subject that interests me most, and I have spent my career trying to untangle its mysteries.’ Over the past four decades, those mysteries have included political censorship (The Henson Case, 2008); the politics of race (Dark Victory, with Marian Wilkinson, 2003); the failures of clerical authority (The Prince: Faith, abuse and George Pell, 2014); and the lives of political leaders: Quarterly Essays on John Howard (2007), Kevin Rudd (2010), Tony Abbott (2012), Bill Shorten (2015), and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation (2017).

David Marr (Lorrie Graham via Black Inc.)

Even with this impressive array of publications, few would have expected frontier history to be Marr’s next port of call. Yet, despite its radical departure in subject matter, Killing for Country: A family story is entirely consistent with Marr’s modus operandi. Remain focused. Track down every last detail. Compile, sift, and test the evidence. Write with razor-like clarity. Don’t waste a word. Know the law. Scrutinise the press. Closely examine the words and self-serving manoeuvrings of those in power. And follow the money – or, in this case, the sheep.

As I read Everything You Need to Know about the Voice, I was acutely conscious of the significance of the timing – just weeks before Australians are due to vote in a referendum on whether we should establish a constitutionally enshrined First Nations Voice to parliament or not. Over the months leading up to the referendum, we have witnessed a significant rise in lies, disinformation, and misinformation, all intended to influence voters, and hence the outcome. This book provides timely and essential reading that rebuts the tide of misinformation.

Co-authored by Cobble Cobble woman and constitutional expert Megan Davis and fellow constitutional expert George Williams, Everything You Need to Know outlines what a constitution is, and how Australia’s was developed, along with the change made in the 1967 referendum, and what is proposed with the Voice to Parliament. The authors chart the history of Indigenous agency and advocacy over decades and demonstrate the continuum of struggle and activism – not only to be recognised but also to have a say. (Megan Davis and George Williams also co-authored Everything You Need to Know about the Uluru Statement from the Heart.)

Walking into Sydney’s iconic Abbey’s Bookshop, I noticed a prominent display of books devoted to the campaign to recognise Indigenous peoples in the Australian Constitution. Some of the books were new to me; all were written with great care and doubtless published for the moment. Marcia Langton’s The Welcome to Country Handbook: A guide to Indigenous Australia wasn’t among them, perhaps because of its newness, perhaps because it transcends the moment, its title signposting a broader remit. Langton’s wide-ranging knowledge, irrepressible curiosity, and longstanding engagement with culture, education, and politics bring a breadth to the work that few others could offer.

The Welcome to Country Handbook will serve the general reader; it would also be at home in senior secondary, as well as higher education curricula. Its numerous examples of Indigenous peoples’ heritage and lived cultures also make it relevant for workplace cultural awareness training courses. I can imagine many workplaces finding distinct chapters and case studies relevant to their professional learning programs. When seeking the Handbook, it will be useful for the reader to know that there are other Langton/Hardie Grant titles with Welcome to Country as lead title (2018, 2019, 2021).

It can take an enormous intellectual effort for non-Indigenous people (such as this reviewer) to grasp Indigenous concepts of time. This is partially due to what Aileen Moreton-Robinson has described as the incommensurability of Indigenous and Western epistemological approaches. In settler-colonial terms, land is a resource to be appropriated, surveyed, and exploited. Temporality is generally used to situate the colonisation event, the before and after, from a perspective where time is linear and forward-looking. By contrast, in Indigenous cosmological approaches, land, culture, and time are co-dependent and in perpetual conversation. Country and time are indivisible.

So, while Western understandings of the Dreamtime situate Indigenous cultures in a deep, discrete past, befitting settler-colonial notions of immutable cultures locked in the Stone Age, Indigenous conceptions of the Dreaming are complex, relational, and, as Deborah Bird Rose wrote, best described as synchrony. The diversity and complexity of Indigenous cultures, languages and world views across mainland Australia, Tasmania, and the Torres Strait means that no single interpretation can be extrapolated to reflect the whole, further complicating how Country and temporality are understood.

The vibrant state of Aboriginal intellectual life is immediately evident upon reading Melissa Lucashenko’s foreword and Daniel Browning’s introduction to his Close to the Subject: Selected works. Lucashenko combines insight with an engaging, colloquial style; Browning, without apology or artifice, weighs up the successes, failures, and resentments of almost three decades as a journalist.

Legacy media and talkback radio were still all-powerful when Browning commenced at the ABC as a cadet journalist in 1994. Entering a jealous, competitive work environment he finds his race and sexuality are fetishised by some of his white colleagues and used to diminish him as a person and a professional. In what used to be referred to as lateral violence, an Aboriginal colleague greets him with a ‘vampiric half-smile’, occasionally hailing him as ‘countryman’, with an emphasis on the first syllable. Faced with this Succession-like ruthlessness Browning admits, ‘Instead of unmaking the craft to fit my own values, I had learned bitterness and self-protection just to survive.’

What unfolds as we read the introduction is an image of a proud, sensitive man who acknowledges that he ‘didn’t rise above the slurs or bullying’. Is it better now? Maybe not for Browning. It still seems to rankle him that he has never been nominated for a Walkley Award. He writes of an unsolicited approach from a university headhunter who holds out the tantalising possibility of a prestigious appointment, commensurate with his achievements, as a professor of journalism. Daring to dream, Browning envisages teaching a subject that would introduce students to the ethical responsibilities of reporting on Indigenous issues. He eventually learns that at some higher level the appointment is vetoed.

I latch onto the mantra                                               
let them go
and go off the grid

switch the phone to moon mode
[do not disturb me]
and later switch it off

go rogue
go smoke signals forged in a fire boiling yabbies we caught in the creek

go clouds of white in blue wren open sky backdropping scribbly gums and
their scribbly gum moths frilly wings enchanting

go salt water rock pools with sea foam icing
go strangler fig jutting roots
like benches for the broken

heartbreak will not break me

go snow

go sand under foot

go river pebble paperweight in hand

go back to the land
back to the land
to the land

and let her heal you
when an ending arrives

Kirli Saunders

In his 1968 Boyer Lectures, After the Dreaming, anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner lamented that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples had been omitted from narratives of the nation’s past. Contending that this omission was ‘a structural matter’, he likened Australian history to ‘a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape’. He proposed that the kinds of stories which could bring Indigenous history into view for Australian readers would focus on the lives of individuals.

The history I would like to see written would bring in the main flow of its narrative the life and times of men like David Unaipon, Albert Namatjira, Robert Tudawali, Durmagan, Douglas Nichols, Dexter Daniels and many others. Not to scrape up significance for them but because they typify so vividly the other side of a story over which the great Australian silence reigns.

Stanner was ahead of his time in his call for biographical approaches. Indigenous life writing did not flourish until the 1980s, when, in the lead-up to the nation’s Bicentenary, such works revealed that ‘white Australia has a black history’, as the National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee (NAIDOC) put it in 1987. Prior to 1968, few biographies of Aboriginal people had been published, and only two Aboriginal autobiographies: David Unaipon’s My Life Story (1951) and Theresa Clements’s From Old Maloga: The memoirs of an Aboriginal woman (1954).

The only other Aboriginal biographies published at that time were the handful included in the inaugural volumes of the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB). Volume I (1966) contained five Indigenous subjects in 575 entries – Arabanoo, Bennelong, Biraban, Bungaree, and Colebe – all men from early New South Wales who were either captured by, or seemingly served, the British. Of the 607 entries in volume II (1967), four were on Aboriginal individuals – Jackey Jackey, Wylie, Yuranigh, and Yagan – all of whom were categorised as ‘Aboriginal guides’, except for Yagan, who was outlawed by the colonists. While Stanner’s vision of the kinds of individuals who exemplified Indigenous history echoed the ADB’s exclusive focus on men, his list differed in significant ways. Rather than depicting figures mainly in terms of their contributions to or impact on the early colonies, Stanner’s selection of individuals comprised an inventor, an artist, an actor, a warrior, a pastor and future state governor, and a trade unionist. These were men who had achieved success, advocated for Indigenous rights, or striven to maintain cultural autonomy and connections to kin in the face of interventionist government policies.

In many respects these differences in approach reflect two broad trajectories in Indigenous history. One illustrates an outdated but not obsolete historiography that arguably homogenises Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and only considers their lives in terms of colonisation (or settler-colonialism), while the other strives to illuminate individual agency and to understand the past in ways that are meaningful to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples in terms of Country and ancestors, or local languages, cultures, and knowledges. Thinking through these different approaches and their implications for the stories we tell has been a key driver of our research project, An Indigenous Australian Dictionary of Biography.

The project began formally in 2017. Our main aim was to redress the under-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the ADB, which by then had published nineteen volumes. This included a 2005 Supplement: an earlier ameliorative response to criticisms about the lack of entries on women and Indigenous people, including calls for change by Marduntjara and Pitjantjatjara historian Gordon Briscoe. Despite this earlier initiative, by 2017 the ADB, over the course of its fifty-year history, had still published only 210 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander entries out of some 13,000 biographies. This represented 1.5 per cent of entries, or about half of today’s Indigenous proportion of the Australian population. Our initial target was to almost double the number of entries in the ADB and to produce 190 new biographies. Over the course of our project, we have prioritised First Nations involvement in our project. In order to achieve this, we have revised our target to one hundred new articles, with a high proportion written and edited in collaboration with Indigenous people.

Another key aim of the project was to ensure that it was Indigenous-led and represented community interests. The Indigenous Working Party (IWP) comprises First Nations researchers from across Australia (including the authors of this essay). It has played a crucial role in these endeavours by overseeing the project, being actively involved in producing the biographies, and advocating for the project to communities and families of potential biographical subjects. To this end, we have had significant involvement from First Nations contributors who have authored or co-authored more than forty per cent of our published and in-press articles, including several who have written multiple entries, such as Yuwaalaraay/Gamilaraay historian and filmmaker Frances Peters-Little and Quandamooka scholar Galiina Ellwood. While the ADB had previously commissioned Aboriginal authors such as IWP member Steve Kinnane, a Mirriwoong scholar, and Yugambeh writer Ysola Best, who wrote five biographies, our current project has considerably added to the number of First Nations contributors, several of whom are first-time biographers.

Moreover, many authors are related to the people they are writing about, or have consulted with families for their input. This was also a significant departure for the ADB, which embraced Western traditions privileging impartiality and distance. From Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives, however, identifying connections and relatedness are precursors to dialogue (i.e, ‘Who’s your mob?’), and crucial to building trust, including trust in the biographers’ account. Intent on highlighting such relationships, we insisted that our entries include author biographies, usually omitted from ADB articles. Further, to acknowledge traditional owners and remind readers of Indigenous sovereignty, these usually include the Country on which the author resides. Finally, we urged the ADB to implement a cultural warning on its website. Such initiatives strive to encourage First Nations readers to feel that the ADB is for us too, that our ancestors are part of Australia’s history, and that we are welcomed as expected readers. All too often Indigenous people are not imagined as part of the audience; we are made to feel spoken about, rather than spoken to.

Our imagined Indigenous reader also guides how we prepare our biographies in collaboration with the ADB research editors Rani Kerin and Kiera Donnelly. In addition to the ADB’s usual fact-checking and stylistic protocols, we strive to ‘Indigenise’ the entries in subtle yet significant ways. It is important to identify the person’s Indigenous name(s), as well as their language group or clan and the names of their kin, and to use local language terms if appropriate. We try to avoid ‘normalising’ colonial perspectives, which often inflect non-Indigenous sources and can include euphemistic terms for violence or back-handed colonial stereotypes.

Our project has also faced several challenges. Some we anticipated but underestimated, such as the difficulty in commissioning biographies of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women. While women in general are grossly under-represented in the ADB, we only managed to improve the representation of Indigenous women from twenty-two to twenty-six per cent (of our new entries). This is partly an effect of colonial sources paying more attention to men than women, as evident in Stanner’s biographical list, but is also arguably a consequence of greater sensitivity towards female figures who might be apical ancestors or have been subjected to doubly offensive racist and sexist treatment or depictions by colonisers. In these difficult or confronting cases, invited authors felt that consultation with all descendants would be essential before they could proceed, an impossible task with our available resources.

We also underestimated the difficulty of commissioning new biographies of Torres Strait Islander people, even with the exceptional expertise of Mabuiag Elder, Uncle John Whop. The ADB had published only eight entries, all on men, before our project began. To date we have added only four new biographical subjects – including one woman, the Mabuiag pioneer of Moa Island, Uraba Demag Ware, written by her descendant Moilang Ware – and Paralympian Harry Mosby, written by non-Indigenous sports historian Gary Osmond. We have commissioned a few more.

While we have identified further potential subjects, finding appropriate authors willing to write biographies has had its challenges. This may be due to the high demands on the relatively small number of scholars involved in Torres Strait Islander research. But it could also reflect the ADB’s long-term failure to foster Islander interest in its national biographical project: having been overlooked for five decades, and still represented by only a dozen individuals, it is unlikely that Torres Strait Islanders see themselves reflected in the ADB or feel compelled to contribute.

We have also faced unforeseen challenges such as the Covid epidemic, and growing concerns over the place of non-Indigenous scholars in the writing of First Nations biography. While the question of who should write Indigenous history has circulated since the early 1980s, it seems like a more pressing concern now, perhaps fuelled by growing calls to decolonise the academy in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, or the wider adoption of Indigenous research ethics protocols. Consequently, a not insignificant number of non-Indigenous historians are uncertain whether it is politically and ethically appropriate for them to engage in First Nations matters. While we encourage non-Indigenous researchers to write Indigenous biographies, we recognise that this is not a sentiment shared by all communities, and respect each community’s right to have a say in who tells their history. Some communities welcome new research to record their Elders’ stories to support cultural revitalisation initiatives, or to produce new histories, including biographies, to pass on to future generations. Other communities, stung perhaps by earlier exploitative research practices, are determined to control how research will be conducted in their community. Given the need for, and the value of, sharing the unique histories and diversity of Indigenous individuals and communities, instead of adopting a universal stance on whether or not to engage in Indigenous biography, we encourage scholars to critically reflect on their own research ethics and approach it on a case-by-case basis. Just as members of the IWP have done throughout our lives as we worked to share stories of our families and communities – our individual trials, collective triumphs, and sense of belonging – here we seek recognition of Indigenous agency and support understandings of the past in ways that are meaningful to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

More than fifty years ago, Stanner drew our attention to ‘the great Australian silence’. While Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and biographies have proliferated in important and innovative ways since then, the view onto our past is still partially obscured, sometimes wilfully, for example in the aggressively sceptical reception of works which seek to recast understandings of Indigenous land management practices. More significantly, there are still many aspects of our historical experience which remain untold, especially within the ADB. While this first phase of our project is drawing to a close, we remain committed to widening our view of Australia’s past to better include First Nations experience, particularly in terms of the lives of First Nations women and Torres Strait Islanders. 

Shino Konishi, DAATSIA Fellow, Australian Catholic University; Julie Andrews, Academic Director (Indigenous Research), La Trobe University; Odette Best, Pro Vice-Chancellor (First Nations Education and Research), University of Southern Queensland; Brenda L. Croft, Professor, Indigenous Art History and Curatorship, Australian National University; Steve Kinnane, Co-Chair of Indigenous Studies, University of Notre Dame; Greg Lehman, Pro Vice-Chancellor Indigenous Leadership, University of Tasmania; and Uncle John Whop, PhD Candidate, Batchelor Institute.

This research was supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme (Project IN170100012). The views expressed herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Australian Government or of the Australian Research Council.

This article is one of a series of ABR commentaries on cultural and political subjects being funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Like the nation at large, the University of Melbourne has a troubling history. Stretching back to Victoria’s early colonisation, that history is entwined with the oppression and dispossession of Australia’s Indigenous peoples.

Indigenous people in Australia experience the consequences of that history daily, but the #blacklivesmatter and #blaklivesmatter protests of 2020 pushed questions about the relationship between Australia’s past and present more forcefully into the non-Indigenous consciousness. In the university sector, they added momentum to efforts to dismantle racist legacies crystallised at the University of Cape Town in 2015 by #RhodesMustFall. Against this context, Melbourne University Publishing will soon publish two volumes on the history of the University of Melbourne’s relationship with Indigenous Australia. Volume 1, Truth, presents contributions from Indigenous and non-Indigenous experts, solicited by editors Ross Jones, Marcia Langton, and James Waghorne. They cover the university’s entanglements with Indigenous Australia from its 1853 foundation to the present through four themes: Place, Indigenous Knowledge, Human Remains, and Settler-Colonial Knowledge.

Some of the questions Truth addresses echo those asked in other Australian, US, British, Irish, Canadian, and South African colleges and universities: where did the money come from? What else should we know about the philanthropists and academics that universities celebrate so fulsomely? Other questions are more locally specific: what is the relationship between the university and the Traditional Owners – the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung – of the Country on which its main campus stands? How have Indigenous students and staff navigated an institution created to advance settler-colonial aspirations? How have Indigenous knowledges, places, objects, and, indeed, bodies featured in the university’s activities? To walk around the Parkville campus or survey a list of founders and benefactors is to encounter a particular version of history. Unsurprisingly, as Truth documents, this history diminishes colonisation’s historical and contemporary impact. It obscures as much as it reveals.

Anita Heiss is the author of non-fiction, historical fiction, commercial women’s fiction, poetry, social commentary, and travel articles. She is a Lifetime Ambassador of the Indigenous Literacy Foundation and a proud member of the Wiradyuri nation of central New South Wales.

Family photographs add so much to Aboriginal autobiography. Aboriginal people will scan them to see who they know and what the buildings, clothes, and area looked like then. Photographs are an open invitation to connect with your people, no matter where they are from.

In Auntie Rita: The classic memoir of an Aboriginal woman’s love and determination, first published in 1994, Auntie Rita (1921–96), a Bidjara woman, and her daughter Jackie Huggins, a Bidjara/Birri Gubba Juru woman, have produced a blended narrative and autobiography that tells of Auntie Rita’s early years living under the Queensland government assimilation polices and her adult life as a wife, widow, and single parent. Jackie – author, historian, academic – is a formidable woman. Together they share a strong and caring story interwoven with the injustices of living under government policies. They tell of the oppressed black people working with white supporters to create opportunities and address inequality for those in Brisbane.

Kado Muir – a Ngalia man – will never be able to have another conversation in his mother tongue. He tells the story of witnessing each of his elders dying and, in the process, his language. Successively, he had fewer and fewer people to communicate with. In the case of his language community, younger contemporaries shifted to English as the language exerted its colonial power – until at last Kado Muir became the last speaker of Ngalia.

Kado Muir’s story is not unique. He is not the only one to experience such a devastating loss, nor will he be the last. Of the approximately five hundred Indigenous languages of Australia, only thirteen continue to be passed down to the next generation. Even these are at risk. Each lost language had a last speaker, one who endured the same pain.

Language, however, is not lost in isolation. The relentless forces of colonisation have severed and continue to sever the connection to generations of accumulated knowledge, stories, and traditions. Ultimately, language documentation is no panacea. It can’t restore everything that’s gone, but it serves as a resilient counter-measure in modern Australia, helping to shape the future vitality of Indigenous Australian languages.

Old Pelican sits by the billabong, he scratches his white hair sighing.
Long time olden time, he says, this little girl goanna place.
Wark wark crow listens, whistling duck swimming.
Them whitemen come from South African Cold Storage Company.
Reckon want Alawa land, clearim for cattle, might be 1929.
‘My mum born that year,’ I whisper. Hot and sweaty.
Want blackfella gone. Clearim up.
Big mob whitefella on horseback yarraman come, ammo crossed chest, you know..
Like big Europe war. Lotta rifle. Enfield I reckon. Youai Enfield.
Make grandfather, father, all fella chop up wood, big mob. Chop.
Chain im up on dis tree, see metal ring, for chain. Tree got pink flower. Pretty one.
‘I see it uncle.’ I sit quiet in the orange dust, eyes down, fingers clasped. 
Them whitefella shootim all, like they nothin, burn im up. Womens run, run with little ones.
But they ride im down. Hit im, kill im. Knock im down with stirrup.
With stick, not wantim waste bullet, smash im against rock, see red there.
‘I see, I mumble,’ staring at the crawling white ants.
Me save by coolomon, just little fella sleepin.
‘Sorry Uncle’. Youai. Dis place like that.

Julie Janson

Reaching Through Time: Finding my family’s stories is the epitome of Indigenous family life writing. Predominantly set in New South Wales, on the east coast of Australia, Reaching Through Time is a journey through more than 200 years of Australian history, from early invasion and colonisation to the present day, through the lens of Indigenous family lived experience. This collection of life stories – skilfully located in the archives, family memory, and secondary sources – traces five generations of the authors’ family. Reaching Through Time is a rich, engaging contribution to Australian history. Bostock is writing against Australian historiography, which has excluded the voices of Indigenous families. As Shauna Bostock says: ‘This book is written for people who want to know our history from an Aboriginal perspective.’

Bostock is a historian, a former primary school teacher, and a Bundjalung woman whose ancestral homelands are located on the Tweed River, close to where the Queensland and New South Wales borders now meet. From the outset, Bostock welcomes us into her world, centring a family’s love for themselves and their connections with Bundjalung Spirit and Country. She says:

My ancestors woke up in that sunshine, drank from crystal-clear streams, hunted game, were guardians of the forest and the mountains, and maintained and preserved sacred sites of earth Magic […] the greatest, most heart-warming reward has been the discovery of an unbroken connection to pre-colonial ancestors – and time immemorial.

Just to north of Darwin is the country of the Tiwi people, spread over Bathurst and Melville Islands. These two new books give voice to Tiwi oral traditions and to the power and resonance within that tradition of orality that encompasses song, narrative, and the ways in which they sustain family and relationships to ancestors and to kin.

The Old Songs Are Always New: Singing traditions of the Tiwi Islands explores the world of Indigenous song composition and maintenance among the Tiwi people of Bathurst and Melville Islands. For many years in the sphere of anthropology and ethnomusicology, Indigenous music was considered arcane; in the world of linguistics song and music, it was rarely explored. In academic terms, this book is a rich and delightful repository of the knowledge of song held by the Tiwi women and men who worked with Genevieve Campbell, a professional musician who is currently a research affiliate at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

Tiwi Story: Turning history downside up is related to the first new release in regard to its deep exploration of orality and how communities value such traditions. In a world where the calls for truth telling become more urgent, in an Australia where the debate rages about a Voice to parliament, here are books that speak to the truths as experienced by Tiwi men and women of Bathurst and Melville Island, and speak also to a wide range of events that are held within the oral traditions of the Tiwi people.

Alfred William Howitt is a well-known yet enigmatic figure in Australian colonial history. Born in England in 1830 and raised by literary and politically active parents, Howitt grew up amid an erudite and socially progressive milieu. With his father and brother, he arrived in Australia in 1852, hoping to ‘make it big’ on the Victorian gold fields. Enthralled by the natural environment and the liberties afforded to a gentleman bushman in the colony, Howitt decided to stay on while his family returned to London.

What happened next has become the stuff of Australian legend. Howitt demonstrated his aptitude as a bushman, led exploration expeditions into the interior, and received considerable public acclaim after discovering the bodies of the explorers Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills in 1861. His curiosity and intellect also saw him make significant contributions to early geo-logical, botanical, biological, and anthropological collecting, and to research.

In Line of Blood: The truth of Alfred Howitt, Craig Horne – speechwriter and member of the extended Howitt family – seeks to better understand Howitt ‘the man’. Though he was eulogised for his many achievements and talents, Howitt’s motivations and character have remained elusive. The book engages in a journey of discovery as Horne attempts to understand how Howitt, a man who relished Australian bush life and had such close engagements with Aboriginal Australians, could continue to harbour racial prejudice.

In Hoodie Economics, Jack Manning Bancroft, the founder of the Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME), offers an outline of the organisation’s next chapter. AIME, established in 2005, paired Indigenous secondary school students with university mentors. Since 2015, AIME has begun to transition, in collaboration with PwC’s Indigenous Consulting and alliance partner Salesforce, into a learning and mentoring resource network. As the organisation’s website puts it, AIME’s latest incarnation, the IMAGI-NATION [University], is a ‘global community of problem-solvers and change-makers’ earmarked to end – intentionally – in 2033, leaving behind ‘a legacy of tools, case studies, and a healthier system for all species on earth’. In the meantime, the ‘innovative platform is set to revolutionize how we solve global challenges, fostering a community of thinkers, dreamers, and doers’. In other words, AIME has entered the economies of algorithmic data, decentralisation, and gamification.

Like Nigerian alternative jazz singer muva of Earth singing, in ‘Feed My Mind’, ‘Dnt talk 2 me / If u ain’t gonna help me grow / Dnt talk 2 me / If u ain’t gonna help me evolve’, Bancroft, by his own admission, is not interested in small talk; he likes to talk about big ideas. An example of such thinking occurs in the ‘Potential’ section of Hoodie Economics, which comprises nine chapters: ‘Note from a Platypus’, ‘Processes of Emergence’, ‘An Invitation’, ‘Small Big Talk’, ‘Inheritance’, ‘Potential’, ‘Relations’, ‘Imagi-nation’, ‘Death’.

There is no denying the power of poetry as thoughtful story-telling, a form of expression free from rules, conventions. It allows a safe environment for experimentation, free from the confines of traditionalism. Portraits in words, detailing the ride of life and thoughts of the mind are painted onto the canvas, where the placement of verses on a page can matter as much as the choices of words themselves.

Susie Anderson’s collection of fragmentary odes to the connection she has to her country, her body, and her life experiences, is a perspicacious example of the creativity and spirit of First Nations poetry.

Beginning with ‘time, place and country’, Anderson gently reminded me of a truth I had inherited from my own family and ancestors: ‘boundaries of Country are rivers / mountains / sea’. It was a fitting introduction to understanding her views on world, presence, and self. I imagined the different settings of inspiration that might have presented themselves during Anderson’s writing. Raised in Horsham, she descends from the Wergaia and Wemba Wemba, the latter being Country I used to work on in my early twenties, pushing me to picture the small hills and dusty plains, bordered by the dry and scant woodlands which dot its landscape. What began as a memory of the Mallee morphed into a yearning of my own Bardi Jawi homeland, and certainly its rivers and seas.

Ali Cobby Eckermann is an award-winning Yankunytjatjara/Kokatha poet and artist. In the words of Yugambeh writer Arlie Alizzi: ‘She Is the Earth is hypnotic, healing and transcendental.’

She Is the Earth is redolent of First Nations’ musicality, reminding us of Northeast Arnhem Land Yolngu song cycles and Central Australian Inma, but also of an Ancient Greek chorus, where women sing the epic tragedy. But is it a long poem, a collection of interrelated poems, or a verse novel? In Eckermann’s own words: ‘I know our struggle continues as First Nations people who are deprived of our true standing on our sacred land.’ Her poetry is a siren song.

Understanding the context of identity in the case of Eckermann’s work is essential to connect with her truth, that of her Yankunytjatjara/Kokatha heritage. Her identity sings from the pages of this work. That caravan home on the edge of a red desert is etched in our vision of her.

Yasmin Smith is an editor, writer and poet of South Sea Islander, Kabi Kabi, Northern Cheyenne, and English heritage. She has worked across literary fiction, non-fiction, children’s books, and poetry, with a focus on supporting First Nations creatives and their stories. She is currently an editor at University of Queensland Press, where her work includes overseeing its groundbreaking First Nations Classics series.

When the first season of Aaron Sorkin’s Newsroom premièred in Australia in 2012, Foxtel had its own onscreen news talent cut a series of promos. A bevy of ageless news anchors – all dense hairdos and blazing white teeth – talked admiringly of how the series portrayed their profession. Journalism, in their telling, was fast-paced, often self-righteous, occasionally fallible, but ultimately always a noble occupation that served the public’s interest. Leigh Sales’s new book, Storytellers, follows a similar line, with the content and even the cover art – a black and white photo of Sales at her news desk, shot from behind, à la Will McAvoy – evincing the same reverence for journalism. Implicitly, too, there is the same nostalgia for the days when everything was just a bit more straightforward.

Some of this feels warranted. Technological change has dramatically reshaped the news media industry, while disinformation and debates about bias in news reportage have washed in atop successive waves of redundancies that left many newsrooms in Australia drained of knowledge and experience. If that drain has been stoppered in recent years by revenue from the News Media Bargaining Code, the people left behind are still, as Sales writes, swamped by information, besieged by deadlines, and grappling with new challenges without the guidance of old hands. In Storytellers, Sales aims to provide that guidance by passing on tips and tricks from Australia’s finest.

Stalin really knew how to lock a country down. Western intelligence services had virtually no secret information sources in the Soviet Union in the 1940s, in contrast to the Soviets’ striking success with Kim Philby, the mole who held a senior position in British intelligence. Western diplomats in Moscow had no direct contacts with members of the Russian population, other than the various watchful helpers supplied by the state. During the war, there were no foreign tourists or visiting businessmen in the country, and just a few Western journalists. The journalists lived together in the Hotel Metropole in the centre of Moscow (the Red Hotel of the title of Alan Philps’s new book), drinking and lamenting the strictness of Soviet censorship and their inability to cover the war except from official handouts.

The Metropole was (and is) a grand though somewhat shabby art deco building in the centre of Moscow, across the road from the Bolshoi Theatre. Its restaurant and bar were more or less off limits to all but specially chosen Russians in the 1940s. The journalists lived there in moderate discomfort (though enormous privilege, compared to ordinary Russians), socialising with each other and the diplomats, waiting for briefings from the much-disliked Nikolai Palgunov, head of the Press Department. On rare occasions, they would be taken, en masse, to a carefully curated war site. The Katyn Forest, site of the massacre of Polish officers, was one such expedition; and the journalists later duly reported the (false) Soviet claim that the Germans were responsible, however fishy it sounded, for want of any other story to file.

A senior public servant writes that the history of corporations shows that there are ‘some things which a Government cannot do officially, and which are best accomplished when the people take the lead, while the State lends its support, remaining in the background until it is required to interfere’. This is ‘almost forgotten now in these days of international law, of diplomats, and of quick intelligence sent to headquarters by wire from the uttermost parts of the earth’.

These words may look as though they come from today’s newspaper headlines, as corporations explore space, launch satellites, and plan to mine the Moon and colonise Mars. In fact, they were written by a British Empire official in 1898 and quoted by Philip Stern in Empire, Incorporated: The corporations that built British colonialism. Taking the reader through six ‘ages’ (discovery, crisis, projects, revolutions, reform, and imperialism), Stern shows how ‘venture colonialism’ financed and shaped empires through the means of joint-stock corporations. Stern traces the evolution of joint-stock corporations over four centuries, beginning in 1566 with the Muscovy Company, the British firm founded to trade with Russia, and ending with the 1982 Falklands War, prior to which the Falkland Islands Company still controlled the major newspaper and television station, nearly half the land, and enterprises with interests in Antarctic exploration. Along the way, we encounter the distant pirates of Jamaica and the more familiar South Australian Company, with characters like Edward Gibbon Wakefield and George Fife Angas. Had Stern used data from the Legacies of British Slavery project at University College London, he would have added that Angas received compensation for the emancipation of 121 slaves in Honduras in 1835. He could, therefore, set up the Union Bank of Australia in 1836 and the South Australian Banking Company in 1840. He could buy 4,000 acres of fertile land on the Rhine and Gawler Rivers in the Barossa Range in 1840. Data from this project may result in more light being shone on the origins of key investors in Australia and across the British Empire.

In April 1952, during the long voyage from Portsmouth around the Cape to the Montebello Islands off the coast of Western Australia, HMS Narvik and HMS Zeebrugge anchored at the Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean. After a slow, lurching trip, the palmy islands and their azure seas were a tonic. There, the crew of the British ships met for the first time with the legendary RAAF No. 2 Airfield Construction Squadron that had built the Woomera rocket range in South Australia and was then building a civil airport on the islands. Five British crew decided, against an explicit order from the Australian Commander, to take a swim. In the treacherous reef waters, they quickly got into trouble and RAAF servicemen went to rescue them. The Prologue to Operation Hurricane gives a harrowing account of how three men drowned: one of the Brits and two of the Australian rescuers.

This tragic augury hangs over the story and sets the scene for the horror and the folly of British atomic tests in Australia. Narvik and Zeebrugge continued their journey and would, in six months’ time, be part of the small flotilla present for Britain’s first atomic weapon test at Montebello.

A lot can change in a few years. In March 2020, on the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic, I wrote a review essay for ABR about the proliferation of trans and gender diverse (TGD) life writing. Back then, the most notable examples came from overseas, and – with the exception of established names like ABC’s Eddie Ayres (now Ed Le Broq), author of the 2017 memoir Danger Music – major Australian publishers had yet to take a chance on local trans voices.

Three years on, the publishing landscape has been transformed. During the early 2020s, Australian readers have been treated to a smorgasbord of TGD life writing, a feast that includes Kaya Wilson’s As Beautiful As Any Other, Bastian Fox Phelan’s How to Be Both, Candice Bell’s The All of It: A bogan rhapsody, Danielle Laidley’s Don’t Look Away, Ed Ayres’s Whole Notes, Madison Godfrey’s Dress Rehearsals, Ellen van Neerven’s Personal Score, Kris Kneen’s Fat Girl Dancing, the edited anthology Nothing to Hide: Voices of Trans and Gender Diverse Australia (of which I am a co-editor), and my own All About Yves: Notes from a transition – not to mention essays from the likes of Sam Elkin, Jasper Peach, Vivian Blaxell, Jinghua Qian, and Oliver Reeson. Then there’s the preponderance of trans voices in the Australian poetry scene: Scott-Patrick Mitchell, Dan Hogan, Rae White, Alex Gallagher, Gavin Yuan Gao, Godfrey, van Neerven, and more. Significantly, much of this new work has been released by major publishers: Penguin, Allen & Unwin, UQP, and Text. No more is trans writing relegated to the underground press. Indeed, as I write, it’s just been announced that Hachette, one of the global ‘Big Five’, has acquired a short story collection by Sydney trans actor Zoe Terakes, to be published in 2024.

Robyn Davidson is still best known as the ‘camel lady’, the young writer whose account of her desert trek from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean with four camels and a dog made her internationally famous. Tracks, published in 1980, has never been out of print. Since then Davidson has led a nomadic life – sometimes living in London, sometimes New York, and often exploring the world’s remote places and writing about them and her encounters with desert dwellers. Now, in her early seventies she has returned to her roots, spurred – like many writers at the same stage of their lives – by the need to examine her own past.

Davidson, the younger of two girls, grew up on her father’s cattle property in Queensland. Her descriptions of her early life – its sounds, smells, textures – and her passionate connection to the natural world provide some of the most evocative writing in this book. Much of this connection she owed to her father. ‘By example rather than instruction he taught me to be unafraid of snakes, spiders, cyclones, ocean waves, gekkos, solitude and the dark,’ she writes. ‘He taught me how to listen to the silence of nature so that its silences opened all the way out to the rim of our exploding universe.’ Her mother, recognising that her younger daughter was musically talented, sent away for books about composers and dancers. Davidson enjoyed music but felt that these books could not compare with the family encyclopedias featuring ‘coloured plates of such things as radiolaria, peridots, tiger iron, fish with electric lights in them, naked people with towers of feathers on their heads’. How, she asks, could anyone not want to understand these things?

The best literary short fiction gives the author an opportunity to stretch their limbs from poetry into abstraction, painting emotion in words without the need to make figurative or even internal sense. The story does not need to be a medium for delivering ‘story’, as such, but can become a container of emotion, for the feelings the artist intends to deliver. The emotion delivered by literary fiction teaches us to feel empathy for the characters, making the short form an effective empathy delivery vehicle.

Speculative short fiction, on the other hand, is a machine built to fill us with wonder and make us wonder (both the noun and the verb forms are appropriate). It could be said that the job of short speculative fiction is to make us lay down the book at key moments and reflect. Our imaginations are engaged, which can help us to understand worlds and cultural contexts we would not normally be exposed to.

In that cultural and literary landscape, Firelight, written by Melbourne-based Kalkadoon writer John Morrissey, is an exemplary collection of Indigenous literary speculative fiction. It engages with both a sense of wonderment and our innate capacity for compassion, wonderful and abstracted at turns, often simultaneously. Literary spec-fic is a genre to which Aboriginal people seem well suited, for a number of reasons; one of them is that Aboriginal literature is constantly and instinctively engaged with the fantastical. Morrissey’s stories, those of a new writer stretching his mind and experimenting with form, demonstrate that perfectly.

Edenglassie is the seventh novel by acclaimed Bunjalung novelist Melissa Lucashenko. Set in a brief historical window – a little-known interim of time and place after transportation of convicts had ended but before Queensland became an independent colony in 1859 – this narrative moves seamlessly between what whitefellas might call past, present, and near future. In this interface, Lucashenko creates characters that cause the reader to not only ask – what if? but also where to now?

In 2024, we meet the feisty centenarian Granny Eddie – Brisbane’s oldest Aboriginal resident; her fiery granddaughter Winona; Doctor Johnny Newman (aptly named, since he has recently discovered his Gomeroi heritage); healer Gaja Opal; and pesky whitefella journalist Dartmouth Rice. From the mid-nineteenth century we meet members of the Goorie Federation of the five Yugambeh rivers, ‘which fell like wide blue ribbons from the western ranges’; warriors Dalapai and Yerrin, his son Murree, and his wife Dawalbin; their adopted Yugambeh son Mulanyin; his lover, Nita; and the Petries, one of the first white families to claim land in Edenglassie since the invasion.

Lucashenko delves deep into themes of reciprocity, entanglement, trust, betrayal, resilience, and connectedness, set againsta visceral canvas involving actual and cultural Indigenocide¹ – a genocide unique to settler-invaded colonies where the First Peoples are valued less than the land they inhabit and that invaders desire.

In the case of Edenglassie, Blak lives are not valued at all. Granny Eddie is both the glue that holds two narratives together and the thread that connects past to present to future and back again. The story begins when Granny Eddie trips on ‘the tiniest jutting tree root’ outside the maritime museum, and ‘[in] outrage the earth flung itself up at her insisting she join it’. Neither the tree nor the earth is inanimate as they draw Granny into an act of remembering where time begins ‘thumping sharply on her left temple’ and her ‘brain slowly began to crochet together a looped understanding of events’.

The events that begin looping are not just those of the present. Time shifts in cyclic arcs, but place does not. On the same ground where Granny fell, time shifts to the 1840s. Dalapai and Yerrin meet when ‘less than three hundred foreigners remained in Magandin’. Yerrin hopes that the strangers will be gone by the next Mullet Run now that ‘the sufferers’ (convicts) are no longer coming. Dalapai cautions though that there is word that ‘free white men are now welcome in our lands’. This scene is pivotal: the narrative is poised on a precipice of what if and what could have been.

After this, dual stories loop and twine. Lucashenko breaks from the temporal and geographical confinement of Western time to a mode of storying place/s that has its origins in the pre-invasion cultures of Aboriginal peoples. From her hospital bed, Granny Eddie speaks of the colonial entanglement in the early days of colonial encroachment, and warns the precocious Dartmouth to be wary of reconstructed history from ‘white historians and university lecturers overflowing with moral rigour and cultural discretion’. Granny reclaims the Goorie history of place when she asserts: ‘I’ve heard my history straight from the Old People, see. I know the truth of what was done and what was not done.’ In assuming control of what settlers call history, Granny unwrites settler claims to knowing the future, the present, and the past, and re-establishes Goorie ways of knowing, being, and telling.

Granny is joined in her hospital room by a presence who speaks of unfinished business. Initially, health professionals dismiss her sentience as a symptom of Granny's age and concussion. But here and throughout Edenglassie, Lucashenko rejects the limits of Western rationalism for characters grounded in their abilities to understand and accept all times simultaneously through embodied experiences. Granny continues to commune with her visitor, even though she is initially confused as to who it might be. This is one of two non-human but animate characters who thread through the narrative. The other is a fish – the matriarch who, without speaking, carries a message of continuance and resilience.

Concurrent with Granny’s story is that of Mulanyin and Nita. As colonial violence peaks and land theft increases, Mulanyin and Nita fall in love. Mulanyin has dreams of buying a whaleboat and going home to Yugambeh Country. But colonial law encroaches. Two hundred years later, outspoken activist Winona meets Doctor Johnny in Granny’s hospital room. The tensions and connections between the two are evidence that colonial legacies and Aboriginal resilience intertwine.

All Goorie characters are grounded in and impassioned by place – their locale – Country. There is no starker contrast between Goorie and colonial thinking than that which relates to land. Mulanyin asks Tom Petrie:

what goes through the brain of an Englishman when he arrives in another man’s country to steal his land, water, game and then with a straight face calls those he steals from thieves?
    Tom answers;
    It’s different, their Country holds no Dreamings to keep them at home.

Edenglassie moves in a great concentric arc with many ripples, like those in the river that is central to the action; and which is an ancient, unbroken vein that pulses life from past to present to future in a continuous cycle. Despite horrific colonial injustices meted out to Goories, this is a story of strength and love. It is an accumulation of all times – a testimony to the continuation of Aboriginal storytelling, value systems, intellectualism, scientific and technological literacy, and understandings of time, non-human agency, and Country. 

Endnote 

1. Indigenocide is a term first coined in an essay by Raymond Davis and Bill Thorpe, ‘Indigenocide and the Massacre of Aboriginal History’ (Overland 2001 pp 21-39) to describe systematic government sanctioned destruction of Indigenous peoples in settler-invaded colonies. 

Laura Elizabeth Woollett demonstrates her mastery of the polyphonic novel in West Girls. The book, Woollett’s fourth, comprises eleven nimbly interwoven chapters that explore origin, agency, and delusion in a patriarchal society.

The central character is Luna Lewis, whom we first meet as a pre-teen visiting family in Malta. Luna projects an innate confidence that often belies – or is belied by – her own naïveté. We learn that her mother has whisked them away from Perth to Europe following her ex-husband’s remarriage to Indah, a former ‘Princess of Indonesia finalist’. Luna boasts of her unusual family dynamic to her sheltered and religious younger cousin, Stefania: ‘I’m a bastard’, she says proudly, showing her a picture of Indah ‘in a sunshiny kebaya with a jewelled black bun’ nestled in the pages of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. She goes on to list the worldly things that fascinate her – squat toilets, amputees, and the Dark Arts in Harry Potter – an early suggestion of her governing principle where living an artful life means embracing the unconventional or the macabre. It’s a salient portrait, one that shadows Luna as the reader follows her into her many lives across continents and decades.

In the modern literary landscape, the novel about a novelist writing a novel has become de rigueur. It can provide an ideal setting for a meditation on the complexities of living a creative life. Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s début novel, But the Girl, follows in this contemporary tradition, but offers something more compelling than navel-gazing: a critique of classical literature, specifically the work of Sylvia Plath, through personal and academic lenses.

The novel considers Plath as both woman and writer through the eyes of its protagonist, referred to simply as Girl: an Asian-Australian student undertaking a residency in Scotland in order to write a postcolonial novel and a PhD on Plath’s poetry (‘Seriously, another Plath scholar? More ink spilled on this white woman in perpetua?’ asks another student incredulously). It takes a metatextual form, both inhabiting and deconstructing itself and its influences – Yu’s opening sentence riffs on the first lines of The Bell Jar, and she frequently pokes fun at the pretensions of the academic and literary worlds (Girl admits that she calls her work-in-progress a ‘postcolonial novel’ rather than an ‘immigrant novel’ even though she doesn’t know exactly what postcolonialism is).

Girl falls in love with The Bell Jar as an undergraduate student – ‘I felt something new, brand new… [it] kidnapped my mind clean away’ – and is just as quickly ‘hurt like hell’ to read Plath’s description of her own reflection as ‘a big, smudgy-eyed Chinese woman staring idiotically into my face’. Exploring the contradiction of being simultaneously seen and erased by literature, Yu dissects Plath’s mythology in a way that reflects the modern parlance of a ‘problematic fave’.

For those familiar with Helen MacDonald’s popular nature memoir H is for Hawk (2014), her latest work will come as a surprise. Prophet is many things, most of which bear little resemblance to any of MacDonald’s previous work. To begin with, Prophet is a co-authored work of fiction, a rare feature in the world of novelists, in which co-authors are often compelled to conceal such paratextual detail, as in Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck’s The Expanse series, published under the pen name James S. A. Corey. Where other narrative arts enjoy the cachet of collaboration, literature – in particular literary fiction – prefers the toil of the sole creator. It is only right, then, that Prophet is a bona-fide page turner made of equal parts spy thriller, science fiction, and romance. Germinated in collaborative back and forth over Zoom at the height of the pandemic, friends MacDonald and Sin Blaché have produced an action novel that, while carrying the troubling traces of the time, leans into the comforting diet of cultural nostalgia millions embraced during the binge-filled days of lockdown.

Prophet begins with the sudden and distinctly X-Files-like appearance of an American diner near a NATO airbase in Suffolk. Lit up and decked out in full postwar American glory, the ersatz diner has no foundations, plumbing, or source of electricity. Meanwhile, elsewhere on the base other curios appear out of nowhere – a Cabbage Patch doll, a Scrabble box, a Pac-Man arcade machine, and so on – around the same time as an airman’s self-immolation and death in a bonfire.

The migrant’s story is defined by a push and pull between homelands left and new ones found – past and present, tradition and modernity, family and fragmentation are constantly at odds with each other. The migrant’s child’s story enters a new space of liminality, belonging to two cultures, yet being outside both, creating a potential crisis of identity as profound as a crisis of home. The migrant’s grandchild continues the narrative, unearthing intergenerational fractures.

Where academic research and news media coverage often neglect the migrant as an individual, novelists resist simplistic framing. They can blur the barriers between fiction, memoir, historical investigation, and cultural myth. International classics like Michael Ondaatje’s Running In The Family (1982), Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck (2009), have long told of identity stretched across place in this way.

Now, full of nuance, three Australian débuts construct a mosaic of intersecting identities: the migrant, the Muslim, and the woman.

Here we are again, luck ringing over the land. Ryan Cropp’s new examination of the life and work of Donald Horne (1921–2005) comes out as we resume unpicking the gordian knot of what exactly is Australia. As Cropp observes, it has become impossible to describe this nation without the word luck, as if a continent rolls dice. It is the language of gamblers, of the complacent. It wasn’t introduced by Horne – any survey of the country’s newspapers will find Australia panegyrised or dismissed for riding its luck, but with the publication of The Lucky Country in 1964 Horne caught a truth in a sentence: ‘Australia is a lucky country run by second-rate people who share its luck.’ It was Horne’s personal stroke of luck, changing him as it changed his country. In later years, when Horne became one of those people who ran the place, had Donald joined the second-raters, sharing the spoils of chance?

Antithetical to ‘luck’ is the idea of planning – preparation, work, systems, structurally leading to just sustainability. Cropp paints a young Horne bridling at the perfectionist rhetoric of centralised government; an anti-communist ideologue, something of a prig. John Anderson (professor of philosophy at Sydney) and Brian Penton (of the Sydney Daily Telegraph) loom like Gog and Magog as he ingratiates himself, impressing and annoying in equal measure, destined to become a Canberra mandarin. A young man easy to admire but hard to like, who falls into journalism, copies of Dickens, Tolstoy and Waugh under arm.

But what book is this? Is it another Great Expectations, where the wise reader waits for the protagonist to abandon erroneous beliefs? Is it a War and Peace, where a Cold War brawler shows his soft belly in times of plenty? Is it a Brideshead Revisited, wistful reassessment of a bygone time?

'State-of-the-nation’ books are a tricky genre: for every The Lucky Country (1964), Donald Horne’s bestselling indictment of 1960s Australia, there must be at least a dozen more which fall swiftly into obsolescence. Yet this common fate is not necessarily a bad thing: such books are meant to be timely, not timeless. As an intervention into the contemporary moment, such texts’ success or value resides in fresh and useful analysis which is currently lacking elsewhere; and the ability of the author to capture a mood that is, if not ‘national’, at least pervasive enough to be widely recognisable. At the same time, it helps if that mood has not yet been properly articulated. To raise the bar further, the best of them offer both vital historical perspective and a path forward, and are written in a persuasive and accessible style which stops short of polemic but resists hesitant equivocation.

Historically, the ‘state-of-the-nation’ book has been a masculinist genre, dependent on a notable degree of established cultural authority, though there have been feminist challenges or alternatives, and notable exceptions and shifts (Julianne Schultz’s widely praised publication The Idea of Australia: A search for the soul of the nation [2022] springs to mind). Relatedly, the authors are typically invested in something called the ‘nation’, however critical they may be of its present manifestation. In Horne’s case, it was a nascent sense of what the nation could be or was slowly becoming, as it unshackled itself from decades of complacent parochialism, epitomised by the White Australia policy, then still in effect, but under increasing public scrutiny as well as political reform.

The life of a spy is based on lies, but both these books make an attempt to separate fact from fiction in the stories of their subjects.

The first book tells the remarkable story of how an Australian from a rather unlikely background rose almost to the top of Britain’s foreign spy service, MI6, and was later accused of being not just a double but a triple agent. Charles Howard Ellis, always known as Dick, was born in 1895 in Sydney’s inner-west suburb of Annandale. His mother died when he was four years old. Together with his father, he led an itinerant life as a child and adolescent, even working as a professional cellist in Melbourne. In June 1914, he took ship for England. Arriving just as the Great War commenced, he enlisted in the British Army. Wounded at the Somme and promoted to captain, he finished the war engaged in military intelligence operations in Persia and Russia.

On many occasions throughout our nation’s history, change seemed imminent, perhaps even just on the horizon, but it has always receded into the distance. The instigation and then closure of successive important representative organisations such as the National Aboriginal Consultative Committee, the National Aboriginal Conference, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, and the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples illustrate the impacts of electoral politics and the vagaries of political ideologies. Each decade seems to have brought a different structure, some more and some less representative than others. But there has been little continuity or coherence, in either the national or state administrative and political arrangements, in addressing the specific concerns of Indigenous people.

In stark contrast, the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart deliberately asserts the authority of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians over the key claims for sovereignty and self-determination – well-known and accepted concepts of political autonomy and authority in international law. The statement declares these concepts are based on spiritual connection to, and being first possessors of, the land of Australia. The statement’s claim to authority represents a pluralist expression of law, a concept that is common in countries that are former colonies where a traditional (or customary) legal system sits alongside the laws of the former colonial authority. Australia can accommodate many laws, many people, and many nations.

The Uluru Statement calls for two substantive reforms. The first is constitutional amendment to incorporate a ‘Voice to Parliament’, an advisory body of Indigenous representatives that would influence and participate in the development of Commonwealth law and policy regarding matters that impact Indigenous communities and peoples. Constitutional entrenchment, rather than simple legislative enactment, is sought to protect the advisory body against dissolution due to changes in political support for such a body, and also to engender popular support for the recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait peoples’ rights in the Constitution.

The second reform is the establishment of a Makarrata Commission, an agreement-making body with responsibilities for developing treaty or agreement-making processes, and supporting a national truth-telling process about history, past abuses, and colonisation, among other matters.

Together, these reforms are expressed in the Uluru Statement as ‘Voice, Treaty, Truth’. We understand these elements as working in concert to deliver structural and substantive reform to the legal and political processes that have until now excluded Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination from Anglo-Australian public law.

The referendum process itself may have wider effects on Australian society at large, much as the 1967 referendum and the national apology each represented a nation-wide shift in attitudes. Given that Australian public law and public policy have generally been dismissive, derogatory, and often destructive towards Indigenous laws and governance structures, there are strong arguments for the federal Constitution to include acknowledgment of the first occupation, ownership, and sovereignty of Australia by Indigenous peoples.

Now, through the broad Indigenous community consultations that led to the Uluru Statement from the Heart, through numerous Australian parliamentary committees and inquiries, through the affirmation of governments, many law-makers, civil society organisations, and the private sector, we have a proposal for an Indigenous-led advisory body known as the ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice’. That advisory body would be included in our Australian Constitution by way of a referendum, which is the only way we can alter the words of our constitutional document. And it needs to be in the Constitution, not only to protect the body from the changing whims of governments, but also because this is what the Uluru Statement asks of us:

With substantive constitutional change and structural reform, we believe this ancient sovereignty can shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood … We seek constitutional reforms to empower our people and take a rightful place in our own country.

Despite the political debate that has ensued around the Voice proposal, we observe that the choice of an institutional advisory body that informs parliament and the executive government is entirely unremarkable. It is a modest proposal. We barely cast a glance at the work of the Productivity Commission or the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC), both of which are mainstream advisory bodies to the national government. They inform law-making; their advice may be considered, or not. Similarly, the Voice to Parliament will have the capacity to inform policy and reform, but it is not a third chamber of parliament. It will not make laws or distribute funding. It will not undertake program delivery. It will have no veto. The Bill that amends the Constitution makes it clear that ‘the Parliament shall have power to make laws with respect to matters relating to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, including its composition, functions, powers and procedures’. Parliament retains control over the way the Voice works.

There are already a series of guiding principles as to what the Voice will be, how it will be composed and how it will operate. The Calma and Langton report titled Indigenous Voice Co-design Process: Final Report to the Australian Government, delivered in late 2021, sets out some key frameworks for how the Voice would work. Like any government agency or advisory body, the final structure and arrangements for the Voice will be decided by parliament when it passes the laws that establish the body. So politicians will retain the final say on how the Voice operates, while the existence of the body is enshrined in the Constitution.

The Calma and Langton co-design report was based on widespread consultation and feedback within communities. The model they propose would have twenty-four representative members, comprising state and territory representatives, Torres Strait representatives, and five additional representatives from remote areas around Australia. It would be gender-balanced and would include youth representatives. The members would be selected by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, not appointed by the executive government, and they would serve on the Voice for a fixed period to ensure regular accountability to their communities. Also with respect to accountability, as well as transparency, it is intended that the Voice be subject to standard governance and reporting requirements, and its members would come within the scope of the newly established federal National Anti-Corruption Commission.

Once established, the Voice would be tasked with making representations to parliament and the executive government on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The Voice would be funded to adequately research, develop, and make these representations, which could be in response to requests from the government and parliament (just as the ALRC responds to references from the government), or they could be proactive representations (just as the Victorian Law Reform Commission is able to initiate its own inquiries). Ideally, of course, the parliament and executive government would seek representations from the Voice early in the development of proposed laws and policies.

If the referendum is successful, a process will be undertaken, involving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, the parliament and the broader public, to definitively settle the design of the Voice. The legislation to establish the Voice will then proceed through standard parliamentary processes to ensure adequate scrutiny by elected representatives in both houses of parliament. Only then will membership of the Voice be decided, and the process of feeding advisory representations to parliament and the government begin.

There are many other valid bases for addressing the potential impact of the Voice, be they moral, ethical, philosophical, economic, policy, or political rationales, but next we will canvas the national values and goals that flow from having the Voice structured in this way, and having this advisory role. In this sense, we engage here with the question of the national interest of the Voice body.

Despite the myriad positive consequences of the Voice as described above, many myths and much misinformation have been propagated about it. To be clear, what is proposed is a Voice to parliament, not a Voice in parliament. It will have no role in passing legislation; that will remain in the hands of elected representatives in the federal parliament, as required by the Constitution. The Voice can make representations to parliament, but it will be up to parliament to decide what it does with those representations; it should pay attention to them, but it will always take into account a wide range of advice from across the community. The Voice does not create special rights for Indigenous people or give them a veto – it just establishes an advisory body. Parliament will be better informed about the impact of proposed laws on First Nations peoples and can amend its laws where that is appropriate. So, for example, it will inform how Closing the Gap and other initiatives can best work to improve outcomes.

The Voice will not damage our democratic institutions; it will enhance them. It will not ‘put race into the Constitution’, as the Constitution already allows for racially discriminatory laws by virtue of section 51(xxvi) (the race power). It will ensure that the silence and omissions of the past can be addressed in the future. 

Melissa Castan is a Professor at the Monash Law Faculty and the Director of the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law. 

Lynette Russell is Sir John Monash Distinguished Professor and ARC Laureate at the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre in the School of Philosophical, Historical, and International Studies at Monash University. She is a widely published author specialising in Aboriginal history.

This is an extract from Time to Listen: An Indigenous Voice to parliament (Monash University Publishing, 2023).

Welcome to a special Indigenous issue of ABR. The timing feels momentous, two weeks out from a referendum which will decide whether there will be a new body within the Australian parliament advising on Indigenous concerns and interests: an ancillary instrument acknowledging Aboriginal peoples’ long-standing custodianship of land and the ongoing, adverse effects of colonisation.

An Indigenous issue in a magazine which has been at the forefront of Australian critical culture since 1961 raises thorny questions. ABR has for decades published knowledgeable, eloquent, and sophisticated analysis of books, and, more recently, of the arts and society, both from Australia and abroad. It should also be remembered that ABR commenced in a distinctly nationalist spirit, founded by Max Harris, Rosemary Wighton, and Geoffrey Dutton in 1961 for the purpose of ‘noticing’ every new Australian book. Readers of the burgeoning ABR archive might raise an eyebrow when they come across the review of a sheep-dog-rearing manual from 1979 (one year after ABR was revived in a second series), but there was a serious intent behind this project: to recognise, engage with – even just ‘notice’ – Australian culture and output, given its historically marginalised position in a publishing and cultural environment dominated by London.

This conception of Australian culture, as the ABR archive also confirms, was not inclusive of cultural activity that was occurring across Australia – most notably, among Indigenous people. And yet, as in so many archives, the story is not total: folded into reviews, here and there, we glimpse the voices of Indigenous people and the recognition of fuller histories.

And so, it is nothing new (as nothing is new!) to notice, elevate, and advance the voices and experiences of one section of society. It is nothing new to do this for historical purposes – as Harris, Wighton, and Dutton did.

It is also nothing new for there to be argument about this, and for this argument to make us consider why we read – indeed, what function we want critics, editors, magazines, and publishers to serve. In his An Anthology of Australian Verse (1952), George Mackaness organised poems according to those that had ‘intrinsic poetical value’ and those that had ‘historical importance’. This was to the dismay of many critics and poets.

When in 1963, as poetry reader for Jacaranda Press, Judith Wright picked up a manuscript by Noonuccal woman Kathleen Walker, she felt the poems’ ‘merciless accusations, their notes of mourning and challenge’ and ‘could almost hear the voices of the critics in advance denying that this was poetry at all’. The title poem of that collection, We Are Going (1964), concluded: ‘the scrubs are gone, the hunting and the laughter. / The eagle is gone, the emu and the kangaroo are gone from this place. / The bora ring is gone. / The corroboree is gone. / And we are going.’ We Are Going became the second highest-selling collection of Australian poetry (after Banjo Paterson). Critics kept asking was it ‘poetry at all’?

Walker, for her part, made the decision to change her name to Oodgeroo, meaning paperbark tree in Noonuccal language, while Queen Elizabeth II was visiting Australia in 1970 to celebrate the bicentenary of Captain James Cook’s exploration of the east coast of Australia. Oodgeroo had by then, for ten years, been state secretary of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI), and that same bicentennial day was part of an early service at La Perouse in Sydney to commemorate ‘the dead tribes who had been wiped out by the early English invaders’, as she wrote in that landmark publication, Paperbark: A collection of Black Australian writings (1990). Pastor Don Brady told her that morning that the success of her poetry – its capacity to communicate to Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians – came from her connection to the land: ‘Kathy, you must be a tribal sister to the paperbark trees because you write so good.’

What was good, and who said it was, was starting to shift. Oodgeroo was clear about it: ‘whatever comes from the heart is good’.

At this moment, two weeks out, we’re taking stock. Our reviewers and commentators, poets and interviewees, have taken us, time and time again, to Indigenous lives, to those who have felt ‘totally powerless’, as Lowitja O’Donoghue once described her younger self, to those who like Oodgeroo and O’Donoghue found a way to make their voices blaze. 

You may have noticed the preponderance of Indigenous women in this issue. It is both an accident and, in retrospect, a reflection of our own inclinations and interests as guest editors. We want to ‘notice’ the voices of Indigenous women.

We hope you enjoy this issue featuring the strongest-ever representation of First Nations reviewers, commentators, interviews, poems, and books in ABR’s complex history.