AustLit
Latest Issues
AbstractHistoryArchive Description
‘All Australian children deserve to know the country that they share through the stories that Aboriginal people can tell them,’ write Gladys Idjirrimoonra Milroy and Jill Milroy (2008: 42). If country and story, place and voice are intertwined, it is vital that we make space in Australian creative writing classrooms for the reading and writing of Australian Indigenous story. What principles and questions can allow us to begin? We propose six groundings for this work:
- Indigenous story is literary history, literary history is creative power.
- We do culture together: culture becomes in collaboration, conscious or unconscious.
- There is no such thing as Indigenous story, and yet it can be performed and known.
- Country speaks, to our conceptions of voice and point of view.
- History and memory are written in the land and on the body in bodies of practice.
- Story transmits narrative responsibility. Narrative responsibility requires fierce listening.
'This two-part paper discusses each of these groundings as orienting and motivating principles for work we do as teachers of introductory creative writing units at the University of Canberra. Part 1 discussed the first three groundings and was published in TEXT Vol 21, No 2, October 2017. Part 2 discusses the remaining three groundings.' (Publication abstract)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
- A Refreshing Sleep 2009 single work short story
- Story About Feeling 1989 selected work poetry
- Gularabulu : Stories from the West Kimberley 1983 selected work criticism life story oral history
- Muwi Muwi-nyhin, Binung Goonj: Boastful Talk and Broken Ears 2000 single work column
- Other Peoples’ Stories 2016 single work essay