AustLit

'An illuminating essay on the bestselling Noongar writer and author of the Miles Franklin Award–winning novels Benang and That Deadman Dance

''I value Kim Scott's fiction so highly because I feel that his approach is to put the flags aside. That Deadman Dance asks us not to consider who we were so much as who we could be, collectively, in the future.'

'Noongar writer Kim Scott has won the Miles Franklin Award twice for his novels. In this moving essay, Tony Birch shows how Scott uses fiction as a pathway to truth. We meet a writer who 'inhabits a range of guises, faces he wears to interrogate the complex and messy frontier history of colonial encounters'. The result is 'new stories' for the nation. This, says Birch, is the work that Kim Scott has been doing for many years.' (Publication summary)

'Daniel Browning, a renowned journalist, has worked in the industry for 30 years. He is a Bundjalung and Kullilli man who has written about or interviewed more First Nations people than any other Australian writer. For many years he led ABC Radio National’s Awaye! program, speaking to Indigenous artists, activists, community leaders and Elders. Close to the Subject, a collection of essays, attests to the reach of Browning’s interests, supported by his powerful intellect and compassion for our people.' (Introduction)

'It’s 1965 and Joe Cluny is living in a working-class suburb with his mum, Marion, and sister, Ruby, spending his days trying to avoid trouble with the nuns at the local Catholic primary school. One evening his Aunty Oona appears on the doorstep, distressed and needing somewhere to stay. As his mum and aunty work out what to do, Joe comes to understand the secrets that the women in his family carry, including on their bodies. Yet their pleas for assistance are met with silence and complicity from all sides. Who will help Joe’s family at their time of need?

'Women & Children is a novel about the love and courage between two sisters, and a sudden loss of childhood innocence.' (Publication summary)

'Award-winning writer and historian Tony Birch grew up listening to stories from his nan, Alma. This week, Tony shares how Alma's advice has influenced his life and his writing.'(Production summary)

'In a drawer beside my writing desk, I keep an old piece of cardboard. It is about the size of an A4 sheet of paper, and is covered in names and lists, measurements and weights using the imperial scale, written in blue ink. The handwriting belongs to my late father, and the listed names are my older brother and sister and myself. I can tell you that on the 16^th of June 1967, at the age of 10, I was four feet four inches tall. Earlier the same year, in June, my waist measured 22 inches and I weighed five stone one ounce. On the same day my older brother could drop kick a football 46 yards, and my sister was four feet seven inches tall.' (Introduction)

'I COLLECT MY father on a hot Friday morning from a funeral home in Preston. He’s waiting for me in a shopping bag, housed in a polystyrene crematorium urn – a temporary arrangement until a meeting can be held with my sisters, one older and one younger. Together, we will decide the ultimate fate of his ashes, as our father left no instructions. My personal wish is to scatter his remains in the Birrarung (Yarra) River, above Dights Falls. I want to watch the ashes slip beneath the white-capped rapids below the falls. It would be a poetic end for a man with little time for poetry. My sisters are yet to express their own wishes, except they are in agreement that although our father spent much of his life on the streets of Aboriginal Fitzroy, he no longer has a place among the ageing renovators of past decades or today’s bearded hipsters furiously recolonising the colony.' (Introduction)