Featured in

- Published 20250204
- ISBN: 978-1-923213-04-3
- Extent: 196 pp
- Paperback, ebook. PDF


Already a subscriber? Sign in here
If you are an educator or student wishing to access content for study purposes please contact us at griffithreview@griffith.edu.au
Share article
More from author

Escaping the frame
In ConversationAll my work as a writer and activist over the last fifty years has comprised various attempts at what I call ‘escaping the frame of European colonisation, European story and European ways of telling story’.
More from this edition

Home as a weapon of cultural destruction
Non-fictionIt was simply expected that Aboriginal people would accept the values and behaviour of the dominant European culture. The Welfare Board insisted that Aboriginal people not only earn an independent living but show the Board they could save money in a bank account. They had to demonstrate that they were avoiding contact with other Aboriginal people and refusing to participate in community-oriented activities, such as sharing resources with kinsfolk and travelling to visit their relatives and home Country. Over and over again, the Board’s reports criticised Aboriginal people for being among their own kind and clinging together in groups. To achieve their assimilation aims, the Welfare Board implemented a crude ‘carrot and stick’ incentive in an attempt to modify Aboriginal behaviour: if Aboriginal people could convince the Welfare Officers that they had cut themselves off entirely from their culture, family and land, they would be rewarded with an ‘Exemption Certificate’.

Steering upriver
Non-fictionAt dawn I cross the bridge, Missouri to Iowa, and turn down the gravel drive. Though I’m different now, this place is the same as it always is this time of year: the sun glowing red over the paddock next door, the grass not yet green, the maple stark. I go away, come back again, and home is like a photograph where time winds back, slows into stasis; where the carpet has changed, but the dishes have not, the cookbooks have not, the piano and artwork and bath towels have not. Here, I can be a child again, my best self, briefly. I hold on to this moment for as long as I can, because too soon I’ll remember how disobedient I am, how bossy and domineering, how I slammed my door until Dad took it off its hinges, how soap tastes in my mouth, how I pushed on these walls until they subsided.

Buy, recycle, repeat
Non-fiction THE TIP SHOP opens at 10 am every Thursday. By 9.50 am there’s a line at the gate at least ten people deep. There’s...