Edition 76
Acts of Reckoning
- Published 28th April, 2022
- ISBN: 978-1-922212-71-9
- Extent: 264pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook
Four years on from the Uluru Statement from the Heart, there’s a clear divide between the groundswell of popular support to recognise the rightful place of First Nations people in Australia’s democratic life and ongoing political inertia in the same space. Tensions remain between long denials and new possibilities: is Australia ready to heal its brutal legacy of settler colonialism? How can we begin to imagine a better future without a full recognition of the past and a full recognition of the moral force of First Nations? And how can this examination and exchange – or reckoning in any context – take place in an era of quick assumptions and divides, alternative facts and cancellations?
Griffith Review 76: Acts of Reckoning is a wide-ranging discussion of the multifaceted issues at play in Australia’s fraught journey towards a full settlement with Indigenous peoples. Can its leaders take up the generous offer from Australia’s Aboriginal nations to walk together to forge change through dialogue? What might be possible for Australia’s narrative when reconciliation between the world’s oldest continuing culture and one of its newest nation states is achieved? What actions are necessary to move beyond words and achieve real-world transformations – in indigenous-settler relations as in other crucial arenas of recalibration?
Examining questions of history, truth-telling and decolonisation, and revisiting colonial figures and their ongoing legacies, Acts of Reckoning reframes the past in order to form new futures – and celebrates how much work is already underway.
Contributing Editor Teela Reid joins Editor Ashley Hay as Griffith Review 76: Acts of Reckoning opens a dialogue for diverse voices, opportunities and perspectives to be articulated, examined and assessed.
AUDIO
Listen to Editor Ashley Hay read her introduction ‘Beyond the frontier’.
Listen to Sachém Parkin-Owens read his poem ‘Glitter & gold’ accompanied by world-renowned beatboxer Tom Thumb.
Listen to contributor Alice Bellette read ‘Blood and bone’.
Listen to Editor Ashley Hay being interviewed on the Books, Books, Books podcast.
In this Edition
Where truths collide
I AM SITTING forward, in nautical terms, looking astern at my awa, who is guiding us through reefs and straits on a moonless night. Above him are stars like phosphorescence in the squid-ink sky. Around his silhouette I see phosphorescence like stars in our small dinghy’s wake. I’m a young man excited to be going night-spearing for kaiyar, the painted crayfish.
Speaking up
The modern Australian incarnation of truth-telling that emerged from the Uluru Statement from the Heart in 2017 came not from dictatorship and civil war, as had truth-telling in the Latin American ‘radical democracies’ of the 1990s, which pioneered transitional justice. Instead, it derived from local people devising local solutions.
The power of the First Nations Matriarchy
I WAS BORN from the world’s most ancient womb: the sacred womb of a First Nations woman. The blood pumping through my veins is the life force of a long line of First Nations Warrior Women whose spirits run deep into this ancient soil. It is a privilege to be raised in a culture that understands the power of the First Nations Matriarchy.
To the islands
LET’S OPEN WITH the fairytale of Snow White. Except Snow White is not named for her pale complexion but for her hair. Her skin is actually a creamy brown, and she is ninety years old. In 2007, I was twelve, and I was gifted my...
Playing in the dark archive
Interviewer: Describe your aesthetic in five words.Jasmine Togo-Brisby: Can. You. See. Us. Now? IN JUNE 2021, in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests in the United States and a wave of similar Australian protests – conducted in solidarity with African Americans and to draw attention...
Everywhen
‘Time, what is time?’Title of the lead track on Somewhere Far Beyond by Germanpower-metal band Blind Guardian THERE ARE AS many ways of thinking about time as there are cultures, but I’m going to talk about the one I know best and contrast it with...
Griffith’s Welsh odyssey
I am going away to England on Friday… I may go away with a tranquil mind and I am quite sure I shall.Sir Samuel Griffith, Telegraph (Brisbane), 29 January 1887 Countless figures in Welsh mythology stumble into hidden labyrinths, are lured down potholes and spend...
On the Queensland frontier
THE 1850S BROUGHT dramatic changes to the Australian colonies – the gold rushes, the end of convict transportation in the eastern colonies, the granting of internal self-government through New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania in 1856. Queensland followed in their wake and detached from NSW...
But we already had a treaty!
IN JULY 2019, the Queensland Government launched a series of community consultations as part of its Path to Treaty initiative. The then Department of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Partnerships explained that ‘when Queensland was settled, there was no treaty agreement with Aboriginal and...
The God of the ‘God powers’
[The Prime Minister’s staff discuss plans for Australia Day]Nick (senior political adviser): Who did Australian history? Murph?Murph (director central policy unit): American.Mel (senior media adviser): Italian Renaissance.Vanmathy (unit office): Pre-revolutionary Russia.Josh (unit office): British.Nick: Am I the only person here who studied Australian history?Theo...
An archive for the dispossessed
As an archive, the Jaffna Public Library told a story about the place of the Tamil people in Sri Lanka. The political authorities of the 1980s wanted to suppress that narrative – and burning the archive was a quick and conclusive way to do it.
Blood and bone
Listen to contributor Alice Bellette read ‘Blood and bone’. Seek company of others who refuse to accept cultural amnesia, who refuse to once again be left out of history. This is active reckoning through recognition / transformation / action: a rememory collision; a fight-flight-guide response; an embodied literary...
Zamby, zombi, zombie
ANGRY MEN GATHERED in the dark of night at Bois Caïman, the Alligator Woods, under the shadow of the mountain Morne Rouge in northern Saint-Domingue on 14 August 1791. Two hundred slaves transported by boat from Africa, forced by French plantation owners to tend...
Disrupting the colonial narrative
The many Indigenous nations of the globe have always been storytellers, and our stories tell of an animate reality in which everything lives and everything connects. The arrival of colonisers in Indigenous homelands engulfed us in cycles of cataclysmic violence that sought to annihilate...
Last rites
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...
Living cultures under the acts
These stories go something like this: pioneering spirit and entrepreneurialism have built success for the whites who have flourished, while congenital bad character leads our peoples to our inevitable conclusions. Pioneering spirit is celebrated across the landscape: Pioneer Park. Pioneer’s Sculpture. Bicentennial Park.
Being here
BACK IN 2015, when we were getting the local language work going here at the Aireys Inlet Primary School in Mangowak, every Monday morning I’d try to fire up the whole-school assembly about Wadawurrung language. Each week the students learnt, and still do, new...
My mother’s silence, my nation’s shame
ON 4 FEBRUARY 1942, stripped of all identification, hands wired behind his back, my grandfather and some 160 other Australians were marched by Japanese soldiers into the jungle on the coast of New Britain in the former Australian Mandated Territory of New Guinea and,...
Writing back
SIR SAMUEL GRIFFITH was my great-great grandfather. He was one of the ‘founding fathers’ of Australian Federation, a premier of Queensland, the first Chief Justice of Australia and intimately involved in drafting the Australian Constitution. This literary journal bears his name. Other ancestors of...
Dune coons and crescent moons
FIRST WORDS Kes emak. Your mum’s cunt. Don’t judge. I learn them from my mother. She is at Coles in Redfern, and I am nestled in her arms like a koala, and this barefoot man with flaky white skin is calling her a towel head and...
Recognition
In the second of a series of intergenerational exchanges and reflections on the links to and legacies of the Whitlam era in the run up to the fiftieth anniversary of the 1972 election – a collaboration between Griffith Review and the Whitlam Institute – a federal...
Supercut
Questioning the past is a vital part of my role as an artist. Art has the influence to shape the way we think and perceive the world, as it has throughout history. I’m motivated by the desire to improve and do better, and the same goes for how I want my art career to proceed. The need to do better in the future is predicated on the fact that to do so, we need to revisit and interrogate the past. This is especially important in a country such as Australia, founded on colonial violence and with a legacy of racism that persists today.
Radical hope in the face of dehumanisation
Our Elders are the epitome of these thousands of generations of existence and survival in this place, and if we’re thinking about the future of the world and our survival, we need to be learning from these people. They hold the most knowledge, the most intimate knowledge of not just surviving but of thriving and maintaining generosity in the face of all the challenges.
Mud reckoning
THERE IS NO such thing as bad Country; there just happens to be bad custodians.
Beating the bounds
‘LIKE THE BROLGA Dancers at the Mullet Run,’ Murree grinned, squatting easily against the base of a gum tree not far below the Botanical Garden. He released a stream of dark tobacco juice onto the grass. A short distance away, Mulanyin was enduring his third...
The Terrible Event: A Memorial
I OFTEN ASK myself: had we simply stuck with The Memorial’s original name, would things have taken such a tragic turn? At the time, I didn’t object to a name change per se but to the fact that it happened only a couple of...
Old gods
Our old gods they are called false they are cut from the land like a mountain nothing holds firm the earth the hand will rise up striking us clear we are pestilence we are dust shrugged skin stripped a back the feet a heart cry as the...
They cannot say their thoughts
(or, If Cohen sang Oodgeroo)
Dance me to the rhythm of a language (I don’t speak) ’Neath sapphire-misted mountains they might kill (ya) Breathe out brokin holy in this land of (rainbow peaks) Every line she speaks is hallelujah.
the sweet lie
my ancestors peer towards dry land from the deck of a ship; or are they like swine, packed into the hold to see the sun only when they arrive for the slaughter – how do you tell those who have survived that it is better to die than...
Kangaroo Island 1819
The fucker’s hanging in the air. The rope’s as black against the light as his black skin, though his skin is bright with sweat where the rope is just a black slash that bisects the sky in equal portions. We have the skins. It’s a good haul....
Q/A
U like America? No U like China? No U like Australia? Sort of U like what about Australia? A small country pretending to be bitter than it is, I mean bigger U dislike what about China? its people still not learning to respect traffic U dislike what about America? its people having no respect for lives even their own, when they...
Dawning
While her mother lies pinned to her bed under the startling weight of a cut to the abdomen more than 1,000 km away, I walk. To the river. To a gentle place beneath she-oak where the water is a body freshly made. A thick branch curves to the...
Muhammad Ali and beauty
The discipline of Nijinsky’s dance the precision of Bach’s improv the reach of Woolf’s spacetime the audacity of Brontë’s narrative the originator of hip-hop rhyme the strength of beehives under siege the shuffle of a hummingbird the velocity of blurred summer the redress too feeble, too late of a Kentucky boulevard grudgingly renamed in...
Glitter & gold
Listen to Sachém Parkin-Owens read his poem ‘Glitter & gold’ accompanied by world-renowned beatboxer Tom Thumb. We need action Not condolences Far too long we marched, danced and died Screamed, starved and cried, in hope someone notices Paid in ration, killed off in orderly fashion, minimal compassion, all for you to caption ‘black...
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