Edition 60
First Things First
- Published 7th August, 2018
- ISBN: 9781925603316
- Extent: 264pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook
After more than two hundred years of largely unresolved disputes, Australia needs to hear the voices of Australia’s First Nations.
First Things First delivers strong contemporary insights from leading First Nations people, complemented by robust non-Indigenous writers. It provides a unique opportunity to share transformative information, structural challenges and personal stories, and aims to be an urgent, nuanced chorus for genuine consideration of Makarrata beyond the symbolic.
With this special edition, co-edited by Julianne Schultz and Sandra Phillips, Griffith Review excavates history and re-imagine the future, while not forgetting the urgencies of the present.
Contributors include: Stan Grant, Marcia Langton, Tony Birch, Melissa Lucashenko, Alexis Wright, Bruce Pascoe, Kathy Marks, Megan Davis and many more.
Griffith Review 60: First Things First is published with the support of QUT and Australia Council for the Arts.
In this Edition
The long road to Uluru
Uluru is a game changer. The response of ordinary Australians to the Statement has been overwhelming…a rallying call to the Australian people to “walk with us in a movement…for a better future”.
Changing the channel
LAST NIGHT, FOLLOWING the tenth anniversary of the national Apology to Australia’s Indigenous peoples, a former host of online rotational curation account IndigenousX made a personal post on Facebook. The former IndigenousX host resides in what is considered a remote part of Australia. It...
A new sovereign republic
Sovereignty: (1) the quality or state of having supreme power or authority; (2) the authority of a state to govern itself; (3) a self-governing state. Oxford English Dictionary With substantive constitutional change and structural reform, we believe this ancient sovereignty can shine through as a fuller expression...
No republic without a soul
ABORIGINAL PEOPLES AND Torres Strait Islanders have just marked two hundred and thirty years of patience with displaced Europeans. We choose patience because we still see and feel white people’s humanity, despite their inhumanity directed at us daily. We choose patience because we know...
A rightful path
IN 1985, I started a bachelor’s degree the month I turned seventeen. Despite a change of degree from social work to arts, I graduated from the University of Queensland with publication and research experience at twenty and became a permanent policy research officer in...
Beware the people-focused omnibus
ORGANISING GOVERNMENT CAN be as important as policy. In his 2017 Wentworth Lecture to the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet Martin Parkinson noted that there had been eleven structures of...
My grandfather’s equality
WHAT WOULD MY grandfather make of our world today? I have wondered about that lately. What would he make of this age of hyper-identity? I doubt he ever uttered the word identity. I doubt he ever considered what it meant to identify with anything....
Ancestors’ words
NO ONE WAS surprised when, in 1977, the Western Australian Government put a blanket ban on its recently decommissioned Aboriginal archive and even threatened legal action against researchers. The archive was a ticking time bomb: the dutifully documented words in its files exposed for...
Lost opportunities
GRIFFITH REVIEW IS not, according to its ‘Writers’ Guidelines’, an ‘academic journal’. This leads me to pause and consider how I can establish what I want to be the starting point for this essay, which is that Australia cannot ‘make peace and firmer ground...
Decolonising the north
THE TURNBULL GOVERNMENT’S initial response to the Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory highlights its failure to include northern Australia and other remote regions in the economic and social life of the nation. The commission’s findings paint...
Hope and conflict at the MCG
THE ADULTS STARE hard, looks of panic rip through the crowd. A curiously dressed man in clinical white clothing follows the ball with a dancer’s grace. He turns quickly between two enormous poles, faces the ground, then raises both arms and sharply points his...
A century of activism and heartache
Where Aboriginal people are concerned, the twin strands of dysfunction and idealisation weave a highly coloured thread through the fabric of Australian culture. The strand that remains all but invisible is that of ordinary Aboriginal lives, the preoccupations and pleasures that amidst all the furore and sentiment remain...
The imperial mind
IT IS A common vanity among humans that our ascent is an exponential trajectory applauded by gods. Our religions encourage us to believe God has never seen anything as beautiful, dutiful and intelligent as we. Those religions also insist that as we are superb and...
Owning the science
SCIENCE AND RESEARCH has an important role to play in the fundamental debate Australians are now having about the rights of this country’s First Peoples and their recognition. This manifests in many ways, but one example powerfully illustrates it. A widespread concern for many...
The voice of Indigenous data
THE ULURU STATEMENT from the Heart is essentially the same missive as sent by Tasmanians Walter and Mary Anne Arthur to Queen Victoria in 1846 – which eventually resulted in the removal of Henry Jeanneret as Commandant of Flinders Island – and every heartfelt petition since,...
Imagining abolition
Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are alienated from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in...
A question of value
IN AUGUST 2016, I stood on the sacred ceremonial grounds of the Yolngu, the people of north-east Arnhem Land, for the annual Garma Festival. I have been to the festival a number of times, but more than any other, this time held a great...
Preparing the treaty generation
ON 25 JULY 2016 I was in a paediatric roundtable at Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital, where we discussed early interventions in Koori children’s lives to help give them the best start possible. Later that evening I found myself horrified by images of teenage Dylan...
Resilience and reconstruction
Wiyi yani, Galinda yani 'All women, all girls' Wina nginyji: Mimi, Ngowiji, Ngarranyi, Ngawiy, Jugu, Manay, Ngaja, Manggay, Gunday, Jimarri, 'Whether you are all: maternal and paternal grandmothers, mothers, aunties, daughters, older sisters, younger sisters, sisters-in-law, cousin sisters or friends,' Nginyjagama gurrijginggirragi, Nginyjagama linginggirragi, Wadbinggirragali, yathawarra, mathawarra, wilalawarra, Winyiwarra...
For her, we must
I LISTENED TO the radio broadcast of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s Closing the Gap address in parliament on 12 February 2018 and, gritting my teeth, expected the worst. I was surprised to hear him mention, if only briefly, violence against Indigenous women as one...
Challenge of negotiation
THIRTY YEARS AGO, at Barunga in the Northern Territory, Prime Minister Bob Hawke promised a treaty. I was there, as director of the Central Land Council. We sat in the dust and had long discussions about how a treaty might take shape, what consultations...
The infantilisation of Indigenous Australians
I GREW UP in the 1990s, the daughter of a white Australian and a Torres Strait Islander. I was raised on my mother’s stories of the Cairns Esplanade, her doctor father and English migrant mother. I learned the stories of generations of my British...
Recovering a narrative of place
At the conclusion of the project, a group of young global citizens, many of them labelled ‘disadvantaged’, many of them previously silent or ignored, shared a common belief, one as simple and yet complex as the difficulties we face in dealing with one of the great challenges of our time. The students agreed that we must listen to those who have lived with Country for thousands of years without killing it, and in order to live with a healthy planet we need to tell stories of our experience with it, and our love for it.
Celebrating difference
I’VE EXPERIENCED THE transcendental power of switching from a toxic narrative of low expectations and negative stereotypes to a new one in which we are all strong and smart: young, black and deadly. And I survived the gruelling dynamics that have undermined the truth...
Enduring traditions of Aboriginal protest
NOBODY SEEMED QUITE capable of distinguishing John Noble from Jimmy Clements when the pair turned up for the royal opening of the new Commonwealth Parliament building in Canberra. It was Monday, 9 May 1927. And as far as European Australia was concerned, the original...
Trick or treaty
AS JACQUI WANDIN gazes out over the rolling paddocks and scribbles of bushland, she can visualise the scene a century and a half ago, when the landscape was dotted with timber cottages, workshops, brick-making kilns, milking sheds, a sawmill, butchery, church and schoolhouse. This was...
Centre of controversy
ALICE SPRINGS TOWN centre is surrounded by three prominent hills, each of them sacred to Central Arrernte people, the traditional owners of the area known as Mparntwe. All three hills have a place in this story. If you have visited Alice Springs, you have...
The trench
DOCTOR JUNK STOPS his car facing the heavy white gate, from where he can see a few outlying buildings of the Barambah Aboriginal Settlement. He gives a double-blast from his car horn, leaving the engine idling while filling his pipe. After a few puffs...
Less is less
A STRANGER RODE into town only it wasn’t a stranger, it was Kerry, come to say goodbye to Pop before he fell off that perch he’d been clinging to real stubborn for so long. Cancer, Ken reckoned, never mind cancer, ya couldn’t kill the...
Hey ancestor!
Hey ancestor, you talking to me? Country time everyday. I know, I know, but wouldn’t you know it, it’s the 26th of January again, old Whitefella Day. Party time for some, sad day for others. Listen! Can’t you hear country keeping its peoples’ memories beating strongly, everybody heard?...
Whose heart is this
I saw through my grandmothers eyes The removal of my mother I shared my grandmothers heart I felt her pain I shared my eyes with her The removal of my son She shared my heart She shared my pain We are broken by the seeing The removal of the children Do the hearts of...