My mum said to me once, everything is a story.
I thought of this yesterday when I was under my umbrella, walking through the rain from Carriageworks to the station at Redfern to get the train to Town Hall. I was on my way to see Jeanette Winterson’s event celebrating 40 years since Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.
The last talk I’d seen at the Festival that afternoon was Past and Future of Indigenous Recognition in which Thomas Mayo reiterated, again, a section of the Uluru Statement from the Heart,
Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are aliened from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They should be our hope for the future.
These dimensions of our crisis tell plainly the structural nature of our problem. This is the torment of our powerlessness.
He quoted this section of the text with the same unfaltering resolve that I’d witnessed on Opening Night. It was a quiet determination for truth visible in his posture, as he turned to the audience and spoke the quote with an open generosity. This quote came soon after Thomas had asked the question, isn’t that obvious? in response to a comment about how First Nations societies across this continent had complex systems of governance. Thomas then asserted that if you see this continent’s First Peoples as human, just like you, how can you be surprised by this fact? All you need to do is look at the AIATIS map (of Indigenous Australia) to see how many nations existed alongside each other, respecting each other’s borders, for over 60,000 years.
As I walked to the station, I thought about the trans panic that is currently sweeping the globe and the exhaustion many trans and gender diverse people are feeling. I thought of how governments and media are insisting, relentlessly, not only on the expulsion of trans and gender diverse people from public life, but also from the public imagination. I thought then, of how often I hear the phrase, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but rarely have I heard the phrase, what doesn’t kill you makes you tired.
I then thought about the required endurance of First Nations People to continue speaking truth to power in a country whose national story is predicated on the denial of truth and a wilful and intentional forgetting.
Thomas spoke, too, on the panel about this cult of forgetfulness amongst non-Indigenous Australians, and the panel chair, Lorena Allam responded in agreement, we cannot forget about the truth because we live it – challenging the notion that colonisation can be spoken about in past tense.
As I walked through the wet dark towards the station, I thought too of the role of writer’s festivals in resisting the cult of forgetfulness, and instead insisting on remembering the story.
I’d be lying, however, if the cynic in me didn’t also wonder about the potential for light engagement, where we might hear someone speak hard truths to a full house in Bay 17 and give ourselves a pat on the back for listening. And yet, when I stay with this question a little longer, I begin to think of the times I’ve had my mind, and more importantly, my heart cracked open by hard truths and consider how these moments have almost always happened relationally – in conversation with other people. Thinking, then, again of Nardi Simpson leading the crowd in song on opening night – a call and response that brought the river into Bay 17 – I consider, too, how writer’s festivals are as much about the audiences as they are about the speakers.
I remember how as an emerging writer taking myself to writer’s festivals in my early 20’s, the times I found myself most affected was always at the signing table meeting and talking with an author, or in the coffee line or book shop, talking with other patrons about what we’d just witnessed. I realise now that it was through those conversations that everything I was learning whilst watching authors on stage was able to finally land in my body, to become part of muscle and bone and tissue. And I believe this is because I am most myself, most whole, and most human, when I am in connection and bound to others – knowing that my liberation is bound up with yours.
– Dylin Hardcastle
