Cirrus@Austlit

'We are always on Country, no matter if it is called city or desert, school or bush, road, rock, mountain, beach—even in the prison it is all Indigenous land. This is the settlers’ unpayable debt. I run down by the river on Wurundjeri Country, in morning or night, whether it is lighted by mist or the silver wattle blooms, it’s all the ancestors and the stories of this land, which I can never fully know. It is through art and writing, I think, that we have already begun to reciprocate these stories, to account for and somehow resist malign presences, which, as Charmaine Papertalk Green tells us in ‘More than Balga Grass trees and kangaroos’ (2022) have tried to ‘eras[e] our stories out’. So here:' (Introduction)

'“I was fed on a diet of lies and invisibility about the true history of this country from a very young age,” recalls Jackie Huggins. In the new edition of her prescient 1998 book Sister Girl: Reflections on Tiddaism, Identity and Reconciliation, Dr Huggins writes history through kinship, storying Aboriginal women’s survival, agony and strength. This healing, Blak feminist book sounds the collective truth and strength of Aboriginal women’s voices into the chambers of a violent history that has tried to silence them.' (Introduction)

'Flock is a brief glimpse at the past 25 years of First Nations writing. As Ellen van Neerven, the collection’s editor, writes, “many collections have come before this one”. There have been a lot of stories, shared between kin, across Country and generations, some of them that evade the written word. Here are 20 previously published short stories that together tell of resurgent ecological communities, of loss, shadow-lives and family.' (Introduction)

'Fiona Foley’s groundbreaking new book Biting the Clouds traces a hidden colonial history of addiction and slavery. “None of the information in this book was ever taught to me in a classroom setting … We have no critical race studies in the curriculum in this country.” By Tristen Harwood.' (Introduction)

'The works of Western Desert women artists, such as Kathleen Petyarre, confront the viewer with the embodied reality of Aboriginal culture. These works are intercultural expressions of Aboriginal ways of being, imprinted within the frame of the canvas. This essay explores the implications of Kathleen Petyarre’s paintings for Settler Australians, and the potential for such works to create a greater appreciation of Country. I suggest that the acrylic paintings performed by Western Desert women artists can be understood as both expressions of the Dreaming and as evocations of sensibilities to be experienced and felt by Settler viewers. With reference to Jennifer Biddle’s Breasts, Bodies, Canvas: Central Desert Art as Experience (2007), I maintain that the work of Western Desert women artists departs from the dominant modes of representing Country, Dreaming narratives and Ancestors – instead articulating bodily experiences and expressions particular to Aboriginal women’s ways of being in and knowing the world.' (Introduction)