'Living on Stolen Land is a prose-styled look at our colonial-settler 'present'. This book is the first of its kind to address and educate a broad audience about the colonial contextual history of Australia, in a highly original way. It pulls apart the myths at the heart of our nationhood, and challenges Australia to come to terms with its own past and its place within and on 'Indigenous Countries'.
'This title speaks to many First Nations' truths - stolen lands, sovereignties, time, decolonisation, First Nations perspectives, systemic bias and other constructs that inform our present discussions and ever-expanding understanding. This title is a timely, thought-provoking and accessible read.' (Publication summary)
Author's note:
This story begins
with the tree on the cover
which shows futures
The roots go deep
down into the ground
because just futures
must be grounded in respectful relationships
with Indigenous peoples
Indigenous homelands
Indigenous sovereignties
The trunk
is the structures needed
for change
these include external structures
like just laws
policies
decision-making processes
but also
internal structures of
minds and hearts
patterns of thought and behaviour
towards Indigenous peoples
The leaves and flowers
are all the ideas
growth
possibilities
that will come
out of respectful relationships
and respectful structures
which will endure
for as long as the tree endures
for as long as it is cared for.
'Jeannie Baker uses mixed materials, including real plants, to illustrate relationships between nature, humans and suburban and urban development in her textless collage picturebooks Window (1991) and Belonging (2004). These popular texts are read and studied in the classroom to raise environmental awareness and explore themes of sustainable development and community action. How can a reading of these two books through the lens of Indigenous writer and academic Ambelin Kwaymullina’s verse manifesto, Living on Stolen Land, reveal and disturb the mechanisms of settler-colonialism as they appear in Baker’s work? Placing these texts in juxtaposition with each other generates new understandings and new narrative possibilities.' (Publication abstract)
'First Nations Australian literature has often been the object of incomprehension and derogation by settler critics – something a deeper perspective of “presencing” can overcome. This chapter takes a decolonial perspective and highlights the self-assertion of First Nations writers against invidious characterization, such as that received by the poetic work of Oodgeroo Noonuccal in the 1960s. It demonstrates how nonIndigenous readers can approach texts by First Nations authors not as “tourists” but as “invited guests.”' (Publication abstract)
'ONE OF THE central tenets of the colonial project is the way control is used to maintain a narrative of dominance, white superiority and so-called truth. This control over narrative manifests in various ways, each of them as violent as the other, but it is purposeful in its effect and reach. The misrepresentation of Aboriginal people within colonial narratives enabled the justification of the myth that Australia was terra nullius – unoccupied land – and the subsequent violent dispossession of the continent’s First Nations. Within this colonial mythscape (a term coined by author Jeanine Leane) resides the fallacy of the ‘Aboriginal problem’ and the characterisation of Aboriginal people as ‘savages’ and ‘uncivilised’. As one example, this colonial mythology propagated (and continues to propagate) the notion of the Aboriginal parent as unfit – the consequence of which is the widespread and intergenerational removal of Aboriginal children from Aboriginal families, an act of genocide co-ordinated under the guise of protection and benevolence. The uncanny settler presumption is that settlers know the Aborigine more than the Aborigine knows themselves.' (Introduction)
