Cirrus@Austlit

'A LONG TIME ago, I spent a day on a replica of HMS Endeavour on Sydney Harbour. It was an uncanny experience. This ship, a reconstruction, seemed an almost inconceivably small thing to have delivered so much change and disruption to the Southern Hemisphere. The knowledge that I was part of the settlement that had resulted – over time – from its visit had to sit alongside the havoc that settlement had brought. At a level of simple geography, it was also uncanny: Sydney Harbour is a body of water the original ship never entered, embraced by shorelines its sailors never saw. This voyage wasn’t re-creating anything that had ever actually happened. ' (Introduction)

'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.' (Introduction)

'BETWEEN 2016 AND 2017, a series of First Nations regional constitutional dialogues were held across Australia. These dialogues led to the Uluru Statement from the Heart, and they were resolute in their rejection of ‘reconciliation’ as an appropriate framework to apply to Australian conditions. According to many who participated in the dialogues, reconciliation is the wrong framework, as it assumes a pre-existing relationship: as the Uluru Statement from the Heart puts it, we have never met. The proper framing of the relationship between First Nations and the Australian people is a starting point, an invitation to meet – and this is the vision of the Uluru Statement. In this way, the delivery of the statement by those First Nations peoples gathered together at Uluru on 27 May 2017 traversed the language of reconciliation after decades of trite utterances and a steely-eyed focus on citizenship rights and Indigenous engagement in the market economy to the exclusion of truth and justice. While employment compacts have proliferated, signed in the name of reconciliation, our people have become sicker and less educated while child removals and incarceration rates have skyrocketed.'(Introduction)

'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 one younger. Together, we will decide the ultimate fate of his ashes, as our father left no instructions. My personal wish is to scatter his remains in the Birrarung (Yarra) River, above Dights Falls. I want to watch the ashes slip beneath the white-capped rapids below the falls. It would be a poetic end for a man with little time for poetry. My sisters are yet to express their own wishes, except they are in agreement that although our father spent much of his life on the streets of Aboriginal Fitzroy, he no longer has a place among the ageing renovators of past decades or today’s bearded hipsters furiously recolonising the colony.' (Introduction)

'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: a kinship that values the role of women as equal to men and all other living things, a matriarchy whose power comes from an enduring love for Blackfullas, and one that is not afraid to speak truth to power and punch up to the white patriarchy.' (Introduction)

'IT IS EARLY evening. The family is together at the home Mum bought and paid for with cash savings squirrelled away over many years. All four of her daughters are present. Aunts, Uncles, cousins too. And, most importantly, our nana – Mum’s mother.' (Introduction)

'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.' (Introduction)

'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 Wadawurrung words, and inevitably with those words came new ways of looking at the cultural history of their home landscape. On the first Monday of every month, and on other special occasions, they also sing the Mangowak Song, a boisterous yet melancholy and yearning piece written with some of the words they have learnt, the lyrics a mixture of English and Wadawurrung.' (Introduction)

'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 mine participated in the frontier wars in North Queensland to brutally claim, ‘settle’ and defend their occupation of Aboriginal lands. In response to the urging of Aboriginal colleagues, I wrote a series of letters to these ancestors for the book Unsettling Australian Histories: Letters to ancestry from a great-great-grandson (2020). The letters in this book also include contributions from Aboriginal Australians and Australian South Sea Islanders in order to articulate and honour First Nations resistances and reclamations. My hope is that these letters – created through cross-cultural friendships and partnerships – engage with the past in ways that foster action in the present.' (Introduction)

'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 the one that we’ve been drowning in ever since colonial capitalism started pouring it over us in 1788.'(Introduction)

'SAMUEL WALKER GRIFFITH and I were both born in Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales, almost a century apart. As children – he at nine years of age and myself at four – we both undertook the long ocean voyage of migration to distant Australia with our respective families. As a boy, I would sometimes visit the towering monolith of Griffith’s tomb in Toowong Cemetery, not far from my modest Bardon home. Nearby Steele Rudd, the creator of the iconic Dad and Dave novels, was also buried. His father, Thomas Davies, had been transported to Sydney and thence to the Burnett for breaking and entering and shoplifting after being arrested in Merthyr in October 1846, only several months after the infant Griffith and his family had quit the town.' (Introduction)

'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 in June 1859. Its inaugural elections were held in April the following year and the parliament sat for its first session on 22 May 1860. From the very start the colony’s novice politicians were confronted with the problem of dealing with fierce resistance from the First Nations across a vast frontier.' (Introduction)

'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 Torres Strait Islander peoples as the first custodians’. ‘First Nations peoples,’ continued the government statement, ‘were displaced from their land without any negotiation, resulting in political, economic and social inequalities that continue to this day.’ On 11 November 2019, one of twenty-four public consultations around the state was held in Birdsville in the Channel Country of south-western Queensland. At the Birdsville meeting to discuss Treaty, Mithaka Elder Betty Gorringe said just one thing from the back of the room: We already had a treaty: the Debney Peace. It’s in Alice’s books.' (Introduction)

'‘RULES ARE RULES, especially when it comes to our borders. No one is above these rules.’ So said Prime Minister Scott Morrison – his own hopes for a quiet January dashed – in defending the ham-fisted cancellation of tennis great Novak Djokovic’s visa on his arrival in Australia at the start of this year. And, to avoid doubt about where the strength lay in the Djokovic versus Australia stand-off, the consent orders agreed in the Federal Circuit Court between the parties made clear that the Minister for Immigration’s discretionary visa cancellation powers – which Michelle Grattan described in The Age as ‘hairy-chested’, and which, ironically, are above the rules of natural justice – meant the fate of Djokovic, known for his controversial stance on vaccination, still lay in the lap of the minister and his ‘God powers’.' (Introduction)

'Editor's note: 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 senator and land rights activist talks with a graduate First Nations constitutional lawyer about Indigenous affairs across the past fifty years and into the future.' (Introduction)