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'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)

Notes

I am going away to England on Friday… I may go away with a tranquil mind and I am quite sure I shall.
Sir Samuel Griffith, Telegraph (Brisbane), 29 January 1887

Countless figures in Welsh mythology stumble into hidden labyrinths, are lured down potholes and spend long years in subterranean states of being.
Jan Morris

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y Griffith Review Acts of Reckoning no. 76 Ashley Hay (editor), Teela Reid /specialistDatasets/BlackWords (editor), 2022 24442457 2022 periodical issue Abstract
'Four years on from the Uluru Statement from the Heart, there’s a clear divide between the groundswell of popular support to recognise the rightful place of First Nations people in Australia’s democratic life and ongoing political inertia in the same space. Tensions remain between long denials and new possibilities: is Australia ready to heal its brutal legacy of settler colonialism? How can we begin to imagine a better future without a full recognition of the past and a full recognition of the moral force of First Nations? And how can this examination and exchange – or reckoning in any context – take place in an era of quick assumptions and divides, alternative facts and cancellations?

'Griffith Review 76: Acts of Reckoning is a wide-ranging discussion of the multifaceted issues at play in Australia’s fraught journey towards a full settlement with Indigenous peoples. Can its leaders take up the generous offer from Australia’s Aboriginal nations to walk together to forge change through dialogue? What might be possible for Australia’s narrative when reconciliation between the world’s oldest continuing culture and one of its newest nation states is achieved? What actions are necessary to move beyond words and achieve real-world transformations – in indigenous-settler relations as in other crucial arenas of recalibration?

'Examining questions of history, truth-telling and decolonisation, and revisiting colonial figures and their ongoing legacies, Acts of Reckoning reframes the past in order to form new futures – and celebrates how much work is already underway.

'Contributing Editor Teela Reid joins Editor Ashley Hay as Griffith Review 76: Acts of Reckoning opens a dialogue for diverse voices, opportunities and perspectives to be articulated, examined and assessed. (Editorial)
2022
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2022
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pg. 127-141