'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)
In country and colonial landscapes, it is
Possible we might see the same things
With paintings offering a glimpse into
The way we think and value we place
On the natural beauty captured thru art
The colonial landscape paintings sometime
Contradicting the colonial attempts at
Colonising and erasing our stories out…
—Charmaine Papertalk Green ‘More than Balga Grass trees and kangaroos’
in Art (2022) by Charmaine Papertalk Green and John Kinsella