Cirrus@Austlit

'In 1993, The International Year for the World's Indigenous Peoples, the ABC Boyer Lectures were presented by seven Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, including Australian of the Year, Mandawuy Yunupingu.

While being informed by the past, the lectures looked forward, offering some vision of the future for Aboriginal and Islander life in Australia.

Titled Voices From the Land and celebrating the wide range of talent and opinion among the Indigenous Australians, the lectures covered medicine, law, education, the media, politics and linguistics.'

(Source: Voices From the Past, ABC Books, 1994, Back Cover)

'Inga Clendinnen believes that democratic people need true stories about their past. In this engaging essay, based on Clendinnen's 1999 Boyer Lectures, she argues for the rejection of any single, simple account of the Australian past. The reader catches the experience of individuals through fragments -- a woman being manhandled on a beach, an old man remembering the hard lessons of his boyhood in a Jesuit mission, an old woman urgently dancing the history of her country.

'What whites have done to indigenous Australians has been described as the 'locked cupboard' of Australian history. Now, "the cupboard is locked no more". This frank and challenging review of race relations in Australia helps us cast off prejudice and foregone conclusions and to look with fresh eyes. It enables us to understand better how this nation came to be what it is today.' (Publisher's blurb)

'Ms Brooks' Boyer Lecture series, entitled The Idea of Home, will explore the nature of expatriation and the lessons of a foreign correspondent's restless years. She will provide a very personal reflection on the environmental predicament we face. In addition, she will explore the particular ethos of 1960s Australia as a place to have come of age and deliver a lecture on the novelist's home in literature.'

Source: ABC website, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/boyerlectures/default.htm
Sighted: 21/11/2011