Speaker 1: The year nineteen sixty three is considered to be one
Speaker 1: of the most pivotal for the civil rights movement in
Speaker 1: the US. It marked not only the Children's Crusade in Birmingham, Alabama,
Speaker 1: that saw thousands of students march against segregation, but it
Speaker 1: was also the year of Martin Luther King's I Have
Speaker 1: a Dream speech. But there is a story much closer
Speaker 1: to home, a major civil rights moment that many of
Speaker 1: us might be less familiar with. In August of nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty three, the Yong people of northeast Arnham Land created
Speaker 1: the Yukola Bach Petitions or nakudaruk. The petitions stated that
Speaker 1: the land in question has been hunting and food gathering
Speaker 1: land for Yerkola tribes from time immemorial. Its stressed that
Speaker 1: places sacred to the Yerkola people, as well as vital
Speaker 1: to their livelihood, are in the excised land. These petitions
Speaker 1: called on the House of Representatives to appoint a committee
Speaker 1: accompanied by competent interpreters, to hear the views of the
Speaker 1: people of Yerkola before permitting the excision of the land
Speaker 1: for the mine, and to ensure that no arrangements be
Speaker 1: entered into with any company which will destroy the livelihood
Speaker 1: and independence of the Yerkola people. Professor clear Wright has
Speaker 1: documented this momentous and often overlooked piece of history in
Speaker 1: her new book naku Daruk The Bark Petitions. It's been
Speaker 1: described by one academic as officially the first history of
Speaker 1: the Uluru Statement era, the very messy story of power,
Speaker 1: subjugation and coexistence. It's hard not to find something deeply
Speaker 1: dispiriting about the fact that a story that began in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty three still finds itself unresolved, still at the
Speaker 1: center of debate in this country. It's hard to think
Speaker 1: of many people more equal to the task than clear Right.
Speaker 1: You may have come across her previous books that have
Speaker 1: given her a reputation as someone who knows how to
Speaker 1: give voice to the forgotten in a Stralian history. Her
Speaker 1: debut was called The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka, and have
Speaker 1: focused on the role that women played at the Eureka Stockade,
Speaker 1: and Nakudaruk is right at her best. It's this compulsively
Speaker 1: readable narrative and a powerful reminder of the enduring spirit
Speaker 1: of resistance and ongoing struggles for recognition and reconciliation in Australia.
Speaker 1: It's also the third and final installment in what writers
Speaker 1: described as her Democracy trilogy. Across three books, she's taken
Speaker 1: historical artifacts and used them to understand the voices that
Speaker 1: are too often missing from our historical record. The Eureka Flag,
Speaker 1: then the Suffragette Banner, and now the Bark Petitions. Australia's history,
Speaker 1: its very democracy, is built on a basis of disenfranchisement
Speaker 1: and silence. Claire Wright's works of history are about writing
Speaker 1: that wrong. I'm Michael Williams and this is read This
Speaker 1: the show about the books we love and the historical
Speaker 1: archives behind. Tell me about your first memory of learning
Speaker 1: Australian history.
Speaker 2: Oh my, that's going back some way now ancient history.
Speaker 2: One would say, Look, that's a high school experience and
Speaker 2: the first time a sense of Australian history. What it
Speaker 2: meant to study it, what I could get out of
Speaker 2: it landed with me. Was in year twelve and I
Speaker 2: had a teacher in year twelve who was the most bland,
Speaker 2: ordinary potato of a woman who absolutely lit up from
Speaker 2: inside when she talked about Australian history. And it was
Speaker 2: something about both that kind of alchemy, the transmogrification that
Speaker 2: happened in her as a human being. When she talked
Speaker 2: about it, that made me sit up straight and really listen.
Speaker 2: And the thing that I most remember about that year
Speaker 2: was we had to do our own research project and
Speaker 2: while most young people, seventeen year olds in the September
Speaker 2: school holidays were sitting out in the sun a bit,
Speaker 2: you know, maybe seeing their friends. You know, exams are
Speaker 2: coming up, but still not the pointy end of the
Speaker 2: year yet I spent two weeks in the bowels of
Speaker 2: the State Library of Victoria. This is when I fell
Speaker 2: in love with history, and Australian history in particular, because
Speaker 2: we had to use original archival research to do the
Speaker 2: essay and we had to set our own essay topic.
Speaker 2: And I remember that I wrote on how the Yarra
Speaker 2: River went from being a babbling in quotation marks to
Speaker 2: sordid cesspool quotation marks, so those were both archival quotes,
Speaker 2: and then I traced that and Michael I was just
Speaker 2: in love. It was like getting the first hit of
Speaker 2: a drug. It was something about the search for the answers,
Speaker 2: about the hit of the find, and then about living
Speaker 2: in the place that you were immersed in. So I
Speaker 2: was immersed in a decade of Melbourne's history from in
Speaker 2: the eighteen forties, and I'd come out of the State
Speaker 2: Library blinking into the light like a mole that had
Speaker 2: come out from underground, because I was so transported into
Speaker 2: that place. And for me that was it.
Speaker 1: Was that the first time you had that rush from history,
Speaker 1: or had you had it with him history from elsewhere,
Speaker 1: and it was the first time I had it about
Speaker 1: Australian history or did it start in Australia for you?
Speaker 2: Look, I think it started in Australia for me. And
Speaker 2: part of that is that I'm not Australian born. I'm
Speaker 2: a first generation immigrant to the country. I came to
Speaker 2: Australia from the United States when I was five, and
Speaker 2: I think that I always had a sense of being
Speaker 2: an outsider. I'm also Jewish, but I didn't go to
Speaker 2: a Jewish school or grow up in a Jewish community,
Speaker 2: so there was that about me. I was living with
Speaker 2: my mother and my stepfather, and they had very different
Speaker 2: kind of lifestyle than the kids that I knew in
Speaker 2: Mount Waverley growing up. They weren't very suburban, they were
Speaker 2: quite bohemian. What studying Australian history did for me was
Speaker 2: to give me a sense of groundedness, I think in
Speaker 2: the place and in the culture that I didn't have
Speaker 2: prior to that. I spent my entire childhood flying over
Speaker 2: the Pacific, backwards and forwards between my mother and my
Speaker 2: father who my dad lived in Canada. So that sense
Speaker 2: of being very transient physically and I guess emotionally intellectually,
Speaker 2: Australian history anchored me. I also think that that is
Speaker 2: why I come at Australian history once I was a
Speaker 2: fully fledged scholar of my own, so I did an
Speaker 2: honors in history, a master's in history, a PhD in history.
Speaker 2: Of post doctor research in history I mean consistent, so
Speaker 2: nothing if not consistent. But it was that postdoctor or
Speaker 2: research that became the Eureka Book. And it wasn't until
Speaker 2: then that I actually sort of linked some of these
Speaker 2: things that we've been talking about here and realized that
Speaker 2: that sense of being outside the house looking in actually
Speaker 2: had informed the way I do history, so that those
Speaker 2: myths and LEDs of Australian history that settler Australians may
Speaker 2: have grown up with didn't feel as embodied to me.
Speaker 2: I didn't take them for granted, and so I think
Speaker 2: that's what's allowed me to have a little bit more
Speaker 2: of that outsiders kind of perspective and be able to
Speaker 2: read against the grain of the myth or the legend.
Speaker 1: I'm glad you point towards the myths and legends, because
Speaker 1: amongst the many functions of history, amongst the many ways
Speaker 1: in which history manifests, one of the most pervasive iterations
Speaker 1: of history, I think lies in the nation state and
Speaker 1: lies in national myth building. Our idea of who we are,
Speaker 1: our identity legitimacy as a nation is absolutely pinned on
Speaker 1: the reading of these events and the retelling of these
Speaker 1: stories in ways that reinforce our idea of ourselves. And
Speaker 1: so the historian as nation builder seems to me to
Speaker 1: be a pretty tight life.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, historians have been implicated in the settler colonial project
Speaker 2: right from the beginning. There's no doubt about that. And
Speaker 2: you read somebody like Anna Clark's book Making Australian History
Speaker 2: and delving into the historiography and the ways that history
Speaker 2: has been written, because as I often say when I
Speaker 2: go and speak to students in schools, the past is
Speaker 2: a time concept, but history is a social construct. And
Speaker 2: they're two very different things. And so human beings make
Speaker 2: history and they write history and they construct history. And
Speaker 2: those are narratives. Those are stories, and some of them
Speaker 2: we have grown up with as bedtime stories. They're comforting narratives.
Speaker 2: They're narratives that are intended to make you feel what
Speaker 2: John Howard might have called relaxed and comfortable. And nobody
Speaker 2: really wants to let go of those in the same
Speaker 2: way that probably in some ways we're always trying to
Speaker 2: get back to that state where our parents still, if
Speaker 2: we were lucky, sat up in bed and read to us,
Speaker 2: and we fell asleep to the soft droning of their voice.
Speaker 2: I mean sort of. That sort of certainty gives security,
Speaker 2: and so those myths and legends have a real place.
Speaker 2: They give people a sense of security. And it's not
Speaker 2: surprising that conservative politicians go after historians and start history
Speaker 2: wars as part of larger culture wars, because what historians
Speaker 2: do is often ask uncomfortable questions, and they go back
Speaker 2: to the archives and back to the sources with those
Speaker 2: uncomfortable questions and find answers there that unsettle those narratives,
Speaker 2: that fracture those narratives.
Speaker 1: It was like enough to interview Mary Beard earlier this year.
Speaker 1: Lucky's just talking about, you know, the classicists as opposed
Speaker 1: to their historian. But one of the things that she
Speaker 1: was very big on was not knowing. You know that
Speaker 1: there is this embedded kind of not knowing and to
Speaker 1: a certain extent, for classicists, their job is to read
Speaker 1: and reread the same historical records that everyone's been reading
Speaker 1: for hundreds of years, but find a way to interpret
Speaker 1: them differently, find a way to approach them and discover
Speaker 1: things in them. And that that act requires a kind
Speaker 1: of imaginative leap. It requires an active empathy where you
Speaker 1: might recognize the subjectivity of the readings that have happened
Speaker 1: before and approach it differently.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, and what Mary does is imagine things from the
Speaker 2: point of view of the slave, not the emperor. Imagine
Speaker 2: things from the point of view of the women who
Speaker 2: were living in ancient Rome. And those were questions hadn't
Speaker 2: really been asked before. Mary and I were at the
Speaker 2: Jaipur Literature Festival together earlier this year and we had
Speaker 2: great fun talking about sources and one of the things
Speaker 2: that I have with Australian history that Mary doesn't have
Speaker 2: with the classical sources she goes back to, is so
Speaker 2: many of her sources are actually the narratives that have
Speaker 2: already been written, whereas I have diaries, letters, newspaper reports,
Speaker 2: government documents, the things that historians of an earlier period
Speaker 2: have much more access to, and I can now find
Speaker 2: them online much better if you can actually get into
Speaker 2: the archives yourself and sift through those boxes or volumes.
Speaker 2: Because a lot of the time it's just what you said,
Speaker 2: you don't know what, you don't know until there it
Speaker 2: is staring you in the face. And then the job
Speaker 2: of the historian is to weive what you have found
Speaker 2: into a cohesive narrative that is going to communicate to
Speaker 2: your audience. Well, for me, something of the experience of
Speaker 2: being in that archive, what it feels like to be
Speaker 2: in Ballarat in eighteen fifty four, or to be in
Speaker 2: London during the great Suffragette rallies of nineteen eleven, or
Speaker 2: with this latest book, what it was like to be
Speaker 2: in Idakala in nineteen sixty three. Because that is the
Speaker 2: great thrill of the historian, is to feel that because
Speaker 2: you're so immersed. The great challenge is then to communicate
Speaker 2: that to the reader.
Speaker 1: When we return, we dive into the genesis of clear
Speaker 1: Right's final installment of the Democracy Trilogy, and she describes
Speaker 1: what it meant to her to document history while it
Speaker 1: was continuing to swirl all around her.
Speaker 2: I first went to Northeast dynham Land with my family
Speaker 2: in twenty ten and was adopted into community after a
Speaker 2: month or so of my kids going to school with
Speaker 2: young kids, and I was adopted into the Unipingu family.
Speaker 2: Was actually adopted by doctor G's Unipingu's fourth wife, who
Speaker 2: was not a good much woman, She's a doctorway woman.
Speaker 2: But that put me in the household of the Unipingus.
Speaker 2: And it was years of going backwards and forwards between
Speaker 2: Melbourne and Northeast darnham Land before it occurred to me
Speaker 2: that that experience, that the massive learning curve that I
Speaker 2: was on, that the great hospitality and warmth and generosity
Speaker 2: that the young people had showed me might become part
Speaker 2: of my work in any way. And that was when
Speaker 2: I I started talking more about history with people up there,
Speaker 2: and that's when essentially the invitation to write this book came.
Speaker 2: One of the things that is at first uncomfortable and
Speaker 2: then just becomes magical is to be in your own
Speaker 2: country and to be totally immersed in a people who
Speaker 2: are not speaking the language that you speak. You might
Speaker 2: expect that if you go overseas. In fact, you do
Speaker 2: expect that. And Australians are so privileged in their monolingualism
Speaker 2: that we understand that if we go to another country,
Speaker 2: we are likely not going to speak its language, whereas
Speaker 2: you know Europeans are familiar with many European languages. It
Speaker 2: was extounding to me and still is that in arnam Land,
Speaker 2: English is the fifth language a young or person will speak.
Speaker 2: They'll speak four different versions of Yong or mutter and
Speaker 2: then English. So what I had to learn to do
Speaker 2: really quickly was shut up and listen. And oh my god,
Speaker 2: that's a good skill for a historian to learn, Michael.
Speaker 2: And that humility that is created through that process is
Speaker 2: I think something that is different about this book from
Speaker 2: my previous works. I've always been very respectful of the archive.
Speaker 2: You know, I've always said I write narrative nonfiction. They're
Speaker 2: written to be read. I want people to race through them.
Speaker 2: I want people to get to the end of a
Speaker 2: chapter and want to know what happens next. I want
Speaker 2: people to be invested in character development, and the archive
Speaker 2: is what gives you that I have never made anything up.
Speaker 2: You know, doctors make a pact to do no harm. Historians,
Speaker 2: I think, make a pact with their reader to not
Speaker 2: make shit up. And yet this book is the one
Speaker 2: in which I felt going into it the most amount
Speaker 2: of responsibility to get things right, to get the tone right,
Speaker 2: to get the balance and the weight of voices right,
Speaker 2: to get the sense of bilingualism that is essential to
Speaker 2: the bark petitions themselves, but also the experience of living
Speaker 2: on country now and certainly in nineteen sixty three the
Speaker 2: Methodist missionaries who went there all had to learn yongomata,
Speaker 2: so they became bilingual. I wanted that to inflect the book.
Speaker 2: I wanted also country itself to be archive. What I
Speaker 2: mean by that is your wal people know how to
Speaker 2: read the land. When a certain flower is out, it
Speaker 2: means that something's going to be happening in the ocean.
Speaker 2: When a breeze starts to come from a different direction,
Speaker 2: it means it's time to harvest something. And what I
Speaker 2: wanted was for the reader to be really imbued with
Speaker 2: that sense of the way in which the climate affects
Speaker 2: the mood of the people, the wet, the dry, the
Speaker 2: build up, but then also to have the six Yngal
Speaker 2: seasons inflected in there as well, so that there's a
Speaker 2: sense of the shoulder to shoulderness, of what people would
Speaker 2: call baala gullily, which means two ways learning. It's what
Speaker 2: the Ularus statement from the Heart asked us all very
Speaker 2: generously to do, which is walk together on this journey.
Speaker 1: As to think from certain practices of history where it's,
Speaker 1: if not an abstract thing, the endpoint is it's still
Speaker 1: about telling a story about something and it's at arm's length. Yes,
Speaker 1: But you are completing the end of an over a
Speaker 1: decade long project in writing histories of Australian democracy, an
Speaker 1: alternative two decades, a trilogy that kind of unpicks the
Speaker 1: project of Australian democracy in different ways. That's an incredibly
Speaker 1: live conversation. You know. That's not an abstract thing. The
Speaker 1: stuff you write about in Nakudaruk has very serious present
Speaker 1: day implications. So I'm just curious about whether that places
Speaker 1: a different pressure on the kind of history that you write.
Speaker 2: When I started researching and writing Nakudaruk ten years ago,
Speaker 2: Ularu's statement from the heart hadn't been written. The idea
Speaker 2: of a voice referendum wasn't in anybody's consciousness. I set
Speaker 2: out to write the story that one I was more
Speaker 2: or less asked by the your or community to work on,
Speaker 2: and two the story that I felt had not been
Speaker 2: written in Australian history yet. And the combination of the
Speaker 2: fact that I had not only the consent but the
Speaker 2: encouragement of senior members of the Yungal community, and I
Speaker 2: had the skills and resources to be able to go
Speaker 2: about this history because I had an ARC grant. Those
Speaker 2: were the things that drove me forward in this project.
Speaker 2: I didn't actually realize I had a trilogy on my
Speaker 2: hands until I started researching Naku Dharuk. And what I
Speaker 2: actually was doing was not casting forward to an open
Speaker 2: ended political moment. What I was doing was casting back
Speaker 2: and joining the dots between Eureka and northeast Arnham Land
Speaker 2: in nineteen sixty three, joining the dots between the Eureka
Speaker 2: flag that had been hand sewn by women to express
Speaker 2: what the diggers of Ballarat were protesting about, which was
Speaker 2: essentially needing and wanting to have their voices heard in
Speaker 2: the halls of Victorian Parliament because they were disenfranchised. I
Speaker 2: realized that the Barque petitions, handmade by young people, signed
Speaker 2: by men and women, expressed that same sentiment and ambition,
Speaker 2: which was to be heard, to have a voice in
Speaker 2: the halls of power, to be able to express grievances
Speaker 2: about what was going on on the ground, to people
Speaker 2: who were similarly disenfranchised structurally as well as culturally. And
Speaker 2: I thought, ooh, I can compare these. I can say
Speaker 2: that the Eureka flag was to the nineteenth century what
Speaker 2: the bark petitions were to the twentieth century. And then
Speaker 2: realized that there was a dot in the middle to join,
Speaker 2: which was the Women's Suffrage Banner which hangs in Parliament House,
Speaker 2: which did the same thing, a material object painted by
Speaker 2: a woman that was carried in the Great Suffragette Rallies
Speaker 2: of London that proclaimed the rights that Australian women had
Speaker 2: already won, were first in the world to win the
Speaker 2: right to stand for parliament and the right to vote
Speaker 2: white women, that is, and that they were claiming a
Speaker 2: voice as well in the body politic in the nation state.
Speaker 2: And so there was a trilogy. So I went back
Speaker 2: and wrote you Daughterers of Freedom and then came back
Speaker 2: to Nakudaruk. When I started researching and writing it, I
Speaker 2: had no sense that it was going to make any
Speaker 2: kind of political intervention. Yes, of course it makes an
Speaker 2: intervention into the narrative of Australian history in that it
Speaker 2: writes First Nations people into mainstream Australian political history. The
Speaker 2: young people are as important in this book as the
Speaker 2: men'sis government and the Methodist Church and the mining interests.
Speaker 2: It's a four cornered contest for this piece of land
Speaker 2: in northeast Arnham Land. In that sense, it's not quarantined
Speaker 2: Aboriginal history, just as I would say that Eureka and
Speaker 2: Your Daughters of Freedom were not quarantined women's history. They
Speaker 2: were revisionists to the extent that certain comfortable myths about
Speaker 2: the gold Rush and comfortable myths about the Federation era
Speaker 2: were turned on their head by realizing that women were
Speaker 2: so deeply implicated, that women had been the agents, the
Speaker 2: historical agents of the changes that were made that we
Speaker 2: then later came to celebrate as being masculine achievements to
Speaker 2: masque killan aspirations, and that reflected masculine virtues like unity
Speaker 2: or collectivity, or standing up for your rights and your
Speaker 2: freedoms in your liberties, which are then gendered male. Nakudaruk
Speaker 2: certainly is interventionist, but I didn't realize that it had
Speaker 2: the potential to be read as activist until I got
Speaker 2: to the conclusion. And the conclusion is the part where
Speaker 2: I take the reader from nineteen sixty four to twenty
Speaker 2: twenty four. Essentially the rest of the book is nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty three, and within that time, by the time I
Speaker 2: was up to writing that we'd had the Ulary Statement
Speaker 2: from the Heart, we'd had the Voice Referendum, we had
Speaker 2: the challenge that doctor g Unipingu had made to the
Speaker 2: Commonwealth Government for reparations for or the loss of land
Speaker 2: and culture that had happened in nineteen sixty three, and
Speaker 2: the finding in his favor. It was impossible not to
Speaker 2: include all of those things in a reckoning of what
Speaker 2: had happened over the last sixty years to bring us
Speaker 2: to the point that we are today, Because the same
Speaker 2: thing that the people were asking for through the bark
Speaker 2: petitions in nineteen sixty three was the very thing that
Speaker 2: the Voice Referendum was essentially in big picture talking about
Speaker 2: which is a voice obviously on the small scale. It
Speaker 2: was asking for a change to the Australian Constitution and
Speaker 2: that's the part that Australian said no to. And I
Speaker 2: think it's really important to remember that in Meghan Davis,
Speaker 2: who was so such a leader in the Ulary's Statement
Speaker 2: from the Heart and the Voice referendum, has made this
Speaker 2: point now, which is that Australians in twenty twenty three
Speaker 2: said no to a particular word, changing to a particular
Speaker 2: line in the Constitution. They didn't say no to everything
Speaker 2: that has to do with aboriginal tyrest Rate Islander writes.
Speaker 1: I mean that's a I think it's an important thing
Speaker 1: to remember. It's a fascinating way to think about it, though,
Speaker 1: because part of what that's suggesting is that the sticking
Speaker 1: point for people was a mistaken belief that a historical
Speaker 1: document or artifact should somehow be unchanging or sacrisanct, that
Speaker 1: it's not something that can be fluid as times changes,
Speaker 1: needs change. But if the constitution's a fixed point and
Speaker 1: people are uncomfortable with the idea of interrogating that fixed point,
Speaker 1: you know that's a failure of imagination when it comes
Speaker 1: to how history functions.
Speaker 2: Surely, absolutely, and I hope one of the ways in
Speaker 2: which this book functions now that Nakudaruk functions. And I
Speaker 2: didn't set out with this expressly given that we have
Speaker 2: had that referendum on the voice. One of the things
Speaker 2: that I hope people can read is the way in
Speaker 2: which the Barque petitions themselves, which were documents sent by
Speaker 2: the people to the Federal Parliament in nineteen sixty three
Speaker 2: to protest against the incursion of mining on their land.
Speaker 2: They weren't rejecting mining per se. What they were protesting
Speaker 2: about was the lack of consultation with them as the
Speaker 2: landowners and any form of compensation, because this essentially broke
Speaker 2: yourngal law. Yal groups had to ask permission of each
Speaker 2: other to come onto each other's clan lands, and they
Speaker 2: had to give something in exchange if they took resources
Speaker 2: from those clan lands. And what these documents show is
Speaker 2: theyal people who you might like to think were Stone
Speaker 2: Age people. Lots of newspaper reports at the time call
Speaker 2: them that the Stone Age people who were unchanging, inflexible,
Speaker 2: who were tied to custom. What the Bark petitions actually
Speaker 2: show was they were able to gracefully, generously find a
Speaker 2: way to speak nation to nation within their sense of
Speaker 2: sovereignty to the Parliament, blending the literacy of the colonizers
Speaker 2: with their own language and with the motifs of their cosmology,
Speaker 2: their spirituality. I mean, if you know how to read
Speaker 2: the painted designs that are on the outside of the petitions,
Speaker 2: these are essentially landholding documents. So what I hope when
Speaker 2: people read this book reflecting on the Voice Referendum, is
Speaker 2: that they might be able to sense that history is
Speaker 2: not so set in stone, that it's created by bold,
Speaker 2: innovative moves of empathy, of imagination, of generosity, of spirit,
Speaker 2: of hospitality, and that the barque petitions in the Knakudaruk
Speaker 2: the youngal words for them, I think, express all of that.
Speaker 1: Claire Ryant's new book, Nakudaruk The Bark Petitions is available
Speaker 1: everywhere now, and if you're a fan of Claire's work,
Speaker 1: look for her podcast with ev Reese's Archive Fever. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of history murdery to enjoy. Right there. Before
Speaker 1: we go, I wanted to let you know what I've
Speaker 1: been reading this week, and fans have read this will
Speaker 1: be unsurprised to know that I am rapturous about the
Speaker 1: new Helen Garner book. Way back in episode one, when
Speaker 1: we got to visit Helen at home, she was working
Speaker 1: on the book that would eventually become the Season, which
Speaker 1: is out now. It's the story of her grandson Ambrose's
Speaker 1: under sixteens football team and Helen's adoring fandom sitting down
Speaker 1: on the boundary line watching him play. But it's a
Speaker 1: Garner book. It's about aging, it's about community, it's about masculinity.
Speaker 1: It's about all that and more, and it's utterly beautiful.
Speaker 1: I didn't want it to end. You can find it
Speaker 1: and all the other books we mentioned today and your
Speaker 1: favorite independent bookshop. That's it for this week's show. If
Speaker 1: you enjoyed it, please tell your friends and rate and
Speaker 1: review us. It helps a lot. Next week I'll read this.
Speaker 1: I'm joined in the studio by the one, the only,
Speaker 1: John Saffron to discuss his new book, which I'll let
Speaker 1: him set it.
Speaker 3: Up for people who don't know it, because Michael doesn't
Speaker 3: know how to set up an interview. I mean so
Speaker 3: so the book scored squat a week squatting at Kanye's
Speaker 3: mansion and Yeah, so I went into Kangnye's mansion. I
Speaker 3: made my way in into the legal expression, and I
Speaker 3: used it as a writer's retreat.
Speaker 1: Read this as a Schwartz Media production made possible by
Speaker 1: the generous support of an ar group. The show is
Speaker 1: produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing by Travis
Speaker 1: Evans and original compositions by Zalton Fetcher. Thanks for listening,
Speaker 1: See you next week.