Speaker 1: Hi there, It's Daniel James and I'm here to introduce
Speaker 1: another episode of Read This Schwartz Meeting His Book podcast,
Speaker 1: hosted by editor of The Monthly and self confessed book
Speaker 1: nerd Michael Williams. It features conversations with some of the
Speaker 1: most talented writers from Australia and around the world. In
Speaker 1: this episode, we're going to hear from historian and author
Speaker 1: Professor Claire Wright. She has just released Knuckle Darruk the
Speaker 1: Bark Petition, which is the final installment of her Democracy trilogy.
Speaker 1: I'm joined by host Michael Williams to tell me a
Speaker 1: little bit more about the episode.
Speaker 2: Hello Michael, Daniel James, Hello, so, Michael.
Speaker 1: Claire Wright is an award winning writer whose books tend
Speaker 1: to focus on the often untold or misrepresented histories of
Speaker 1: our nation. For those listeners who might not be familiar
Speaker 1: with her work, could you tell me a little bit
Speaker 1: more about it?
Speaker 3: Yeah. People may be most familiar with Claire right through
Speaker 3: her Stellar prize winning book The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka.
Speaker 3: It was the book that really put her on the
Speaker 3: scene as a major historian, and the idea behind it
Speaker 3: was to focus on the role that women had played
Speaker 3: in the Eureka Stockade that to a certain extent, they
Speaker 3: were a voice that we never heard when we thought
Speaker 3: about that kind of history. She followed it up with
Speaker 3: another book called You Daughters of Freedom, and that one
Speaker 3: told the story of Australia's suffrage campaigners and how they
Speaker 3: won the vote for women, for white women, to be
Speaker 3: more precise, And so she's again and again really interested
Speaker 3: in the ways in which certain voices are missing from
Speaker 3: the official history that we tell. She takes these historical artifacts,
Speaker 3: whether it's the Eureka flag or the suffrage banner, and
Speaker 3: uses them to say that here's part of the story
Speaker 3: that you're missing. Here are some of the people that
Speaker 3: you haven't heard from. And in this third book, marko Daruk,
Speaker 3: she takes the bark Petitions.
Speaker 1: And so Knuckldaruk. The Barque Petitions is the final installment
Speaker 1: of what Claire is now calling her Democracy Trilogy. It's
Speaker 1: really important yet often overlooked part of Australian history that
Speaker 1: really centers on a year nineteen sixty three. That's the
Speaker 1: year that's usually more associated with American civil rights.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: That's the year that Martin Luther King Junior gave his
Speaker 3: eye have a dream speech. There was the Children's Crusade
Speaker 3: in Birmingham, Alabama that saw thousands of students march against segregation.
Speaker 3: Claire's telling a story much closer to home, but still
Speaker 3: primarily concerned with civil rights. It was August of nineteen
Speaker 3: sixty three when the Yongul people of northeast Arnham Land
Speaker 3: created the Yokala Bak petitions otherwise known as Naku Daruk.
Speaker 3: The petition said that the land in question has been
Speaker 3: hunting and food gathering land for the Yukola tribes from
Speaker 3: time immemorial, and it argues that places sacred to the
Speaker 3: Yeklar people as well as vital to their livelihood, are
Speaker 3: part of the excised land the kind of proposed mining area.
Speaker 3: It was a petition that called on the House of
Speaker 3: Representatives to appoint a committee accompanied by and the language
Speaker 3: is really amazing. It's competent interpreters to hear the views
Speaker 3: of the people of Yukola before permitting the excision of
Speaker 3: land for the mine. No arrangements should be entered into
Speaker 3: with any company which will destroy the livelihood and independence
Speaker 3: of the Yerkola people. It's hard not to read this
Speaker 3: and think about this history in the context of the
Speaker 3: referendum into the voice to Parliament that obviously failed last year.
Speaker 3: And there's this incredible through lane from the history of
Speaker 3: that Claire's telling to the present moment, and it's what
Speaker 3: makes this book and hopefully the conversation we had on
Speaker 3: read this so irresistible.
Speaker 2: Coming up in a moment Claire Riot is shutting up
Speaker 2: and listening. Tell me about your first memory of learning
Speaker 2: Australian history.
Speaker 4: Oh my, that's going back some way now, ancient history.
Speaker 4: One would say, Look, that's a high school experience and
Speaker 4: the first time a sense of Australian history, what it
Speaker 4: meant to study it, what I could get out of
Speaker 4: it landed with me was in year twelve and I
Speaker 4: had a teacher in year twelve who was the most bland,
Speaker 4: ordinary potato of a woman who absolutely lit up from
Speaker 4: inside when she talked about Australian history. And it was
Speaker 4: something about both that kind of alchemy, the transmogrification that
Speaker 4: happened in her as a human being when she talked
Speaker 4: about it, that made me sit up straight and really listen.
Speaker 4: And the thing that I most remember about that year
Speaker 4: was we had to do our own research project and
Speaker 4: while most young people, seventeen year olds in the September
Speaker 4: school holidays were sitting out in the sun a bit,
Speaker 4: you know, maybe seeing their friends. You know, exams are
Speaker 4: coming up, but still not the pointy end of the year.
Speaker 4: Yet I spent two weeks in the bowels of this
Speaker 4: Date Library of Victoria. This is when I fell in
Speaker 4: love with history, and Australian history in particular, because we
Speaker 4: had to use original archival research to do the essay,
Speaker 4: and we had to set our own essay topic. And
Speaker 4: I remember that I wrote on how the Yarrow River
Speaker 4: went from being a babbling brook in quotation marks to
Speaker 4: sordid cesspool quotation marks, So those were both archival quotes.
Speaker 4: And then I traced that and Michael, I was just
Speaker 4: in love. It was like getting the first hit of
Speaker 4: a drug. It was something about the search for the answers,
Speaker 4: about the hit of the find, and then about living
Speaker 4: in the place that you were immersed in. So I
Speaker 4: was immersed in a decade of Melbourne's history from in
Speaker 4: the eighteen forties. And I'd come out of the State
Speaker 4: Library blinking into the light like a mole that had
Speaker 4: come out from underground. Because I was so transported into
Speaker 4: that place, and for me that was it was.
Speaker 3: That the first time you had that rush from history,
Speaker 3: or had you had it with history from elsewhere, and
Speaker 3: it was the first time you had it about Australian
Speaker 3: history or did it start in Australia for you.
Speaker 4: Look, I think it started in Australia for me. And
Speaker 4: part of that is that I'm not Australian born. I'm
Speaker 4: a first generation immigrant to the country. I came to
Speaker 4: Australia from the United States when I was five, and
Speaker 4: I think that I always had a sense of being
Speaker 4: an outsider. I'm also Jewish, but I didn't go to
Speaker 4: a Jewish school or grow up in a Jewish community,
Speaker 4: so there was that about me. I was living with
Speaker 4: my mother and my stepfather, and they had very different
Speaker 4: kind of lifestyle than the kids that I knew in
Speaker 4: Mount Waverley growing up. They weren't very suburban, they were
Speaker 4: quite bohemian. What studying Australian history did for me was
Speaker 4: to give me a sense of groundedness, I think in
Speaker 4: the place and in the culture that I didn't have
Speaker 4: prior to that. I spent my entire childhood flying over
Speaker 4: the Pacific backwards and forwards between my mother and my
Speaker 4: father who my dad lived in Canada. So that sense
Speaker 4: of being very transient physically and I guess emotionally intellectually
Speaker 4: Australian history anchored me. I also think that that is
Speaker 4: why I come at Australian history once I was a
Speaker 4: fully fledged scholar of my own, so I did an
Speaker 4: honors in history, a Masters in history, a PhD in history.
Speaker 4: Of postdoctor research in history, I mean consistent, nothing if
Speaker 4: not consistent. But it was that postdoctor or research that
Speaker 4: became the Eureka Book. And it wasn't until then that
Speaker 4: I actually sort of linked some of these things that
Speaker 4: we've been talking about here and realized that that sense
Speaker 4: of being outside the house looking in actually had informed
Speaker 4: the way I do history, So that those myths and
Speaker 4: legends of Australian history that settler Australians may have grown
Speaker 4: up with didn't feel as embodied to me. I didn't
Speaker 4: take them for granted, and so I think that's what's
Speaker 4: allowed me to have a little bit more of that
Speaker 4: outsiders kind of perspective and be able to read against
Speaker 4: the grain of the myth or the legend.
Speaker 3: I'm glad you point towards the myths and legends, because
Speaker 3: amongst the many functions of history, amongst the many ways
Speaker 3: in which history manifests, one of the most pervasive iterations
Speaker 3: of history, I think lies in the nation state, and
Speaker 3: lies in national myth building. Our idea of who we are,
Speaker 3: our identity legitimacy as a nation is absolutely pinned on
Speaker 3: the reading of these events and the retelling of these
Speaker 3: stories in ways that reinforce our idea of ourselves. And
Speaker 3: so the historian as nation builder seems to me to
Speaker 3: be a pretty tight lockup.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, historians have been implicated in the settler colonial project
Speaker 4: right from the beginning. There's no doubt about that. And
Speaker 4: you know, you read somebody like Anna Clark's book Making
Speaker 4: Australian History and delving into the historiography in the ways
Speaker 4: that history has been written, Because as I often say
Speaker 4: when I go and speak to students in schools, the
Speaker 4: past is a time concept, but history is a social construct,
Speaker 4: and they're two very different things. And so human beings
Speaker 4: make history and they write history and they construct history.
Speaker 4: Those are narratives. Those are stories, and some of them
Speaker 4: we have grown up with as bedtime stories. They're comforting narratives.
Speaker 4: They're narratives that are intended to make you feel what
Speaker 4: John Howard might have called relaxed and comfortable, and nobody
Speaker 4: really wants to let go of those in the same
Speaker 4: way that probably in some ways we're always trying to
Speaker 4: get back to that state where our parents still, if
Speaker 4: we were lucky, sat up in bed and read to us,
Speaker 4: and we fell asleep to the soft droning of their voice.
Speaker 4: I meant that sort of certainty gives security, and so
Speaker 4: those myths and legends have a real place. They give
Speaker 4: people a sense of security. And it's not surprising that
Speaker 4: conservative politicians go after historians and start history wars as
Speaker 4: part of larger culture wars, because what historians do often
Speaker 4: ask uncomfortable questions, and they go back to the archives
Speaker 4: and back to the sources with those uncomfortable questions and
Speaker 4: find answers there that unsettle those narratives, that fracture those narratives.
Speaker 3: I was luck enough to interview Mary Beard earlier this year.
Speaker 3: Luck's just talking about, you know, the classicists as opposed
Speaker 3: to their historian. But one of the things that she
Speaker 3: was very big on was not knowing, you know that
Speaker 3: there is this embedded kind of not knowing, and to
Speaker 3: a certain extent, for classicists, their job is to read
Speaker 3: and reread the same historical records that everyone's been reading
Speaker 3: for hundreds of years, but find a way to interpret
Speaker 3: them differently, find a way to approach them and discover
Speaker 3: things in them. And that that act requires a kind
Speaker 3: of imaginative leap. It requires an act of empathy where
Speaker 3: you might recognize the subjectivity of the readings that have
Speaker 3: happened before and approach it differently.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, and what Mary does is imagine things from the
Speaker 4: point of view of the slave, not the emperor. Imagine
Speaker 4: things from the point of view of the women who
Speaker 4: were living in ancient Rome. And those were questions that
Speaker 4: hadn't really been asked before. Mary and I were at
Speaker 4: the Jaipo Literature Festival together earlier this year and we
Speaker 4: had great fun talking about sources. And one of the
Speaker 4: things that I have with Australian history that Mary doesn't
Speaker 4: have with the classical sources she goes back to, is
Speaker 4: so many of her sources are actually the narratives that
Speaker 4: have already been written, whereas I have diaries, letters, newspaper reports,
Speaker 4: government documents, the things that historians of an earlier period
Speaker 4: have much more access to and I can now find
Speaker 4: them online much better if you can actually get into
Speaker 4: the archives yourself and sift through those boxes or volumes,
Speaker 4: because a lot of the time it's just what you said,
Speaker 4: you don't know what, you don't know until there it
Speaker 4: is staring you in the face. And then the job
Speaker 4: of the historian is to weave what you have found
Speaker 4: into a cohesive narrative that is going to communicate to
Speaker 4: your audience. For me, something of the experience of being
Speaker 4: in that archive, what it feels like to be in
Speaker 4: Ballarat in eighteen fifty four, or to be in London
Speaker 4: during the great Suffragette rallies of nineteen eleven, or with
Speaker 4: this latest book, what it was like to be in
Speaker 4: Urdkala in nineteen sixty three. Because that is the great
Speaker 4: thrill of the historian, is to feel that because you're
Speaker 4: so immersed. The great challenge is then to communicate that
Speaker 4: to the reader.
Speaker 3: When we return, we dive into the genesis of Claire
Speaker 3: Right's final installment of the Democracy Trilogy, and she describes
Speaker 3: what it meant to her to document history while it
Speaker 3: was continuing to swirl all around her.
Speaker 4: I first went to Northeast darnham Land with my family
Speaker 4: in twenty ten and was adopted into community after a
Speaker 4: month or so of my kids going to school with
Speaker 4: young or kids and I was adopted into the Unipingu family.
Speaker 4: Was actually adopted by doctor G's Unipingu's fourth wife, who
Speaker 4: was not a good much woman, She's a doctaway woman.
Speaker 4: But that put me in the household of the Unipingus
Speaker 4: and it was years of going backwards and forwards between
Speaker 4: Melbourne and Northeast darnham Land before it occurred to me
Speaker 4: that that experience, that the massive learning curve that I
Speaker 4: was on, that the great hospitality and warmth and generosity
Speaker 4: that the young people had showed me might become part
Speaker 4: of my work in any way. And that was when
Speaker 4: I started talking more about history with people up there,
Speaker 4: and that's when essentially the invitation to write this book came.
Speaker 4: One of the things that is at first uncomfortable and
Speaker 4: then just becomes magical is to be in your own
Speaker 4: country and to be totally immersed in a people who
Speaker 4: are not speaking the language that you speak. You might
Speaker 4: expect that if you go overseas. In fact, you do
Speaker 4: expect that, and Australians are so privileged in their mind
Speaker 4: no lingualism, that we understand that if we go to
Speaker 4: another country, we were likely not going to speak its language,
Speaker 4: whereas you know Europeans are familiar with many European languages.
Speaker 4: It was expounding to me and still is that in
Speaker 4: arnum Land, English is the fifth language that a young
Speaker 4: or person will speak. They'll speak four different versions of
Speaker 4: yong or mutter and then English. So what I had
Speaker 4: to learn to do really quickly was shut up and listen.
Speaker 4: And oh my god, that's a good skill for a
Speaker 4: Nestorian to learn, Michael. And that humility that is created
Speaker 4: through that process is I think something that is different
Speaker 4: about this book from my previous works. I've always been
Speaker 4: very respectful of the archive. You know, I've always said
Speaker 4: I write narrative nonfiction. They're written to be read. I
Speaker 4: want people to race through them. I want people to
Speaker 4: get to the end of a chapter and want to
Speaker 4: know what happens next. I want people to be invested
Speaker 4: in character development, and the archive is what gives you that.
Speaker 4: I have never made anything up. You know, doctors make
Speaker 4: a pact to do no harm. Historians, I think, make
Speaker 4: a pact with their reader to not make shit up.
Speaker 4: And yet this book is the one in which I
Speaker 4: felt going into it the most amount of responsibility to
Speaker 4: get things right, to get the tone right, to get
Speaker 4: the balance and the weight of voices right, to get
Speaker 4: the sense of bilingualism that is essential to the bark
Speaker 4: petitions themselves, but also the experience of living on country
Speaker 4: now and certainly in nineteen sixty three, the Methodist missionaries
Speaker 4: who went there all had to learn yongomata, so they
Speaker 4: became bilingual. I wanted that to inflect the book. I
Speaker 4: want it also country itself to be archive. What I
Speaker 4: mean by that is youngal people know how to read
Speaker 4: the land. When a certain flower is out, it means
Speaker 4: that something's going to be happening in the ocean. Now,
Speaker 4: when a breeze starts to come from a different direction,
Speaker 4: it means it's time to harvest something. And what I
Speaker 4: wanted was for the reader to be really imbued with
Speaker 4: that sense of the way in which the climate affects
Speaker 4: the mood of the people, the wet, the dry, the
Speaker 4: build up, But then also to have the six Yngal
Speaker 4: seasons inflected in there as well, so that there's a
Speaker 4: sense of the shoulder to shoulderness of what people would
Speaker 4: call baala gullily, which means two ways learning. It's what
Speaker 4: the ull Statement from the Heart asked us all very
Speaker 4: generously to do, which is walk together on this journey.
Speaker 3: As to think from certain practices of history where it's,
Speaker 3: if not an abstract thing, the endpoint is still about
Speaker 3: telling a story about something, and it's at arm's length. Yes,
Speaker 3: but you are completing the end of an over a
Speaker 3: decade long project in writing histories of Australian democracy, an
Speaker 3: alternative two decades, a trilogy that kind of unpicks the
Speaker 3: project of Australian democracy in different ways. That's an incredibly
Speaker 3: live conversation. You know, that's not an abstract thing. The
Speaker 3: stuff you write about in Nakudaruk has very serious present
Speaker 3: day implications. So I'm just curious about whether that places
Speaker 3: a different pressure on the kind of history that you write.
Speaker 4: When I started researching and writing Nakudaruk ten years ago,
Speaker 4: Ulurus Statement from the Heart hadn't been written. The idea
Speaker 4: of a voice referendum wasn't in anybody's consciousness. I set
Speaker 4: out to write the story that one I was more
Speaker 4: or less asked by the or community to work on
Speaker 4: and two the story that I felt had not been
Speaker 4: written in Australian history yet. And the combination of the
Speaker 4: fact that I had not only the consent but the
Speaker 4: encouragement of senior members of the community, and I had
Speaker 4: the skills and resources to be able to go about
Speaker 4: this history because I had an ARC grant. Those were
Speaker 4: the things that drove me forward in this project. I
Speaker 4: didn't actually realize I had a trilogy on my hands
Speaker 4: until I started researching Naku Dharuk, and what I actually
Speaker 4: was doing was not casting forward to an open ended
Speaker 4: political moment. What I was doing was casting back and
Speaker 4: joining the dots between Eureka and northeast Arnham Land in
Speaker 4: nineteen sixty three, joining the dots between the Eureka flag
Speaker 4: that had been hand sewn by women to express what
Speaker 4: the diggers of Ballarat were protesting about, which was essentially
Speaker 4: needing and wanting to have their voices heard in the
Speaker 4: halls of Victorian Parliament because they were disenfranchised. I realized
Speaker 4: that the Bark petitions, handmade by young people, signed by
Speaker 4: men and women, expressed that same sentiment and ambition which
Speaker 4: was to be heard to have a voice in the
Speaker 4: halls of power to be able to express grievances about
Speaker 4: what was going on on the ground to people who
Speaker 4: were similarly disenfranchised structurally as well as culturally. And I thought, ooh,
Speaker 4: I can compare these. I can say that the Eureka
Speaker 4: flag was to the nineteenth century what the Bark petitions
Speaker 4: were to the twentieth century. And then realized that there
Speaker 4: was a dot in the middle to join, which was
Speaker 4: the Women's Suffrage Banner which hangs in Parliament House, which
Speaker 4: did the same thing, a material object painted by a
Speaker 4: woman that was carried in the Great Suffragette Rallies of
Speaker 4: London that proclaimed the rights that Australian women had already won,
Speaker 4: were first in the world to win the right to
Speaker 4: stand for Parliament and the right to vote white women,
Speaker 4: that is, and that they were claiming a voice as
Speaker 4: well in the body politic in the nation state. And
Speaker 4: so there was a trilogy. So I went back and
Speaker 4: wrote you'd Orders of Freedom, and then came back to Nakudharuk.
Speaker 4: When I started researching and writing it, I had no
Speaker 4: sense that it was going to make any kind of
Speaker 4: political intervention. Yes, of course, it makes an intervention into
Speaker 4: the narrative of Australian history in that it writes First
Speaker 4: Nations people into mainstream Australian political history. The young or
Speaker 4: people are as important in this book as the men'sis
Speaker 4: government and the Methodist Church and the mining interests. It's
Speaker 4: a four cornered contest for this piece of land in
Speaker 4: northeast Arnham Land. In that sense, it's not quarantined Aboriginal history,
Speaker 4: just as I would say that Eureka and Your Daughters
Speaker 4: of Freedom were not quarantined women's history. They were revisionists
Speaker 4: to the extent that certain comfortable myths about the Gold
Speaker 4: Ros and comfortable myths about the Federation era were turned
Speaker 4: on their head by realizing that women were so deeply implicated,
Speaker 4: that women had been the agents, the historical agents of
Speaker 4: the changes that were made that we then later came
Speaker 4: to celebrate as being masculine achievements to masculine aspirations, and
Speaker 4: that reflected masculine virtues like unity or collectivity or standing
Speaker 4: up for your rights and your freedoms and your liberties,
Speaker 4: which are then gendered male. Nakudaruk certainly is interventionist, but
Speaker 4: I didn't realize that it had the potential to be
Speaker 4: read as activist until I got to the conclusion, and
Speaker 4: the conclusion is the part where I take the reader
Speaker 4: from nineteen sixty four to twenty twenty four. Essentially the
Speaker 4: rest of the book is nineteen sixty three. And within
Speaker 4: that time, by the time I was up to writing
Speaker 4: that we'd had the Ulurus Statement from the Heart, we'd
Speaker 4: had the Voice Referendum, we had the challenge that doctor
Speaker 4: g Unipingu had made to the Commonwealth Government for reparations
Speaker 4: for the loss of land and culture that had happened
Speaker 4: in nineteen sixty three, and the finding in his favor.
Speaker 4: It was impossible not to include all of those things
Speaker 4: in a reckoning of what had happened over the last
Speaker 4: sixty years to bring us to the point that we
Speaker 4: are today, Because the same thing that the people were
Speaker 4: asking for through the Bark petitions in nineteen sixty three
Speaker 4: was the very thing that the Voice Referendum was essentially
Speaker 4: in big picture talking about, which is a voice. Obviously
Speaker 4: on the small scale, it was asking for or a
Speaker 4: change to the Australian Constitution. And that's the part that
Speaker 4: Australian said no to. And I think it's really important
Speaker 4: to remember that. In Meghan Davis who was so such
Speaker 4: a leader in the Ulary's statement from the Heart and
Speaker 4: the Voice referendum has made this point now, which is
Speaker 4: that Australians in twenty twenty three said no to a
Speaker 4: particular word changing to a particular line in the Constitution.
Speaker 4: They didn't say no to everything that has to do
Speaker 4: with aboriginal tyrest Rate Islander writes.
Speaker 3: I mean that's I think it's an important thing to remember.
Speaker 3: It's a fascinating way to think about it, though, because
Speaker 3: part of what that's suggesting is that the sticking point
Speaker 3: for people was a mistaken belief that a historical document
Speaker 3: or artifact should somehow be unchanging or sacrisanct, that it's
Speaker 3: not something that can be fluid as times changes, needs change.
Speaker 3: But the Constitution's a fixed point, and people are uncomfortable
Speaker 3: with the idea of interrogating that fixed point. You know,
Speaker 3: that's a failure of imagination when it comes to how
Speaker 3: history functions.
Speaker 4: Surely, absolutely, and I hope one of the ways in
Speaker 4: which this book functions now that Nakudaruk functions. And I
Speaker 4: didn't set out with this expressly, but given that we
Speaker 4: have had that referendum on the Voice, one of the
Speaker 4: things that I hope people can read is the way
Speaker 4: in which the Bark petitions themselves, which were documents sent
Speaker 4: by the Yawngal people to the Federal Parliament in nineteen
Speaker 4: sixty three to protest against the incursion of mining on
Speaker 4: their land. They weren't rejecting mining per se. What they
Speaker 4: were protesting about was the lack of consultation with them
Speaker 4: as the landowners and any form of compensation, because this
Speaker 4: essentially broke yourngal law. Grew had to ask permission of
Speaker 4: each other to come onto each other's clan lands, and
Speaker 4: they had to give something in exchange if they took
Speaker 4: resources from those clan lands. And what these documents show
Speaker 4: is the normal people who you might like to think
Speaker 4: were stone Age people. Lots of newspaper reports at the
Speaker 4: time called them that the stone Age people who were unchanging, inflexible,
Speaker 4: who were tied to custom. What the Bark petitions actually
Speaker 4: show was they were able to gracefully generously find a
Speaker 4: way to speak nation to nation within their sense of
Speaker 4: sovereignty to the parliament, blending the literacy of the colonizers
Speaker 4: with their own language and with the motifs of their
Speaker 4: cosmology their spirituality. I mean, if you know how to
Speaker 4: read the painted designs that are on the outside of
Speaker 4: the petitions, these are essentially landholding documents. So what I
Speaker 4: hope when people read this book reflecting on the Voice Referendum,
Speaker 4: is that they might be able to sense that history
Speaker 4: is not so set in stone, that it's created by bold,
Speaker 4: innovative moves of empathy, of imagination, of generosity, of spirit,
Speaker 4: of hospitality, and that the Bark Petitions and the Knakudaruk
Speaker 4: the youngal words for them I think express all of that.
Speaker 3: Claire Rand's new book, Nakudaruk the Bark Petitions is available
Speaker 3: everywhere now, and if you're anne of Claire's work, look
Speaker 3: for her podcast with Eve Reese Archive Fever. There's a
Speaker 3: lot of history murdery to enjoy right there.
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