In a 2016 Meanjin essay one of this country’s most celebrated writers, Alexis Wright, asked us a fundamental question in relation to storytelling and the role of the writer. ‘What happens when you tell somebody else’s story?’ she asked, in a thoughtful piece of writing that did not demand that white Australia not engage with the story of Aboriginal people (as some have concluded). In addressing the question, Wright asked of each of us, Aboriginal and ‘settler’ both, that we give deeper consideration to the act of telling stories and take greater responsibility for the decisions we make as writers. We may make a choice to respond to individual creative impulses, or choose to restrain ourselves from acting on those impulses in favour of making decisions of greater cultural value. Wright was clear about the consequences of the stories of Aboriginal people being told by others: ‘We do not get much of a chance to say what is right or wrong about the stories told on our behalf … it just happens, and we try to deal with the fallout.’

Too often, Aboriginal people deal with the humiliation of witnessing our stories being appropriated by outsiders, while living with the experience of having our own voices or those of our Elders, in particular, being ignored, silenced or discredited. In his 2009 book Guilt about the Past, the legal scholar and novelist Bernard Schlink writes, in relation to the oppression of people by the dominant society, ‘there are people who were not heard and not seen who want their truth acknowledged’. Schlink concludes that people who have suffered discrimination and trauma need to have their dignity returned, with restorative justice including the right to control the dissemination of their own story. In colonial societies such as Australia, the work of justice must include not only the right of Aboriginal people to control and speak our own stories, but also the beginnings of a genuinely postcolonial dialogue with non-Aboriginal people, the forging of new and productive narratives.