History Now 2025 Wood Memorial Lecture in History: 'Creative Histories: A Conversation'

Episode Transcript
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Catherine Shirley (00:01):
Welcome to the History Now podcast series,
brought to you by the HistoryCouncil of New South Wales in
partnership with Chau Chak WingMuseum and the Vere Gordon
Childe Centre at the Universityof Sydney.
In this episode, History Nowteams up with the Wood Memorial
Lecture Team to stage anin-conversation event focusing
on creative histories.

(00:22):
Session Chair, Dr.
Sophie Loy Wilson from theUniversity of Sydney, holds a
conversation with threeextraordinary scholars who have
drawn on lived experiences anddifferent methodologies to
produce creative histories thathave made an impact on how we
think about and do history.
These speakers are Dr.

(00:43):
Shauna Bostock, a Banjalungwoman whose research focuses on
the multi-generational historyof her Aboriginal ancestors,
Andre Dao, an award-winningauthor and researcher from
Naarm, Melbourne.
And Katerina Teaiwa , Professorof Pacific Studies at the
School of Culture, History andLanguage at the Australian

(01:04):
National University.
She's a scholar, artist,activist, and nationally
award-winning teacher.

Kirsten Mackenzie (01:13):
Good evening and welcome.
My name is Kirsten Mackenzie,and I begin by acknowledging
that we meet tonight on thelands of the Gadigal people of
the Eura Nation.
We acknowledge the tradition ofcustodianship and law of the
country on which the Universityof Sydney campuses stand.
We pay our respects to elderspast and present, to those who

(01:33):
have cared and continue to carefor country and to First Nations
people present with us tonight.
It's a great honor for me tolive and work on these lands,
particularly as one who was bornin South Africa on the lands of
the Amazulu people.
It is my 28th year living onthis continent, my 24th living
uh working at the University ofSydney.

(01:54):
I think I need a timeout forgood behaviour.
Um and to some of you, it mightseem incongruous that I speak
to you now as chair ofAustralian history.
I've been privileged to holdthis position since 2023, one
supported by a bequest from theNew South Wales Parliament to
the University of Sydney anduntil recently known as the

(02:14):
bicentennial chair.
But as I welcome you with myaccented migrant voice, we
gather tonight to honour andcontinue the legacy of another
migrant, George Arnold Wood,who, like myself, came to
Australia in the pursuit ofhistory.
Wood was born in 1865 inLancashire, England, and

(02:34):
delivered his own inauguraladdress, uh, in his own
inaugural lecture asCharleston's chair in
Australia's first historydepartment on 22nd of May, 1891.
By then the university hadalready been in existence for
four decades.
So they were a little late withtheir um endowment, with their
establishment of a chair inhistory.

(02:55):
We recognize Wood for his rolein establishing the department,
for professionalizing and forgiving intellectual
respectability to modern historyin Australia, a discipline
still striving for recognitionat that time.
Wood was no anti-imperialist,but he faced censure from the
university senate for hisprotests against the conduct of

(03:17):
the South African War, andparticularly the treatment of
women and children inconcentration camps.
My own great-grandfather was achild held in these very camps
as Wood raised his voice againstit.
In the year after Wood's deathin 1929, a memorial fund was
established in recognition ofhis foundational work, and in

(03:38):
1949, the first of the Woodmemorial lectures in his honor
was given.
These lectures are emblematicof our colleagues' dedication to
research and teaching and tothe strengths of Australian
history and of history inAustralia at this institution.
At a time when the humanitiesare under intense pressure, our

(03:58):
discipline is thriving againstthe odds.
Our student numbers at thisuniversity, I'm pleased to say,
are rising.
Reading Wood's 1891 inaugurallecture and preparing these
remarks, I was struck by thefact that he begins it with the
very same assertion that westill ground our core unit in uh
history majors today.

(04:21):
That history is produced by andwithin the urgencies of its own
time.
This is a central theme of ourconversation tonight.
My final duty is to thank thosewho've made tonight possible,
our fearless leaders, MarkMcDonald, Chair of Discipline,
and Chris Hilliard, interim headof school of the School of
Humanities, and Tylus Professorof History, our TILAS

(04:43):
professional staff at theschool, particularly Lauren
Picker.
I'd like to thank Craig Barkerfrom Char Chakwing Museum for
including us in the History Nowpodcast series he's put together
in collaboration with the NewSouth Wales History Council.
My inspiring colleagues, JamesFinlay and Nira Kandasami,
devised this event together withMike and with Sophie Loy

(05:04):
Wilson.
Sophie will be chairingtonight's session and
introducing our speakers.
Senior lecturer in history,Sophie is an outstanding scholar
of Chinese Australian history,combining expertise in labor
history, cultural history, andnew histories of capitalism.
Her next book comes out of herARC funded DECRA project and is

entitled Chinese Business: Secrecy and Survival in White (05:26):
undefined
Australia 1850 to 1950, and it'sgoing to be an absolute crap.
Her work has beentransformative in our
understanding of what Australianhistory is and how it should be
produced.
And I can think of no betterperson to move the Wood Memorial
Lecture conversation forwardwith our three guest speakers.

(05:48):
Before I pass over to Sophie,I'm just going to ask Naomi
Duncan Parry, who's president ofthe New South Wales History
Council, to say a few words.

Naomi Parry Duncan (05:58):
Excellent.
So thanks very much, Kirsten.
And look, welcome everybody onbehalf of the History Council of
New South Wales to this veryspecial event.
And so I'm Naomi Parry Duncan.
I am the very newly electedpresident of the History
Council.
And we're very proud to bepartnering with the Chow Chat
Wing Museum this year to presentthe History Now series, which

(06:20):
is a continuation of what we didlast year, but we've done a new
venue with Craig's Stellarsupport.
So thank you very much.
And it is really fabulous to beworking with the discipline of
history within Sydney Universitytonight to present the Wood
Memorial Lecture.
And how good is it that it's aconversation and not a lecture?
Like that's really awesome.
I mean, lectures are good, butconversations I think are

(06:43):
better.
So history now owes itsexistence to passionate
historians who have wanted tobring new perspectives to all
aspects of historical practice.
And as we're witnessing rightnow in this time of um very odd
global chaos, um historyperspective does help us to make
at least some sense of it, evenif it also like the historical

(07:05):
precedents perhaps are not thebest.
Um history is absolutelyessential for shining a light on
culture and other cultures andfor the civic values that we
depend on to regulate ourbehaviour in the world and our
society.
So um history is under attack,it is um there are fundamental

(07:27):
fights going on within history.
So um hug the historians aroundyou because we do actually need
it.
So our speak not while they'retalking though.
So um our speakers tonight areextraordinary scholars that have
drawn on lived experience anddifferent methodologies to
produce creative histories thathave made an impact on how we

(07:49):
think and do history.
So I am very grateful to um toall of you for speaking, to
everyone here, and I'm gonnahand over to Craig, who will be
the MC from this point forward.
So thank you very much.

Sophie Loy-Wilson (08:04):
Okay.
Welcome everybody.
I'm so honored uh to bechairing uh this George Arnold
Wood Memorial lecture inhistory.
I'm gonna invite a wonderfulspeaker to sit down.
They've been standing up forquite a while.
So please um feel good to takeyour seats.
I'll join you in a second.
I'm gonna introduce some of theideas and thinking behind the

(08:25):
conversation that I'm so excitedfor us to have tonight.
So, uh, nalawala yerabaranalayan.
Welcome to come, let us sit,let us talk on unceded Gadigal
land, Eora country.
So I'm so excited to be heretonight.

(08:47):
I want to thank you all forcoming.
Right now, community mattersmore than ever.
And all of you coming tonightis a commitment to listening, to
challenging the powerstructures that continue to
wreak havoc um in our world uhtoday.
So thank you so much for beinghere.
Today we are going to hear fromthree historians who have all

(09:07):
found new emancipatory ways tocreate history in the present.
So I'm delighted to welcomeKaterina Diawa, Andre Dow, and
Shauna Bostock.
So please um join me up andeach writer has generously
shared their idea of family,kin, and community with us.
They brought the the selfthemselves into their writing in

(09:31):
brave and generous ways whilealso forcing a confrontation
with a larger question.
How to write history in aviolent world riven with
imperial, environmental, andindeed spiritual destruction.
How to find hope and meaningthrough storytelling in such a

(09:52):
world.
Is there a way to remember thepast, inherit the past with all
its accompanying injustices andconfusions that somehow creates
a future in the present?
So, what I'm gonna do now isI'm gonna introduce uh each
panelist, um, and then umthey're going to share some of

(10:13):
their work with you inconversation with me.
We're gonna come together for aconversation at the end, and
then right at the end, we'regoing to have a Q&A.
So start thinking now about thequestions you want to ask uh
these wonderful thinkers andwriters.
Okay, so our first uh uhpanelist today is uh Professor
Katarina Tiawa.
Okay, and Katerina is ascholar, artist, activist,

(10:37):
dancer, and a professor ofPacific Studies at the
Australian National University.
She is the author of a bookthat means a lot to me: the
brilliant Consuming OceanIslands, Stories of People and
Phosphate in Banaba.
Apart from her celebratedscholarly record, she is a
committed teacher andcommunicator, having won not one

(10:57):
but two National TeachingExcellent Award Excellence
Awards at ANU.
On top of being a teacher and ahistorian, she's also uh a
curator and has toured multiplevisual arts exhibitions around
the world, drawing attentions tohistories of imperial phosphate
mining in Kiribati and theensuring displacement and

(11:17):
creative survival of bunabuns onRabi in Fiji.
Okay, so these exhibitions havebeen shown around the world,
including in places likeKathmandu and Hong Kong.
Is that right?
Katarina, yeah.
She's also been a consultantwith UNESCO and the Secretariat
of the Pacific Community onCultural Mapping, Planning and
Policy in Oceania.
Okay, so I'm delighted towelcome uh Katarina.

(11:40):
Um, our second panelist uh tomy right is Andre Dow.
Um Andre is a writer, artist,and activist who lives on NAM
country in Melbourne.
His debut novel, A NAM, drawingon his own family history, won
the Prime Minister's LiteraryAward for Fiction uh in the New
South Wales Premier's LiteraryAward for New Writing, and was

(12:03):
shortlisted for the MilesFranklin Literary Award and the
Voss Literary Award.
In 2024, he was named a SydneyMorning Herald Best Young
Australian novelist.
He is the co-founder of Behindthe Wire, the award-winning oral
history project documenting thestories of adults and children
who have been detained by theAustralian government after

(12:24):
seeking asylum in Australia.
I highly recommend readingAndre's incredible piece on
Manis Island, What I Heard AboutManis Island, written after he
listened to 14 hours, right,Andre, of recordings from Manis
Island.
Okay.
Andre is also an artist whosework has been exhibited along
with a larger collective at theIan Potter Museum of Art in

(12:47):
Melbourne and the City Galleryin Wellington.
And finally, our third panelistis Shauna Bostock over here.
Shauna writes as anacademically trained and
rigorous historian with anabsolute and unshakable
accountability to the family andcommunity she comes from.
And this positioning iscombined with a rare capacity to

(13:10):
connect directly with herreaders, whoever they may be.
And I'm quoting from awonderful review of Shauna's
book by Victoria Haskins, who'shere tonight, who talks about
Shauna's conversational stylewith her readers, her commitment
to engaging her readers withher own family story and
entwining them in their fate.
Sean is also an IndigenousAustralian research editor at

(13:30):
the National Centre of Biographyat ANU.
For her PhD thesis, she tracedher four Aboriginal
grandparents' family lines asfar back as possible in the
historical written record.
Her thesis was published asReaching Through Time, Finding
My Family Stories, and won theCommunity and Regional History
Prize at the 2024 New SouthWales Premier's History Awards.

(13:51):
Sean has also published widely,and I highly recommend her
recent Griffith Review piece,Home as a Weapon of Cultural
Destruction, recently published.
So it's been such an incrediblepleasure to read these
incredible works of history inpreparation for tonight.
Hope you can hear theexcitement in my voice.
So, Katerina, I want to startwith you, and thank you for

(14:14):
sitting through all that.
I want to ask you about yourprocess.
So you're someone, as you'veyou've said and you've written
in your book, that in order tokind of engage with history, you
read the linear, as you say,the linear and encyclopedic
accounts of the past of Bannaba,the place that you've brought

(14:35):
alive for all of us.
You read these linear andencyclopedic accounts of
historians and travel writers,but it left you wanting.
Okay.
You weren't satisfied with theway that history had been
approached.
So I want to ask you about howyou began uh telling the story
differently.
What frustrated you and whatwas your creative process?
Thanks so much.

Katarina Tiawa (14:56):
Um na Maori and Nisambulavinaka, everyone.
Um thank you so much to theorganizers for having me here
today, and thank you to myfellow panelists as well.
Um just want to acknowledgethat we're on indigenous uh
lands and we don't take thatrelationship lightly at all.

(15:17):
Um, it's something that's veryimportant to me as an indigenous
Bannaban woman as well, um, andparticularly because the
histories of Bannaba are sodeeply entangled with empire and
extraction and colonialism andcapitalism uh in Australia too.
So in response to yourquestion, I I want to start with

(15:40):
um two things that have shapedmy process.
One is my family, um, and thisis a very small portion of my
family, believe it or not, uh,from Rumbi Island in Fiji.
I have literally just come fromthis trip.
Um, so if you see me looking alittle bit fatigued, a little

(16:01):
bit weary, it's because I justspent um nine days on Rumbi
Island with my family or withpart of my family doing um uh
ongoing work to support Bannabanhuman rights.
Um, when I read all of thesehistories of Bannaba in the
process of trying to figure outhow we got to Fiji in the first

(16:25):
place because we're notindigenous to Fiji, um I quickly
realized that aside from beingquite violent history uh of
extraction and displacement ofthe Banabin people, um it was uh
also a history that didn'trepresent the experience of the
island itself.

(16:45):
So two things are at the centerof my work, the people and the
land.
Um, with the people uhfollowing the people and
following their stories, it'sit's part of the regular
methodology in history and inanthropology and in many
disciplines and fields.
Um, and so there were lots ofmethods, ethnographic,

(17:07):
interviews, qualitative researchthat I could draw on for that.
But the part that was reallydifficult for me was the land.
And so my first entry point isthrough kinship, it's through my
family, it's who I am, where Icome from.
Um, my father is uh IndigenousBanabin and E.
Kidibas from Tabitower.
He has nine brothers andsisters.

(17:29):
They all have, on average,between four to ten children,
um, and they all have children.
And so when I started doing myresearch, my first um question
was who are we?
Where do we come from?
And how on earth did we gethere to Fiji?
Because it was very clear to usthat we were not indigenous.
So as I started to unpack ourfamily story, that took me to

(17:53):
the island.
And then I was like, holy crap,what happened to this island?
Because it was a very violenthistory of extraction and
decimation, where 22 milliontons of a six square kilometer
island were extracted and movedand spread across the fields of
Australia and New Zealand forglobal mass agriculture.

(18:14):
So part of Australia and NewZealand's um uh agricultural
development and success in thisworld comes off the back of
extraction of both Banaba andNauru.
So my starting point isdefinitely my family because
kinship and um relationships arereally, really important and

(18:35):
extend back deeply across timeand place.
But then the second part is theisland um itself.
Do you want me to continue?
Do you have another question inthere?
Or I'll do my 10 minutes now inresponse to your question.
Okay.
So one of the ways that I triedto understand what happened to
the island was putting aside allthose, and there weren't too

(18:59):
many, but there were some bigdominant histories of Barnaba,
really authoritative, reallycelebrating the history of the
companies, the Australian andNew Zealand and British
companies that extracted all thephosphate for superphosphate
fertilizer.
Um, but what was notsatisfactory to me is that these

(19:20):
did not reflect not justsetting aside the experiences of
the Bannabin people who weredisplaced and who were
completely railroaded.
Literally, they built traintracks across the island to
extract the phosphate, but theisland itself was broken up and
fragmented and shipped off.
So it's basically like takingthe land from under your house.

(19:43):
Here's your house, you've beenliving there for thousands of
years, your ancestors have beenliving there for thousands of
years, then they come and theygo, oop, we want that soil.
We want those rocks.
Those rocks in that soil arereally, really valuable for us.
So they move your homes andthey start digging.
So I wanted to tell a historyof Banaba that reflected the

(20:03):
materiality of that story,meaning, where's the island?
Where did it go?
Where did it flow to?
Which animals ate it?
Which plants and things weregrown off the back of it.
And so by following andtracking the island itself, I
began to understand ourhistories as deeply fragmented.

(20:24):
And what historians andscholars usually try to do is
like sew it all back together insome beautiful meta narrative
of empire and colonialism andall of those things and make it
look seamless and wonderful.
And that is not satisfactory tome because we are not like

(20:45):
that.
We are a fragmented, displaced,traumatized people.
We also have a lot of joy and alot of humor and all of those
things as well.
But there is nothing perfectand nothing sewn perfectly
together about our experiencessince displacement in 1945.
So I needed my histories toreflect the reality of the

(21:08):
people and the reality of theland itself.
When I talk about land, I go tothe rocks.
I'm not talking about land justmetaphorically or conceptually
or poetically.
That's all nice too, but I amreally deadly serious about
little bits of rock and stoneand dust floating in the air, or

(21:30):
dust floating all over thefarmlands, or being dropped out
of the back of top dressingplanes as they were in New
Zealand.
And once you get to that level,it's really hard to sew the
pieces back together.
So when I was doing this uhresearch in the National
Archives of Australia and alsoin the Bar Smith Adelaide

(21:52):
Library, where they have thisamazing Pacific collection that
is seeded by Harry and HonorMaud.
If you know your CentralPacific history, you might know
who those two are, formerresident commissioner of the
Gilbert Islands.
I found a lot of text, but itwas the text that was missing
the stories of the island andthe stories of the people.

(22:15):
So I started looking for othersources of history: photographs,
films, objects, whatever youname it.
So the more diverse my sourcesgot, the more I wanted to honor
the diversity of those sourcesand not put them into text.
Now, maybe that's because Ihave a background in dance and

(22:36):
the arts, and I'm a veryembodied person, and I can't sit
still for too long, and I can'thandle too much text in my
life.
Um, in high school and in uni,I had a uh degrees in science.
Um, so I'm not patient enoughwith the text, and so it's
really nice to be sitting herewith two beautiful writers who
are very patient with text andwith words and check and recheck

(23:00):
all of those things.
But I'm much more comfortablewith movement and with objects
and with all kinds of things indifferent forms and formats.
So I wanted to tell andreconstruct that story using the
diversity of sources and tomake sure I kept it fragmented
but compelling and interestingand hopefully engaging to

(23:24):
various audiences.
I didn't like what otherhistorians had done with this
work, where they were like, yay,phosphateers, they're so
awesome.
They came from Sydney with gunsand they pointed them at the
natives and then they took theirland.
Yeah, that that's not cool atall.
So I went through the archivesand pulled different kinds of

(23:45):
content and then reconstructedit in order to tell the story in
different ways.
So it's a reimagining, it's areconstruction, but for me, it's
also a process of healing.
So as I'm reconstructing thesefragments, to me, I can't be on
the island, I can't fix itbecause all five governments

(24:07):
that are now involved with itare like, yeah, no time for
this, no priority here.
Oh dear, isn't that awful?
That island was destroyed, outof sight, out of mind.
So I've got to do some kind ofhealing in another way.
So every single one of myexhibitions is a bit of putting
the island back together.

(24:27):
So you'll see a lot of text,you'll see a lot of, they're all
straight from the archives, thetext, um, or the words and
quotes from different umBannabins over time and space.
But then you have thepinnacles, which are the bones
of the land on the backs of thewhat I imagine are the sacks
that took the superphosphate andspread it over all the fields.

(24:50):
So everything is bringing theland and the people back
together in the same space, butnot in a perfect way.
And I also have images of myfamily in there.
That's um my curator YukiKihara, who's been an amazing
mentor for me over the last fewyears.
And then part of the exhibitionhas always been a 100-year

(25:13):
history of mining on Banaba,where I pull out old rickety
dinkity Kodak footage from thearchives, and I've reconstructed
it with my own filming on theisland.
Um, so these are some differentiterations of Project Banaba.
This is the one from the BishopMuseum in Honolulu, which was

(25:33):
another quite different umiteration, and we might come
back to this when we continueour conversations later.
But you can see bits of theisland and bits of the people,
and you see in the middle bodyof the land, body of the people
around quite what looks like aniconic Pacific hula skirt.
It's actually made of phosphatesacks from Napier, where the

(25:57):
Cook Islanders who would do thatdancing would go down to the
factory and say, Hey, can wehave some of your sacks?
Because it was the perfectmaterial to strip and make into
a dancing skirt.
And so when I explained that tothe Cook Islanders who lived
there, they were like, Okay, ohdear.
And then they gave me one ofthe skirts and said, put that in

(26:17):
your exhibition and tell thisstory.
So again, the materiality issort of coming back to the fore.
Um, this is the currentiteration of Project Banaba,
which is Dance Protest, which ishere in the Chau Chak Wing
Museum on the bottom floor.
Um worked really closely withRebecca Conway and Yuki Kihara

(26:38):
on it, and it's taking thiswhole story in a different
direction.
Um, so I'm just going to endwith I've been telling this
story for a long time about theland and the people and my
family.
And then my sister passed away,and she was this big Pacific
feminist poet, scholar, artist,activist.
And I was always like, Yeah, mysister's the feminist, so I'm

(27:02):
just going to chill and not beone.
But now that she's passed, herwork and her passion to tell
Pacific women's stories and totell Bannabin women's stories
has now feels like aresponsibility for me to take
up.
So there's a very real kind ofum feminist young woman and

(27:23):
multi-generational story ofcontinuing the activism and the
resistance of Bannabin women,which is part of the story that
I am now ready to tell that Ididn't fully tell in my book,
where we were we were thosewomen who held on to the trees
when the bulldozers came.
That's not just something theydo in other parts of the world.

(27:45):
The women were like, this isnot cool.
We don't want you to take thisland or any of these trees.
And so I'm starting toreconstruct um that more
matriarchal part of our story inthis iteration and hope to take
it forward soon.
So that is how I do history.

So, you know, it strikes me, uh, Katerina and
Shauna and Andre, that we livein a world where the processes
that all three of you writeabout, processes of imperialism,
violent resource extraction,violent globalization, the
destruction of the environment,dehumanization and war are more
urgent than ever.

(28:26):
And I feel, Katerina, that youshowed a faith in your readers
to understand a fragmented storyat a time when they are still
being sold a very neatcapitalist narrative about why
resource extractions can makeyou richer and happier.
So we need to acknowledge thatthe story you're telling is a
counter story of resistanceagainst a lot of stories that
justify resource extraction allthe time in our ears every day.

(28:51):
Um, so we're gonna come back tothe issue of resistance and
activism, but I wanted to uhmove on to to Andre, which we
had kind of hours.
Um uh and I'm looking forwardto us coming together for
conversation.
Andre, um, in your beautifulbook, and um, you write about
your grandparents.
Um, you write about manymembers of your family, you

(29:11):
write about all your loved ones.
In that book, as in the book ofthese other two authors, we get
to meet a lot of loved ones.
Um, your grandfather, you tellus, was imprisoned for 10 years
uh in Chihal Prison, a place youwrite that you have been
imagining and reimagining sinceyou were a teenager.
He spent, you write, 300, 600,3,653 days there as a prisoner

(29:35):
of the communists.
Um his time in this place isone of many stories, many forms
of inheritance you confront inan arm.
You ask us and yourself, whatam I supposed to do with the
stories handed down to me?
I want to know how you figuredout that the way to do this was
this beautiful book.

(29:56):
What is your relationship towriting and history?
How did you decide to tell usthis story?

André Dao (30:07):
Thanks so much, Sophie, for that um that
beautiful question.
Um, I just want to begin byacknowledging uh the Gadigal
people, the traditionalcustodians of the land we're
meeting on.
Um and I pay my respects totheir elders, past and present,
and um, and in particular, uh,you know, think about the
responsibility that places on meas uh as a storyteller and and

(30:30):
as a legal scholar, um, torespect their ongoing um
sovereignty.
Um Sophie, I guess um, inrelation to the um to Anam uh
and how I came upon I guess theform of this book, which is if
you pick it up, it's quitefragmented, it doesn't follow a

(30:53):
linear path.
Um, some of what's in there istrue in the sense of I found
things in documents or inphotos, and I describe those
documents and those photos.
Um, some of the things in thereare true in the sense that
they're the things that mygrandfather told me or my
grandmother told me about theirexperiences.

(31:14):
And some of those things um Iimagined and and made up, but I
hope are true in some other umin some other sense.
But I think I came upon tellingmy grandfather's story in this
particular way really through uma series of failures.
So, you know, I tried to writeit as a straightforward history.

(31:36):
Um, and in particular, I triedto write it that way because I
felt that's what my familywanted.
They wanted me to take aforgotten history, um, uh, you
know, a man who had suffered andwhose suffering had not been
acknowledged, um, and to givesome sort of voice and

(31:56):
visibility to that life.
Um, and so as a young man, Ithought that the way to do that
was to write a kind of history.
Um and I couldn't do it, and Icouldn't do it because um the
documentary evidence wasn'tthere, um, and that's has
something to do with thecolonial history of Vietnam.
Um, and but I also couldn't doit because um because he passed

(32:20):
away, and so I wasn't able tocontinue to speak to him.
Um, I also wasn't able to do itbecause um I actually found at
a certain point that just bywriting down what he had said or
what um I found in the thearchive, so to speak, didn't get
anything close to um what itfelt like to be part of my

(32:43):
family.
Um and so I had to sort of findanother way to write it.
Um and and I guess um, yeah, Ithought for the kind of the 10
minutes um of this uh uh sharedlecture, and it's such a
privilege to be sharing um thisspace with with both of you.
Um I thought I'd I guess I'dtell a story or really a series

(33:05):
of stories about how I approachhistory, and so it's not so much
about how I wrote Anam, but umreally on the sort of work I've
been doing since um sincewriting Anam.
Deep in the Metropolitan Museumof Art is a room in which
Socrates is always about todrink the fatal cup of hemlock.
The room is dedicated to theart of the age of revolution.

(33:29):
Alongside Socrates hangportraits of an Egyptian
mamelouque, a refugee fromNapoleon's failed invasion, a
teenage aristocrat, and a pairof apprentices in the studio of
Jacques-Louis David.
The didactic on the wall talksof the winds of revolution
sweeping from America and Franceto Haiti and Greece and India
and Peru.

(33:49):
But the painting I am lookingfor is not there.
For years it hung here, aportrait of a seven-year-old boy
in a red and gold outfit.
He too was affected by arevolution, though not one of
the ones mentioned in thedidactic.
He is a prince, the son of theking of Dang Chom, or what the

(34:11):
French call Cauchin Sheen.
His name is Gun, and hisfather, deposed by a peasant
revolt led by a beetle nuttrader, is in exile in Bangkok.
Gunn has arrived at Versailleson the eve of the French
Revolution to seek an alliancewith Louis XVI to win back his
father's throne.
For years I've been haunted bydigital reproductions of this

(34:35):
painting, by thoughts of thisboy and his chaperone, a bishop
named Pignot de Bahin.
I had been wondering what ithad been like for the boy to
make the months-long journeyfrom Southeast Asia to France,
to play in the long hallways ofVersailles with Louis' children,
to become, for a season, asensation at court, a must-have

(34:56):
accessory for Marie Antoinetteand her circle.
I had been hoping by going tothe Met and seeing this portrait
for myself to exorcise Gann'sghost, or perhaps to commune
with it.
But my arrival was ill-timed.
After years on loan, the Methad returned the painting to the

(35:17):
Societe des Missions Étrangersde Paris, the Catholic
missionary organization that hadsent Pignot de Bahane to the
Orient in the first place.
So I had missed my encounterwith Prince Gann in New York.
But what was it that I wasreally looking for?
It was not the painting itself,but the boy that it claimed to

(35:38):
have captured.
By chance, not long after Ileft New York, I had another
encounter with Gann in a novelby the French writer Georges
Bataille.
In a curious coincidence, ifyou believe in such things, the
name of the novel was Annam,almost precisely the same as
mine, but with two ends ratherthan one.

(36:00):
Bataille begins his book withthe boy prince in a decayed,
dying Versailles.
The boy is torturously lonely.
He is surprised by the cold ofautumn and has an awkward,
stifling audience with Louis,and then he dies of pneumonia.
For a while I am outraged.
Gunn had not died in France farfrom home.

(36:20):
He had sailed back with Pignotde Bahane via Pondicherry, where
they raised money and men.
Then they had joined hisfather's decade-long campaign to
unite the kingdoms of what wetoday call Vietnam.
But Batay had killed off thelittle Vietnamese boy,
preferring instead that hismissionaries should travel alone
to Annam, which itself wouldonly be the exotic backdrop for

(36:43):
the spiritual and existentialsolitude of missionaries
forgotten on the far side of theearth by their church and their
king.
But then, what was it that Iwas really looking for?
Not the boy himself.
Was I not like Bataille lookingat Gan to try to see someone
else?
Indeed, I have been imaginingfor some time now Prince Gan as

(37:06):
one of my cousins, grown up inVietnam and only lately come
here to Australia.
I have been imagining him asone of the migrant workers I
interviewed between lockdowns, aslicer at an abattoir, a picker
on a blueberry farm, prized forhis slender Asian fingers, able
to pick quietly and gently.

(37:27):
I have been reading over oldtranscripts with migrants from
Taiwan and Fujian and Penang.
What is it that I am lookingfor?
They talk about work and homeand the Australian landscape.
But I am looking for somethingdifferent.
I am looking for who I mighthave been if my mother had not

(37:47):
gotten on a boat, if her boathad not arrived finally at Pilal
Bedong, a Malaysian island in atemporary refugee camp, if she
had not been sent in the end toMelbourne.
I am trying to imagine myselfas one who had stayed rather
than left, or better yet, onewho had stayed and then left.

(38:07):
I look for this cousin, this methat is not me, in the tunnels
under Vinmop village.
The village is just north ofthe DMZ, that zone of non-being,
purged with incessant bombingin Agent Orange.
And though Vinmop is not partof the demilitarized zone, some

(38:28):
668,000 tons of bombs weredropped on this area between
1964 and 1972.
About seven tons for eachinhabitant.
And yet the villagers did notleave.
Instead, they built a networkof tunnels in the limestone.
30 meters underground, I passedsilent wells, kitchens, a

(38:50):
so-called maternity clinic, arecess in the wall where women
gave birth.
What is it that I am reallylooking for in these ruins?
I like to think I'm not likethe other tourists stepping
gingerly across these wet,smooth floors, ducking their
heads, relieved that they willsoon be back in the daylight.
But like any tourists, I amonly passing through.

(39:13):
I can move back and forthbetween the underground and the
open as I please.
And I do go back in to a tunnelthat has been closed.
There are no lights in thistunnel.
I have to use my phone'sflashlight to light my way.
When I stop to take a photo,the flashlight is disabled.

(39:34):
In the sudden dark, I can hearsomething in the walls, the
scuttling, shuffling of littlefeet.
Perhaps this is what I waslooking for: the presence that
remains.
It was in search for thatpresence that I put on this
t-shirt tonight, bearing thewords of Dr.

(39:54):
Ezeddin Shahab, a 28-year-oldpoet and doctor in Gaza.
His poem goes, and if you mustcontinue your war, then do it
without us.
Bomb the dust, starve the wind,colonize the silence.
Thinking with the villages ofInmop, I realize now that

(40:17):
Shahab's play is not a play forthe completion, for the
completion of the genocide.
I am reminded of another poemby another Palestinian, the
playwright Amir Nizar Zwabi.
Published in 2014, in the midstof another war in Gaza, Zwabi
writes, Ten years and sevenoperations later, the mission is

(40:40):
completed.
Upper Gaza is totallyabandoned.
All of Gaza has movedunderground.
Men, women, and children, agreat mass of people.
We dug entire neighborhoods,streets, highways, schools,
theaters, hospitals.
We dug mirror images of theland above that we abandoned.
In the face of genocidaldestruction and colonial

(41:06):
violence, whether today or inwhat we call the past, I think
the role of the writer, of thewitness, is to refuse the
foreclosure of possibilities, tolook underground as it were, to
find the dead still living, andthe living in need of being
remembered.
Thank you.

Right, Andre, thank you.
That was really, reallybeautiful.
We'll come back at the end ofthis incredible uh shared panel
to discussions of uhstorytelling and panel and and
creativity and violence.
But I do now want to turn onthe turn to our final um a

(42:11):
panelist, um to Shauna Bostock.
Um Shauna, in your beautifulbook, um Reaching Through Time,
you might have about yourburning curiosity for the past.
All in every page of that book,the past as fuel, um, your

(42:32):
curiosity for the past as fuelum is palpable to the reader.
In fact, you kind of reachedout with the text, and I felt
like you just grabbed my arm andsaid, come to the archive with
me through me.
You know, and I I really wantedto, I really wanted to do that.
I wanted to ask you about thisfearless truth telling that you
do.
You even thank your readers inthe book at the beginning.

(42:55):
You thank them for theirwillingness to listen, to take
the journey with you, but it'san active listening that you're
asking from your readers.
It's not an easy listening.
I want to know how you gothere.
I know you were a teacher,you've been many, many things in
your life, but how did you getto this burning curiosity for
the past that's fueled yourcreative endeavor?

Shauna Bostock (43:16):
Um, so uh I'm here to share with you some of
the creative ways that Iconverted my PhD thesis into a
published book.
And um, some people might notknow about my research, so I'm
going to share quickly with youa summary of my thesis chapters
before talking about thedifferent processes I used to

(43:39):
write my book.
Um my research focus is myAboriginal family's history.
Traveling back in time, Itraced my four Aboriginal
grandparents' family lines to asfar back as I could go in the
written historic record.
And then my research movedforward from the past to the
present, examining the livedexperience of my ancestors,

(44:02):
which I then situated within thecontext of Australian history.
Um do I just press thisforward?
Oh, yes, fantastic.
Okay, so just I'm I'm I'm doingthese slides to show you my
thesis because then I'm going totalk about the transition to
the book.
And so um I'm just gonna pop upthe slides of each chapter and

(44:25):
um fill you in on my research ina bit more detail before I move
on to the book.
So around 2008, anon-Indigenous Bostok woman
called Thilma contacted my uncleand told me that she had traced
the Bostok family line back tothe 1600s in England.
She informed him that therewere two generations of slave
traders in my family, a fatherand son, both named Robert.

(44:49):
And when slave trading wasabolished, Robert Bostock Jr.
was convicted by the Britishgovernment and transported to
the colony.
So this just really, reallytriggered um my burning
curiosity about our familyhistory because um it was just
so shocking that um that that wefound that Thelma informed us

(45:12):
of this uh slave traders in thefamily.
And my uncle rang me up late atnight one one night, and it was
really late, and I I thoughtsomebody had died, and um and he
told me that Thelma had gottenin touch with him, and he said,
You won't believe what thiswoman had told us about um
Augustus John Bostock, the theum the family member who we

(45:34):
descend from.
AJ's family.
He said they were slavetraders, and he said, Imagine
that, those white fellas must berolling in their graves knowing
we turned out to be a motherblackfellas.
So I used that as an epilogueon um one of my um chapter
headings, and so um um I'm goingto go through the slides now um

(45:55):
to give you an idea of how Iconstructed a thesis about my
family history because um ThelmaThelma excited me um about how
far she went back to the 1600sin England, and I thought, well,
I could start from the presentand go back and join up with
Augustus John Bostock, our uhthe man who where we got our our

(46:17):
family name from.
So that was what was soexciting, and I was just as
curious as all get out.
So this um chapter one wascalled Bunjalung Beginnings, um,
1882 to 1911, and it startedfrom my earliest archival
records, including mynon-Indigenous
great-great-grandfather AugustusJohn Bostock's Conditional Land

(46:37):
Purchase, the encroachment ofwhite settlers onto country,
government land acts, and theimpact of colonization on my
ancestors.
Chapter two was called Born andMarried on the Reserve, um,
1911 to 1934.
Three of my four grandparentswere born on Aborigines
Reserves, and these photos wereall taken at Box Ridge,
Aborigines Reserve, where allfour of my grandparents were

(47:00):
married.
I examined the managed reservesystems and the surveillance and
control of the AboriginesProtection Board and the
indenture of Aboriginal childreninto domestic service for
non-Indigenous um Australians.
I'm just going through thesequickly and these very brief
descriptions, which really don'tgo into the detail, but I want

(47:20):
to be quick because I have somuch to say.
Um so this uh next chapter waschapter three, and it was called
Work and Movement on theLandscape, 1934 to 1946, and
it's a study of Aboriginalsurvival and employment.
After the gold rush, uh thepastoral industry needed

(47:41):
Aboriginal workers, andStockman's work, um, but when
Stockman's work started to fadeaway, many Aboriginal people
became employed in the lumberindustry and clearing land, and
Aboriginal people had to travelall over the country seeking
employment, and we're usuallyonly offered short-term uh
contract work.

(48:01):
And I just want to quickly takeyou back.
Oh, see the top left-handcorner?
That little baby is my father,and um, and that's a tent in the
background.
You can see that it's tied tothe log.
Um, and what that thatphotograph tells me, or what
tells us is that um mygrandmother had to travel with
her family, you know, with youknow, dad's four siblings, and

(48:24):
travel with um my grandfatherbecause he was working for the
CCC, the trip, the constructioncorps that were cutting roads
into mountains and um doing sortof like you know, like like
Chang Gang sort of work, butthat really um hard physical
labour.
And my and and the women andthe children had to travel with
them to be with their spouse tocollect the wages to feed the

(48:46):
children.
So they were sort of um movingall the time.
Um so that's chapter three.
Chapter four was called Exodusfrom the country to the city,
1946 to 1955.
And this chapter describes themass mass exodus from country to
the big cities.
Aboriginal people were fed upwith the government's

(49:09):
surveillance and control, andwere attracted to inner city
factories in Redfern, who neededworkers so badly that they
didn't care about the colour oftheir skin.
And my grandfather Henry justyou know, it really just sort of
tugs at my heartstrings that mygrandfather father Henry was 38
years old when he firstexperienced job certainty in his

(49:30):
life and um had weekends offlike regular people, and um, you
know, um that kind of jobcertainty didn't come to him
until that time in his life.
So chapter five was calledYouth and Modernity and Um
Radicalization, 1955 to 1975.
Aboriginal people becameorganized and formed groups to

(49:51):
help new arrivals from countryareas.
Uh Charles Perkins formed theFoundation for Aboriginal
Affairs to look after socialneeds of Aboriginal people.
And later Aboriginal legalAboriginal Legal Service and
Medical Services wereestablished by Aboriginal
people.
Aboriginal people came togetherto fight for equality and land

(50:12):
rights.
Chapter six was called CreativeExpression and Aboriginal
Voice, 1975 to 2000.
In Redfern, the young radicalshad realized that their protests
were received with hostilityfrom the wider Australian
community.
And they realized that throughsatire and ridicule on stage,
they were able to get theirmessage across to white

(50:34):
Australians.
So creative expression throughwriting and the arts blossomed,
um, as did Aboriginal Pride andSolidarity.
The final chapter of my thesiswas called Ego Histoire, uh,
Reflections of My Life.
Um I read the work of Frenchhistorian Pierre Nora, who

(50:57):
coined the phrase ego histoireto describe the collective
product of his advice tohistorians to write about
themselves.
He argued that spelling outone's involvement with the
material offers a betterprotection than vain protests
about objectivity.
What was a stumbling blockbecomes an advantage, and the
unveiling and analysis ofexistential involvement, rather

(51:21):
than moving away from someimpartial investigation, becomes
instead an instrument forimproving understanding.
And so when pondering um how Iwas going to convert my thesis
into a manuscript, I feltsomewhat um you know forearmed
with possibilities afterlearning about ego histoire.

(51:43):
So I finished my thesis um in2021, and immediately in 2022, I
got a book deal with Alan andUnwin.
Um and uh I wrote it in 2022and it was published in 2023.
Um, Alan and Unwin were very,very specific about um wanting

(52:05):
an what they called a narrativefor the general reader.
They kept flogging me.
It's a narrative for thegeneral reader.
We don't want an academic book,we want this story to be a
narrative for the generalreader, and they just kept
saying it over and over again.
They were not interested inwhat they called thesis speak.
And so even when I was doing mychapters and I was sending them

(52:27):
to my publisher, ElizabethWeiss, um, uh I would send her a
chapter and then she would havea little box beside it saying,
Thesis speak, you know, rewritethis part, thesis speak, rewrite
that.
You know, like for example, inthe introduction of my book, I
break it up into sections undertitles, and I had a section

(52:48):
called Historiography ofAboriginal History, and she's
Thesis speak, history ofAboriginal history, because we
wanted to get it to a generalaudience, and that's exactly
what I wanted to do.
I've been completely motivatedin my research journey to to um
enlighten and to address thenational ignorance of Aboriginal

(53:11):
history.
You know, so many people don'tknow the truth about Aboriginal
history, and um, and and thatthat's my driving force to to
you know to to bring that out tothe wider public.
So I thought it was a fantasticidea because that's exactly
what I wanted.
But that wasn't easy to do atfirst, you know, and finding my

(53:32):
voice, um, uh it seemed to takeme some, you know, quite some
time to find my voice.
But once I I embraced thefreedom of letting go of some
academic norms and writing asthough I was having a
conversation with the reader andhaving a bit of courage to
share my emotions, I found itbecame easier to speak with an

(53:54):
authentic voice rather than acarefully guarded one or you
know, one that's fearful ofjudgment from my peers.
And and so um um I don't knowhow long I'm going, but I've got
three examples uh of writing.
Um so I'll just share them withyou.
Uh this is um um archives thatI found at the Mitchell Library.

(54:17):
I'm going through theAborigines Reserve missionary's
um personal belongings, and andthis is the paragraph that I
wrote in my book, and it seemsto you know tell you my style of
writing, my conversationalstyle, and how I want to involve
the reader in the process ofdiscovering these things with
me, letting the reader know whatI'm thinking.

(54:38):
So I said nothing prepared mefor the shock of being in the
grand reading room at theMitchell Library in Sydney and
discovering that among themissionaries' personal
collection was a photograph ofmy grandmother, uncle, aunt, and
father.
UAM, the United AboriginesMission uh missionary, Mrs.
Alma Smith's collectioncontained photographs that my

(54:59):
grandfather my grandmother hadsent her of my father and his
siblings at various uh times intheir childhood.
It also contained an addressbook that that belonged to Mrs.
Smith, and in its pages she'drecorded a number of addresses
of my grandmother.
The address book proves thatshe maintained contact with my
grandmother decades after sheleft the mission to begin

(55:20):
married life.
This is tangible evidence of anobvious affection between these
two very different women.
And at first I thought it wassweet, but the more I thought
about the missionaries, the moreunsettled I became.
So this picture of themissionaries with children.

(55:40):
I said here was a religiousgroup that, while teaching and
preaching the tenets ofChristianity, found nothing
wrong with being activelyinvolved in separating
Aboriginal babies and youngchildren from their mothers and
families.
Young Aboriginal children andthe Aborigines Protection Board
deemed neglected and removedfrom their families.
I beg your pardon.

(56:01):
Young Aboriginal children thatthe Aborigines Protection Board
deemed neglected and removedfrom their families.
Those who were babies or tooyoung to be incarcerated at the
Aborigines Protection Boardinstitutions were taken to the
UAM's children's home atBombaderi.
The United Aborigines MissionOrganization supported and

(56:22):
perpetuated the removal ofAboriginal children from their
families by providing theAborigines Protection Board with
a repository to deposit them.
I deliberately used the wordrepository because it was a
receptacle to hold Aboriginalinfants and children and deposit
for safekeeping.
If the missionaries did notprovide the Bombardier

(56:44):
children's home, then theAborigines Protection Board
would not have been assuccessful and efficient as they
were in carrying out theirremoval agenda.
So what I'm trying to do withthe reader is sort of show them
things, but also to explain, youknow, a different takeover,
tell them what I'm thinkingabout it.

(57:05):
So I'm sharing that with thereader, you know, my emotions
and my anger and you know awhole gamut of emotions.
And um, so that's kind of myreading style, my writing style.
I'm gonna skip this one and goto this one.
Now there's a bit of backgroundwith Gulf Country Man.
There was a letter written by adaughter of a superintendent of

(57:26):
the Deepine Creek AboriginesReserve, and she said, Oh,
father used to carry a pistolaround with him on the reserve.
And one day there was thisfellow that came from Gulf
Country, and my father said tohim, he held a pistol up, a
Mauser pistol, shot it in theair, and he said, You be a good
boy, Darkie, and we'll get alongfine.

(57:47):
And then she just said, andthen the daughter said in this
letter, Darkie used to walkaround, you know, by himself,
and he seemed to wonder and nottalk to anybody else, and blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah.
So I wrote this paragraph and Isaid, When I see Golf
Countryman in my I I saidfirstly before this paragraph,
this, I said, I refuse to callhim by that name.

(58:08):
I will not disrespect him inthat way.
When I see Gulf Countryman inmy imagination, I see a
traditional man who was forciblytaken over 2,000 kilometres
from his family and his country.
I see Gulf Country Man as a manwho was trying to survive the
old way.
He had the uh that's a typo.
He had the sacred knowledge ofhis country.

(58:29):
He knew where to find water andhow to hunt game and trap fish.
He knew the seasons and whereto find specific bush food all
year round.
He knew how to read nature, butDeeping Crink was not his
country.
It must have seemed like aprison cell compared to the wide
open spaces that he would haveknown.
He was on foreign land.
I imagine him wandering aroundalone on the reserve, yearning

(58:51):
to be on his home country withhis own family and his own
tribal group, and my heart weepsfor him.
So that's a uh, you know, anindication of the kind of the
letdown of my um academic kindof writing to bring that emotion
to the reader.
And um, and it wasn't just sadthings or things that I was

(59:12):
angry about, you know, those,like I said, there was a whole
gamut of emotions, but I got abit of a funny one here too,
which I'll share with youbecause I wasn't backward in
coming forward with that either.
Um one of the reviewers from umfrom the the bookstore here,
um, Better Read Than Dead,Marcus said in a review of my
book that he was surprised athow funny it was, because I

(59:33):
chucked some gags in too just tobreak up, you know, the the big
dense blocks of informationthat I was trying to get to to
the person.
Because um, you know, let's notforget that oh I don't know if
I've mentioned it, or maybe it'sin a latter slide and I'm going
to mention it, but um but umthe you know I wanted to educate
Australia.
It sounds like such a you knowa very sort of um you know it

(59:57):
sounds like a pompous thing tosay, but I wanted To educate
Australia, I wanted to tell themthe truth about Aboriginal
history.
I had this multi-generationalAboriginal family history from
colonization to the present.
Y'all want to know aboutAboriginal history?
Well, I'll tell you.
But anyway, I threw in somejokes, and people, reviewers,
have commented about that.
So I'll share a joke with you.

(01:00:17):
My father um took up acting inlater life.
He had a big and he was incherry pickers, and then he got
out of that for some otherroles, and he was in black
diggers.
Um those are his real medalsthat he's wearing there, by the
way.
And there's a little storyabout them performing at the
opera house and all the big wigsat the brass and generals and
the majors were there.

(01:00:38):
And dad was standing there withthe cast with his medals on and
his combat badge, which says ithas done active service and
this wide, you know.
And um these generals are like,Oh, hello, hello, hello, and
you know, and dad said, uh, ohyes, yes, I I I know those
medals.
And he said, Well, I know themtoo because I earned them, you
know, and they just sort of oh,you know, this this little this

(01:00:58):
little short black fella tellingtelling them have a look at
these, mate.
You know, so that was hisattitude.
But anyway, um Dad was uh I dida a story on on Aboriginal uh
creative expression, and I saiddad thought he must have
impressed someone in thebusiness because shortly after
the production he got thatproduction, he got a call from

(01:01:19):
the Sydney Theatre Companyasking if he would like to play
the role of Chucker in theirproduction of Cherry Pickers by
Kevin Gilbert.
Like Henry in Fountains Beyond,the character Chucker was an
Aboriginal elder.
The story revolves arounditinerant workers wandering on
the country looking for work.
It was brutally honest aboutfamily spirituality and
dispossession.
My father was quite surprisedthat he didn't have to audition

(01:01:41):
for the role, and I rememberteasing him, geez dad, there
must be a shortage of short-fatblackfellas.
So it was good to tuck in somesome um um some some breakers.
Icebreakers, not icebreakers,but uh but kind of where the uh
the the the uh information got abit dense.
I tried to to break it up tokeep the interest of the reader,

(01:02:04):
to tell stories, you know.
So if I if I dropped a a youknow a a big block of
information on the reader, thenI'd come up with you know a
memory or something that I saidor the an amazing uh image and
whatever.
So so I kind of sum things uphere by saying that um I
constantly reminded about mycreative process of writing

(01:02:26):
history.
Um I constantly reminded myselfwho my target audience was, the
general reader who likelyhasn't studied history, but so I
tried to make it reallyinteresting and entertaining and
funny.
I constantly remembered what myoriginal goal was, and that was
to teach Australia truthtelling.
I made sure that blocks ofhistory, uh historical

(01:02:47):
information were broken up withless dense creative writing or
stories, or my observations, ororal history, or letters, or
dialogue with direct quotes,etc.
To retain the reader's interestum and bring these things, um
and I brought these things intothe narrative strategically with
an awareness of what was comingbefore and after the dense

(01:03:08):
blocks of information.
Um I wanted to keep to myintroduction to promise because
in the introduction I promisedthat I would provide the reader
with a balanced view, because asmuch as there was uh you know
an outstanding amount ofoppression and hardship in
Aboriginal history, I want therewas also outstanding examples

(01:03:30):
of non-Indigenous kindness andhumanity to Aboriginal people.
So I wanted to create a balanceand I made sure that I kept my
promise that I put into theintroduction.
And then um I tried to showdon't tell um um and avoided
paraphrasing um um letters orthings that my ancestors said

(01:03:51):
because I wanted to ensure thatmy ancestors' voice voices and
outcries of injustice andemotions were heard and felt by
the reader, and I kept remindingmyself all the way along that I
had to creatively write thenarrative with the end in mind.
I wanted the reader to arriveat um where I wanted them to be,
and um and that was um wherethere's a little bit more we're

(01:04:21):
probably over time, but yeah,okay.
There it is.
That's that's how I did um uhwriting okay, writing the
multi-generational familyhistory from colonization to the
present.
And I tried to write the readercreated to make it read.

Sophie Loy-Wilson (01:04:45):
Oh wow.
Uh such a delight to have thesethree um uh thinkers and
historians kind of up againsteach other, right?
It's like similarities anddifferences.
I want to kind of um um bringit together now, okay?
And uh one of the things thatwe haven't talked about,
although it's evident in allthree of your work, it's so
clear in all three of your work,your work, is and I the idea

(01:05:08):
about change an idea aboutchanging the present.
So all three of you, I think,have been have quite consciously
uh uh spoken into a momentwhere you felt there wasn't
knowledge or visibility about uhthe story you were telling, is
that I think that would be thatwould be a fair thing to say.
Yeah.
I'm not quite sure whether youwould call yourself activist

(01:05:28):
historians, but I think you areall three historians who seek to
change the present, whether itis um a lack of knowledge in the
present about an injustice, orwhether it is simply changing uh
the way that we all movethrough the world and think
about our interconnection witheach other and our ethical
obligation to each other.
So I wanted to ask all three ofyou uh uh about about this

(01:05:52):
question of change.
When you approach your work,um, what did you want to change?
When you approach your worknow, what do you want to change?
What what do you want to whatchange do you want to see in the
world and can history enactthat change?

André Dao (01:06:07):
Sure, thank you.
Um I guess there this idea ofchange or what I wanted to to
change makes me think of the umthe way um I ended, and um,
which is with um a couple ofletters that the narrator writes
to his daughter.
Um, and so this um this sectionof the book was written after

(01:06:30):
I'd um become a father for thefirst time, and um, and I had
been up at that point, I think Ispent about eight years on this
project, kind of trying tograpple with, you know, who was
my grandfather, what did he gothrough, what's the history of
colonial Vietnam and then thewar, and you know, so all of
these sort of big picturequestions, I suppose.

(01:06:51):
Um and uh and in particular, II was trying to also explore
really what did it mean for meor my narrator who was the me
that's not me, um, who uh is akind of you know, uninvited um
son of a refugee family onStolen Lands, right?

(01:07:11):
Like what what does that mean?
How do I, you know, do I belonghere, do I not belong here?
Um in this place that oftenmakes my family, makes me, makes
people that look like me feelnot welcome.
Right?
Like that was part of the thingI'm I'm trying to grapple with.
But then I had all of thisstuff going on, and then I was
looking at um you know mydaughter and thinking, well,

(01:07:35):
what's the use of all of thisyou know stuff for her?
Like and and some of it, youknow, I was thinking and it it
kind of changed the way I wasgrappling with the material with
these questions, instead of itbeing something that frankly,
you know, could lean into theself-indulgent or the um the
overly academic or you know, andso on, you know, wanting to

(01:07:58):
tease out these difficultquestions.
It became a kind of practicalquestion.
Like, what do you tell um a kidabout a history of you know not
belonging, um, which I was sortof committed to politically, of
saying, well, you know, there'ssomething maybe politically
generative about saying, no, Idon't quite belong in this

(01:08:19):
place, um, but I'm stillresponsible for its history in
some way.
Um but then how do I boil thatdown to something that you can
give a child or you know, thatyou can give them a sense of
their history that then impelsthem to change things or to have
agency in their lives.
Um and so that was sort of thatwas a big shift for me, and I

(01:08:40):
kind of I think I took thatshift and put it into the novel
as that's to the extent that ithas a narrative arc, it would be
the narrator realizing that allof this remembering has to come
down to not only what youinherit but what you pass on as
well.

Katarina Tiawa (01:09:00):
Um, yeah, definitely.
There are two major aspects ofmy work.
Um one is to change people'sunderstanding of
Australia-Pacific relations.
So at one point, Pacifichistorians were pretty dominant

(01:09:21):
at the ANU.
You'd be lucky to find a coupleof us left at the ANU because
now history is no longerdominant, and it was from 1947
until the corporatization of theuniversity, and now it's all
about Pacific diplomacy, Pacificaid and development, Pacific

(01:09:45):
international relations, andPacific security.
And this like absolute amnesiaabout the history of
Australia-Pacific relations.
Your average Australian thinksAustralia is constantly giving
to the Pacific.
Its aid budget is the highestin terms of the overall foreign

(01:10:08):
aid budget.
So Australians think Australiajust pays for all of this stuff
in the Pacific with zeroconsciousness of how much
Australia extracted and tookfrom the Pacific through land,
through mining, and labor withall of those plantations that

(01:10:29):
helped make Australia soprosperous.
So one of my goals is to changethis idea of what Australians
think the Pacific means.
And what by that I meanparticularly settler Australia,
the part of settler Australia.
Um so Barnabah and Nauru, andto an extent Manus, are all

(01:10:54):
places that Australia colonized,extracted, controlled in the
past, and then in the present,pretended they were doing a nice
service for them by doing someoffshore detention, all of this
kind of stuff.
And Manus and Nauru were quitedehumanized in that process,

(01:11:15):
with Australians really notunderstanding anything about
actual Papua New Guineans oractual Nauruans and what
Australia had done to thosecountries.
So that's one of the aspects ofmy work is Pacific history
literacy in Australia andactually the truth about
Australia's relationship withthe Pacific, which is extremely

(01:11:37):
extractive.
The second one is justice forBannabah and for Bannabans,
because there were fivestakeholder countries or states
or states in formation involvedin phosphate mining, and four
which really, really, reallyseriously economically benefited

(01:11:57):
from the mining.
And then Bannabans were justlike dropped like hotcakes and
thrown in the dustbin andcompletely forgotten.
And that is an ongoing issue.
Bannabans are like stuck inthis space between Fiji and
Kiddebus.
There's these non-citizens withnon-full rights to a whole

(01:12:19):
range of services, includingthings like electricity and
water.
So I've just come from Rambi,where like the water was shut
off for most of the day.
There's absolutely no fullelectrification of the island,
and there are not, they're noteven close to being a smidgen of
full services on the island forpeople after displacement in
1945.

(01:12:40):
So that's a long time of notfully being incorporated into
Fiji, and Kiribati going, oh,thank God, those troublesome
bannabins are away, so we canbenefit from all the taxes and
everything that the miningbrought in for the country of
Kiribati, which has amulti-million dollar revenue
equalization fund ceded fromphosphate mining.

(01:13:02):
So that's just Kiribati andFiji.
And then there's Australia andNew Zealand and UK, who all
benefited from 80 years ofphosphate mining and extraction,
who had to pay like very, verylittle, if anything, to the
Bannabans who are stillstruggling today.
So those are two aspects of mywork.
One, education, literacy, andawareness about Australia,

(01:13:25):
Pacific histories andrelationships, and a lot of
injustice in there, and thenspecifically justice for Bannaba
and Bannabans.
Thank you.

Shauna Bostock (01:13:53):
I have heard throughout my life people saying
to me and other Aboriginalpeople, oh, that happened a
couple of hundred years ago,can't you just get over it?
You know, and they don't reallyhave the understanding of the
cataclysmic impact ofcolonization on Aboriginal
people and itsmulti-generational legacy.

(01:14:15):
And uh I um am driven toaddress the the national
ignorance of of it all,especially because uh my
research is a multi-generationalexamination, so you can see
that the through the generationsthe impact that the Aborigines

(01:14:38):
Protection Board had onAboriginal people from 1883 to
you know 1960s.
And you know, uh an example ofof my frustration is when I
teach first-year Bachelor ofEducation students, um,
Aboriginal history.
And the first thing I ask themwhen they walk in is um, hands

(01:15:00):
up if you can tell me aboutTyranalius, and you know, like
put their hands up and and theytalk about it, and um and I say,
Um, hands up if you could tellme about the Aborigines
Protection Board, and there'sjust crickets, you know, not a
not a word said, and uh and andthat just astonishes me because
the Aborigines Protection Boardwas such a major part of

(01:15:21):
generations of my family'slives, and the control and
surveillance was extraordinary,which you'll read my book.
Um, so so I'm driven to to umto bring their stories out, and
the book is called ReachingThrough Time because I feel as
though throughout the wholeprocess I've reached into the

(01:15:44):
darkness of that archive, pulledthem out to restore their
humanity.
You know, there's there's a lotof archives in that book that
have never seen the light ofday, but I got access to them
purely because I have fourAboriginal grandparents and I
researched their family lines.
So because I had that directlineage, I got access to a lot

(01:16:05):
of archives.
And if I didn't have thatlineage, then they would never
have seen the light of day.
So there's so much that thiscountry doesn't know about
Aboriginal history, and so Iwant to change that.
Thank you.

Okay, so I've got I've got uh uh one more
question.
Um, and probably after afterthis discussion, we might open
it up to the audience uh forquestions because I can feel the
excitement in the room for theaudience wanting to ask the
three of you uh uh somequestions.
So all three of you have touredwith your work, be it your um
your books, um, be it umexhibitions or dance, all three

(01:16:45):
of you have engaged withaudiences in intense ways.
And that takes guts, okay, todo that.
Um, you know, there is a sensewith some ways of doing history
where the self can hide, maybebehind certain kinds of
edifices.
The three of you don't hide.
You go out there and you tellthe stories that you have to
tell loudly and to manyaudiences.
So I'm curious about theresponses that you've gotten

(01:17:07):
from either family members oraudiences to your work and the
extent to which those responseshave changed your view of what
you do.

Shauna Bostock (01:17:17):
I was really quite surprised by the response
to my work.
It's just sort of like, ohapathy, what are you bringing
all that up for?
Why are you doing this, youknow, and um oh, for God's sake,
what's she banging on aboutnow?
You know, and there's this kindof um um um uh tall poppy

(01:17:39):
syndrome in the Aboriginalcommunity, you know, where when
you when you take yourself topostgraduate education, it's
just sort of like, oh, you know,there's this sense of of their
awareness of your separationfrom the group.
And um, and so uh I I findmyself being driven to to to uh

(01:18:02):
change that and and and make myfamily aware, but um, but
they're very they're very um uhnot non-receptive, but they're
they're very oh that's reallyinteresting, you know, and I I
just I just I just feel like I'man alien or adopted and um you
know like they just don't sharethe same passion that I do, and

(01:18:24):
so I'll just take it elsewhere.

Um I've definitely gotten similar
responses from some members ofof my family, especially so I do
try to refrain from talking toomuch academia or research or
whatever around them.
And when I take photographs, Ishow it back to them and they
love that part, but they're notquite sure what I'm doing or why

(01:18:50):
I'm doing it.
However, on this trip that Ijust went, um there are some
political tensions on theisland.
Um, and I'm associated with oneside of those tensions.
And while I was going aroundtalking to people in all the
different villages of which Iwas related to, most people um
we got this message from theauthorities saying Katrina Tawa

(01:19:13):
is holding unauthorized meetingson Rambi Island.
She is not authorized to do it,please stop her, and then CC to
the police to mock to twodifferent police, police forces
on the island.
And so all of these messageswere coming through, and the
police would say Katrina Tawa'smeeting with her family.

(01:19:34):
It's fine, it's all it's it'sauthorized.
So in this case, I had 100 plusmembers of my family there with
the folks that I was meeting todiscuss Barnaban human rights,
and the they explained this tomy family.
And for the first time, myfamily, the mamas, the babies,

(01:19:55):
the children were sitting therelike, oh, that's what you do,
which was awesome.
Because usually, if you try toexplain, you know, if you try to
talk to members of your family,they're like, uh, you know,
it's like uh next, um, which isfine, it's normal, it's normal,
you know what I mean?
It's not, it's it's that's justhow it is.

(01:20:16):
But I could see them payingattention to others, talking
about why this work wasimportant, why it was important
that we do this research thatall this work I've been doing
for almost 30 years.
And I was like, oh my God,thank God, that's the way you
did.
You get somebody else to talkabout how awesome it is.
Yay! So that was amazingbecause in fact, my fan, like

(01:20:39):
the police were like, we are notgoing to talk to those hundred
people over there.
She has every right to be here.
This is her island, that's hervillage, et cetera, et cetera.
So that's one, you know,amazing, very, very recent
response, which was like a bigaha moment for me.
Because usually my work isoverseas.
It's in Australia, it's in NewZealand, it's in the United

(01:21:01):
States, it's in Hong Kong, it'sin England somewhere.
And so that was a verygrounding experience.
And when I have taken this toother places, my favorite part
of people's response is thatthey come up with their own
family archives.
They go, like, there was thisone guy who was waiting for me

(01:21:24):
at the MTG Hawkes Bay Ta'huridiGallery.
And I was like, I just showedup, I was tired.
They were like, there's a guywaiting for you.
I was like, oh, who's that guy?
Was I supposed to meet him?
No, it was this lovely doctorwho was retired, who was sitting
there with three perfectlycopied files of his family

(01:21:46):
personal records.
And his father was the was inthe New Zealand Navy and was the
person to receive the sword ofsurrender from the Japanese
forces that had occupied Banaba,under which my
great-grandfather and a lot ofmy relatives were in those
camps, those Japanese war camps.

(01:22:07):
And I was just like, I haveliterally just landed and then
been given these stories andphotographs and narratives
because he was like, Who am Igoing to share this with?
Who cares?
So it resonates a lot, I think,with what you were talking
about, and definitely what youwere talking about.
But in terms of these peoplewho've been in history, who've

(01:22:31):
been in time, who've experiencedprofound things and done like
profound things, and nobodyknows what they did or why they
did and what happened.
But they're big and they'reprofound and they're, you know,
they're amazing, but we only getto see the histories of like a
sliver of human beings, most ofwhich I would say don't deserve

(01:22:54):
all that attention.
Because really, it's theseeveryday people who do profound,
amazing things, which is why inmy book I have a lot of
stories.
I have a lot of stories ofworkers, I have stories of the
guy who worked in the chemist onBunaba and who was like a hobby
photographer.
I have so many stories ofhousewives who were bored out of

(01:23:18):
their minds because theirhusbands were doing all the
mining, but the women were sofunny and so interesting and so
observant.
And their stories about whatwas going on on the island are
so much more interesting.
So my book is full of otherpeople's stories because even as
an indigenous Bannaban, I'm notjust interested in my own
story.

(01:23:38):
Of course I am.
I've got family.
We've been on this island forthousands of years, but my
history and my stories arericher, so much richer by
understanding and engaging withall those perspectives of all
kinds of people.
The big people who wereappointed by the king or
whatever, and the small peoplewho were like born on the

(01:24:01):
island, the little kids who arerunning around the island.
I'm interested in all of theirstories.
That's what makes it so amazingand so rich and so wonderful.
So when people come out withtheir personal archives,
honestly, that's like thebiggest gift because you can go
to the National Archives, youcan go to the state libraries,
you can go to all of these, andyou will get a particular

(01:24:24):
perspective, but you will neverhave access to stuff that's in
people's shelves and cupboardsor kept in these very precious
ways that this doctor had them.
And so when people hand me thatstuff, I'm like, oh my God,
amazing.
So now I have so many boxes ofthings at the ANU and in our

(01:24:49):
wonderful new corporateuniversity, where we're allowed
two bookshelves and no boxes.
Because I don't know howsomehow magically and
mysteriously it's structurallycompromising of the Coombs
building.
That Coombs building's beenaround forever.
Like, how suddenly can it notfit the boxes?
But I've got so many boxes, andevery time somebody goes, Can

(01:25:11):
we get rid of this stuff?
I'm like, I'm an academic.
What do you think we do?
You know what I mean?
Like, I've got so much stuffand it's all meaningful.
It's all wonderful.
These papers are wonderful.
Like, don't touch my papers.
We're not gonna AI this stuff.
I don't want the digitalchatbot AI.

I want the material things: words, paper, objects, stories, (01:25:28):
undefined
photographs, right?
This I think is like the battleof the future because they're
trying to.
I love digitization.
I love Trove, but I don't wantthis stuff to take over the
fundamentals of history and thisstuff.

(01:25:48):
That's what it is.
So I love personal archives.
I love these little beautifulthings that people have kept
precious, and they've shared somuch of that with me over the
course of telling these Barnabinstories.

Yeah, when you talk, Katarina, I think we
can feel the people who you'veincluded in those stories and in
those people whose stories areyet, those boxes kind of with
you.
It's a collective force that wecan feel.
Umre might just like um yeah.

André Dao (01:26:18):
So I mean, there's definitely uh sections of my
family who have told me they'rewaiting for the movie, you know.
Um and it it really um itreally didn't help uh that um uh
Vietnam Ryan's wonderful novel,The Sympathizer, was recently
made into a big HBO series.

(01:26:40):
So now the family are waitingfor that, and they're kind of
like, Will you two get RobertDowney Jr.
in your film?
And like, okay, I'm not sure.
Um one one thing I hadn'tanticipated about the reaction
of my family to the novel thoughwas um so for the Australian

(01:27:00):
edition, uh, we decided toinclude so the cover is a photo
of um is an actual photo of mygrandfather, just to further
blur those lines between fictionand and and history.
Um and uh I yeah, what what Ihadn't anticipated was the way
that really turned the book intoan object um for my family,

(01:27:24):
particularly my non-Englishreading family, who wanted the
object.
They wanted the book um as thiskind of thing to sort of sit in
the house that said that's youknow, that's my brother, that's
my husband, that's my um father,um, and he's there.
And that kind of sense of umthe officialness of the book as

(01:27:45):
object, you know.
I had written about him beforefor an online publication that
means nothing for them, right?
But to have the book and havethe photo that meant something.
Um, I mean, finally, when itwas published in the UK, they
you know they decided to go witha different cover and we we had
a conversation about um adifferent photo that they wanted

(01:28:07):
to choose.
I mean, then somehow the coverfor the UK edition was, I guess
they uh they they upload it toyou know Amazon or whatever
before it is published.
But um I kind of um one night,uh one morning I woke up to a
series of um furious messages inthe family WhatsApp chat, um,
in which my family who ended upbeing resettled in France had

(01:28:31):
come across this UK cover andthey said, Oh, you know, so
someone's A, has stolen yourbook, um but B, they've put this
other, they've put the wrongman on the cover.
That's not you know, that's notyour grandfather.
Um, and then because I had beenasleep through all of this and
been able to correct them, Ithink they got a bit hysterical,

(01:28:52):
and then they said, you know,that man has the face of a
communist.
Um and yeah, and so then I hadto go, oh, actually, this is the
photo it comes from.
He was actually a Catholicacolyte.
We chose the photo because youknow, that's a connection to the
family.
So, you know, but then what Irealized was also just how much
they had this history of going,it would be just right that the

(01:29:16):
you know the English publisherwould put the wrong kind of
Vietnamese person on the cover,right?
The the lack of kind of trustthere.
Um I was just thinking,Katarina, while you were
speaking about the objects andum in the work that I've done
with um asylum seekers, peopledetained in immigration
detention centers.
Uh I just remember one uminterview that I did with

(01:29:40):
someone, his name was his name'sJohn Gilzari, who he's a
Hazaragi man who lives in Danongin Melbourne.
And we did this long interviewabout his life and um his
experience of being umimprisoned in um you know for
seeking asylum.
We got to the very end of ofthe interview and and I just
sort of asked that you know thatyou.
When you have that one morequestion that you kind of come

(01:30:02):
to at the end, hadn't reallyplanned about it.
I said, Oh, is there anyanything that you have like any
physical objects that you havethat you want to show me about
your journey?
Um, and then he was like, Oh,actually I do.
And he went off and rummagedaround, he got this old cassette
tape out and said, Oh, this umthis is the tape of um uh this
this really famous Hazaragisinger.

(01:30:24):
Um, and actually, um, you know,before I got on the boat
leaving Indonesia, um I askedthe the driver who was taking us
down to the boat just to playthis tape because I thought, you
know, it's a very dangerousjourney, I could die in it.
The last, you know, the lastmusic I want to hear is this
tape.
And you know, he still hadthat, and it was the things that
people have sitting around intheir bedrooms, in their

(01:30:47):
cupboards.
It's sort of um incredible tothink, and then also that sense
of where will it all go and whatare our institutions doing
about keeping some of this,having holding that space for
these objects.

All right, thank you for your patience.
Um, I've had the pleasure ofasking these three brilliant
minds questions.
So now I'd like to open up umthe floor to questions.
Uh I think um we have a rovingmic as that.
Thank you so much, Lauren.

Question 1 (01:31:18):
Sorry, thank you very much.
Um wonderful um presentationsand and and discussion.
Um we probably don't have thatmuch time to ask too many
questions.
And I guess I what I love aboutthe the work that all three of
you do is how much of you youput into it.
Um you, your politics, youryour your lived experiences, um,

(01:31:40):
your families.
Um and that takes a lot ofcourage, right?
That takes a lot of, as asyou've talked about in terms of
the reactions as well, thattakes a lot of courage to do
that kind of work and to do itin the face of some of the kind
of um obstacles that we do faceas academics, structural
obstacles, publication outputsand and peer review and

(01:32:04):
objectivity uh problems.
Um so I guess I just wonderedif I'm I'm really cheered that
there are a lot of youngerstudents and postgraduate
students here and early careerpeople who might be able to take
heart from the kind of the workthat you do.
And I wondered if maybe youcould um if you could just uh

(01:32:26):
counsel us on on how to pushourselves, how to challenge
ourselves to write and to thinkabout doing more creative
histories.

I might take a stab at that question, and thank
you so much for your feedback.
It really means a lot,actually.
I mean, the way audiences andstudents respond to my work is
so important because I have noidea.
Um but I think in response toMike's question, I actually

(01:33:00):
don't know how to do it anyother way.
So I've always been confused inacademia where they try to
train you in all of thisobjectivity, and that really,
truly, deeply makes no sense tome.

(01:33:20):
It really, truly, deeplydoesn't.
I mean, obviously, especiallyin the social sciences and
humanities.
I'm like, everything ispositioned, everything is
constructed, no eye of God, noeye of God.
I'm an old Donna Haraway fan,no eye of God.
Um, but not because DonnaHaraway said it, but because

(01:33:41):
that makes no sense, actually.
Um, so one of my my most recentpublication is um is about it's
I actually have forgotten thetitle.
Something like to hell with thedisciplines or something like
that, like something where Iwent on a rant, an absolute
rant.
But now that you know thehumanities and social sciences

(01:34:04):
under attack, I'm like oop, oop,till it, till it, till it,
because now I feel I feelcompassion and sympathy for
everyone as well.
But I don't understand thistraining that everyone receives
to remove the humanity and thepositionality.
Like, I'm like, I don't carewhat your background is, you
might have come from the moon orwherever.

(01:34:26):
And somehow, if you'reindigenous or you're a person of
color, then your story is extraspecial or unique.
Yes, actually, probably maybeit is, but actually, no,
everyone has this.
If we actually all had theseamazing conversations with our
ancestors, the good, the bad,and the ugly, things, you know,

(01:34:50):
would be more human and morecompassionate.
But we're so busy forgettingour ancestors.
And I truly believe they wantus to do this work.
Truly.
Ancestor is the other part ofmy approach.
I gave my ANU Archives lecturewas Islands, Archives,
Ancestors.

(01:35:10):
Those are the three things thatare at the heart of the work,
and I feel like they're verymuch at the heart of everyone on
this panel.

So we have a room full of custodians, I feel,
right?
We do.
We have a room full ofcustodians.
Uh um, so it was such an honorto be part of this conversation.
I'm sure we can all agree itwas just so vibrant and
wonderful.
Um, I want to end with a termthat uh Andre uses in his book,
which is anamesis, which is thesalvation in a certain kind of

(01:35:40):
remembering, right?
Good Catholic word that he uhtalks about being a Catholic boy
in mass in our suburbanMelbourne growing up.
Um so please uh thank you somuch.
We have a reception now.
You can purchase uh Sean'sbook, you can purchase Andre's
book and the catalogue forKaterina's exhibition.
Please join me in thanking ourthree speakers.

Catherine Shirley (01:35:58):
Thank you for joining us for this podcast.
If you'd like to hear more,subscribe to our series via your
favourite streaming platformand join us for our next history
in our episode, interpretingCockatoo Island, Warima, past,
present, and future.
For a full list of HistoryCouncil cultural partners, along
with a list of other podcastsproduced by us, please visit our

(01:36:22):
website HistoryCouncilnsw.org.au forward slash
podcasts.
I'm Catherine Shirley, thankyou.

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