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History Talks - HCNSW Podcasts
The History Talks podcasts offer a valuable opportunity to delve into Australian history through the insights of prominent historians or those who significantly contribute to historical knowledge.
These recordings capture speaker events, providing listeners with a platform to engage with the rich historical narratives and perspectives shared by experts in the field. Whether exploring significant events, individuals, or societal transformations, these podcasts serve as an accessible and informative resource for those interested in delving deeper into Australia's past.
The History Talks podcasts are a series of recordings of speaker events featuring leading Australian Historians, produced by the History Council of New South Wales. Creative Commons license: CC BY-NC-SA (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike)
History Talks - HCNSW Podcasts
History Now 2025 Wood Memorial Lecture in History: 'Creative Histories: A Conversation'
In this History Now/Wood Memorial Lecture event, Dr. Sophie Loy-Wilson from the discipline of History at the University of Sydney sits down with three extraordinary scholars who have drawn on lived experiences and diverse methodologies to produce creative histories that have made an impact on how we think about and do history.
Shauna Bostock, André Dao, and Katerina Teaiwa discuss their past and future projects, challenging us to imagine new ways of approaching, practicing, and presenting history in Australia today.
The Wood Memorial Lecture is funded by a generous endowment to the discipline of History in the School of Humanities at the University of Sydney to facilitate a public Lecture in Australian History.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:
Dr Shauna Bostock is currently the Indigenous Australian Research Editor at the National Centre of Biography at ANU. A former primary school teacher, Shauna Bostock's curiosity about her ancestors took her all the way to a PhD in Aboriginal history, which turned into a book entitled Reaching Through Time: Finding my family’s stories(Allen & Unwin). The book was awarded the NSW Community and Regional History Prize in 2024, and praised as a 'compelling blend of Indigenous history, community history and the history of colonial settlement.'
André Dao is an author and researcher from Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. His debut novel, Anam, won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for New Writing, and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Voss Literary Award. In 2024, he was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist. André was awarded the 2024 Pascall Prize for Cultural Criticism for essays published in The Saturday Paper, Meanjin and Liminal. He is a postdoctoral fellow with the ARC Laureate Program in Global Corporations and International Law at Melbourne Law School, where is working on a history of how the computing company, IBM, travelled to the Global South.
Katerina Teaiwa is Professor of Pacific Studies in the School of Culture, History and Language at the Australian National University. She is a scholar, artist, activist and nationally award-winning teacher of Banaban, I-Kiribati (Tabiteuean) and African American heritage born and raised in Fiji. Her exhibition "Dance Protest" is currently showing at the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney.
This event is in the 2025 History Now series. History Now is presented by the History Council of NSW in conjunction with the Chau Chak Wing Museum and the Vere Gordon Childe Centre.
History Now 2025 has been supported by Create NSW.
Welcome to the History Now podcast series, brought to you by the History Council of New South Wales in partnership with Chau Chak Wing Museum and the Vere Gordon Childe Centre at the University of Sydney. In this episode, History Now teams up with the Wood Memorial Lecture Team to stage an in-conversation event focusing on creative histories. Session Chair, Dr. Sophie Loy Wilson from the University of Sydney, holds a conversation with three extraordinary scholars who have drawn on lived experiences and different methodologies to produce creative histories that have made an impact on how we think about and do history. These speakers are Dr. Shauna Bostock, a Banjalung woman whose research focuses on the multi-generational history of her Aboriginal ancestors, Andre Dao, an award-winning author and researcher from Naarm, Melbourne. And Katerina Teaiwa , Professor of Pacific Studies at the School of Culture, History and Language at the Australian National University. She's a scholar, artist, activist, and nationally award-winning teacher.
Kirsten Mackenzie:Good evening and welcome. My name is Kirsten Mackenzie, and I begin by acknowledging that we meet tonight on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eura Nation. We acknowledge the tradition of custodianship and law of the country on which the University of Sydney campuses stand. We pay our respects to elders past and present, to those who have cared and continue to care for country and to First Nations people present with us tonight. It's a great honor for me to live and work on these lands, particularly as one who was born in South Africa on the lands of the Amazulu people. It is my 28th year living on this continent, my 24th living uh working at the University of Sydney. I think I need a timeout for good behaviour. Um and to some of you, it might seem incongruous that I speak to you now as chair of Australian history. I've been privileged to hold this position since 2023, one supported by a bequest from the New South Wales Parliament to the University of Sydney and until recently known as the bicentennial chair. But as I welcome you with my accented migrant voice, we gather tonight to honour and continue the legacy of another migrant, George Arnold Wood, who, like myself, came to Australia in the pursuit of history. Wood was born in 1865 in Lancashire, England, and delivered his own inaugural address, uh, in his own inaugural lecture as Charleston's chair in Australia's first history department on 22nd of May, 1891. By then the university had already been in existence for four decades. So they were a little late with their um endowment, with their establishment of a chair in history. We recognize Wood for his role in establishing the department, for professionalizing and for giving intellectual respectability to modern history in Australia, a discipline still striving for recognition at that time. Wood was no anti-imperialist, but he faced censure from the university senate for his protests against the conduct of the South African War, and particularly the treatment of women and children in concentration camps. My own great-grandfather was a child held in these very camps as Wood raised his voice against it. In the year after Wood's death in 1929, a memorial fund was established in recognition of his foundational work, and in 1949, the first of the Wood memorial lectures in his honor was given. These lectures are emblematic of our colleagues' dedication to research and teaching and to the strengths of Australian history and of history in Australia at this institution. At a time when the humanities are under intense pressure, our discipline is thriving against the odds. Our student numbers at this university, I'm pleased to say, are rising. Reading Wood's 1891 inaugural lecture and preparing these remarks, I was struck by the fact that he begins it with the very same assertion that we still ground our core unit in uh history majors today. That history is produced by and within the urgencies of its own time. This is a central theme of our conversation tonight. My final duty is to thank those who've made tonight possible, our fearless leaders, Mark McDonald, Chair of Discipline, and Chris Hilliard, interim head of school of the School of Humanities, and Tylus Professor of History, our TILAS professional staff at the school, particularly Lauren Picker. I'd like to thank Craig Barker from Char Chakwing Museum for including us in the History Now podcast series he's put together in collaboration with the New South Wales History Council. My inspiring colleagues, James Finlay and Nira Kandasami, devised this event together with Mike and with Sophie Loy Wilson. Sophie will be chairing tonight'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, and new histories of capitalism. Her next book comes out of her ARC funded DECRA project and is entitled Chinese Business: Secrecy and Survival in White Australia 1850 to 1950, and it's going to be an absolute crap. Her work has been transformative in our understanding of what Australian history is and how it should be produced. And I can think of no better person to move the Wood Memorial Lecture conversation forward with our three guest speakers. Before I pass over to Sophie, I'm just going to ask Naomi Duncan Parry, who's president of the New South Wales History Council, to say a few words.
Naomi Parry Duncan:Excellent. So thanks very much, Kirsten. And look, welcome everybody on behalf of the History Council of New South Wales to this very special event. And so I'm Naomi Parry Duncan. I am the very newly elected president of the History Council. And we're very proud to be partnering with the Chow Chat Wing Museum this year to present the History Now series, which is a continuation of what we did last year, but we've done a new venue with Craig's Stellar support. So thank you very much. And it is really fabulous to be working with the discipline of history within Sydney University tonight to present the Wood Memorial Lecture. And how good is it that it's a conversation and not a lecture? Like that's really awesome. I mean, lectures are good, but conversations I think are better. So history now owes its existence to passionate historians who have wanted to bring new perspectives to all aspects of historical practice. And as we're witnessing right now in this time of um very odd global chaos, um history perspective does help us to make at least some sense of it, even if it also like the historical precedents perhaps are not the best. Um history is absolutely essential for shining a light on culture and other cultures and for the civic values that we depend on to regulate our behaviour in the world and our society. So um history is under attack, it is um there are fundamental fights going on within history. So um hug the historians around you because we do actually need it. So our speak not while they're talking though. So um our speakers tonight are extraordinary scholars that have drawn on lived experience and different methodologies to produce creative histories that have made an impact on how we think and do history. So I am very grateful to um to all of you for speaking, to everyone here, and I'm gonna hand over to Craig, who will be the MC from this point forward. So thank you very much.
Sophie Loy-Wilson:Okay. Welcome everybody. I'm so honored uh to be chairing uh this George Arnold Wood Memorial lecture in history. I'm gonna invite a wonderful speaker to sit down. They've been standing up for quite a while. So please um feel good to take your seats. I'll join you in a second. I'm gonna introduce some of the ideas and thinking behind the conversation that I'm so excited for us to have tonight. So, uh, nalawala yerabara nalayan. Welcome to come, let us sit, let us talk on unceded Gadigal land, Eora country. So I'm so excited to be here tonight. I want to thank you all for coming. Right now, community matters more than ever. And all of you coming tonight is a commitment to listening, to challenging the power structures that continue to wreak havoc um in our world uh today. So thank you so much for being here. Today we are going to hear from three historians who have all found new emancipatory ways to create history in the present. So I'm delighted to welcome Katerina Diawa, Andre Dow, and Shauna Bostock. So please um join me up and each writer has generously shared their idea of family, kin, and community with us. They brought the the self themselves into their writing in brave and generous ways while also forcing a confrontation with a larger question. How to write history in a violent world riven with imperial, environmental, and indeed spiritual destruction. How to find hope and meaning through storytelling in such a world. Is there a way to remember the past, inherit the past with all its accompanying injustices and confusions that somehow creates a future in the present? So, what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna introduce uh each panelist, um, and then um they're going to share some of their work with you in conversation with me. We're gonna come together for a conversation at the end, and then right at the end, we're going to have a Q&A. So start thinking now about the questions you want to ask uh these wonderful thinkers and writers. Okay, so our first uh uh panelist today is uh Professor Katarina Tiawa. Okay, and Katerina is a scholar, artist, activist, dancer, and a professor of Pacific Studies at the Australian National University. She is the author of a book that means a lot to me: the brilliant Consuming Ocean Islands, Stories of People and Phosphate in Banaba. Apart from her celebrated scholarly record, she is a committed teacher and communicator, having won not one but two National Teaching Excellent Award Excellence Awards at ANU. On top of being a teacher and a historian, she's also uh a curator and has toured multiple visual arts exhibitions around the world, drawing attentions to histories of imperial phosphate mining in Kiribati and the ensuring displacement and creative survival of bunabuns on Rabi in Fiji. Okay, so these exhibitions have been shown around the world, including in places like Kathmandu and Hong Kong. Is that right? Katarina, yeah. She's also been a consultant with UNESCO and the Secretariat of the Pacific Community on Cultural Mapping, Planning and Policy in Oceania. Okay, so I'm delighted to welcome uh Katarina. Um, our second panelist uh to my right is Andre Dow. Um Andre is a writer, artist, and activist who lives on NAM country in Melbourne. His debut novel, A NAM, drawing on his own family history, won the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction uh in the New South Wales Premier's Literary Award for New Writing, and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Voss Literary Award. In 2024, he was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian novelist. He is the co-founder of Behind the Wire, the award-winning oral history project documenting the stories of adults and children who have been detained by the Australian government after seeking asylum in Australia. I highly recommend reading Andre's incredible piece on Manis Island, What I Heard About Manis Island, written after he listened to 14 hours, right, Andre, of recordings from Manis Island. Okay. Andre is also an artist whose work has been exhibited along with a larger collective at the Ian Potter Museum of Art in Melbourne and the City Gallery in Wellington. And finally, our third panelist is Shauna Bostock over here. Shauna writes as an academically trained and rigorous historian with an absolute and unshakable accountability to the family and community she comes from. And this positioning is combined with a rare capacity to connect directly with her readers, whoever they may be. And I'm quoting from a wonderful review of Shauna's book by Victoria Haskins, who's here tonight, who talks about Shauna's conversational style with her readers, her commitment to engaging her readers with her own family story and entwining them in their fate. Sean is also an Indigenous Australian research editor at the National Centre of Biography at ANU. For her PhD thesis, she traced her four Aboriginal grandparents' family lines as far back as possible in the historical written record. Her thesis was published as Reaching Through Time, Finding My Family Stories, and won the Community and Regional History Prize at the 2024 New South Wales Premier's History Awards. 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 incredible pleasure to read these incredible works of history in preparation for tonight. Hope you can hear the excitement in my voice. So, Katerina, I want to start with you, and thank you for sitting through all that. I want to ask you about your process. So you're someone, as you've you've said and you've written in your book, that in order to kind 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 alive for all of us. You read these linear and encyclopedic accounts of historians and travel writers, but it left you wanting. Okay. You weren't satisfied with the way that history had been approached. So I want to ask you about how you began uh telling the story differently. What frustrated you and what was your creative process? Thanks so much.
Katarina Tiawa:Um na Maori and Nisambulavinaka, everyone. Um thank you so much to the organizers for having me here today, and thank you to my fellow panelists as well. Um just want to acknowledge that we're on indigenous uh lands and we don't take that relationship lightly at all. Um, it's something that's very important to me as an indigenous Bannaban woman as well, um, and particularly because the histories of Bannaba are so deeply entangled with empire and extraction and colonialism and capitalism uh in Australia too. So in response to your question, I I want to start with um two things that have shaped my process. One is my family, um, and this is a very small portion of my family, believe it or not, uh, from Rumbi Island in Fiji. I have literally just come from this trip. Um, so if you see me looking a little bit fatigued, a little bit weary, it's because I just spent um nine days on Rumbi Island with my family or with part of my family doing um uh ongoing work to support Bannaban human rights. Um, when I read all of these histories of Bannaba in the process of trying to figure out how we got to Fiji in the first place because we're not indigenous to Fiji, um I quickly realized that aside from being quite violent history uh of extraction and displacement of the Banabin people, um it was uh also a history that didn't represent the experience of the island itself. So two things are at the center of my work, the people and the land. Um, with the people uh following the people and following their stories, it's it's part of the regular methodology in history and in anthropology and in many disciplines and fields. Um, and so there were lots of methods, ethnographic, interviews, qualitative research that I could draw on for that. But the part that was really difficult for me was the land. And so my first entry point is through kinship, it's through my family, it's who I am, where I come from. Um, my father is uh Indigenous Banabin and E. Kidibas from Tabitower. He has nine brothers and sisters. They all have, on average, between four to ten children, um, and they all have children. And so when I started doing my research, my first um question was who are we? Where do we come from? And how on earth did we get here to Fiji? Because it was very clear to us that we were not indigenous. So as I started to unpack our family story, that took me to the island. And then I was like, holy crap, what happened to this island? Because it was a very violent history of extraction and decimation, where 22 million tons of a six square kilometer island were extracted and moved and spread across the fields of Australia and New Zealand for global mass agriculture. So part of Australia and New Zealand's um uh agricultural development and success in this world comes off the back of extraction of both Banaba and Nauru. So my starting point is definitely my family because kinship and um relationships are really, really important and extend back deeply across time and place. But then the second part is the island um itself. Do you want me to continue? Do you have another question in there? Or I'll do my 10 minutes now in response to your question. Okay. So one of the ways that I tried to understand what happened to the island was putting aside all those, and there weren't too many, but there were some big dominant histories of Barnaba, really authoritative, really celebrating the history of the companies, the Australian and New Zealand and British companies that extracted all the phosphate for superphosphate fertilizer. Um, but what was not satisfactory to me is that these did not reflect not just setting aside the experiences of the Bannabin people who were displaced and who were completely railroaded. Literally, they built train tracks across the island to extract the phosphate, but the island itself was broken up and fragmented and shipped off. So it's basically like taking the land from under your house. Here's your house, you've been living there for thousands of years, your ancestors have been living there for thousands of years, then they come and they go, oop, we want that soil. We want those rocks. Those rocks in that soil are really, really valuable for us. So they move your homes and they start digging. So I wanted to tell a history of Banaba that reflected the 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 were grown off the back of it. And so by following and tracking the island itself, I began to understand our histories as deeply fragmented. And what historians and scholars usually try to do is like sew it all back together in some beautiful meta narrative of empire and colonialism and all of those things and make it look seamless and wonderful. And that is not satisfactory to me because we are not like that. We are a fragmented, displaced, traumatized people. We also have a lot of joy and a lot of humor and all of those things as well. But there is nothing perfect and nothing sewn perfectly together about our experiences since displacement in 1945. So I needed my histories to reflect the reality of the people and the reality of the land itself. When I talk about land, I go to the rocks. I'm not talking about land just metaphorically or conceptually or poetically. That's all nice too, but I am really deadly serious about little bits of rock and stone and dust floating in the air, or dust floating all over the farmlands, or being dropped out of the back of top dressing planes 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 uh research in the National Archives of Australia and also in the Bar Smith Adelaide Library, where they have this amazing Pacific collection that is seeded by Harry and Honor Maud. If you know your Central Pacific history, you might know who those two are, former resident commissioner of the Gilbert Islands. I found a lot of text, but it was the text that was missing the stories of the island and the stories of the people. So I started looking for other sources of history: photographs, films, objects, whatever you name it. So the more diverse my sources got, the more I wanted to honor the diversity of those sources and not put them into text. Now, maybe that's because I have a background in dance and the arts, and I'm a very embodied person, and I can't sit still for too long, and I can't handle 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 enough with the text, and so it's really nice to be sitting here with two beautiful writers who are very patient with text and with words and check and recheck all of those things. But I'm much more comfortable with movement and with objects and with all kinds of things in different forms and formats. So I wanted to tell and reconstruct that story using the diversity of sources and to make sure I kept it fragmented but compelling and interesting and hopefully engaging to various audiences. I didn't like what other historians had done with this work, where they were like, yay, phosphateers, they're so awesome. They came from Sydney with guns and they pointed them at the natives and then they took their land. Yeah, that that's not cool at all. So I went through the archives and pulled different kinds of content and then reconstructed it in order to tell the story in different ways. So it's a reimagining, it's a reconstruction, but for me, it's also a process of healing. So as I'm reconstructing these fragments, to me, I can't be on the island, I can't fix it because all five governments that are now involved with it are like, yeah, no time for this, no priority here. Oh dear, isn't that awful? That island was destroyed, out of sight, out of mind. So I've got to do some kind of healing in another way. So every single one of my exhibitions is a bit of putting the island back together. So you'll see a lot of text, you'll see a lot of, they're all straight from the archives, the text, um, or the words and quotes from different um Bannabins over time and space. But then you have the pinnacles, which are the bones of the land on the backs of the what I imagine are the sacks that took the superphosphate and spread it over all the fields. So everything is bringing the land and the people back together in the same space, but not in a perfect way. And I also have images of my family in there. That's um my curator Yuki Kihara, who's been an amazing mentor for me over the last few years. And then part of the exhibition has always been a 100-year history of mining on Banaba, where I pull out old rickety dinkity Kodak footage from the archives, and I've reconstructed it with my own filming on the island. Um, so these are some different iterations of Project Banaba. This is the one from the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, which was another quite different um iteration, and we might come back to this when we continue our conversations later. But you can see bits of the island and bits of the people, and you see in the middle body of the land, body of the people around quite what looks like an iconic Pacific hula skirt. It's actually made of phosphate sacks from Napier, where the Cook Islanders who would do that dancing would go down to the factory and say, Hey, can we have some of your sacks? Because it was the perfect material to strip and make into a dancing skirt. And so when I explained that to the Cook Islanders who lived there, they were like, Okay, oh dear. And then they gave me one of the skirts and said, put that in your exhibition and tell this story. So again, the materiality is sort of coming back to the fore. Um, this is the current iteration of Project Banaba, which is Dance Protest, which is here in the Chau Chak Wing Museum on the bottom floor. Um worked really closely with Rebecca Conway and Yuki Kihara on it, and it's taking this whole story in a different direction. Um, so I'm just going to end with I've been telling this story for a long time about the land 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, my sister's the feminist, so I'm just going to chill and not be one. But now that she's passed, her work and her passion to tell Pacific women's stories and to tell Bannabin women's stories has now feels like a responsibility for me to take up. So there's a very real kind of um feminist young woman and multi-generational story of continuing the activism and the resistance of Bannabin women, which is part of the story that I am now ready to tell that I didn't fully tell in my book, where we were we were those women who held on to the trees when the bulldozers came. That's not just something they do in other parts of the world. The women were like, this is not cool. We don't want you to take this land or any of these trees. And so I'm starting to reconstruct um that more matriarchal part of our story in this iteration and hope to take it forward soon. So that is how I do history.
Sophie Loy-Wilson:So, you know, it strikes me, uh, Katerina and Shauna and Andre, that we live in a world where the processes that all three of you write about, processes of imperialism, violent resource extraction, violent globalization, the destruction of the environment, dehumanization and war are more urgent than ever. And I feel, Katerina, that you showed a faith in your readers to understand a fragmented story at a time when they are still being sold a very neat capitalist narrative about why resource extractions can make you richer and happier. So we need to acknowledge that the story you're telling is a counter story of resistance against a lot of stories that justify resource extraction all the time in our ears every day. Um, so we're gonna come back to the issue of resistance and activism, but I wanted to uh move on to to Andre, which we had kind of hours. Um uh and I'm looking forward to us coming together for conversation. Andre, um, in your beautiful book, and um, you write about your grandparents. Um, you write about many members of your family, you write about all your loved ones. In that book, as in the book of these other two authors, we get to meet a lot of loved ones. Um, your grandfather, you tell us, was imprisoned for 10 years uh in Chihal Prison, a place you write that you have been imagining and reimagining since you were a teenager. He spent, you write, 300, 600, 3,653 days there as a prisoner of the communists. Um his time in this place is one of many stories, many forms of inheritance you confront in an arm. You ask us and yourself, what am I supposed to do with the stories handed down to me? I want to know how you figured out that the way to do this was this beautiful book. What is your relationship to writing and history? How did you decide to tell us this story?
André Dao:Thanks so much, Sophie, for that um that beautiful question. Um, I just want to begin by acknowledging uh the Gadigal people, the traditional custodians of the land we're meeting on. Um and I pay my respects to their elders, past and present, and um, and in particular, uh, you know, think about the responsibility that places on me as uh as a storyteller and and as a legal scholar, um, to respect their ongoing um sovereignty. Um Sophie, I guess um, in relation to the um to Anam uh and how I came upon I guess the form of this book, which is if you pick it up, it's quite fragmented, it doesn't follow a linear path. Um, some of what's in there is true in the sense of I found things in documents or in photos, and I describe those documents and those photos. Um, some of the things in there are true in the sense that they're the things that my grandfather told me or my grandmother told me about their experiences. And some of those things um I imagined and and made up, but I hope are true in some other um in some other sense. But I think I came upon telling my grandfather's story in this particular way really through um a series of failures. So, you know, I tried to write it as a straightforward history. Um, and in particular, I tried to write it that way because I felt that's what my family wanted. They wanted me to take a forgotten history, um, uh, you know, a man who had suffered and whose suffering had not been acknowledged, um, and to give some sort of voice and visibility to that life. Um, and so as a young man, I thought that the way to do that was to write a kind of history. Um and I couldn't do it, and I couldn't do it because um the documentary evidence wasn't there, um, and that's has something to do with the colonial history of Vietnam. Um, and but I also couldn't do it because um because he passed away, and so I wasn't able to continue to speak to him. Um, I also wasn't able to do it because um I actually found at a certain point that just by writing down what he had said or what um I found in the the archive, so to speak, didn't get anything close to um what it felt like to be part of my family. Um and so I had to sort of find another way to write it. Um and and I guess um, yeah, I thought for the kind of the 10 minutes um of this uh uh shared lecture, and it's such a privilege to be sharing um this space with with both of you. Um I thought I'd I guess I'd tell a story or really a series of stories about how I approach history, and so it's not so much about how I wrote Anam, but um really on the sort of work I've been doing since um since writing Anam. Deep in the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a room in which Socrates is always about to drink the fatal cup of hemlock. The room is dedicated to the art of the age of revolution. Alongside Socrates hang portraits of an Egyptian mamelouque, a refugee from Napoleon's failed invasion, a teenage aristocrat, and a pair of apprentices in the studio of Jacques-Louis David. The didactic on the wall talks of the winds of revolution sweeping from America and France to Haiti and Greece and India and Peru. But the painting I am looking for is not there. For years it hung here, a portrait of a seven-year-old boy in a red and gold outfit. He too was affected by a revolution, though not one of the ones mentioned in the didactic. He is a prince, the son of the king of Dang Chom, or what the French call Cauchin Sheen. His name is Gun, and his father, deposed by a peasant revolt led by a beetle nut trader, is in exile in Bangkok. Gunn has arrived at Versailles on the eve of the French Revolution to seek an alliance with Louis XVI to win back his father's throne. For years I've been haunted by digital reproductions of this painting, by thoughts of this boy and his chaperone, a bishop named Pignot de Bahin. I had been wondering what it had been like for the boy to make the months-long journey from Southeast Asia to France, to play in the long hallways of Versailles with Louis' children, to become, for a season, a sensation at court, a must-have accessory for Marie Antoinette and her circle. I had been hoping by going to the Met and seeing this portrait for myself to exorcise Gann's ghost, or perhaps to commune with it. But my arrival was ill-timed. After years on loan, the Met had returned the painting to the Societe des Missions Étrangers de Paris, the Catholic missionary organization that had sent Pignot de Bahane to the Orient in the first place. So I had missed my encounter with Prince Gann in New York. But what was it that I was really looking for? It was not the painting itself, but the boy that it claimed to have captured. By chance, not long after I left New York, I had another encounter with Gann in a novel by the French writer Georges Bataille. In a curious coincidence, if you believe in such things, the name of the novel was Annam, almost precisely the same as mine, but with two ends rather than one. Bataille begins his book with the boy prince in a decayed, dying Versailles. The boy is torturously lonely. He is surprised by the cold of autumn 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 far from home. He had sailed back with Pignot de Bahane via Pondicherry, where they raised money and men. Then they had joined his father's decade-long campaign to unite the kingdoms of what we today call Vietnam. But Batay had killed off the little Vietnamese boy, preferring instead that his missionaries should travel alone to Annam, which itself would only be the exotic backdrop for the spiritual and existential solitude of missionaries forgotten on the far side of the earth by their church and their king. But then, what was it that I was really looking for? Not the boy himself. Was I not like Bataille looking at Gan to try to see someone else? Indeed, I have been imagining for some time now Prince Gan as one of my cousins, grown up in Vietnam and only lately come here to Australia. I have been imagining him as one of the migrant workers I interviewed between lockdowns, a slicer at an abattoir, a picker on a blueberry farm, prized for his slender Asian fingers, able to pick quietly and gently. I have been reading over old transcripts with migrants from Taiwan and Fujian and Penang. What is it that I am looking for? They talk about work and home and the Australian landscape. But I am looking for something different. I am looking for who I might have been if my mother had not gotten on a boat, if her boat had not arrived finally at Pilal Bedong, a Malaysian island in a temporary refugee camp, if she had not been sent in the end to Melbourne. I am trying to imagine myself as one who had stayed rather than left, or better yet, one who had stayed and then left. I look for this cousin, this me that is not me, in the tunnels under Vinmop village. The village is just north of the DMZ, that zone of non-being, purged with incessant bombing in Agent Orange. And though Vinmop is not part of the demilitarized zone, some 668,000 tons of bombs were dropped on this area between 1964 and 1972. About seven tons for each inhabitant. And yet the villagers did not leave. Instead, they built a network of tunnels in the limestone. 30 meters underground, I passed silent wells, kitchens, a so-called maternity clinic, a recess in the wall where women gave birth. What is it that I am really looking for in these ruins? I like to think I'm not like the other tourists stepping gingerly across these wet, smooth floors, ducking their heads, relieved that they will soon be back in the daylight. But like any tourists, I am only passing through. I can move back and forth between the underground and the open as I please. And I do go back in to a tunnel that has been closed. There are no lights in this tunnel. I have to use my phone's flashlight to light my way. When I stop to take a photo, the flashlight is disabled. In the sudden dark, I can hear something in the walls, the scuttling, shuffling of little feet. Perhaps this is what I was looking for: the presence that remains. It was in search for that presence that I put on this t-shirt tonight, bearing the words of Dr. Ezeddin Shahab, a 28-year-old poet and doctor in Gaza. His poem goes, and if you must continue your war, then do it without us. Bomb the dust, starve the wind, colonize the silence. Thinking with the villages of Inmop, I realize now that Shahab's play is not a play for the completion, for the completion of the genocide. I am reminded of another poem by another Palestinian, the playwright Amir Nizar Zwabi. Published in 2014, in the midst of another war in Gaza, Zwabi writes, Ten years and seven operations later, the mission is completed. Upper Gaza is totally abandoned. All of Gaza has moved underground. Men, women, and children, a great mass of people. We dug entire neighborhoods, streets, highways, schools, theaters, hospitals. We dug mirror images of the land above that we abandoned. In the face of genocidal destruction and colonial violence, whether today or in what we call the past, I think the role of the writer, of the witness, is to refuse the foreclosure of possibilities, to look underground as it were, to find the dead still living, and the living in need of being remembered. Thank you.
Sophie Loy-Wilson:Right, Andre, thank you. That was really, really beautiful. We'll come back at the end of this incredible uh shared panel to discussions of uh storytelling and panel and and creativity and violence. But I do now want to turn on the turn to our final um a panelist, um to Shauna Bostock. Um Shauna, in your beautiful book, um Reaching Through Time, you might have about your burning curiosity for the past. All in every page of that book, the past as fuel, um, your curiosity for the past as fuel um is palpable to the reader. In fact, you kind of reached out with the text, and I felt like you just grabbed my arm and said, come to the archive with me through me. You know, and I I really wanted to, I really wanted to do that. I wanted to ask you about this fearless truth telling that you do. You even thank your readers in the book at the beginning. You thank them for their willingness to listen, to take the journey with you, but it's an active listening that you're asking from your readers. It's not an easy listening. I want to know how you got here. I know you were a teacher, you've been many, many things in your life, but how did you get to this burning curiosity for the past that's fueled your creative endeavor?
Shauna Bostock:Um, so uh I'm here to share with you some of the creative ways that I converted my PhD thesis into a published book. And um, some people might not know about my research, so I'm going to share quickly with you a summary of my thesis chapters before talking about the different processes I used to write my book. Um my research focus is my Aboriginal family's history. Traveling back in time, I traced my four Aboriginal grandparents' family lines to as far back as I could go in the written historic record. And then my research moved forward from the past to the present, examining the lived experience of my ancestors, which I then situated within the context of Australian history. Um do I just press this forward? Oh, yes, fantastic. Okay, so just I'm I'm I'm doing these slides to show you my thesis because then I'm going to talk about the transition to the book. And so um I'm just gonna pop up the slides of each chapter and um fill you in on my research in a bit more detail before I move on to the book. So around 2008, a non-Indigenous Bostok woman called Thilma contacted my uncle and told me that she had traced the Bostok family line back to the 1600s in England. She informed him that there were two generations of slave traders in my family, a father and son, both named Robert. And when slave trading was abolished, Robert Bostock Jr. was convicted by the British government and transported to the colony. So this just really, really triggered um my burning curiosity about our family history because um it was just so shocking that um that that we found that Thelma informed us of this uh slave traders in the family. And my uncle rang me up late at night one one night, and it was really late, and I I thought somebody had died, and um and he told me that Thelma had gotten in touch with him, and he said, You won't believe what this woman had told us about um Augustus John Bostock, the the um the family member who we descend from. AJ's family. He said they were slave traders, and he said, Imagine that, those white fellas must be rolling in their graves knowing we turned out to be a mother blackfellas. So I used that as an epilogue on um one of my um chapter headings, and so um um I'm going to go through the slides now um to give you an idea of how I constructed a thesis about my family history because um Thelma Thelma excited me um about how far she went back to the 1600s in England, and I thought, well, I could start from the present and go back and join up with Augustus John Bostock, our uh the man who where we got our our family name from. So that was what was so exciting, and I was just as curious as all get out. So this um chapter one was called Bunjalung Beginnings, um, 1882 to 1911, and it started from my earliest archival records, including my non-Indigenous great-great-grandfather Augustus John Bostock's Conditional Land Purchase, the encroachment of white settlers onto country, government land acts, and the impact of colonization on my ancestors. Chapter two was called Born and Married on the Reserve, um, 1911 to 1934. Three of my four grandparents were born on Aborigines Reserves, and these photos were all taken at Box Ridge, Aborigines Reserve, where all four of my grandparents were married. I examined the managed reserve systems and the surveillance and control of the Aborigines Protection Board and the indenture of Aboriginal children into domestic service for non-Indigenous um Australians. I'm just going through these quickly and these very brief descriptions, which really don't go into the detail, but I want to be quick because I have so much to say. Um so this uh next chapter was chapter three, and it was called Work and Movement on the Landscape, 1934 to 1946, and it's a study of Aboriginal survival and employment. After the gold rush, uh the pastoral industry needed Aboriginal workers, and Stockman's work, um, but when Stockman's work started to fade away, many Aboriginal people became employed in the lumber industry and clearing land, and Aboriginal people had to travel all over the country seeking employment, and we're usually only offered short-term uh contract work. And I just want to quickly take you back. Oh, see the top left-hand corner? That little baby is my father, and um, and that's a tent in the background. You can see that it's tied to the log. Um, and what that that photograph tells me, or what tells us is that um my grandmother had to travel with her family, you know, with you know, dad's four siblings, and travel with um my grandfather because he was working for the CCC, the trip, the construction corps that were cutting roads into mountains and um doing sort of like you know, like like Chang Gang sort of work, but that really um hard physical labour. And my and and the women and the children had to travel with them to be with their spouse to collect the wages to feed the children. So they were sort of um moving all the time. Um so that's chapter three. Chapter four was called Exodus from the country to the city, 1946 to 1955. And this chapter describes the mass mass exodus from country to the big cities. Aboriginal people were fed up with the government's surveillance and control, and were attracted to inner city factories in Redfern, who needed workers so badly that they didn't care about the colour of their skin. And my grandfather Henry just you know, it really just sort of tugs at my heartstrings that my grandfather father Henry was 38 years old when he first experienced job certainty in his life and um had weekends off like regular people, and um, you know, um that kind of job certainty didn't come to him until that time in his life. So chapter five was called Youth and Modernity and Um Radicalization, 1955 to 1975. Aboriginal people became organized and formed groups to help new arrivals from country areas. Uh Charles Perkins formed the Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs to look after social needs of Aboriginal people. And later Aboriginal legal Aboriginal Legal Service and Medical Services were established by Aboriginal people. Aboriginal people came together to fight for equality and land rights. Chapter six was called Creative Expression and Aboriginal Voice, 1975 to 2000. In Redfern, the young radicals had realized that their protests were received with hostility from the wider Australian community. And they realized that through satire and ridicule on stage, they were able to get their message across to white Australians. So creative expression through writing and the arts blossomed, um, as did Aboriginal Pride and Solidarity. The final chapter of my thesis was called Ego Histoire, uh, Reflections of My Life. Um I read the work of French historian Pierre Nora, who coined the phrase ego histoire to describe the collective product of his advice to historians to write about themselves. He argued that spelling out one's involvement with the material offers a better protection than vain protests about objectivity. What was a stumbling block becomes an advantage, and the unveiling and analysis of existential involvement, rather than moving away from some impartial investigation, becomes instead an instrument for improving understanding. And so when pondering um how I was going to convert my thesis into a manuscript, I felt somewhat um you know forearmed with possibilities after learning about ego histoire. So I finished my thesis um in 2021, and immediately in 2022, I got a book deal with Alan and Unwin. Um and uh I wrote it in 2022 and it was published in 2023. Um, Alan and Unwin were very, very specific about um wanting an what they called a narrative for the general reader. They kept flogging me. It's a narrative for the general reader. We don't want an academic book, we want this story to be a narrative for the general reader, and they just kept saying it over and over again. They were not interested in what they called thesis speak. And so even when I was doing my chapters and I was sending them to my publisher, Elizabeth Weiss, um, uh I would send her a chapter and then she would have a little box beside it saying, Thesis speak, you know, rewrite this part, thesis speak, rewrite that. You know, like for example, in the introduction of my book, I break it up into sections under titles, and I had a section called Historiography of Aboriginal History, and she's Thesis speak, history of Aboriginal history, because we wanted to get it to a general audience, and that's exactly what I wanted to do. I've been completely motivated in my research journey to to um enlighten and to address the national ignorance of Aboriginal history. You know, so many people don't know the truth about Aboriginal history, and um, and and that that's my driving force to to you know to to bring that out to the wider public. So I thought it was a fantastic idea because that's exactly what I wanted. But that wasn't easy to do at first, you know, and finding my voice, um, uh it seemed to take me some, you know, quite some time to find my voice. But once I I embraced the freedom of letting go of some academic norms and writing as though I was having a conversation with the reader and having a bit of courage to share my emotions, I found it became easier to speak with an authentic voice rather than a carefully guarded one or you know, one that's fearful of judgment from my peers. And and so um um I don't know how long I'm going, but I've got three examples uh of writing. Um so I'll just share them with you. Uh this is um um archives that I found at the Mitchell Library. I'm going through the Aborigines Reserve missionary's um personal belongings, and and this is the paragraph that I wrote in my book, and it seems to you know tell you my style of writing, my conversational style, and how I want to involve the reader in the process of discovering these things with me, letting the reader know what I'm thinking. So I said nothing prepared me for the shock of being in the grand reading room at the Mitchell Library in Sydney and discovering that among the missionaries' personal collection was a photograph of my grandmother, uncle, aunt, and father. UAM, the United Aborigines Mission uh missionary, Mrs. Alma Smith's collection contained photographs that my grandfather my grandmother had sent her of my father and his siblings at various uh times in their childhood. It also contained an address book that that belonged to Mrs. Smith, and in its pages she'd recorded a number of addresses of my grandmother. The address book proves that she maintained contact with my grandmother decades after she left the mission to begin married life. This is tangible evidence of an obvious affection between these two very different women. And at first I thought it was sweet, but the more I thought about the missionaries, the more unsettled I became. So this picture of the missionaries with children. I said here was a religious group that, while teaching and preaching the tenets of Christianity, found nothing wrong with being actively involved in separating Aboriginal babies and young children from their mothers and families. Young Aboriginal children and the Aborigines Protection Board deemed neglected and removed from their families. I beg your pardon. Young Aboriginal children that the Aborigines Protection Board deemed neglected and removed from their families. Those who were babies or too young to be incarcerated at the Aborigines Protection Board institutions were taken to the UAM's children's home at Bombaderi. The United Aborigines Mission Organization supported and perpetuated the removal of Aboriginal children from their families by providing the Aborigines Protection Board with a repository to deposit them. I deliberately used the word repository because it was a receptacle to hold Aboriginal infants and children and deposit for safekeeping. If the missionaries did not provide the Bombardier children's home, then the Aborigines Protection Board would not have been as successful and efficient as they were in carrying out their removal agenda. So what I'm trying to do with the reader is sort of show them things, but also to explain, you know, a different takeover, tell them what I'm thinking about it. So I'm sharing that with the reader, you know, my emotions and my anger and you know a whole gamut of emotions. And um, so that's kind of my reading style, my writing style. I'm gonna skip this one and go to this one. Now there's a bit of background with Gulf Country Man. There was a letter written by a daughter of a superintendent of the Deepine Creek Aborigines Reserve, and she said, Oh, father used to carry a pistol around with him on the reserve. And one day there was this fellow that came from Gulf Country, and my father said to him, he held a pistol up, a Mauser pistol, shot it in the air, and he said, You be a good boy, Darkie, and we'll get along fine. And then she just said, and then the daughter said in this letter, Darkie used to walk around, you know, by himself, and he seemed to wonder and not talk to anybody else, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I wrote this paragraph and I said, When I see Golf Countryman in my I I said firstly before this paragraph, this, I said, I refuse to call him by that name. I will not disrespect him in that way. When I see Gulf Countryman in my imagination, I see a traditional man who was forcibly taken over 2,000 kilometres from his family and his country. I see Gulf Country Man as a man who was trying to survive the old way. He had the uh that's a typo. He had the sacred knowledge of his country. He knew where to find water and how to hunt game and trap fish. He knew the seasons and where to find specific bush food all year round. He knew how to read nature, but Deeping Crink was not his country. It must have seemed like a prison cell compared to the wide open spaces that he would have known. He was on foreign land. I imagine him wandering around alone on the reserve, yearning to be on his home country with his own family and his own tribal group, and my heart weeps for him. So that's a uh, you know, an indication of the kind of the letdown of my um academic kind of writing to bring that emotion to the reader. And um, and it wasn't just sad things or things that I was angry about, you know, those, like I said, there was a whole gamut of emotions, but I got a bit of a funny one here too, which I'll share with you because I wasn't backward in coming forward with that either. Um one of the reviewers from um from the the bookstore here, um, Better Read Than Dead, Marcus said in a review of my book that he was surprised at how funny it was, because I chucked some gags in too just to break up, you know, the the big dense blocks of information that I was trying to get to to the person. Because um, you know, let's not forget that oh I don't know if I've mentioned it, or maybe it's in a latter slide and I'm going to mention it, but um but um the you know I wanted to educate Australia. It sounds like such a you know a very sort of um you know it sounds like a pompous thing to say, but I wanted To educate Australia, I wanted to tell them the truth about Aboriginal history. I had this multi-generational Aboriginal family history from colonization to the present. Y'all want to know about Aboriginal history? Well, I'll tell you. But anyway, I threw in some jokes, and people, reviewers, have commented about that. So I'll share a joke with you. My father um took up acting in later life. He had a big and he was in cherry pickers, and then he got out of that for some other roles, and he was in black diggers. Um those are his real medals that he's wearing there, by the way. And there's a little story about them performing at the opera house and all the big wigs at the brass and generals and the majors were there. And dad was standing there with the cast with his medals on and his combat badge, which says it has 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, oh yes, yes, I I I know those medals. And he said, Well, I know them too because I earned them, you know, and they just sort of oh, you know, this this little this little short black fella telling telling them have a look at these, mate. You know, so that was his attitude. But anyway, um Dad was uh I did a a story on on Aboriginal uh creative expression, and I said dad thought he must have impressed someone in the business because shortly after the production he got that production, he got a call from the Sydney Theatre Company asking if he would like to play the role of Chucker in their production of Cherry Pickers by Kevin Gilbert. Like Henry in Fountains Beyond, the character Chucker was an Aboriginal elder. The story revolves around itinerant workers wandering on the country looking for work. It was brutally honest about family spirituality and dispossession. My father was quite surprised that he didn't have to audition for the role, and I remember teasing him, geez dad, there must be a shortage of short-fat blackfellas. So it was good to tuck in some some um um some some breakers. Icebreakers, not icebreakers, but uh but kind of where the uh the the the uh information got a bit dense. I tried to to break it up to keep the interest of the reader, to tell stories, you know. So if I if I dropped a a you know a a big block of information on the reader, then I'd come up with you know a memory or something that I said or the an amazing uh image and whatever. So so I kind of sum things up here by saying that um I constantly reminded about my creative process of writing history. Um I constantly reminded myself who my target audience was, the general reader who likely hasn't studied history, but so I tried to make it really interesting and entertaining and funny. I constantly remembered what my original goal was, and that was to teach Australia truth telling. I made sure that blocks of history, uh historical information were broken up with less dense creative writing or stories, or my observations, or oral history, or letters, or dialogue with direct quotes, etc. To retain the reader's interest um and bring these things, um and I brought these things into the narrative strategically with an awareness of what was coming before and after the dense blocks of information. Um I wanted to keep to my introduction to promise because in the introduction I promised that I would provide the reader with a balanced view, because as much as there was uh you know an outstanding amount of oppression and hardship in Aboriginal history, I want there was also outstanding examples of non-Indigenous kindness and humanity to Aboriginal people. So I wanted to create a balance and I made sure that I kept my promise that I put into the introduction. And then um I tried to show don't tell um um and avoided paraphrasing um um letters or things that my ancestors said because I wanted to ensure that my ancestors' voice voices and outcries of injustice and emotions were heard and felt by the reader, and I kept reminding myself all the way along that I had to creatively write the narrative with the end in mind. I wanted the reader to arrive at um where I wanted them to be, and um and that was um where there's a little bit more we're probably over time, but yeah, okay. There it is. That's that's how I did um uh writing okay, writing the multi-generational family history from colonization to the present. And I tried to write the reader created to make it read.
Sophie Loy-Wilson:Oh wow. Uh such a delight to have these three um uh thinkers and historians kind of up against each other, right? It's like similarities and differences. I want to kind of um um bring it together now, okay? And uh one of the things that we haven't talked about, although it's evident in all three of your work, it's so clear in all three of your work, your work, is and I the idea about change an idea about changing the present. So all three of you, I think, have been have quite consciously uh uh spoken into a moment where you felt there wasn't knowledge or visibility about uh the story you were telling, is that I think that would be that would be a fair thing to say. Yeah. I'm not quite sure whether you would call yourself activist historians, but I think you are all three historians who seek to change the present, whether it is um a lack of knowledge in the present about an injustice, or whether it is simply changing uh the way that we all move through the world and think about our interconnection with each other and our ethical obligation to each other. So I wanted to ask all three of you uh uh about about this question of change. When you approach your work, um, what did you want to change? When you approach your work now, what do you want to change? What what do you want to what change do you want to see in the world and can history enact that change?
André Dao:Sure, thank you. Um I guess there this idea of change or what I wanted to to change makes me think of the um the way um I ended, and um, which is with um a couple of letters that the narrator writes to his daughter. Um, and so this um this section of the book was written after I'd um become a father for the first time, and um, and I had been up at that point, I think I spent about eight years on this project, kind of trying to grapple with, you know, who was my grandfather, what did he go through, what's the history of colonial Vietnam and then the war, and you know, so all of these sort of big picture questions, I suppose. Um and uh and in particular, I I was trying to also explore really what did it mean for me or my narrator who was the me that's not me, um, who uh is a kind of you know, uninvited um son of a refugee family on Stolen Lands, right? Like what what does that mean? How do I, you know, do I belong here, do I not belong here? Um in this place that often makes my family, makes me, makes people that look like me feel not welcome. Right? Like that was part of the thing I'm I'm trying to grapple with. But then I had all of this stuff going on, and then I was looking at um you know my daughter and thinking, well, what's the use of all of this you know stuff for her? Like and and some of it, you know, I was thinking and it it kind of changed the way I was grappling with the material with these questions, instead of it being something that frankly, you know, could lean into the self-indulgent or the um the overly academic or you know, and so on, you know, wanting to tease out these difficult questions. It became a kind of practical question. Like, what do you tell um a kid about a history of you know not belonging, um, which I was sort of committed to politically, of saying, well, you know, there's something maybe politically generative about saying, no, I don't quite belong in this place, um, but I'm still responsible for its history in some way. Um but then how do I boil that down to something that you can give a child or you know, that you can give them a sense of their history that then impels them to change things or to have agency in their lives. Um and so that was sort of that was a big shift for me, and I kind of I think I took that shift and put it into the novel as that's to the extent that it has a narrative arc, it would be the narrator realizing that all of this remembering has to come down to not only what you inherit but what you pass on as well.
Katarina Tiawa:Um, yeah, definitely. There are two major aspects of my work. Um one is to change people's understanding of Australia-Pacific relations. So at one point, Pacific historians were pretty dominant at the ANU. You'd be lucky to find a couple of us left at the ANU because now history is no longer dominant, and it was from 1947 until the corporatization of the university, and now it's all about Pacific diplomacy, Pacific aid and development, Pacific international relations, and Pacific security. And this like absolute amnesia about the history of Australia-Pacific relations. Your average Australian thinks Australia is constantly giving to the Pacific. Its aid budget is the highest in terms of the overall foreign aid budget. So Australians think Australia just pays for all of this stuff in the Pacific with zero consciousness of how much Australia extracted and took from the Pacific through land, through mining, and labor with all of those plantations that helped make Australia so prosperous. So one of my goals is to change this idea of what Australians think the Pacific means. And what by that I mean particularly settler Australia, the part of settler Australia. Um so Barnabah and Nauru, and to an extent Manus, are all 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 some offshore detention, all of this kind of stuff. And Manus and Nauru were quite dehumanized in that process, with Australians really not understanding anything about actual Papua New Guineans or actual Nauruans and what Australia had done to those countries. So that's one of the aspects of my work is Pacific history literacy in Australia and actually the truth about Australia's relationship with the Pacific, which is extremely extractive. The second one is justice for Bannabah and for Bannabans, because there were five stakeholder countries or states or states in formation involved in phosphate mining, and four which really, really, really seriously economically benefited from the mining. And then Bannabans were just like dropped like hotcakes and thrown in the dustbin and completely forgotten. And that is an ongoing issue. Bannabans are like stuck in this space between Fiji and Kiddebus. There's these non-citizens with non-full rights to a whole range of services, including things 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 full electrification of the island, and there are not, they're not even close to being a smidgen of full services on the island for people after displacement in 1945. So that's a long time of not fully being incorporated into Fiji, and Kiribati going, oh, thank God, those troublesome bannabins are away, so we can benefit from all the taxes and everything that the mining brought in for the country of Kiribati, which has a multi-million dollar revenue equalization fund ceded from phosphate mining. So that's just Kiribati and Fiji. And then there's Australia and New Zealand and UK, who all benefited from 80 years of phosphate mining and extraction, who had to pay like very, very little, if anything, to the Bannabans who are still struggling today. So those are two aspects of my work. One, education, literacy, and awareness about Australia, Pacific histories and relationships, and a lot of injustice in there, and then specifically justice for Bannaba and Bannabans. Thank you.
Shauna Bostock:I have heard throughout my life people saying to me and other Aboriginal people, oh, that happened a couple of hundred years ago, can't you just get over it? You know, and they don't really have the understanding of the cataclysmic impact of colonization on Aboriginal people and its multi-generational legacy. And uh I um am driven to address the the national ignorance of of it all, especially because uh my research is a multi-generational examination, so you can see that the through the generations the impact that the Aborigines Protection Board had on Aboriginal people from 1883 to you know 1960s. And you know, uh an example of of my frustration is when I teach first-year Bachelor of Education students, um, Aboriginal history. And the first thing I ask them when they walk in is um, hands up if you can tell me about Tyranalius, and you know, like put their hands up and and they talk about it, and um and I say, Um, hands up if you could tell me about the Aborigines Protection Board, and there's just crickets, you know, not a not a word said, and uh and and that just astonishes me because the Aborigines Protection Board was such a major part of generations of my family's lives, and the control and surveillance was extraordinary, which you'll read my book. Um, so so I'm driven to to um to bring their stories out, and the book is called Reaching Through Time because I feel as though throughout the whole process I've reached into the darkness of that archive, pulled them out to restore their humanity. You know, there's there's a lot of archives in that book that have never seen the light of day, but I got access to them purely because I have four Aboriginal grandparents and I researched their family lines. So because I had that direct lineage, I got access to a lot of archives. And if I didn't have that lineage, then they would never have seen the light of day. So there's so much that this country doesn't know about Aboriginal history, and so I want to change that. Thank you.
Sophie Loy-Wilson:Okay, so I've got I've got uh uh one more question. Um, and probably after after this discussion, we might open it up to the audience uh for questions because I can feel the excitement in the room for the audience wanting to ask the three of you uh uh some questions. So all three of you have toured with your work, be it your um your books, um, be it um exhibitions or dance, all three of you have engaged with audiences in intense ways. And that takes guts, okay, to do that. Um, you know, there is a sense with some ways of doing history where the self can hide, maybe behind certain kinds of edifices. The three of you don't hide. You go out there and you tell the stories that you have to tell loudly and to many audiences. So I'm curious about the responses that you've gotten from either family members or audiences to your work and the extent to which those responses have changed your view of what you do.
Shauna Bostock:I was really quite surprised by the response to my work. It's just sort of like, oh apathy, what are you bringing all that up for? Why are you doing this, you know, and um oh, for God's sake, what's she banging on about now? You know, and there's this kind of um um um uh tall poppy syndrome in the Aboriginal community, you know, where when you when you take yourself to postgraduate education, it's just sort of like, oh, you know, there's this sense of of their awareness of your separation from the group. And um, and so uh I I find myself being driven to to to uh change that and and and make my family aware, but um, but they're very they're very um uh not non-receptive, but they're they're very oh that's really interesting, you know, and I I just I just I just feel like I'm an alien or adopted and um you know like they just don't share the same passion that I do, and so I'll just take it elsewhere.
Katarina Tiawa:Um I've definitely gotten similar responses from some members of of my family, especially so I do try to refrain from talking too much academia or research or whatever around them. And when I take photographs, I show it back to them and they love that part, but they're not quite sure what I'm doing or why I'm doing it. However, on this trip that I just went, um there are some political tensions on the island. Um, and I'm associated with one side of those tensions. And while I was going around talking to people in all the different villages of which I was related to, most people um we got this message from the authorities saying Katrina Tawa is holding unauthorized meetings on Rambi Island. She is not authorized to do it, please stop her, and then CC to the police to mock to two different police, police forces on the island. And so all of these messages were coming through, and the police would say Katrina Tawa's meeting with her family. It's fine, it's all it's it's authorized. So in this case, I had 100 plus members of my family there with the folks that I was meeting to discuss Barnaban human rights, and the they explained this to my family. And for the first time, my family, the mamas, the babies, the children were sitting there like, oh, that's what you do, which was awesome. Because usually, if you try to explain, 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 is fine, it's normal, it's normal, you know what I mean? It's not, it's it's that's just how it is. But I could see them paying attention to others, talking about why this work was important, why it was important that we do this research that all 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 talk about how awesome it is. Yay! So that was amazing because in fact, my fan, like the police were like, we are not going to talk to those hundred people over there. She has every right to be here. This is her island, that's her village, et cetera, et cetera. So that's one, you know, amazing, very, very recent response, which was like a big aha moment for me. Because usually my work is overseas. It's in Australia, it's in New Zealand, it's in the United States, it's in Hong Kong, it's in England somewhere. And so that was a very grounding experience. And when I have taken this to other places, my favorite part of people's response is that they come up with their own family archives. They go, like, there was this one guy who was waiting for me at the MTG Hawkes Bay Ta'huridi Gallery. And I was like, I just showed up, I was tired. They were like, there's a guy waiting for you. I was like, oh, who's that guy? Was I supposed to meet him? No, it was this lovely doctor who was retired, who was sitting there with three perfectly copied files of his family personal records. And his father was the was in the New Zealand Navy and was the person to receive the sword of surrender from the Japanese forces that had occupied Banaba, under which my great-grandfather and a lot of my relatives were in those camps, those Japanese war camps. And I was just like, I have literally just landed and then been given these stories and photographs and narratives because he was like, Who am I going to share this with? Who cares? So it resonates a lot, I think, with what you were talking about, and definitely what you were talking about. But in terms of these people who've been in history, who've been in time, who've experienced profound things and done like profound things, and nobody knows what they did or why they did and what happened. But they're big and they're profound and they're, you know, they're amazing, but we only get to see the histories of like a sliver of human beings, most of which I would say don't deserve all that attention. Because really, it's these everyday people who do profound, amazing things, which is why in my book I have a lot of stories. I have a lot of stories of workers, I have stories of the guy who worked in the chemist on Bunaba and who was like a hobby photographer. I have so many stories of housewives who were bored out of their minds because their husbands were doing all the mining, but the women were so funny and so interesting and so observant. And their stories about what was going on on the island are so much more interesting. So my book is full of other people's stories because even as an indigenous Bannaban, I'm not just interested in my own story. Of course I am. I've got family. We've been on this island for thousands of years, but my history and my stories are richer, so much richer by understanding and engaging with all those perspectives of all kinds of people. The big people who were appointed by the king or whatever, and the small people who were like born on the island, the little kids who are running around the island. I'm interested in all of their stories. That's what makes it so amazing and so rich and so wonderful. So when people come out with their personal archives, honestly, that's like the biggest gift because you can go to the National Archives, you can go to the state libraries, you can go to all of these, and you will get a particular perspective, but you will never have access to stuff that's in people's shelves and cupboards or kept in these very precious ways that this doctor had them. And so when people hand me that stuff, I'm like, oh my God, amazing. So now I have so many boxes of things at the ANU and in our wonderful new corporate university, where we're allowed two bookshelves and no boxes. Because I don't know how somehow magically and mysteriously it's structurally compromising of the Coombs building. That Coombs building's been around forever. Like, how suddenly can it not fit the boxes? But I've got so many boxes, and every time somebody goes, Can 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 stuff and 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 digital chatbot AI. I want the material things: words, paper, objects, stories, photographs, right? This I think is like the battle of the future because they're trying to. I love digitization. I love Trove, but I don't want this stuff to take over the fundamentals of history and this stuff. That's what it is. So I love personal archives. I love these little beautiful things that people have kept precious, and they've shared so much of that with me over the course of telling these Barnabin stories.
Sophie Loy-Wilson:Yeah, when you talk, Katarina, I think we can feel the people who you've included in those stories and in those people whose stories are yet, those boxes kind of with you. It's a collective force that we can feel. Umre might just like um yeah.
André Dao:So I mean, there's definitely uh sections of my family who have told me they're waiting for the movie, you know. Um and it it really um it really didn't help uh that um uh Vietnam Ryan's wonderful novel, The Sympathizer, was recently made into a big HBO series. So now the family are waiting for that, and they're kind of like, Will you two get Robert Downey Jr. in your film? And like, okay, I'm not sure. Um one one thing I hadn't anticipated about the reaction of my family to the novel though was um so for the Australian edition, uh, we decided to include so the cover is a photo of um is an actual photo of my grandfather, just to further blur those lines between fiction and and and history. Um and uh I yeah, what what I hadn't anticipated was the way that really turned the book into an object um for my family, particularly my non-English reading family, who wanted the object. They wanted the book um as this kind of thing to sort of sit in the house that said that's you know, that's my brother, that's my husband, that's my um father, um, and he's there. And that kind of sense of um the officialness of the book as object, you know. I had written about him before for an online publication that means nothing for them, right? But to have the book and have the photo that meant something. Um, I mean, finally, when it was published in the UK, they you know they decided to go with a different cover and we we had a conversation about um a different photo that they wanted to choose. I mean, then somehow the cover for the UK edition was, I guess they uh they they upload it to you 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 in the family WhatsApp chat, um, in which my family who ended up being resettled in France had come across this UK cover and they said, Oh, you know, so someone's A, has stolen your book, um but B, they've put this other, they've put the wrong man on the cover. That's not you know, that's not your grandfather. Um, and then because I had been asleep through all of this and been able to correct them, I think they got a bit hysterical, and then they said, you know, that man has the face of a communist. Um and yeah, and so then I had to go, oh, actually, this is the photo it comes from. He was actually a Catholic acolyte. We chose the photo because you know, that's a connection to the family. So, you know, but then what I realized was also just how much they had this history of going, it would be just right that the you know the English publisher would put the wrong kind of Vietnamese person on the cover, right? The the lack of kind of trust there. Um I was just thinking, Katarina, while you were speaking about the objects and um in the work that I've done with um asylum seekers, people detained in immigration detention centers. Uh I just remember one um interview that I did with someone, his name was his name's John Gilzari, who he's a Hazaragi man who lives in Danong in Melbourne. And we did this long interview about his life and um his experience of being um imprisoned in um you know for seeking asylum. We got to the very end of of the interview and and I just sort of asked that you know that you. When you have that one more question that you kind of come to at the end, hadn't really planned about it. I said, Oh, is there any anything that you have like any physical objects that you have that you want to show me about your journey? Um, and then he was like, Oh, actually I do. And he went off and rummaged around, he got this old cassette tape out and said, Oh, this um this is the tape of um uh this this really famous Hazaragi singer. Um, and actually, um, you know, before I got on the boat leaving Indonesia, um I asked the the driver who was taking us down to the boat just to play this tape because I thought, you know, it's a very dangerous journey, I could die in it. The last, you know, the last music I want to hear is this tape. And you know, he still had that, and it was the things that people have sitting around in their bedrooms, in their cupboards. It's sort of um incredible to think, and then also that sense of where will it all go and what are our institutions doing about keeping some of this, having holding that space for these objects.
Sophie Loy-Wilson:All right, thank you for your patience. Um, I've had the pleasure of asking these three brilliant minds questions. So now I'd like to open up um the floor to questions. Uh I think um we have a roving mic as that. Thank you so much, Lauren.
Question 1:Sorry, thank you very much. Um wonderful um presentations and and and discussion. Um we probably don't have that much time to ask too many questions. And I guess I what I love about the the work that all three of you do is how much of you you put into it. Um you, your politics, your your your lived experiences, um, your families. Um and that takes a lot of courage, right? That takes a lot of, as as you've talked about in terms of the reactions as well, that takes a lot of courage to do that kind of work and to do it in the face of some of the kind of um obstacles that we do face as academics, structural obstacles, publication outputs and and peer review and objectivity uh problems. Um so I guess I just wondered if I'm I'm really cheered that there are a lot of younger students and postgraduate students here and early career people who might be able to take heart from the kind of the work that you do. And I wondered if maybe you could um if you could just uh counsel us on on how to push ourselves, how to challenge ourselves to write and to think about doing more creative histories.
Katarina Tiawa: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 and students respond to my work is so important because I have no idea. Um but I think in response to Mike's question, I actually don't know how to do it any other way. So I've always been confused in academia where they try to train you in all of this objectivity, and that really, truly, deeply makes no sense to me. It really, truly, deeply doesn't. I mean, obviously, especially in the social sciences and humanities. I'm like, everything is positioned, everything is constructed, no eye of God, no eye of God. I'm an old Donna Haraway fan, no eye of God. Um, but not because Donna Haraway said it, but because that makes no sense, actually. Um, so one of my my most recent publication is um is about it's I actually have forgotten the title. Something like to hell with the disciplines or something like that, like something where I went on a rant, an absolute rant. But now that you know the humanities and social sciences under attack, I'm like oop, oop, till it, till it, till it, because now I feel I feel compassion and sympathy for everyone as well. But I don't understand this training that everyone receives to remove the humanity and the positionality. Like, I'm like, I don't care what your background is, you might have come from the moon or wherever. And somehow, if you're indigenous or you're a person of color, then your story is extra special or unique. Yes, actually, probably maybe it is, but actually, no, everyone has this. If we actually all had these amazing conversations with our ancestors, the good, the bad, and the ugly, things, you know, would be more human and more compassionate. But we're so busy forgetting our ancestors. And I truly believe they want us to do this work. Truly. Ancestor is the other part of my approach. I gave my ANU Archives lecture was Islands, Archives, Ancestors. Those are the three things that are at the heart of the work, and I feel like they're very much at the heart of everyone on this panel.
Sophie Loy-Wilson:So we have a room full of custodians, I feel, right? We do. We have a room full of custodians. Uh um, so it was such an honor to be part of this conversation. I'm sure we can all agree it was just so vibrant and wonderful. Um, I want to end with a term that uh Andre uses in his book, which is anamesis, which is the salvation in a certain kind of remembering, right? Good Catholic word that he uh talks about being a Catholic boy in mass in our suburban Melbourne growing up. Um so please uh thank you so much. We have a reception now. You can purchase uh Sean's book, you can purchase Andre's book and the catalogue for Katerina's exhibition. Please join me in thanking our three speakers.
Catherine Shirley:Thank you for joining us for this podcast. If you'd like to hear more, subscribe to our series via your favourite streaming platform and join us for our next history in our episode, interpreting Cockatoo Island, Warima, past, present, and future. For a full list of History Council cultural partners, along with a list of other podcasts produced by us, please visit our website History Councilnsw.org.au forward slash podcasts.
Catherine Shirley:I'm Catherine Shirley, thank you.