Remarks inspired by three sessions at the Bellingen Readers & Writers Festival
The sessions were by the following authors that presented their books:
A) The photographer and writer Jon Rhodes, 'Whitefella Way', 2022
B) Anastasia Guise, (collaborative authors) Fire Stories: Reflections from Northern Rivers locals on the 2019/2020 bushfires.
C) Sarah George, Gamu: The Dreamtime Stories, Life & Feelings of Big Bill Neidjie
Moderation: Ross Macleay
Storification of the life of others might sum up the common thread
for these three presentations.
Anthropological enthusiasts with a gaze of an outsider curate and frame encounters of lived lives and experiences of others.
The mostly narrative form in text, image or audio is to make the stories 'more accessible'. It is to meet the longing for the unambiguous, a clarity of meaning, a search for orientation.
The literary device of narrative storification of the others' lived lives seems to have a contemporary ring of 'authenticity'. People open up 'first hand' about their lives and 'confess' to their trauma. The presently popular genre of autofiction blends autobiography and fiction.
Ever since the "narrative turn" (Peter Brooks) “storification” is en vogue and sells. The craft of narrative fiction or storytelling has also been seized by PR, medical communication, council spins and generally narrates corporate 'stories'.
In the age of attention deficits, the failure to actively listen seems ubiquitous. Distracted and overloaded, one has to relearn to listen, read and observe again. Forests of books and public mainstream broadcasters (ABC feeds) consist of 'stories' and no longer claim to be 'news'.
The genre of the first-person recount is said to easily connect with the interlocutor's emotions. Data visualisation or pictorial representation of information aims to 'bring the message home'.
The demand for authenticity in uncertain times is apparently met by the trustworthy first-person narrative. It is alluding to an immediate, direct, true and uncomplicated reciprocal exchange of meaningful experiences.
Communities of experience and practice can find a social anchor in a 'we'. For the consumer the stories appear more emotionally engrossing as the narrative appeals to an ingrained and familiar enculturated pattern of a narrative arc/structure.
There seems to be a difference if the interlocutor's “stories” are the literary confessing, retelling or bearing witness of an individual narration or a socially curated autofiction.
The 'story' of a representative/member of a First Nation sharing collective knowledge appears to be on another level of transmission. The ‘Indigenous cultural capital’ which is shared comprises the material and symbolic goods, the knowledge that functions as a social relation within an economy of practices.
For a long time cultural assets have been dealt with by members of another culture or identity. The curation of these cultures and traditions have been undertaken by members of the dominant culture (settlers/ anthropologists/enthusiasts) for too long.
It is time to refrain from voicing the concerns of others and start to face up to one's own mode of relating, then and now.
”The decolonizing practices by Indigenous scholars have outlined contours of critical Indigenous praxis that seek to liberate Indigenous communities from colonial and settler hegemonies of knowledge production, dissemination of knowledges, and the ongoing constraints colonial systems of systemic racism have imposed on Indigenous peoples as a global phenomenon.” (source)
Indigenous knowledge-holders have cared for Country for 65,000 years sustainably. The story of our 'Grand Narrative' has collapsed into an apocalyptic horror fiction 'story' with respect to the state of the environment and our social interrelatedness.
Time is long overdue for 'Whitefella Way'/settler colonial society to remember, reflect, and face up to the 'story' of their ongoing encounters. Self-reflexivity is needed to critically interrogate ourselves about our self-understanding and our decolonising practices.
There's a story in “truth telling” in the treatment of relationality and Country from the settlers' perspective. There's so much postcoloniality waiting to be unearthed, so much unlearning to be done. Nothing less than a reset in relation to self, land and people.
LINKS:
Jonn Rhodes, Whitefella Way
“In the final chapter Rhodes investigates the mass killing of Warlpiri, Anmatyerre, Kaytej and Warumungu in the Northern Territory – the 1928 Coniston Massacre – and again asks, when will the fundamental truth of the 140-year-long Australian Frontier War be wholeheartedly acknowledged and memorialised by the government of the Commonwealth of Australia?”
In Jon Rhodes' 'Cages of Ghosts' he is tracing the vandalism of iconoclasts in NSW.
Cage of Ghosts, Jon Rhodes
Rhodes documents rock engravings and carved trees in NSW. "It is a photographic exploration of the destruction of cultural heritage by an iconoclastic system. Sacred sites today 'only exist as ‘caged’, places that are now imprisoned by development. Rhodes creates a subtle, challenging narrative of the ambiguities and complexities of non-Indigenous relations with Indigenous culture over more than a century."
Anastasia Guise, (collaborative authors) Fire Stories: Reflections from Northern Rivers locals on the 2019/2020 bushfires. Collaboratively curated rich media stories about traumatised
survivors of the climate induced bushfires in NSW, 2019/2020.
The Dreamtime Stories, Life & Feelings of Big Bill Neidjie, Sarah George
Further links:
Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology.1999
(Deconstructing the intellectual paradigms of colonialism)
Mapping Colonial Frontier Massacres, Australia, 1788 to 1930
