Read This: Clare Wright Is Shutting Up and Listening

I'm joined by host Michael Williams to tell me a little bit more about the episode.

about that kind of history. She followed it up with another book called You Daughters of Freedom, and that one told the story of Australia's suffrage campaigners and how they won the vote for women, for white women, to be more precise, And so she's again and again really interested in the ways in which certain voices are missing from

the official history that we tell. She takes these historical artifacts, whether it's the Eureka flag or the suffrage banner, and uses them to say that here's part of the story that you're missing. Here are some of the people that you haven't heard from. And in this third book, marko Daruk, she takes the bark Petitions.

The petition said that the land in question has been hunting and food gathering land for the Yukola tribes from time immemorial, and it argues that places sacred to the Yeklar people as well as vital to their livelihood, are part of the excised land the kind of proposed mining area. It was a petition that called on the House of Representatives to appoint a committee accompanied by and the language

is really amazing. It's competent interpreters to hear the views of the people of Yukola before permitting the excision of land for the mine. No arrangements should be entered into with any company which will destroy the livelihood and independence of the Yerkola people. It's hard not to read this and think about this history in the context of the referendum into the voice to Parliament that obviously failed last year.

And there's this incredible through lane from the history of that Claire's telling to the present moment, and it's what makes this book and hopefully the conversation we had on read this so irresistible.

inside when she talked about Australian history. And it was something about both that kind of alchemy, the transmogrification that happened in her as a human being when she talked about it, that made me sit up straight and really listen. And the thing that I most remember about that year was we had to do our own research project and while most young people, seventeen year olds in the September school holidays were sitting out in the sun a bit,

you know, maybe seeing their friends. You know, exams are coming up, but still not the pointy end of the year. Yet I spent two weeks in the bowels of this Date Library of Victoria. This is when I fell in love with history, and Australian history in particular, because we had to use original archival research to do the essay,

and we had to set our own essay topic. And I remember that I wrote on how the Yarrow River went from being a babbling brook in quotation marks to sordid cesspool quotation marks, So those were both archival quotes. And then I traced that and Michael, I was just in love. It was like getting the first hit of a drug. It was something about the search for the answers, about the hit of the find, and then about living

in the place that you were immersed in. So I was immersed in a decade of Melbourne's history from in the eighteen forties. And I'd come out of the State Library blinking into the light like a mole that had come out from underground. Because I was so transported into that place, and for me that was it was.

Mount Waverley growing up. They weren't very suburban, they were quite bohemian. What studying Australian history did for me was to give me a sense of groundedness, I think in the place and in the culture that I didn't have prior to that. I spent my entire childhood flying over the Pacific backwards and forwards between my mother and my father who my dad lived in Canada. So that sense of being very transient physically and I guess emotionally intellectually

Australian history anchored me. I also think that that is why I come at Australian history once I was a fully fledged scholar of my own, so I did an honors in history, a Masters in history, a PhD in history. Of postdoctor research in history, I mean consistent, nothing if not consistent. But it was that postdoctor or research that

became the Eureka Book. And it wasn't until then that I actually sort of linked some of these things that we've been talking about here and realized that that sense of being outside the house looking in actually had informed the way I do history, So that those myths and legends of Australian history that settler Australians may have grown

up with didn't feel as embodied to me. I didn't take them for granted, and so I think that's what's allowed me to have a little bit more of that outsiders kind of perspective and be able to read against the grain of the myth or the legend.

stories in ways that reinforce our idea of ourselves. And so the historian as nation builder seems to me to be a pretty tight lockup.

and they're two very different things. And so human beings make history and they write history and they construct history. Those are narratives. Those are stories, and some of them we have grown up with as bedtime stories. They're comforting narratives.

They're narratives that are intended to make you feel what John Howard might have called relaxed and comfortable, and nobody really wants to let go of those in the same way that probably in some ways we're always trying to get back to that state where our parents still, if we were lucky, sat up in bed and read to us, and we fell asleep to the soft droning of their voice. I meant that sort of certainty gives security, and so those myths and legends have a real place. They give

people a sense of security. And it's not surprising that conservative politicians go after historians and start history wars as part of larger culture wars, because what historians do often ask uncomfortable questions, and they go back to the archives and back to the sources with those uncomfortable questions and find answers there that unsettle those narratives, that fracture those narratives.

to their historian. But one of the things that she was very big on was not knowing, you know that there is this embedded kind of not knowing, and to a certain extent, for classicists, their job is to read and reread the same historical records that everyone's been reading for hundreds of years, but find a way to interpret them differently, find a way to approach them and discover things in them. And that that act requires a kind

of imaginative leap. It requires an act of empathy where you might recognize the subjectivity of the readings that have happened before and approach it differently.

had great fun talking about sources. And one of the things that I have with Australian history that Mary doesn't have with the classical sources she goes back to, is so many of her sources are actually the narratives that have already been written, whereas I have diaries, letters, newspaper reports, government documents, the things that historians of an earlier period have much more access to and I can now find them online much better if you can actually get into

the archives yourself and sift through those boxes or volumes, because a lot of the time it's just what you said, you don't know what, you don't know until there it is staring you in the face. And then the job of the historian is to weave what you have found into a cohesive narrative that is going to communicate to

your audience. For me, something of the experience of being in that archive, what it feels like to be in Ballarat in eighteen fifty four, or to be in London during the great Suffragette rallies of nineteen eleven, or with this latest book, what it was like to be in Urdkala in nineteen sixty three. Because that is the great thrill of the historian, is to feel that because you're so immersed. The great challenge is then to communicate that to the reader.

But that put me in the household of the Unipingus and it was years of going backwards and forwards between Melbourne and Northeast darnham Land before it occurred to me that that experience, that the massive learning curve that I was on, that the great hospitality and warmth and generosity that the young people had showed me might become part

of my work in any way. And that was when I started talking more about history with people up there, and that's when essentially the invitation to write this book came. One of the things that is at first uncomfortable and then just becomes magical is to be in your own country and to be totally immersed in a people who are not speaking the language that you speak. You might

expect that if you go overseas. In fact, you do expect that, and Australians are so privileged in their mind no lingualism, that we understand that if we go to another country, we were likely not going to speak its language, whereas you know Europeans are familiar with many European languages. It was expounding to me and still is that in arnum Land, English is the fifth language that a young or person will speak. They'll speak four different versions of

yong or mutter and then English. So what I had to learn to do really quickly was shut up and listen. And oh my god, that's a good skill for a Nestorian to learn, Michael. And that humility that is created through that process is I think something that is different about this book from my previous works. I've always been very respectful of the archive. You know, I've always said I write narrative nonfiction. They're written to be read. I

want people to race through them. I want people to get to the end of a chapter and want to know what happens next. I want people to be invested in character development, and the archive is what gives you that. I have never made anything up. You know, doctors make a pact to do no harm. Historians, I think, make a pact with their reader to not make shit up.

And yet this book is the one in which I felt going into it the most amount of responsibility to get things right, to get the tone right, to get the balance and the weight of voices right, to get the sense of bilingualism that is essential to the bark petitions themselves, but also the experience of living on country now and certainly in nineteen sixty three, the Methodist missionaries who went there all had to learn yongomata, so they became bilingual. I wanted that to inflect the book. I

want it also country itself to be archive. What I mean by that is youngal people know how to read the land. When a certain flower is out, it means that something's going to be happening in the ocean. Now, when a breeze starts to come from a different direction,

it means it's time to harvest something. And what I wanted was for the reader to be really imbued with that sense of the way in which the climate affects the mood of the people, the wet, the dry, the build up, But then also to have the six Yngal seasons inflected in there as well, so that there's a sense of the shoulder to shoulderness of what people would

call baala gullily, which means two ways learning. It's what the ull Statement from the Heart asked us all very generously to do, which is walk together on this journey.

live conversation. You know, that's not an abstract thing. The stuff you write about in Nakudaruk has very serious present day implications. So I'm just curious about whether that places a different pressure on the kind of history that you write.

written in Australian history yet. And the combination of the fact that I had not only the consent but the encouragement of senior members of the community, and I had the skills and resources to be able to go about this history because I had an ARC grant. Those were the things that drove me forward in this project. I didn't actually realize I had a trilogy on my hands until I started researching Naku Dharuk, and what I actually was doing was not casting forward to an open ended

political moment. What I was doing was casting back and joining the dots between Eureka and northeast Arnham Land in nineteen sixty three, joining the dots between the Eureka flag that had been hand sewn by women to express what the diggers of Ballarat were protesting about, which was essentially needing and wanting to have their voices heard in the

halls of Victorian Parliament because they were disenfranchised. I realized that the Bark petitions, handmade by young people, signed by men and women, expressed that same sentiment and ambition which was to be heard to have a voice in the halls of power to be able to express grievances about what was going on on the ground to people who were similarly disenfranchised structurally as well as culturally. And I thought, ooh,

I can compare these. I can say that the Eureka flag was to the nineteenth century what the Bark petitions

were to the twentieth century. And then realized that there was a dot in the middle to join, which was the Women's Suffrage Banner which hangs in Parliament House, which did the same thing, a material object painted by a woman that was carried in the Great Suffragette Rallies of London that proclaimed the rights that Australian women had already won, were first in the world to win the right to stand for Parliament and the right to vote white women, that is, and that they were claiming a voice as

well in the body politic in the nation state. And so there was a trilogy. So I went back and wrote you'd Orders of Freedom, and then came back to Nakudharuk. When I started researching and writing it, I had no sense that it was going to make any kind of political intervention. Yes, of course, it makes an intervention into the narrative of Australian history in that it writes First

Nations people into mainstream Australian political history. The young or people are as important in this book as the men'sis government and the Methodist Church and the mining interests. It's a four cornered contest for this piece of land in northeast Arnham Land. In that sense, it's not quarantined Aboriginal history, just as I would say that Eureka and Your Daughters

of Freedom were not quarantined women's history. They were revisionists to the extent that certain comfortable myths about the Gold Ros and comfortable myths about the Federation era were turned on their head by realizing that women were so deeply implicated, that women had been the agents, the historical agents of the changes that were made that we then later came to celebrate as being masculine achievements to masculine aspirations, and

that reflected masculine virtues like unity or collectivity or standing up for your rights and your freedoms and your liberties, which are then gendered male. Nakudaruk certainly is interventionist, but I didn't realize that it had the potential to be read as activist until I got to the conclusion, and the conclusion is the part where I take the reader from nineteen sixty four to twenty twenty four. Essentially the

rest of the book is nineteen sixty three. And within that time, by the time I was up to writing that we'd had the Ulurus Statement from the Heart, we'd had the Voice Referendum, we had the challenge that doctor g Unipingu had made to the Commonwealth Government for reparations for the loss of land and culture that had happened in nineteen sixty three, and the finding in his favor.

It was impossible not to include all of those things in a reckoning of what had happened over the last sixty years to bring us to the point that we are today, Because the same thing that the people were asking for through the Bark petitions in nineteen sixty three was the very thing that the Voice Referendum was essentially in big picture talking about, which is a voice. Obviously on the small scale, it was asking for or a change to the Australian Constitution. And that's the part that

Australian said no to. And I think it's really important to remember that. In Meghan Davis who was so such a leader in the Ulary's statement from the Heart and the Voice referendum has made this point now, which is that Australians in twenty twenty three said no to a particular word changing to a particular line in the Constitution. They didn't say no to everything that has to do with aboriginal tyrest Rate Islander writes.

with the idea of interrogating that fixed point. You know, that's a failure of imagination when it comes to how history functions.

their land. They weren't rejecting mining per se. What they were protesting about was the lack of consultation with them as the landowners and any form of compensation, because this essentially broke yourngal law. Grew had to ask permission of each other to come onto each other's clan lands, and they had to give something in exchange if they took resources from those clan lands. And what these documents show is the normal people who you might like to think

were stone Age people. Lots of newspaper reports at the time called them that the stone Age people who were unchanging, inflexible, who were tied to custom. What the Bark petitions actually show was they were able to gracefully generously find a way to speak nation to nation within their sense of sovereignty to the parliament, blending the literacy of the colonizers with their own language and with the motifs of their

cosmology their spirituality. I mean, if you know how to read the painted designs that are on the outside of

the petitions, these are essentially landholding documents. So what I hope when people read this book reflecting on the Voice Referendum, is that they might be able to sense that history is not so set in stone, that it's created by bold, innovative moves of empathy, of imagination, of generosity, of spirit, of hospitality, and that the Bark Petitions and the Knakudaruk the youngal words for them I think express all of that.