The year nineteen sixty three is considered to be one of the most pivotal for the civil rights movement in the US. It marked not only the Children's Crusade in Birmingham, Alabama, that saw thousands of students march against segregation, but it was also the year of Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech. But there is a story much closer to home, a major civil rights moment that many of
us might be less familiar with. In August of nineteen sixty three, the Yong people of northeast Arnham Land created the Yukola Bach Petitions or nakudaruk. The petitions stated that the land in question has been hunting and food gathering land for Yerkola tribes from time immemorial. Its stressed that places sacred to the Yerkola people, as well as vital
to their livelihood, are in the excised land. These petitions called on the House of Representatives to appoint a committee accompanied by competent interpreters, to hear the views of the people of Yerkola before permitting the excision of the land for the mine, and to ensure that no arrangements be entered into with any company which will destroy the livelihood and independence of the Yerkola people. Professor clear Wright has documented this momentous and often overlooked piece of history in
her new book naku Daruk The Bark Petitions. It's been described by one academic as officially the first history of the Uluru Statement era, the very messy story of power, subjugation and coexistence. It's hard not to find something deeply dispiriting about the fact that a story that began in nineteen sixty three still finds itself unresolved, still at the center of debate in this country. It's hard to think of many people more equal to the task than clear Right.
You may have come across her previous books that have given her a reputation as someone who knows how to give voice to the forgotten in a Stralian history. Her debut was called The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka, and have focused on the role that women played at the Eureka Stockade, and Nakudaruk is right at her best. It's this compulsively readable narrative and a powerful reminder of the enduring spirit of resistance and ongoing struggles for recognition and reconciliation in Australia.
It's also the third and final installment in what writers described as her Democracy trilogy. Across three books, she's taken historical artifacts and used them to understand the voices that are too often missing from our historical record. The Eureka Flag, then the Suffragette Banner, and now the Bark Petitions. Australia's history, its very democracy, is built on a basis of disenfranchisement and silence. Claire Wright's works of history are about writing
that wrong. I'm Michael Williams and this is read This the show about the books we love and the historical archives behind. Tell me about your first memory of learning Australian history.
Oh my, that's going back some way now ancient history. One would say, Look, that's a high school experience and the first time a sense of Australian history. What it meant to study it, what I could get out of it landed with me. Was in year twelve and I had a teacher in year twelve who was the most bland, ordinary potato of a woman who absolutely lit up from 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
the State 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 Yarra River went from being a babbling 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 that the first time you had that rush from history, or had you had it with him history from elsewhere, and it was the first time I had it about Australian history or did it start in Australia for you?
Look, I think it started in Australia for me. And part of that is that I'm not Australian born. I'm a first generation immigrant to the country. I came to Australia from the United States when I was five, and I think that I always had a sense of being an outsider. I'm also Jewish, but I didn't go to a Jewish school or grow up in a Jewish community, so there was that about me. I was living with my mother and my stepfather, and they had very different kind of lifestyle than the kids that I knew in
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 master's in history, a PhD in history. Of post doctor research in history I mean consistent, so 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 LEDs 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.
I'm glad you point towards the myths and legends, because amongst the many functions of history, amongst the many ways in which history manifests, one of the most pervasive iterations of history, I think lies in the nation state and lies in national myth building. Our idea of who we are, our identity legitimacy as a nation is absolutely pinned on the reading of these events and the retelling of these
stories in ways that reinforce our idea of ourselves. And so the historian as nation builder seems to me to be a pretty tight life.
Absolutely, historians have been implicated in the settler colonial project right from the beginning. There's no doubt about that. And you read somebody like Anna Clark's book Making Australian History and delving into the historiography and the ways that history has been written, because as I often say when I go and speak to students in schools, the past is a time concept, but history is a social construct. And they're two very different things. And so human beings make
history and they write history and they construct history. And 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 mean sort of. 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 is 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.
It was like enough to interview Mary Beard earlier this year. Lucky's just talking about, you know, the classicists as opposed 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 active empathy where you might recognize the subjectivity of the readings that have happened before and approach it differently.
Absolutely, and what Mary does is imagine things from the point of view of the slave, not the emperor. Imagine things from the point of view of the women who were living in ancient Rome. And those were questions hadn't
really been asked before. Mary and I were at the Jaipur Literature Festival together earlier this year and we 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 weive what you have found into a cohesive narrative that is going to communicate to
your audience. Well, 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 Idakala 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.
When we return, we dive into the genesis of clear Right's final installment of the Democracy Trilogy, and she describes what it meant to her to document history while it was continuing to swirl all around her.
I first went to Northeast dynham Land with my family in twenty ten and was adopted into community after a month or so of my kids going to school with young kids, and I was adopted into the Unipingu family. Was actually adopted by doctor G's Unipingu's fourth wife, who was not a good much woman, She's a doctorway woman. 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 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 monolingualism that we understand that if we go to another country, we are likely not going to speak its language, whereas
you know Europeans are familiar with many European languages. It was extounding to me and still is that in arnam Land, English is the fifth language 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 historian 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 wanted also country itself to be archive. What I mean by that is your wal 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. 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 Ularus statement from the Heart asked us all very generously to do, which is walk together on this journey.
As to think from certain practices of history where it's, if not an abstract thing, the endpoint is it's still about telling a story about something and it's at arm's length. Yes, But you are completing the end of an over a decade long project in writing histories of Australian democracy, an alternative two decades, a trilogy that kind of unpicks the project of Australian democracy in different ways. That's an incredibly
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.
When I started researching and writing Nakudaruk ten years ago, Ularu's statement from the heart hadn't been written. The idea of a voice referendum wasn't in anybody's consciousness. I set out to write the story that one I was more or less asked by the your or community to work on, and two the story that I felt had not been
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 Yungal 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 Barque 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 Daughterers of Freedom and then came back to Nakudaruk. 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 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 Rush 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
masque killan aspirations, and that reflected masculine virtues like unity or collectivity, or standing up for your rights and your freedoms in 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 Ulary 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 or 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 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.
I mean that's a I think it's an important thing to remember. It's a fascinating way to think about it, though, because part of what that's suggesting is that the sticking point for people was a mistaken belief that a historical document or artifact should somehow be unchanging or sacrisanct, that it's not something that can be fluid as times changes,
needs change. But if the constitution's a fixed point and people are uncomfortable with the idea of interrogating that fixed point, you know that's a failure of imagination when it comes to how history functions.
Surely, absolutely, and I hope one of the ways in which this book functions now that Nakudaruk functions. And I didn't set out with this expressly given that we have had that referendum on the voice. One of the things that I hope people can read is the way in which the Barque petitions themselves, which were documents sent by the people to the Federal Parliament in nineteen sixty three to protest against the incursion of mining on 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. Yal groups 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 theyal people who you might like to think were Stone
Age people. Lots of newspaper reports at the time call 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 barque petitions in the Knakudaruk the youngal words for them, I think, express all of that.
Claire Ryant's new book, Nakudaruk The Bark Petitions is available everywhere now, and if you're a fan of Claire's work, look for her podcast with ev Reese's Archive Fever. There's a lot of history murdery to enjoy. Right there. Before we go, I wanted to let you know what I've been reading this week, and fans have read this will be unsurprised to know that I am rapturous about the
new Helen Garner book. Way back in episode one, when we got to visit Helen at home, she was working on the book that would eventually become the Season, which is out now. It's the story of her grandson Ambrose's under sixteens football team and Helen's adoring fandom sitting down on the boundary line watching him play. But it's a Garner book. It's about aging, it's about community, it's about masculinity. It's about all that and more, and it's utterly beautiful.
I didn't want it to end. You can find it and all the other books we mentioned today and your favorite independent bookshop. That's it for this week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends and rate and review us. It helps a lot. Next week I'll read this. I'm joined in the studio by the one, the only, John Saffron to discuss his new book, which I'll let him set it.
Up for people who don't know it, because Michael doesn't know how to set up an interview. I mean so so the book scored squat a week squatting at Kanye's mansion and Yeah, so I went into Kangnye's mansion. I made my way in into the legal expression, and I used it as a writer's retreat.
Read this as a Schwartz Media production made possible by the generous support of an ar group. The show is produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing by Travis Evans and original compositions by Zalton Fetcher. Thanks for listening, See you next week.