Writings from the heart – indigenous voice, art, and identity

By AMBER GRIFFIN

Currency House’s second edition of the New Platform Paper (NPP) series, From the Heart: The Voice, the Arts and Australian Identity is a collection of essays, addresses and speeches by preeminent First Nations thinkers with backgrounds in creative arts, law, and philosophy.

The book includes contributions by Josephine Caust, Tyson Yunkaporta, Joel Pearson, Sally Sales, Eddie Synot and Rachael Maza.

Rachael Maza is a Yidinji and Meriam woman and the artistic director of Ilbijerri Theatre Company in Melbourne. Her piece, Re-RIGHT-ing the Narrative, talks about the imperative for First Nations people to tell their own story.

“It was completely normal for a completely white creative team to make a black story. The reality is […] things haven’t improved very much and we are still having to fight for the right to tell our stories. The term “self-determination” has been around a long time now, but I wonder if people know what it actually means,” Maza told City Hub.

Maza emphasises the importance of storytelling for First Nations people. “Storytelling is the sinew that ties us together and to this place; it’s through story that we know who we are, our identity – and this is not a First Nations thing – this is all humans.

Excerpt from Re-RIGHT-ing the Narrative:

“Make space for us to be self-determined in our story making, because the stories that we will tell, will not be about dysfunction and how we all died out, but about our heroes, our resilience, our extraordinary sophistication and tenacity and political nous and phenomenally powerful communities. The stories that we will tell, will be our celebration of who we are. The stories that we will tell, we will share generously with this country, and this country will be the richer for it. And those are the stories that our kids will hear and be proud to be black.”

-Rachael Maza

“But why it’s so critical for the first peoples of this country at this particular time in our history is we, Australia, are at a juncture, a fork in the road. We can keep going the way we’ve been going, or we can take the other road – the road that recognises the significant place of the first peoples of this land and their extraordinary cultures and longevity […]

Compounding the urgency for first nations peoples to be telling their stories, is the fact that for 240 years stories ‘about us’ have not been told ‘by us’ – Self-determination in storytelling, in theatre, means ‘those whose story it is have the creative, cultural and political authorship over how and for whom the story is told’.”

“These narratives were not written by us but by those who have profited from the dispossession of the first peoples of this country and the theft of their land. It is an innate human instinct to want to tell a version of one’s history that they can be proud of, leaving out or worse still -completely fabricating the facts as needed.”

“The attitudes about aboriginal people today lie deep in the national psyche and too often are revealed in moments like Goodes’s booing, 15-year-old Cassius killed walking home from school, 97% of kids in detention are black etc. We need and must be able to write our own narratives: narratives of our heroes and our warriors.” Maza said.

‘The Voice, the Arts and Australian Identity’ – Currency House’s new ‘Platform Paper Vol 2’ is available at www.currency.com.au