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Research Through,
With and As Storying
Research Through, With and As Storying explores how Indigenous and non-
Indigenous scholars can engage with storying as a tool that disassembles
conventions of research. The authors explore the concept of storying across
different cultures, times and places, and discuss principles of storying and
storying research, considering Indigenous, feminist and critical theory
standpoints. Through the book, Phillips and Bunda provide an invitation to
locate storying as a valuable ontological, epistemological and methodological
contribution to the academy across disciplines, arguing that storying research
gives voice to the marginalised in the academy.
Providing rich and interesting coverage of the approaches to the field
of storying research from Aboriginal and white Australian perspectives,
this text seeks to enable a profound understanding of the significance of
stories and storying. This book will prove valuable for scholars, students
and practitioners who seek to develop alternate and creative contributions
to the production of knowledge.
Louise Gwenneth Phillips is an academic in the School of Education at the
University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.
Tracey Bunda is Professor and Head of the College for Indigenous Studies,
Education and Research at the University of Southern Queensland,
Toowoomba, Australia.
Research Through,
With and As Storying
Louise Gwenneth Phillips
and Tracey Bunda
First published 2018
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2018 Louise Gwenneth Phillips and Tracey Bunda
The right of Louise Gwenneth Phillips and Tracey Bunda to be
identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
The Open Access version of this book, available at www.
taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative
Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0
license.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-08949-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-10919-0 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781315109190
We dedicate this book to our ancestors who gave us the
gift of stories – the gift to story. And to those who have
storied before us, to those who inspire us and nurture us,
we hold deep thanks and gratitude. We remain as one with
you and with stories.
Foreword
Through storying, may we never be still
From our earliest memories, elders family members and friends tell stories
that nurture us, challenge us and inform us of beautiful realities of the stars
in the sky that guide us in spiritual and earth-bound journeys. Stories also
warn us about harsh pain brought on by racism, assault and war. Louise
Phillips and Tracy Bunda come “together” in order “two-gather” shared
meanings. They remind us that when all voices are being heard through
storying, regardless of positionality, we can have hope and create “guide
ropes” to nurture relationships, form authentic collaborations and energise
actions to support humanness in all our encounters. The language and met-
aphors are vivid throughout this book, and the authors evoke a range of
dynamic and passionate emotions.
This work with storying, courageously led by Phillips and Bunda,
addresses the human meaning making involved in the passion to tell stories
and the thirst to receive the stories. The webs of connection among aca-
demic research, pedagogy and influence open the possibility for new meth-
odologies, new positionality and new theorising that are inclusive rather
than exclusive. Of course, stories do take many shapes as the authors here
acknowledge and honour. And the intended sharing of meaning of stories
is always contingent upon the context in which the stories are shared, the
relationships among the storying-givers and the storying-receivers and, of
course, the language used to share the stories. Translation of stories is not
always perfect, to be sure, and this is more dire and consequential within
contexts of exploitation, colonialism, war and oppression.
Stories support our changing norms of knowledge delivery and exchange
and mantles of expert roles among all participants. Stories are often trans-
generational. Educators are beginning to acknowledge the importance of
multigenerational learning through stories. Thankfully, Indigenous peoples
all over the world have rich traditions that have supported perseverance
with storying, and many in academia are just beginning to be tutored in the
knowledge and humanness passed down through the storying practices and
are just beginning to learn of the power.
Foreword ix
For years I’ve learned from participants in storying research whose wis-
dom and experience puts my own knowledge in the shadows. Often muses –
knowledgeable and informative – come to us in the personas of learners
from all ages and all backgrounds. Expertise is seen in the eyes and gestures
of a 3-year-old, the cryptic words of a 90-year-old elder from the Anishi-
nabe people in Northern Minnesota, a Nigerian woman who escaped from
gaol in Libya, and an unaccompanied minor seeking asylum in the United
Kingdom.
As the authors say, “humanness is inextricably tied to the larger projects
of justice and love.” And speaking of our projects with storying that spread
wings and webs across many types of activities, theorising and analysis of
research, we do see contention and dismay. And we are charged with the
task of being courageous in the new frontiers of knowledge production. And
what in many white, positivist cultures seems to be an oxymoron, research
must begin with what the community being researched wants. Many of us
believe research should always be a collaboration that certainly includes
insiders as guides. It cannot be a space that only advances the careers of
white academics. It must be a space that value adds to Aboriginal communi-
ties, communities of migration, communities of poverty, communities who
don’t use dominant languages and communities whose people hold unique
values and life choices.
Phillips and Bunda acknowledge that the technologies and apparatuses
that operate in the academy that focus on scientific and empirical impera-
tives are limiting and not inclusive. And the brave authors don’t stop there.
This limiting focus in the academy, they propose, could be the “binds that
tie us” to the academy but often prohibit study of “values – within a set of
guide ropes – that remind us of our humanness.”
The authors show us multiple ways that storying is transformative whilst
also highlighting the joyfulness of the work in its making. And as with most
transformations, there is a complicated mix of struggle, even trauma, and
uncertainty along with the joy.
We, at the end of 2017, are reeling from terrible political stories of war,
displacement, trauma, migration, stories of decades of sexual assault and
abuse, and even in Southern California a story from a 4-year-old girl saying
to her preschool teacher, “La migra [immigration agency in the US] took
my dad. I’m leaving soon to be with my dad. Mom said.” Yet, the authors
take the position that “stories are alive and in constant fluidity as we story
with them. In research, we see storying as sitting and making emergent
meaning with data slowly over time through stories.” This gives us hope for
our human condition; stories do support our humanness.
This work resonates for me because stories have supported much research
that problematises the neocolonial roots of our conceptions of children
and families in my own country and around the world. Stories highlight
x Foreword
institutional systems, the pedagogies, the assessments and daily life realities
affecting learners who have been colonised, who are immigrants and who
are currently migrating through uncertain global landscapes. Many of our
participants, both children and adults, are living and studying in California
and they bring with them generations of family stories, knowledge, linguis-
tic perspectives and lived experiences from Indigenous communities from
the Oaxaca region of Mexico and from Central America. Their specific
family experiences in multilingual contexts, with multigenerational knowl-
edges, critical conceptualizations of place and matters of concern ( Latour,
2004 ), were born, in part, from their experiences in their homelands. We
see evolving theoretical stances to early childhood work with children and
families based upon a third space that combines aspects of the homeland
and the communities where they now live.
We do learn from each other’s experiences. We learn from children. We
learn from colleagues we have yet to meet. Wisdom from artists, political
activists and folk tales helps frame the complex nature of our work. Ortiz
(2001) explains that his people have been living a history of questions for 500
years. He documents that folk tales and art are the ways Indigenous people
speak truth to power. I n “The Story of Questions” the conversation between
Subcomandante Marcos and the elder Antonio is about Zapata, a leader of
the Mexican Revolution who was of Indigenous ancestry and spoke Nahuatl.
He says, “But it is also not about Zapata. It is about what shall happen. It is
about what shall be done” ( Ortiz, 2001 , p. 51). The folk tale ends with the
following:
This is how the true men and woman learned that questions are for
walking, not for just standing around and doing nothing. And since
then, when true men and women want to walk, they ask questions.
When they want to arrive, they take leave. And when they want to
leave, they say hello. They are never still.
May we never be still, with stories supporting us.
Elizabeth P. Quintero
California State University, Channel Islands
References
Latour, B. (2004). Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to mat-
ters of concern. Critical Inquiry, 30(Winter), 225–248. Chicago, IL: The Univer-
sity of Chicago.
Ortiz, S. (2001). Essays. In Subcomandante Marcos, folktales of the Zapatista revo-
lution. El Paso, TX: Cinco Puntos Press.
Preface
This book has arisen from our working relationship and deep desire to share
our work and interest in storying. We hope it encourages transformation,
whilst also giving high value to the joyfulness of storying. First though, we
must locate ourselves, and then have a discussion of how we came together.
So that you may know who is who, Louise is speaking in italics, whilst
Tracey is not.
In Aboriginal communities, naming oneself through defining, in Aborigi-
nal vernacular, who is your mob and where does that mob come from, what
country, is protocol. To this extent then, I name myself as Ngugi/Wakka
Wakka and respectfully follow both matrilineal and patrilineal lines of
descent. My professional identity is very much tied to my work in Aborigi-
nal and Torres Strait Islander higher education which I have undertaken for
last three decades.
I am a white fifth-generation Australian who has worked with Aborigi-
nal early childhood communities since the late 1980s, with the Kameygal
peoples of Eora nation, with the Dunghutti peoples, and more recently with
Aboriginal peoples of the 35 nations who were relocated to Wakka Wakka
country. For the last 15 years (and the first 16 years of my life), I respectfully
walk, work and live on the country of Jagera, Yuggera and Turrbal peoples
and have recently nestled a home in Tar’au-nga (Taringa; place of stones).
In August 2014, when I was the cochair of the Postgraduate Research
Conference Committeeat my institution, we invited Tracey to give the key-
note address to foreground Aboriginal Australian ontologies, epistemolo-
gies and methodologies. I was relatively fresh from the completion of my
own PhD and was honoured by this invitation. In not knowing the audience,
I was hoping that the appeal of stories was universal. With this presumption
tucked under my arm, off I went and delivered an address that fundamen-
tally argued that the PhD is a story – albeit a large storytelling of people,
events, histories, lived lives, juxtapositions, contradictions, contentions and
compulsions.
xii Preface
Tracey intimately shared her parents’ lived stories of enforced mission
incarceration – of separation from family from a young age and ongoing
daily lived encounters of racism illustrated with family photos and perti-
nent intersections with critical race theory. I urged that the doctoral study
is a story that connects back to the student as storyteller, as the conduit for
other stories, stories that are theoretically bound because you make it so or
because the story theoretically does so for itself. In the address, I told stories
of my family but I also told why I tell stories of my family.
I was emceeing the event and recall a profound silence when Tracey’s
address ended, as we sat holding the pain in her stories. Through Tracey’s
poetic storytelling of her family’s lived experiences, we came to know, more
intimately, the legacies of colonisation. Stories of my family were an hon-
ouring of those who had passed.
A few months later we were both at an Australian Association of Research
in Education meeting. I was representing a Narrative Inquiry research
group and I spoke of a desire to use the more inclusive term story. Tracey
gave a very affirming “I’m with you” response, which I treasured. Not long
after, Louise then asked me to join a research application that she facilitated
(human rights education and children’s citizenship) and though our applica-
tion was not successful we had the opportunity to work together again. The
following year, I invited Tracey to present a paper in a symposium titled
Storying and Self in Narrative Research at the Australian Association of
Research in Education conference. These connections also allowed us to
strengthen our relationship. In the writing of my paper and the presentation
of our papers for that symposium I began to think, “There is a book here.”
And by the time she asked to share in the writing of this book, I did not have
any hesitation. And so began months and months of talking and writing
about, through and with stories . . . Stories are and stories we be.
I want to make clear that my invitation to Tracey to coauthor a book
on storying was motivated by her connection and affirmation of story and
storying, not to tokenistically tick a box of including Aboriginal knowledges
on storying. This is true. Contributing to this book allows me to balance out
all the separate roles I occupy within the university – manager, administra-
tor, advocate, mentor, academic, researcher and scholar. And if I am strate-
gic, storying connects back into each. It’s head down, boonthi up, write the
book, because you want to and because you can.
Every day I am grateful for this opportunity for us to cowrite on what is
dear to us both. I am acutely aware and sensitive to the racialised tensions in
Australia, and for Tracey to collaborate with a white person is a confronting
step of trust when it is known, and deeply embodily known, that whitefullas
“fuck you over” through theft of children, land and knowledges and ongoing
subjugated positioning. I never want to add to this ongoing intergenerational
Preface xiii
pain, though I am aware that simply my white presence can stir the pain and
ill thought, through expressions that may be heard and received as harm-
ful. Knowing this, I tread carefully, consultatively, transparently and kindly.
Tracey and I meet, talk, share stories, share gifts and share homes. And I
ask questions and permissions of Tracey about my expression and direction
frequently. Again, this is true. For sure, there are said-out-loud agreements in
forming a collaboration . . . with some silent/unspoken bits. The presence of
racialised spaces – including our own writing space – does not mean that as
an Aboriginal person, I do not have agency. There are no troublings that we
cannot talk through. Having said that, I also acknowledge your respect of me
and Aboriginal matters and hopefully you can see that this is reciprocated.
We have written this book on Google Docs (no product endorsement
intended) so that our writing is visible to each other throughout the pro-
cess. I am aware that I have no control over how readers receive this work,
but I hope that you understand my position, as one of deeply supportive,
empathetic and respectful of Indigenous peoples, and that I have worked
closely and kindly with Aboriginal Australian people for many years. I am
also aware that many readers will look to this book to hear Tracey’s sto-
ries and Aboriginal knowings, because Aboriginal Australians are a minor-
ity voice rarely heard. I humbly accept a side position: a small gesture of
unconditional surrender that broadly white Australia has lacked courage to
enact, yet is required for Indigenous sovereignty (Nicolacopoulos & Vassi-
lacopoulos, 2014). How many fora have we now entered where our shared
voice on storying has been underheard by those within the audience who
want to fetishize and hold a fascination to only the Indigenous within our
work? Blah! Some days you have to take the objectifying gaze of indi-
vidual whiteness and twist its neck so it will look hard at itself. You are
correct; there are no guarantees for the ways in which we want to be seen
and heard. Our methodology for working together is careful and considered,
courageous and a work in progress that is not taken for granted. Hopefully
readers will want to surrender to our words and thoughts in this book on
research through, with and as storying, and be encouraged to add, develop
and create their own storied research work.
In being true to the relationality of story and storying, we introduce authors
that we refer to by their full names, then subsequently refer to them by first
or full names. We see such as a more respectful way to refer to others.
Reference
Nicolacopoulos, T., & Vassilacopoulos, G. (2014). Indigenous sovereignty and the
being of the occupier: Manifesto for a white Australian philosophy of origins.
Melbourne: Re.Press.
Acknowledgements
We, foremost, acknowledge Aboriginal Australians for sustaining the lon-
gest living culture through story, storytelling and storying. We are honoured
to create this work emplaced on the country of such extraordinary legacy.
We would like to acknowledge the insightful review of this book by Kath-
ryn Gilbey and Jenny Ritchie, and the generosity of Elizabeth Quintero in
writing the foreword and for the so amenable, behind-the-scenes assistance
provided by Catherine Delzoppo.
1 Beginning stories and storying
Together/two-gather through storying
We have a deep desire for our research through, with and as storying to be
transformative whilst also giving high value to the joyfulness of the work in
its making. Our work, as academics, is situated in the field of education: for
Tracey, in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education, and for Louise, in
early childhood and arts education. Our (and the our here stands with academ-
ics beyond ourselves) work in higher education is serious and important work,
in a serious and important work site – the academy. Yet, it is often felt by
many an academic, particularly those within the education, arts and humani-
ties fields, that the serious and important work that we do is negated by the
technologies, in the Foucauldian sense, and apparatuses that operate in the
academy which place high value on the scientific and empirical imperatives
that have an imagined superworthiness bolstered by unrealistic measurabilities
and unbending accountabilities. One need only to think of the pressures placed
upon academics to publish in reified spaces and the consequential sense of
failure if this is not achieved. The blunt-force effects of these imperatives are
felt every day, and whilst we understand these may very well be the binds that
tie us whilst in the academy, we also hold strongly to another set of values
for our work and worth. These values do not detract from the seriousness of
being accountable, transparent, outcome driven and competitive, and look to
friendly (rather than cut-throat) considered scholarship. We imbue our work in
values – within a set of guide ropes – that remind us of our humanness, rather
than give ourselves over to cyborgian effect. And so in this spirit we com-
mence with a play on words through naming our shared interests, not only as a
coming together, but also two-gather. Together as known in normalised gram-
mar conventions calls attention to our joining, but we are also signalling our
warm-smile-on-the-face desire to transform conventions through a thoughtful
playfulness with words, to rewrite our connection and therefore give breath to
another grammar convention of coming two-gather. In reflecting on our prac-
tice, that is, what we have done and what we are aiming to do, our affinity with
stories draws us close so that we two-gather to write this text.
DOI: 10.4324/9781315109190-1
2 Beginning stories and storying
A love of stories
Tracey
I grew up with the privilege of having a mother who was a storyteller, a good
storyteller not only for the immediate family but also for the larger extended
family. Her stories taught genealogy for learning about relationships, how to
be with others of family and to know our own place within it. Her stories took
me to places through telling about family and friends. Listening to her stories
made you laugh, cry, be frightened, thoughtful, angry, sad, contemplative and
satisfied. Telling stories was a very natural behaviour that taught, nurtured
and prepared you for the future. Stories, I have come to appreciate, have been
the lens through which I understand the world. There are many within my
large family who are storytellers, finessed performers who can reduce a lis-
tener to tears from laughing or crying in equal measure. I continue to hold this
love of stories close to me and contemplate that perhaps a contribution I have
is the capacity to write stories and give back through this ability.
Louise
I have savoured the world of stories since embarking on studies in early
childhood education and forging a storytelling career from performing told
stories as early childhood pedagogy, though the spark for stories was prob-
ably ignited much earlier. Like Tracey’s mother, my mother too told stories,
and still does today, of the happenings in her life. She especially loves the
madness of life stories: those that make you chuckle at your own lunacy
or delight at the wonderfully serendipitous. A yearning for stories has per-
vaded my adulthood, with this hunger somewhat satiated through active
participation in storytelling guilds and festivals of the storytelling revival.
Perhaps, as Berger and Quinney (2005 ) suggest,
this revival reflects a culture that is ill at ease, that lacks compelling
myths to bind us all together. Perhaps it has something to do with our
sense of rootlessness, of separation from extended family . . . a way to
resurrect something we never had.
(pp. 8–9)
For more than 25 years, I have provided storytelling performances and work-
shops with young children at conferences, kindergartens, schools, museums,
libraries and festivals. Through this passion for stories, I saw the great educa-
tive potential of storytelling early in my teaching career. I undertook an inde-
pendent project on storytelling in education in the final year of my education
degree, from which I published two articles ( Phillips, 1999 , 2010), which to
my surprise continue to be searched for, read and cited. Once my twins were
in kindergarten, I felt I had time to pursue a PhD into storytelling pedagogy
Beginning stories and storying 3
from 2006 to 2010. The art of stories and storytelling are central to my world-
view, and expressed through my practices as a professional storyteller, early
childhood teacher, early childhood consultant and academic. I perform sto-
ries, play with stories, write stories, present workshops on storytelling and
weave stories and storytelling into research methodology and writings for
their great capacity to cultivate deep understandings of what it means to live
in this world. I draw my knowledge base of story and storytelling from more
than 25 years of reading, writing and performing stories as a storyteller, being
an active Storytellers’ Guild member and researching story and storytelling.
From this shared love of stories, we now explain what we mean by story
and storying.
We see story as the communication of what it means to be human, that tells
of emplaced, relational tragedies, challenges and joys of living. Stories are spo-
ken, gestured, danced, dramatised, painted, drawn, etched, sculpted, woven,
stitched, filmed, written and any combination of these modes and more.
Figure 1.1 Collectively storied sticks and stones from a storying workshop. Partici-
pants were asked to recall a story that tells of who they are, imbue that
story into a self-selected stone or stick and then place it into a collective
composition.
Photograph taken by Louise.
4 Beginning stories and storying
Story is the word and approach that resonates for us, not narrative. Since
at least the 1970s, there has been a narrative turn across a wide range of
disciplines (e.g., theology, history, health, social sciences, business and
therapy), though Sobol, Gentile and Sunwolf (2004 ) surmise that most of
the scholars who have contributed to this turn would “only use the word
storytelling in unguarded moments” (p. 2). They go on to explain that nar-
rative is the term of choice for scholars with an interest “in appealing to
the inclinations of adults in realms of power, prestige” (p. 2). We are more
interested in all voices being heard, regardless of positionality (e.g., gender,
race, class). We, like storytelling scholars Sobol, Gentile and Sunwolf, see
an air of “pretension” and “over-intellectualization” in the term narrative
(p. 2). We argue for the place of story in research, and we do so because it is
everyday language used by people across cultures, ages, classes, disciplines
and sectors.
For Tracey, story is the word her mob speaks. Indeed, apart from Aborigi-
nal academic and creative circles, and even then, only some, the question
to be asked is, “What is the use and value of the term narrative within
Aboriginal spaces?” Do Aboriginal peoples say, “Come, sit, tell me a narra-
tive?” Good go! The term narrative would be ridiculed and mocked as yet
another white concept that has snuck its way in, to colonise, to reconfigure
the freedoms inherent within Aboriginal talking spaces. Not to mention that
there would be consequences for the bearer carrying this word narrative
into the space – enough to say, in Aboriginal ways of knowing, “poor fella”.
Poor fella because the bearer has carried an unnecessary disruption to the
Aboriginal space of telling stories. Nor do we want to position Aboriginal
peoples as unknowing of the concept of narrative nor unknowing of how
such concepts differentiate between those who have and those who have
not – imagined superior intellectual currency because of the use of this lan-
guage concept, narrative. Such simplistic binaries all too often permeate
and trouble Aboriginal spaces, and work to trouble Aboriginal standpoint
positions ( Nakata, 2007 ). Unequivocally then, for Aboriginal peoples it is
story /ies, not narrative.
For Louise, story is the word that makes her heart sing, that has bonded
her in her work with children, storytellers and other artists. Narrative implies
a specified genre structure, evoking didactic primary school English classes
on how to write a narrative, whereas the invitation of “tell me a story” is a
loose and open invitation to speak – to share your life happenings. The form
doesn’t matter; rather what matters is the lively retellings of connections to
people and places. So, most importantly, embedded in our core social jus-
tice principles, we see story as the word that is accessible to all.
For story is not just written. Cherokee scholar Thomas King (2003 ) points
out western assumptions that, to be complete, stories need to be written
Beginning stories and storying 5
down, and that written literature has an inherent sophistication over oral sto-
ries, “that as we move from the cave to the condo we slough off the oral and
leave it behind. Like an old skin” (p. 100). We argue to keep and treasure
that skin, to decorate that skin, to add other layers to that skin.
We acknowledge the legacy of the work of narrative inquiry, though have
not felt at home in that space, due to a disconnect with the term narrative.
Key scholars of narrative inquiry Connelly and Clandinin (1990) distin-
guish the work that they do as researchers from the storied practices of the
everyday and the everyday person:
Narrative is both phenomenon and method. Narrative names the struc-
tured quality of experience to be studied, and it names the patterns of
inquiry for its study. To preserve this distinction we use the reason-
ably well-established device of naming the phenomenon “story” and
the inquiry “narrative”.
(p. 2)
We build on this distinction, and see storying as inquiry, as theorising, as
sharing/presenting research. Narrative inquiry scholars have debated the
term narrative (see Clandinin & Murphy, 2007 ), acknowledging a prob-
lem with the term in that it is often used as “a general meaning of any
kind of prose” rather than “story form” (Polkinghorne interview with Clan-
dinin & Murphy, 2007 , p. 634). And Polkinghorne argues for the claiming
of narrative research as that which is storied and follows story form, though
without suggestion of substituting the term narrative research for story/ing
research. We argue for storying research as research that is accessible by all,
that is everyday practice, that crosses cultures, classes and modes: story and
storying does that. The 2-year-old tells, listens to and asks for stories just
as a 92-year-old does; a desert woman tells, listens to and asks for stories
just as a corporate man does and so on. Narrative is not a word in common
usage.
From the Aboriginal point of view, story, in all its Aboriginal-language
terms, has always been.
From the white perspective, the word story emerged in English in the
1200s, derived from the Latin word historia, referring to an account of what
had happened. The roots of story are embedded in the sharing of life’s hap-
penings ( Smith, W., 2007 ). A distinction from the word history developed in
the 1500s ( Online etymology dictionary, 2017 ), which was very much based
on a categorisation of history as truth and story as untruth/fiction. The age
of enlightenment was most probably a catalyst for such a distinction, with
its agenda of moral progress and reason, foregrounding truth. This was the
time when new science emerged explaining the natural world as “an orderly
6 Beginning stories and storying
domain governed by strict mathematical-dynamical laws,” in which author-
ity of knowledge was not claimed until subjected to rigorous sceptical ques-
tioning (Bristow, 2017). The legacy of such doubt, scepticism and lack of
trust spawned a coldheartedness in western thinking that continues to deter-
mine what is truth and untruth, what is authorised knowledge and unauthor-
ised knowledge. We see that stories do not seek to offer “totalizing truths”,
but instead provide “local situated truths” ( Davies & Gannon, 2006 , p. 4).
There are notes of privilege embedded in narrative and history that we
reject and resist. One need only to look at the way in which dominant nar-
ratives of Aboriginal peoples in the Australian context are sutured into
questionable facts of history that continue to hold sway (e.g., the history
wars) (Macintyre, 2003). Neoliberalist realms of power were troubled by
and questioned truth making in the field of history so much so that the white
historian as ally, writing of Aboriginal massacres in Australian history, was
brought under intense and prolonged interrogation. Polarised versions of
the truth, constructed as either the black armband or the white blindfold,
missed the total irony of white hysteria being played out in the absence
of Aboriginal peoples’ voices in the “debate”. This situation confirmed
what many Aboriginal people already know – the telling of our histories is
primarily the prerogative of white people. Where do we find ourselves as
Aboriginal people in Australian history – the victim, the vanquished, the
sovereign warrior woman?
White archives document names, dates, places, roles, not stories – what is
privileged and what is authorised. Archived facts and figures are labels for
categories. Categorisation is an ongoing colonising practice ( Smith, L. T.,
2012 ). Stories tell of rich complexities, layered with symbolic meaning.
Truth does not matter. Rather it is the gifting of new insights that matter.
Historically, written records are dominated by those who could write and
had status – typically upper class (gentry, royalty, seafarers, explorers),
typically men and typically white – clearly a biassed perception of what is
authorised knowledge. Telling stories is an oral tradition celebrated across
cultures and classes, though we recognise, for varying cultural groups and
for varying sensitivities, there are boundaries that cannot be crossed (we
discuss this further in Chapter 3 ).
Other methodologies have emerged that foreground embodied lived
experiences through story – such as writing-as-a-method-of-enquiry ( Rich-
ardson, 1994 ), autoethnography ( Ellis, 2004 ), performance ethnography
( Alexander, 2005 ) and collective biography ( Davies & Gannon, 2006 ) – to
create an embodied understanding of phenomena. Arts-based research (see
Leavy, 2014 ) offers a breadth of ways to work with story through visual,
embodied and literary imagery. On the whole, these methodologies involve
Beginning stories and storying 7
telling stories, listening to stories and writing stories to theoretically work
through phenomena, truths and understandings. We recognise that many
work with story ontologically, epistemologically and methodologically, and
that many use the term storying. However, we have not located a text that
specifically focuses on researching through, with and as storying, especially
not one explored from by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous perspectives
walking alongside each other. We have consequently composed this book as
what we see as a necessary contribution to this space.
Storying is . . .
We define storying as the act of making and remaking meaning through sto-
ries. The anthimeria (verbification) of story is purposeful to reflect that it is
living and active rather than fixed, archived products. Stories are in constant
unfolding. As Native American scholar Thomas King (2003 ) declares, “The
truth about stories is that that’s all we are” (p. 2). And Indian scholar Devika
Chawla (2011 ) further explains,
Stories breathe their own breaths, they are organic in nature, and
dynamic in process. They are as primal to us as the organs in our body,
and evolve as we do. We can control them to the extent that we choose
the stories and the times we tell them. But even when we punctuate,
reframe, retell or edit, we cannot but let them escape. As human beings,
we are “storying” beings.
(p. 16)
It is our position that stories are alive and in constant fluidity as we story
with them. In research, we see storying as sitting and making emergent
meaning with data slowly over time through stories. Connelly and Clan-
dinin (1990 ) do use the words storying and restorying, as active meaning-
making processes with story that both participants and researchers do.
And they define narrative inquiry as “both a methodology and a way of
understanding experience narratively” ( Clandinin, 2013 , p. 9) or “narrative
ways of thinking about phenomena” (p. 11). Based on a Deweyan view
of experience, narrative inquirers study lived experiences. We see story-
ing as more than this. We see storying as what you do in the propositions/
conceptualisations of research, in the gathering of data with others, in the
theorising and analysis of data, in the presentation of research. Storying is
axiological, ontological and epistemological. We argue for story as theory,
as data, as process, as text on the ethical grounds of accessibility and fore-
grounding the marginalised.
8 Beginning stories and storying
For Aboriginal peoples, story and storytelling commenced at the begin-
ning. Stories are embodied acts of intertextualised, transgenerational law
and life spoken across and through time and place. In and of the everyday
and everytime, stories – whether those that told of our origin or of our being
now – all carry meaning: a theorised understanding that communicates the
world. There are many storytellers within our communities and many stories
are told. For white readers who would see this book as only pages that will
give over to the badly named Dreaming stories of Aboriginal origins, they
will be sadly disappointed. By not including stories of Aboriginal origin,
there is not a dismissal of the value of such stories but rather, for Tracey,
as the Aboriginal author, her speaking of stories and the sharing of other
Aboriginal authored stories are those that are located firmly in the space
and time when Aboriginal countries and peoples came to be colonised. Sto-
ries of the coloniser and Aboriginal ways of renegotiating Aboriginal being
in colonised places, the ways in which Aboriginal people can recolonise
country and how Aboriginal ways of knowing, being and doing ( Martin,
2008 ; Arbon, 2008 ) in the contemporary everyday can be voiced and heard,
are the focus in this book. In part, this focus reflects Tracey’s own location
as an Aboriginal person, one Aboriginal positionality in a sea of surviving
colonising contexts. It is a location that respectfully acknowledges stories
before white people came, and her writing about contemporary everyday
storying weaves back, picking up the threads of age-old traditions and prac-
tices to tell different Aboriginal stories, speaking them into being. So, there
is respect for the weft in the weave where stories are told by storytellers
in Aboriginal country, where stories reach across and into other genera-
tions, where stories educate and entertain, where stories build the theoreti-
cal impulse for what we are naming as storying, through a differing lens, to
firmly position our world views as Aboriginal peoples.
We now explain the centrality of storying in being human.
Defining the human in storying
Humans are “storying” beings – and telling stories is a natural human habit
( Gottschall, 2012 ). Stories cultivate a deeper sense of humanity ( Arendt,
1958/1998 ; Bruner, 2003 ; Nussbaum, 1997 ). Story provides a way for
humans to frame their understanding of the world, giving shape and order to
it ( Fisher, 1987 ). To Bruner, “ ‘great’ storytelling is about compelling human
plights that are accessible to ‘readers’” (p. 35). We argue that stories aren’t
just for readers, but can also be spoken, danced, drawn, painted, filmed and
so on. Bruner described how people suffering from the neurological condi-
tion of dysnarrativia (the inability to tell or understand stories) are unable
to also sense what other people might be thinking, feeling or even seeing.
Beginning stories and storying 9
According to Bruner, these people present as having lost a sense of self as
well as a sense of others. On this basis, Bruner concluded that we need the
ability to tell and understand stories to develop an understanding of identity
and humanity.
Attention to making meaning through story is ancient, as Clandinin and
Rosiek (2007 ) acknowledge:
Human beings have lived out and told stories about that living for as
long as we could talk. And then we have talked about the stories we
tell for almost as long. These lived and told stories and the talk about
the stories are one of the ways that we fill our world with meaning and
enlist one another’s assistance in building lives and communities.
(p. 35)
We argue that storying honours the legacy of our ancestors engaging in
theorising and research from the emergence of language. We see research
as a practice occurring across the world since the dawn of time, not only
that which is “authorized” in western scholarship. Grand cultural stories,
such as those referred to as myths, legends and folk tales (such naming
we see as disagreeable, relegating stories to untruths), gift ontological and
epistemological theories that are treasured by communities and passed on
from generation to generation. Named in this way, stories as myths, leg-
ends and folk tales are left abandoned, set apart, positioned as lesser to the
purities of evidentiary knowings, and rather are tainted by fanciful ways
of being and telling, all confirmed in the deft articulation of those words
antonymous with truth making. Consider the ways in which the historical
Aboriginal subject was rendered childlike simultaneous to being barbarous.
All this, whilst Aboriginal peoples were highly likely to be fluent in several
languages, created environments that were disease free and lived in onto-
logical knowledges that for thousands of generations practised peace for
the land and the people. There are incommensurabilities. We hold that truth
is a contested site. We are not simple folk who tell simple tales. We hold to
a truth that stories and storying forms are created in sites of sophisticated
knowledge, sites of higher knowledge.
Stories sustain cultures and languages. Louise’s storytelling friend Waj-
uppa Tossa (2012 ) has for more than 20 years been telling Isan stories and
training hundreds of others to tell Isan stories to sustain Isan language and
culture in Thailand. Additionally, stories sustain Aboriginal Australian cul-
tures, through story, song, dance and art.
In Aboriginal terms, sharing and connecting through stories with audi-
ences draws on the traditions of responsibilities and reciprocities inherent
in relationalities that tie back into kinship systems.
10 Beginning stories and storying
Across the globe, storytelling enables connection with the other. Even
though storytellers may share a story that is not their personal experience,
a good storyteller will always share something of herself through the inti-
macy of connection with her audience. This quality of storytelling Benja-
min (1968/1999 ) describes as “traces of the storyteller [that] cling to the
story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel” (p. 91).
In many ways, this personal sharing creates intimacy and thereby draws
the listener in, as she identifies her life with that of the storyteller. There
are points of connection that resonate with listeners, for they may have had
similar experiences or they can imagine that the same could happen to them.
This intimacy can invoke what Arendt (1958/1998 ) referred to as a web of
human relationships, as the connection between storyteller, story and lis-
tener cultivates connections with others.
The relationship with others is at the core of storytelling and storying –
there must be tellers and listeners. The fate and creation of the story depends
on being with others, what Kristeva (2001 ) referred to as “inter-being”
(p. 15). When Louise tells stories, those who she tells of are with her; she
carefully holds their lived experiences in her hands and gently breathes
life into them through embodied performative retelling. To Kristeva, the
coimplication of selves and others is in the loop of storytelling. Storytell-
ing implies an existence of community because it requires storytellers and
audiences who listen and respond. The involvement of others is necessary
for meaning. Benjamin (1968/1999 ), Arendt (1958 /1998) and Kristeva
all claim that in storytelling, meaning rests with the listeners. A story is a
gift with layers of meaning to unwrap and sit with when, where and how
required. “Storytelling reveals meaning without the error of defining it”
(Arendt, 1970, p. 105). Meaning is thus never definitive, as listeners will
create meanings applicable to their lives and experiences.
To Arendt (1958/1998 ), accounts of the actions people initiate tell more
about the person than any tangible product produced by the person. We
cherish Arendt’s proposition that we can only know who somebody is by
knowing the story in which she or he is the hero. In workshops where
the authors have presented on storying, the audience has been invited to
share the stories of who they are. The intimacy of these courageous sto-
ries readily evoke empathy, respect and “ inter-being”. Arendt explains the
place of story in action through an examination of courage. “The connota-
tion of courage . . . is in fact present in the willingness to act and speak
at all, to insert oneself into the world and begin a story of one’s own”
(p. 186). Those who have the courage to start something new are heroes
in their own stories. Such stories are theories; such stories astound and
provoke ongoing tellings and thinking on what it means to be human and
more-than-human.
Beginning stories and storying 11
We relish in the subjective world of storying, and are grateful to femi-
nism for claiming and foregrounding subjectivity. Feminists argue for stories
as central for understanding the lived experiences of gender, class and race
oppression ( Morley, 1997 ). For Aboriginal readers, a nod to feminism would
place us on contentious ground. Certainly, white middle-class materialist
forms of feminism have done little to elevate the agendas of black women
and peoples globally. The creation of the term womanist by Alice Walker
(1983 ) is a speaking back to these critiques, in which women of colour seek
to include issues of class and race through a recognition of women’s culture
and power in an integrated world. Translated into the Australian context,
womanist positions have their own particular Aboriginal-woman flavour that
draws from traditions and practices of defining Aboriginal women’s sover-
eign strength and power. It is a current practice of Aboriginal scholarship to
speak into standpoint locations ( Nakata, 2007 ; Moreton-Robinson, 2013 ),
both as a way of naming oneself in Aboriginal epistemological practice, and
of giving indirect acknowledgement to feminist theory as a source of stand-
point methodology. By no means should women’s – and especially Aborigi-
nal women’s – talkings back to white feminisms cease, for there remains
many a power-sensitive dialogue ( Haraway, 1988 ) to be spoken across the
racialised, gendered and classed space of the Australian context. The Aborig-
inal standpoint methodology thus leans into feminist theory to acquire power
sensitivity, not just internally to Aboriginal conversations, but especially in
conversations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples. In taking up
this approach, Aboriginal peoples in many social spaces have made crucial
contributions to critical understandings of colonising dimensions of power
through storying of white institutional and ideological power (Arbon, 2008 ;
Dodson, 2007 ; Dudgeon, 2010; Herbert, 2010 ; Gilbey, 2014 ). Circulating
such knowledge can serve Indigenous purposes when fed carefully into
trustworthy networks of wider reception. This book aims to be such a space.
Haraway (1991 ) offers further thought: “Feminists don’t need a doctrine
of objectivity that promises transcendence, a story that loses track of its
mediations just where someone might be held responsible for something,
and unlimited instrumental power” (p. 187). She continues that feminists
don’t want to theorise the world, much less act within it, in terms of
Global systems, but we do need an earth-wide network of connections,
including the ability partially to translate knowledges among very
different – power-differentiated – communities. We need the power of
modern critical theories of how meanings and bodies get made, not in
order to deny meaning and bodies, but in order to live in meanings and
bodies that have a chance for a future.
(p. 187)
12 Beginning stories and storying
We see stories and storying translating embodied knowledges from diverse
communities who are often silenced or their voices rarely given airplay.
For these reasons, we speak back to positivist hierarchical arrogant privi-
leging of what counts as knowledge, because “the doctrines of objectiv-
ity . . . threatened our [feminist] sense of collective historical subjectivity
and agency and our ‘embodied’ accounts of the truth” (p. 186). As Celtic
mythologist Sharon Blackie (2016 ) points out, “Women were always the
story-givers, the memory-keepers, the dreamers” (p. 361).
Through storying we foreground bodies (privileging sensation, emo-
tion and spirit) and relationships – an antithesis to much of the modern
academic joint, which is designed and still operates on Cartesian thinking
of separating the mind from the mechanical pragmatics of the body. In
Aboriginal storying, carriage of emotion, relatedness and spirituality brings
Aboriginal life essence, logic and ethic to storying. It is central to Aborigi-
nal standpoint positioning. How well the body and the mind work together
is the measure of the good storyteller, though we acknowledge there are
few spaces in the academy where the storyteller can be. The privileging of
the mind in academia has been read in Jungian terms by Sobol et al. (2004 ),
who found that
the Academy has evolved in a patriarchal environment dedicated to the
principle of Logos, the domain of rationality, knowledge, and abstrac-
tion. Storytelling embraces the feminine principle of Eros, which car-
ries emotion, relatedness, and spirituality; and that Eros principle has
shaped the environment and the orientation of storytelling devotees and
their gatherings.
(p. 5)
The mind is privileged in the academy for its production of causal explana-
tions, whilst sensation is often deemed as a source of untruth and illusions or
of inconsequential value. Individualism and objectivity are honoured. Such
is enacted through individual offices (solitude for the mind), bodies only
used to get the mind from one meeting place to another, and being tracked
individually according to their individual outputs and individual national
and international recognition. We also recognise that these measures privi-
lege white patriarchal norms, and critical Aboriginal embodiments (perhaps
the most obvious contrast to white patriarchy in the academy), wanting to
story research whilst being tangled up in these norms, face challenges to
standpoint positions which talk country, talk family, talk stories as theory.
Stories have hearts and souls – they breathe – they are alive (Frank, 2010 ).
Hence, we use the anthimeria storying to infer an ongoing creating and
Beginning stories and storying 13
meaning-making process. And that by working with bodies, sensation, feel-
ings and relationships we argue that there is capacity to bring more inclu-
sive and accessible understanding and insight into research.
Together/two-gather
In sum, our strong intent is to be situated with story, and through its verbifi-
cation of storying we celebrate its living state. Through critical theories, we
assert storying over knowledge produced in the name of narrative. We see
that story, stories and storying belong to all. Our positioning commences
with a critical framing of storying to push back onto questions of what
counts as truth. For us, this mode of research produces creative, thought-
ful and felt spaces that provoke deep, resonant thought to the human and
more-than-human project. From this platform, we now move to share how
we are emplaced – our roots – our located positionality through ancestral
storying that we two have gathered as re-presentation of the humanness of
our work.
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2 Locating self in place and
ancestral storying
To commence our contribution to storying, we locate ourselves – who are
we in the human project, locating our roots to story our cultural identities.
We share ancestral stories gathered and held in our whole of beings as part
of our lifelong identity work. We feel the roots of each other’s stories, his-
torical pulses and pains, drawing threads and knots and tensions between
stories.
The basket
Tracey
In a previous life, somewhere between teaching in the classroom and work-
ing in the university, I was employed in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander Branch of the Queensland Education Department. Part of my role
was to assess the quality of resources that would support the teaching of
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander studies in the school curriculum. I
recall a film resource which showed basket-making skills used by Aborigi-
nal women in the north of Queensland. I set about, with imperfect remem-
bering, making this basket.
I am fascinated and perplexed by the gardening-design uptake of palm
trees where I live. I think these plants belong in the tropical north. Regard-
less, palm trees are an established feature in modern urban design and, with
the generosity of the westerly wind and my neighbour’s palm trees, a palm
frond was delivered into my backyard.
To create the basic rectangular pattern for the basket, I first sawed off the
stem and frond. What is left is the sheath, that part which wraps around the
trunk of the palm tree. The sheath is hard and unforgiving, so in order to
work with this stiff fibrous material it needs to be made malleable by being
wet. I submerged the sheath in my bathtub, weighed down by a cast-iron
DOI: 10.4324/9781315109190-2
18 Locating self in storying
Figure 2.1 Basket of entangled archives.
Photograph taken by Louise.
pot so that it could be thoroughly soaked. (The cast-iron pot left an imprint
in the fibre, and though I was initially disappointed, my colleague Robyn,
an academic artist, saw the stain of the pot as a value added to the design.
Blessed be artists for seeing the world differently.) After a few days, I took
the sheath from the water. At the longest edges, I folded the sheath inwards
about 2 cm to make a seam. I then folded the sheath almost exactly in half.
One half was longer by approximately 5–6 cm. Along the edges of the
basket I punched holes with a nail at equidistance so that I could stitch
the edges together. For this, I used jute in a cross-stitch pattern. I added
some decoration to the basket by sewing in the eucalyptus nuts which I had
painted and threaded with jute. I plaited a jute strap for carrying the basket
(the strap is placed around your forehead like a headband and when carried
in this way allows the basket to nestle on your back between your shoulder
blades whilst your hands are free for gathering) and its other function was
for hanging the basket. The finished basket was oiled, which I am hoping
helps in the preservation and mimics the transfer of body oil from person to
basket, if it were a basket in use at the time of BC (before Cook).
The photograph shows a series of words and phrases coming to lay across
the fibrous front of the basket. These phrases and words are taken directly
from our archival research initiated, in part, from those stories told to us
by family of our ancestral roots, and holding that knowledge and reclaim-
ing that knowledge through women’s crafts, of needle penetrating fibre to
Locating self in storying 19
(re)present. The basket and archival documents meld to present our story-
ing research, moving through time and place to dig deeper, to critically
examine and to imagine lives. There is a cathartic effect, as hooks (1995 )
notes, “to tell one’s story and the process of telling is symbolically a gesture
of longing to recover the past in such a way that one experiences both a
sense of reunion and a sense of release” (p. 158). When storying is organic,
embodied – through seeing, hearing and feeling, in becoming and known,
recited, remembered and recalled – emergent conditions coalesce, to form
in thought, to speak anew the colonial texts that would make our ancestors
disembodied, as if separate from the times and ideologies that would place
them as less than human. We restory their lives, by tearing up the archival
scripts, drawing from our theoretical baskets, imagining a differing human-
ity for those from which we come. Stories theorised for our heads, stories
stitched into our hearts. As Blaze Kwaymullina (2007 ) notes,
Stories spoken from the heart hold a transformational power, they are
a way for one heart to speak to another. They are a means for sharing
knowledge, experience and emotion. A story spoken from the heart can
pierce you, become a part of you and change the way you see yourself
and the world. Listening to a heart story is a way of showing respect,
a silent acknowledgement of what the speaker has lived through and
where they have come from. Stories can also transform the speaker.
Sharing the past can ease old pains, soothe deep hurts and remind you
of old joys, hopes and dreams.
(p. 6)
Naming ourselves
Tracey
Story is the tool through which I investigate identity work. Knowing who
I am and where I come from is but part of my identification. It is equally
important to know that my individual identity is very much bound up with
others, which includes family and other relations. I tell a story of my pater-
nal grandmother and father.
The realities of being named with an Aboriginal identity in colony Aus-
tralia is not without contention. I purposefully couple colony and Australia
and in doing so borrow from Haunani-Kay Trask (1993 ), Hawaiian warrior
woman and scholar, as a reminder that acts of colonisation have persistent
effects on the lives of Aboriginal peoples. One of these effects is for the
dominant to determine the ways in which we are named. I acknowledge
that within Aboriginal communities there is an unsettling about the naming
20 Locating self in storying
of us, be it as Indigenous Australian or Aboriginal peoples. Part of this
unsettling rejects the term Indigenous, which became popularised through
government stylus. I often wonder whether this was as a result of white
public servants’ fingers become tired and annoyed at typing “Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander”. Yet, in taking up the term Aboriginal we need
to be reminded that this word too is not of our own making; it is a colonial
construct. There were no Aboriginal people before white people. Langton
(1993 ) reminds us, “ before contact there were Yolngu, Pitjantjatjara, Wal-
piri, Waka Waka . . . and so on” (p. 32). I have childhood rememberings
of my father naming himself as Wakka Wakka and proudly so. In generic
terms, we spoke of ourselves and others as Gooris. To speak in this way is
part of my family’s language of identification. Naming ourselves makes us
human.
In 1998, I received a Queensland Department of Environment grant to
undertake family history. And though I had oral family stories, I wanted to
investigate further about the Purga Mission and the Barambah/Cherbourg
Aboriginal Reserve because of the connectedness of these institutions to
my larger family. Many of the older Aboriginal families within Ipswich
have the same connections. My intention was to develop a fuller history,
coupling the oral and archival with genealogies which I would record, for
my families, for the other Aboriginal families and for future generations.
This research was important for me. It would allow me and other Aboriginal
peoples to speak back to dominant white practices that worked to erase our
being through stealing our generations and dispossessing us of our lands,
thus leaving many within our communities without a complete genealogy to
recite and therefore an incapacity to know all of our family and to know in
deep ways our country. Through this project I had wanted to tell stories of
resistance, survival, the tragic, the celebratory and the comical.
It was an interesting project that took me on my first venture into the state
archives. For Aboriginal peoples yet to enter the archives, be prepared. In
one respect, there is a sense of benevolence, a gratefulness that the colonis-
ers were so, in Aboriginal ways of talking, corked up, to record so much
detail yet, at the same time, a sense of being astounded that the colonisers
were so corked up to record so much detail. Here, the detail was not about
naming Aboriginal peoples as human.
I digress for a moment. In my doctoral study I named the university as a
white institution complicit in the colonial project and did so to theoretically
argue the ways in which white institutional and ideological power colonises
knowledge production. I wrote,
The colonial knowing of us as objects of study travelled from the diaries
of white “explorers”, the records of government officials, the observa-
tions of squatters and colonial news print, coalesced into “scientific”
Locating self in storying 21
notes in the field and travelled further to laboratories, lecture theatres
and research proposals in anthropology and archaeology departments
at universities. In this way the university retained a complementary
arrangement with the colonial project. The colonial project initially
engaged in the dispossession of Aboriginal peoples from our lands.
The university initially engaged in knowing Aboriginal peoples from
the perspective of white people: a dispossessing of ourselves from
ourselves.
(Bunda, 2014 , p. 116)
From the time of this project and researching in the archives I have a
copy of a document, an Aboriginal census for June 1928 of the Baram-
bah Settlement, Murgon, Queensland. The interconnectedness between this
census document and the institution of the university is plainly stated. It
was compiled by an accountant for the Barambah Settlement (possibly an
administrator for the Chief Protector of Aborigines) and, interestingly, the
other contributors named their location as the University of Sydney. Did
these University of Sydney contributors know they were assisting in the
dispossessing of ourselves from ourselves? Probably not. For as much as
the census is constituted by labels that name in particularly ways, there is a
derogation of Aboriginal peoples, labels interpolating with senses of dehu-
manisation. Invisible stitching that would keep the interface, between black
and white, firm and secure. Neat, controlled, all stitched up.
The census went into great detail in classifying Aboriginality and in the
absence of critical consciousness was framed in a historical time whereby
Aboriginal peoples were captured under the Act ( Aboriginal Protection and
Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act, 1897 ):
The census is divided into eight subsections as follows:
1 Full blood adult males.
2 Full blood adult females.
3 Full blood male children.
4 Full blood female children.
5 Caste adult males.
6 Caste adult females.
7 Caste male children.
8 Caste female children.
The classificatory system went further:
In sections 5–6–7 and 8 the caste of each individual has been recorded.
The fraction indicates the full blood aboriginal percentage and the suc-
ceeding letter or letters indicate the nature of the caste.
22 Locating self in storying
C indicates Chinese blood
W “European”
N “Negroid”
K “Melanesian” or Polynesian blood.
Thus ½ C indicates a hybrid between a full blood aborigine and a
Chinaman and ½ WK indicates an individual one of whose parents was
a full blood aborigine while the other was a half caste Kanaka.
Racial hierarchical systems were firmly imprinted in this classificatory
system.
The document identified that
All individuals in sections 3–4–7 and 8 are 14 years of age or younger.
My father did not have a birth certificate. This was made known when he
applied to enlist for World War II. His year and date of birth were orally
recorded by an accidental meeting of my two grandmothers who crossed
paths at the Department of Native Affairs where they were each seeking
permissions to travel. Movements of Aboriginal people were vigorously
policed under the Act, ensuring that no unwarranted Aboriginal presences
would cross the boundaries between black and white and thus avert imag-
ined threatenings of safety and security for white people. Such imagined
threats and the control of Aboriginal movements were recast as a need “to
protect” Aboriginal people from the vices of white societies. In turn this
signalled the segregation of Aboriginal peoples away from the wider com-
munity onto Aboriginal Reserves – designated by the white nation as spaces
of protection. Though, depending on the mental state of the “supervisors” in
care of Aboriginal peoples, such reserves could, in fact, be punitive spaces
where heartbreaking sadness, terror, hunger and deprivation reigned. Stand-
ing in the offices of the Department of Native Affairs my maternal grand-
mother was pregnant with my mother and my paternal grandmother held
the hand of a little boy, about 2 years of age. This is how verification of my
father’s birthday came to be known, and it is this verification, relayed back
to the Department of Native Affairs by my father, that enabled him to secure
an “official” authorisation that stood in the absence of a birth certificate,
making way for his enlistment.
I come back round to the story of the census document. A Vincent Bunder
was identified as ½ W followed by the number 6, the age of the child. Is this
my father? Based on the knowings of my grandmothers, my father would
have been born in 1921, and at the time and date of this census he would
have been 6, for his birthday is not until September, though the spelling of
Locating self in storying 23
our surname is not correct. He is identified as a half caste with his father
being a white man.
Regimes of dispossessing ourselves from ourselves were well estab-
lished on the reserves and missions through regimented control, minimalist
and poor-quality education and systems of slavery that ensured Aboriginal
people lived up to the racialised standard of being indolent . The sale of
my grandmother’s labour was a contracted agreement between white men,
those who sold and those who bought. On the Queensland colonial frontier,
black women sweated their labour – cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing,
caring for children, feeding, herding the animals, fencing and much more.
Under this regime, my father was born. Was he born of love or violence? I
will never know.
This racialised language, this system of classifying, had indelible, long-
lasting effect on the ways of being for Aboriginal peoples. Sadly, the lan-
guage of full blood, half caste and quarter caste stayed within our families
and communities. Within the white communities, this racialised language
remained the language of supremacy for exerting power over our Aborigi-
nal being. My light brown–coloured skin, like my father’s, set us apart from
the rest of our darker-coloured family members. Whilst there was safety in
being physically different in my family, this was not the case when I did not
have the protection of my family. As a child, when I crossed over into white
spaces, my Aboriginality would sometimes come to be a point of fascina-
tion and sometimes fetishsisation. Sometimes people were confronting to
the point of violent. I remember being questioned as to the blood quantum
of my Aboriginality to verify my authenticity as an Aboriginal person to the
white people who asked the question. Was I half caste? Was I quarter caste?
These labels were commonly used in dialogues from hurtful and hateful
white peoples to many an Aboriginal person. As long as I live I will despise
these labels. A politics of pigmentation, a foul vapour would come to lie on
my skin in these moments, to remind me that I was less than Aboriginal, less
than white, something in between – possibly a freak.
In my family, the most influential discourse was born of the intellectual
warriorship from both my mother and father. The meeting of the maternal
salt water and the paternal fresh water sovereignties, epistemologies and
pedagogies fed my standpoint ( Haraway, 1991 ), and it has taught me to
know, look and speak in particular ways to rebut dominant and subjugating
ways of knowing us as Aboriginal peoples. This legacy informs the theories
in my basket, a critical accessory for my work in the white institution of
education ( Bunda, 2014 ). Colonial ideological effects continue to permeate
white institutions, albeit in new forms. A failure to remain vigilant to these
effects places Aboriginal people in unsafe and insensitive spaces, ironically
in our own country where our sovereignties should be acknowledged and
24 Locating self in storying
respected. The messy exhaustive work of combat-deflecting insult, preju-
dice, stereotypes and racism detracts from the liberatory work of decoloni-
sation and recolonisation. As researchers, storying ourselves in this country
names a fundamental step in making ourselves human.
Louise
Hearing Tracey’s story of naming self further prickles the troubling of being
a white Australian. I feel shame for the pain and suffering my storying sister
and her family have suffered at the hands of white colonisation. The trou-
bling of naming myself as Australian first stirred when I travelled around
India in 1987 for 3 months at age 18 (prior to this I grew up in a relatively
sheltered life in a middle-class suburb, second youngest of seven). Each time
I met someone in India I was commonly asked, “Where you from?” and after
my reply, “Australia”, I was met with the uncomfortable stereotypes of beer-
guzzling, sport-loving men. And as I answered, I wondered more and more
what that meant. I did (and still do) not feel proud to answer “Australia”. I
knew I needed to dig deeper to understand the shaping of Australia and what
it meant to be a white Australian. With Australia being “a relatively newly
formed nation” built on colonisation, a declaration of Australian citizenship
does not reveal ethnic heritage, nor does it enact the honest critical reflection
required in the naming of ourselves to make us human that Tracey illustrated.
As Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos (2014 ) explain, “As unloved and
non-loving the colonial subject hides the depth of his or her ontological emp-
tiness by engaging in criminal activity the world over” (p. 45). I can see how
the rise of scepticism and reduced trust in the age of enlightenment has fed
the hardened state of the colonial subject who perpetuates self/other directed
violence. Naming self as Australian is riddled with “ontological emptiness”.
I descend from displaced ancestors – diaspora – though there is little honesty
in the heritage and territorial claim of the white Australian.
In my return from India, I searched for stories of the colonisation of Aus-
tralia. Not the white stories; I had enough of those in school – year after
year the same white “facts” repeated, a whitewashed version of history. I
first went to my local library and found Massacres to Mining: The Coloni-
sation of Australia by Janine Roberts (1981). I was nauseatingly sickened;
a deep-seated unsettling penetrated my whole being. Janine Roberts awak-
ened me to the sheer terror Aboriginal Peoples have been (and continue to
be) subjected to since colonisation . I became unsettled, aware that my kin
were overstaying visitors on stolen land. I was/am ashamed of the incessant
violation. There was/is nothing to be proud of in the making of the nation
Australia. As Henry Reynold’s (1999 ) well-known book later asked, Why
Weren’t We Told?
Locating self in storying 25
And so I searched for kith and kin – as to who my ancestors were, where
they came from and what my ancestors’ roles and experiences were in the
horrors of genocide under the sinister mask of nation building. As Nicola-
copoulos and Vassilacopoulos (2014 ) point out, without a self-conscious
white-Australia philosophy, we have yet to formulate an answer to “Where
do you come from?” This question demands “white Australians to respond
by situating ourselves philosophically in relation to our origins . . . as the
only thing that is our very own” (p. 15). Origins only offer some answers to
our out-of-placeness ( atopos). What Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos
then argue is that what white Australians need to face is the naming of our
relations to the spaces we inhabit.
I searched my family history – back three to five generations along all
lineages to arrivals in Australia, to locate cultural origins and to see what
role my ancestors played in the colonisation project – to see my ancestors’
relations to the forming of colony Australia. Much of this was hidden by the
white practice of “sweeping under the carpet” past shames – “bodies turn
away from the others who witness the shame” ( Ahmed, 2005 , p. 75).
Across decades of searching, all I have found is the appropriation of
Aboriginal-language names to property. My mother’s mother’s mother’s
father’s parents (Samuel and Maryann Markwell) owned and managed a
farming property that was named Mungaree (Yugara language for “place of
fishes” in 1865 in the area that is now known as Slack’s Creek, one of the
first settled areas in the region now covered by Logan City Council of Bris-
bane) ( Keirs, 1997 ). My great-great-grandparents were the second owners
of Mungaree after John Slack ( Logan City Council, 2017 ). I could locate no
trace of the Markwell’s relationship with local Yugara people, nor how John
Slack came to name the property Mungaree. My father also appropriated an
Aboriginal-language name to our family home. He grew up on Kulgoa Ave-
nue in Ryde, and so decided to get the word Kulgoa painted on metal letters
adhered to the front of our house, to the left of our front door. We were never
told what it meant, but just accepted it as the name of our house. Ryde his-
tory of street names states kulgoa means “running through”, though no lan-
guage group is identified. On 17 December 1898, the Sydney Evening News
on p. 8 had an article titled “Native Names and Their Meanings”, which lists
the meaning of dozens of Aboriginal-language words, including kulgoa. A
continuing thread the unnamed author sustains throughout the article is how
pretty sounding these names are compared to the English names given to
many places, such as Dead Dog Beach and Mount Misery.
And so I wonder, was permission ever sought to use Mungaree and Kul-
goa to brand property? I imagine John Slack asked Yugara people, “What
do you call this place?” And perhaps he somehow felt better for claiming
the land as his own by using the local people’s name for it. In the comfort
26 Locating self in storying
of their whiteness, my ancestors saw Australia’s First Nations’ people as a
group that could provide “pretty” names. There seemed no interest beyond
this, nor horror at the violent atrocities to Aboriginal peoples that were hap-
pening around them. Perhaps they felt worlds apart. After all, the govern-
ing bodies did all they could to keep Aboriginal people away from white
occupiers. The theft and appropriation of Aboriginal language illustrates a
tokenistic naming of my ancestors’ relations to their inhabitation of Aus-
tralian country and reeks of the mindset of western liberal property owner-
ship. And that property ownership is an imperative of whiteness, though
to authentically confront our relations with the inhabitation of Australian
country, Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos (2014 ) propose that we con-
front the question of ownership of Australian territory – that we declare that
Australia has been built on the lying premise of terra nullius.
The secret instructions that were given to Captain James Cook in 1768
by the Commissioners for Executing the Office of Lord High Admiral of
Great Britain, before he set sail to observe the transit of Venus in the Pacific,
were to map and observe the eastern coast of the land then known as New
Holland:
You are also with the Consent of the natives to take possession of Con-
venient Situations in the Country in the Name of the King of Great
Britain; or, if you find the Country uninhabited take possession for His
Majesty by setting up proper marks and inscriptions, as first discover-
ers and possessors.
(Beaglehole, 1955 , p. cclxxxii)
In the journals of Cook’s journey up the east coast, they noted frequent
sightings of numerous Aboriginal peoples and frequent attempts to meet
that were repelled. Cook then disregarded all the evidence of inhabitation
that he witnessed first-hand and, when he and his crew reached the top of
the eastern coast, he planted the British flag on a small island in the Torres
Strait (named through this act as Possession Island) and claimed posses-
sion of the entire eastern coast for Britain ( Beaglehole, 1955; see Gordon
Bennett’s storying through painting of this act in Possession Island [1991],
www.ngv.vic.gov.au/gordonbennett/education/04.html). Joseph Banks,
the botanist who accompanied Cook’s journey, was later instrumental in
pushing for what became named by Britain as New South Wales as a penal
settlement at the Beauchamp Committee on Transportation in 1785. Banks
argued that no purchasing of land would be required (as was the case with
the other contenders Africa, Canada and the West Indies), as the Aboriginal
people showed no interest in what Captain Cook and his crew had to offer
Locating self in storying 27
( Renwick, 1991 ). The perceptions, decisions and actions of these two men
have created monumental devastation through widespread displacement
and genocide for millions of people, all flora and fauna, land and water
of what are now known in English as Australian territories. Such uncon-
scionable arrogance, that Cook and Bank felt that their perception of other
people’s lived practice was the authority to determine that their existence
and inhabitation was of insignificance. “Ontological emptiness . . . the colo-
nial subject then enacts violence against all others whose acts of solidarity
serve as the perpetual ground for the repetition of this self/other directed
violence” ( Nicolacopoulos & Vassilacopoulos, 2014 , p. 45).
The absence of any archived encounters between my ancestors and local
Aboriginal peoples speaks volumes as to whose history is privileged. White
middle- and upper-class histories are documented and archived. My parents
did share with me ancestral names, places and brief titbits of life events sprin-
kled throughout my growing up, and I asked more questions in my adulthood,
and searched through archives finding much, much more. My mother also
acquired two self-published family history books from her mother’s lineage.
In the ancestral-searching conversations that Tracey I shared in preparation
for this book, white privilege in archives became more and more visible. I
could readily search grave records back five generations, yet grave records
of Aboriginal communities such as for Tracey’s grandmother proved elusive.
Aboriginal protection and welfare boards recorded Aboriginal births, deaths
and marriages of people who were defined as “Aborigines” and “supervised”
by the board, and church bodies managing missions also kept records ( Aus-
tralian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 2017). The
extensive records that were kept were an abhorrent invasion of privacy and
abusive scientific categorisation, such as the dehumanising practice of listing
Tracey’s father as “½ W 6”. These records aren’t readily available via the
Internet. Instead, permission has to be sought to access the records through
state and national archives. Private genealogy companies (such as ancestry.
com) are designed for white middle-class ancestries. Archives categorise and
control and privilege a scientific voice. They track, categorise and surveil. I
feel for the lostness of incomplete genealogies, through absence of intergen-
erational sharing of emplaced, embodied stories.
Grandmothering stories
We look to our grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s stories to connect
womanhood across time, culture and place, through storying archives and
family stories. By doing this we create and hold women’s time which, as
Julia Kristeva (1981 ) describes, is “extra subjective time, cosmic time,
28 Locating self in storying
occasional vertiginous visions and unnameable jouissance” (p. 16). Like
Nye, Barker and Charteris (2016 ), by looking to ancestral maternal sto-
ries we locate, embody and embrace displacement, loss, hardship, survival
and care across generations as a valid means for “new cartographies for
research” (p. 189). The flesh we have crafted and woven into stories to bring
archives to life translates historical evidence offering generative mean-
ing making ( Radstone, 2010 ) to reveal lineage and emplace our intergen-
erational positionality. The concerns of contestable history and academic
rigour (i.e., what is truth and whose truth is authorised) are not welcome or
relevant here.
Tracey
The other story that I wish to share is that of my patrilineal grandmother,
the one who held the hand of my father as they waited in the Department of
Native Affairs for permission to travel.
I did not know this grandmother; my older brothers knew her best for
she had passed before I was born. So I know her through the stories of my
father and mother, and from having dug into the archives I know her from
the writings of “protectors” and government administrators as just another
“Aborigine”, as a functional statement on a page, a fragment of a broken-up
story that was reflective of Aboriginal peoples of the times. There are a few
of her own handwritten letters.
I can remember searching in the archives, documents strewn across the
desk, including my own. I recall sorting the papers and as I reached for a
page, I thought to myself, “What have I written here?” It was not my notes.
The cursive writing of my grandmother had transcended time and place to
be found in my own hand. A warm smile came to my face – the script style
writes our bloodlines.
I will call her Grannie for that is how my mother would speak of her –
Grannie Bunda. And in the process of telling some of the fragments of the
fragments, she will be more than a functionary record of the archives, as I
will speak with her and be with her in the writing of this story. It is a tech-
nique that I have previously used in my writing ( Bunda, 2007 ): an intercept,
a disruption – to silencing and forgetting – a tactic for giving meaning to
her life.
My Grannie was born at the turn of last century, not long after the Act
(1897) came into play. She was born into a social and political horrorscape
for Aboriginal peoples. An 1874 Legislative Assembly report on the Aborig-
ines of Queensland, as compiled through submissions by colonial residents,
notes the number, present condition and prospects of “Aborigines” (the
Locating self in storying 29
language of the coloniser) in each region, and advises as to the best means
of improving their (Aboriginal peoples’) condition. The report also identi-
fies that “the condition” was “to make their labour useful to the settlers and
profitable to themselves ”.
And that
these papers have been prepared with much care by persons well
acquainted with the Aborigines, and anxious for their welfare, and con-
tain much interesting information of a race the great majority of whom,
whatever may be done to improve their condition, there is too much
reason to fear, are doomed to an early extinction.
The report is a clear example of how notions of welfare and concern for
improving the condition of Aboriginal peoples were tied up in using our old
people as cheap labour. The “profitable to themselves” part, we know, did not
eventuate. Adding to this view, Social Darwinism twines itself around the
articulations, strangling our mob into self-fulfilling colonial-pursued proph-
ecies, slowly but surely taking the life out of our ancestors’ lives.
In this horrorscape, my Grannie was walked from her country to incar-
ceration at Barambah (Cherbourg). Oh, Grannie, walking all that way. Were
you frightened? Tired? Were they cruel?
She spoke her language and when her son was born she taught him her
language. She told him stories. And her stories, and her mother’s stories,
became his stories, told in language, told in private spaces to him, where the
speaking of language in whispers could not be heard by the white authori-
ties and punishment would be avoided. She taught him well and he inhaled
the breath of her stories, absorbing them on his skin, in his heart, reaching
to his young boy warrior spirit within, grounding him to his sovereign self.
Grannie, can you tell me the stories and teach me lingo?
The regulations of the Act were thorough – new forms of scarification on
the Aboriginal body. Archival documents show records of her wages, never
seen, held in the Natives Savings Account. Never spent by her, sometimes in
credit, sometimes in debit, always controlled by the settlement authorities. A
1933 Report on the Books and Accounts of the Cherbourg Aboriginal Settle-
ment is checked by a handwritten note seen at the top of the page. It reads,
Examples listed in the Murgon (being the closest town to Cherbourg)
report disclose that the transactions in respect of the issue of stores is
very unsatisfactory.
An incarceration so complete that the “settlement”, through anxieties for
welfare, for improving conditions, through making (slave) labour useful,
30 Locating self in storying
was also an enterprise for economic efficiencies whereby the “natives’”
wages paid for stores and more. Additionally, a “settlement maintenance
levy” was implemented, whereby
every person in employment contribute one shilling per week from
their wages to the settlement to assist in providing for his wife if mar-
ried or his keep when out of employment.
(Blake, 2001 , p. 36)
The success of this system saw the levy rise to 20% of wages deducted, but
no more than 3 shillings (Blake, p. 37).
In my collection, there are letters. Letters from my father to the superin-
tendent of Cherbourg seeking permission for his mother to visit our family
in Ipswich. Letters from the superintendent to the chief protector seeking
verification that this would be permissible. A letter from the chief protector
to Grannie, noting the inconvenience to the superintendent. A letter from
my Grannie to the superintendent asking for her ration book – the adminis-
trivia for dispossessing ourselves from ourselves. Grannie, sorry my Gran,
I swear. FUCK ! I can’t bear to read it and hear it in my head, let alone know
that you lived it. Stealing you from your country, locking you up, not giving
you a decent education, sending you out to work for wages you would never
see, having to take your language underground, a black tax for your own
incarceration. Who are these people?
My grandmother passed in 1950. She died of consumption. The cor-
respondence continued still – from the police inspector to the protector,
the protector to the police inspector, the hospital to the protector, the police
inspector to my mother and father, my mother and father to the police
inspector and to the protector, the funeral home to the protector and the
protector to the funeral home. My Grannie was 49 when she died and even
in death, when her last breath had gone, she was still under the Act.
Louise
I am 49 as I read your Grannie’s story, my dear sister Tracey. Through my
weeping empathetic soul I try to imagine my life ending at this age, but I
have such a life of privilege that it is unfathomable to be wrenched from my
family, country and language – to be enslaved and to have no freedom to
speak your mind, to make life choices, to even fucking visit family. And I
struggle to understand the inhumane consciousness that inflicted such vile
human rights abuses. How could those bastards sleep at night? They must
have had the coldest of hearts: “unloved and non-loving”, ontologically
empty ( Nicolacopoulos & Vassilacopoulos, 2014 , p. 45) to not care.
Locating self in storying 31
Tracey, your sublime storying interweaves multiple voices making Gran-
nie’s story so embodied. We see and feel Grannie’s relations with the colo-
nising forces and with you, her unborn granddaughter who writes with the
same script, who longs to be with her, who feels her lifelong unbearable pain.
I imagine that what sustained your dear Grannie is wilfulness. Wilful-
ness to survive, to be a sovereign being. Yet, her enactment of sovereignty
(speaking language, connecting with family) would have been judged as
wilful and punished: the judgement of will as a problem of others ( Ahmed,
2014 ). My great-great-grandmother was also wrenched from family, coun-
try and language and enslaved, a hundred years earlier.
Another perverse chapter in the nation-building project of white Australia
is the convict experience. Though now convict ancestry is glorified as the
“humble beginnings of a greatly successful social experiment” (Nicolacopou-
los & Vassilacopoulos, 2014 , p. 19), my grandfather did not tell my mother
and her siblings that his grandparents were transported convicts. It was only
in the 1970s that it became “fashionable” for the convict stain to see the light
of day. As teenagers, my mother’s father’s grandparents were transported to
Van Diemen’s Land as convicts (forced occupiers of stolen land).
In 1842, my great-great-grandmother Nancy Ann lived with her wid-
owed mother and three siblings in a single room in Belfast. The family had
no steady income. Perhaps they had moved to Belfast from the country in
search of work in the booming cotton and linen industries. Perhaps that’s
how Nancy’s father died, crushed by the brutally unsafe machinery and
work conditions, leaving his wife Mary and their four children to fend for
themselves. And for Nancy, from 13, this meant selling what she had (her
body) and taking what was available: sugar, bear’s grease and ham (well,
those were the items that she was caught stealing) (Female Convicts in Van
Diemen’s Land Database, 2017 ). In early January 1842, Nancy joined forces
with a local lad named Edward and they devised a plan to steal a silver plate
from a Mr Sharman Moore Esquire, Falls Road, Willowbank of Belfast.
The plan was to sell the plate for food to feed her family, though Mr Moore
intercepted and Nancy Ann was charged and tried for robbery and burglary
at Antrim, 20 miles North of Belfast, on 13 January 1842, and given a sen-
tence of 10 years transportation to Van Diemen’s Land ( Archives Office
of Tasmania, 2007a ). Their crime was only that of poverty, in a time when
property was worth more than human lives ( Swiss, 2010 ). (In a twisted
act of justice-to-come, the only property known as Willowbank on Falls
Road, Belfast, now is Willowbank Youth Club with Falls Women’s Centre,
painted two tones of luscious purple next door.) When Nancy Ann’s mother,
Mary, heard her eldest daughter’s sentence, she quietly sobbed within and
scrapped whatever she could to pay for a scribe to write a petition against
the sentence of transportation.
32 Locating self in storying
CRF 1842 A1 Nancy Adams Film 46
Stamped Chief Secretary’s Office Jan 26 1842
His excellency the Lord Lieutenant general; and general of Ireland
May it please His Excellency the humble petition of Mary Adams
That the daughter of petitioner Viz, Nancy Adams was tried at the Bel-
fast quarter Sessions of the peace on Thursday the 13th Day of January for
having four Candlesticks in her possession the same being the property of
Mr Moore Falls Road Belfast. She was therefore found guilty and was Sen-
tenced to Ten years transportation.
The unfortunate girl is fifteen years old on the 23rd June last and on her
being tried an indictment for three shillings and two pence halfpenny. She
got nine months imprisonment for the same. Petitioner is a poor indigent
widow, who being left with four small children without any means of sup-
port. Two of which children is now incumbent on her. She is left in a deplor-
able state without friends to do anything for her or children.
Petitioner Most humbly Solicits His Excellency The Lord Lieutenant
in His humane goodness to take Compassion on her unfortunate daughter
and please to Mitigate her Sentence from that of Transportation for ten
years, to whatever imprisonment on any of Her Majesty’s Penitentiarys or
prisons as His Excellency may seem meet. And petitioner as in duty bound
will pray.
Mary Adams
Court Belfast 14th January 1842
(Female Convicts in Van Diemen’s Land Database, 2017 )
The reply that was sent to Mary simply stated, “The law must take its
course.” And that was the last Mary ever saw or knew of Nancy Ann’s fate.
Feeling the heart-wrenching pain of losing a daughter, I write this to my
dear great-great-great-grandmother so her soul may rest.
Dear Mary,
It’s your great-great-great-granddaughter here. I just want to bring you
peace and let you know that Nancy Ann lived a long life with nine children
and hundreds of descendants.
After her trial, Nancy Ann spent three months incarcerated in Grangegor-
man Prison Dublin, the first female-only prison in the British Isles ( Lawlor,
2012 ). Knowing her sentence of transportation to an unknown territory of
Van Diemen’s Land, and leaving everything that she knew behind – her
Locating self in storying 33
family, her home, her friends, her way of life and the measly few belong-
ings she possessed – her body was the only space on which she could record
her history and her hopes. Over time, Nancy Ann used a rusty old nail to
etch into the skin above her right elbow the initials C C S P M A M C W
M and above her left elbow R R M R S R T R J D and two hearts. She
gathered what soot she could retrieve from prison lamps and rubbed it into
the wounds to create an embodied permanent trace of those she was leav-
ing behind. Amidst those initials, perhaps the Ms were her mother and her
sister, both named Mary. Her father was Thomas and her brother John. Or
a more sickening thought perhaps is that they were not a sovereign body
claim, but clientele claiming female-body territory through branding ( Bar-
nard, 2016 ) from her “two years on the town” as noted on her convict record
at the age of 15. To Nancy Ann, life was withdrawing heart and soul deep
within, and seizing available opportunities.
In the warped threads of Nancy Ann’s fate, she was transported on a convict
ship called Hope. I imagine hope was all Nancy Ann had to hold onto. Hope
for something better. Hope for some security and some comfort. Nancy Ann
arrived in Van Diemen’s Land on 17 August 1842 and was sent to the notorious
Cascades Female Factory. Her description was scientifically recorded.
Trade: house servant. Height: 5 feet, 2 ¾ inches. Age: 16. Complex-
ion: fresh. Head: oval. Hair: sandy brown. Visage: oval, rather small.
Forehead: retreating. Eyebrows: dark brown, thin. Eyes: brown. Nose:
straight. Mouth: small. Chin: small. Remarks: C C S P M A M C and W
M above elbow on right arm and R R M R S R T R J D and two hearts
above elbow on left arm.
(Archives Office of Tasmania, 2007b)
By 1843 Nancy was assigned to Mrs Meagher as a servant, and punished
for neglect of duty on 18 April 1843, and then again on the 8 May for being
out after hours. On 21 August, she was sentenced to 6 months’ hard labour
back in the Female Factory for disorderly conduct (Female Convicts in Van
Diemen’s Land Database, 2017 ; Archives Office of Tasmania, 2007a ). The
Female Factory was a harsh place of cold, hard stone cells, 12-hour hard-
labour days in cell yards washing and pulling out knots of shipping ropes until
hands were rubbed raw, with scarce food and water and coarse uniforms that
chafed skin away and were riddled with lice, fleas and vermin (Swiss, 2010 ).
Female convicts were purposefully sent to Van Diemen’s Land as breed-
ing fodder for the oversupply of male convicts, who outnumbered women
nine to one ( Swiss, 2010 ). And it didn’t take long for ex-convict William
Neighbour (who had served 7 years for embezzlement) (Archives Office
of Tasmania, 2007c) to submit an application to marry Nancy Ann to the
Convict Department authorities for approval. Permission to marry was
34 Locating self in storying
Figure 2.2 William Neighbour and Nancy Ann Adam’s Permission to Marry record.
Archives Office of Tasmania, 2007d
approved on the 27 October 1844 (Archives Office of Tasmania, 2007d).
William was provided with a child-bearing mate to help populate the new
colony – all part of the warped social engineering of the time.
By July 1849, they had two children, Mary Ann and William Joseph,
and William senior was anxious about feeding his growing family. On his
way home, he saw a sack of oats in a laneway that he thought would feed
his family for at least 2 months. But as an ex-convict, William was never
completely free, and so someone was always watching him. His theft saw
him back in gaol for another 15 months on 1 July 1849 (Archives Office
of Tasmania, 2007c). Nancy Ann was then recommended for conditional
pardon on 17 July 1849 but this was not approved until the following year
on 30 July 1850. By 6 January 1852, it was recognised that Nancy Ann had
served her sentence and so was declared “free by servitude”. Not until 28
April 1855 did Nancy Ann collect her Certificate of Freedom, which certi-
fied her “free” status, by which time she had five children (Female Convicts
in Van Diemen’s Land Database, 2017).
Though William and Ann Neighbour (in her married life she dropped
“Nancy” from her name) were now “free”, they were still half citizens, sub-
ject to controlled movement. They could not leave Van Diemen’s Land and
probably never even saw the coast, but remaining in the town they were
assigned to live, Campbell Town, in central Tasmania. They were subjected
to weekly headcounts after divine service on Sunday and their bank accounts
were assumed by the Crown ( Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2006 ).
Locating self in storying 35
Ann and William Neighbour had a total of nine children. Then, suddenly,
at age 49 (the same age as your dear Grannie, Tracey), William had a heart
attack on his return home from his work as a sexton at the local church in
1865. Their youngest child was only 1 year old and my great-grandfather
was 3. The community gathered to support Ann and her brood and gave her
the railway house, with the job of raising and dropping the boom gate when
trains came through. She lived on to the grand age of 91, and her obitu-
ary in The Daily Telegraph (22 September 1917) referred to Mrs William
Neighbour as highly respected, a native of Belfast, Ireland, and a resident of
Tasmania for 75 years (Female Convicts in Van Diemen’s Land Database,
2017).
In locating myself in my ancestors’ storied lives, I have walked in the
places they walked and seen where their remains lie, I sense their being, I
sense their hardship, their pain and their extraordinary resilience. But I also
know that in Nancy Ann and William’s whiteness, their life chances and
identities could be changed within their lifetimes. Yet the ongoing colonis-
ing discrimination of Aboriginality continues for Tracey and her family.
Tracey responds to Louise’s ancestral storying
From the penetrating gaze on Aboriginal peoples and poor vulnerable white
peoples, patriarchal white sovereignty has many names. It is the magis-
trate’s signature on the bottom of a page declaring you are to be taken away,
transported away from family, friends. It is also the averted gaze of the
powerful to not see, to not be involved when care is most needed by the
powerless. It is the law having to take its course. I refer to Blaze Kwaymul-
lina (2007 ) who says colonisation is and always was a con “shedding guilt
through an intricate web of denial stories” (p. 30). If it is a con, then it is a
cruel one full of coldness, thriving on disdain and intolerance for difference.
Having grown up with the benefit of old people who understood the blunt
force of colonisation, I was always surprised and honoured at their ability to
be generous of spirit. In the full light of subjugation, these old people would
have a kind word for white people’s suffering. So I take up this practice
and say to you, Louise, I hear your stories. I know of similar hardship of
which you speak and I honour you for being troubled about your location as
a white woman in the lands of Aboriginal peoples. A troubling, I acknowl-
edge, that will often remain unspoken in black-white relationships, without
a name. Our shared dialogue for knowing each other’s ancestors is a good
start to answering the first research questions of this country, that is, “Who’s
your mob and where do you come from?” And the only way to answer these
questions is to tell stories. Deadly, thank you.
36 Locating self in storying
Storying across cultures, times, place and space
A people without stories are a people without a history.
(Chawla, 2011 , p. 16)
Tracey
There is a purposefulness in telling ancestral stories through knowing
our grandmothers, for there is our source. The source of our mothers, the
source of ourselves, the source of our herstories. In telling my grandmoth-
er’s story, I have sought to move through space, weaving words to bring
me closer to her. Her story is but one sample of the many Aboriginal lives
caught in the horrorscape of that time. I have also sought to make known
colonisation and its sinuous trails over our countries, over our bodies. We,
as Aboriginal peoples, live with the imprints that the trails leave behind,
on the countries and bodies of the generations previous. But this is not a
remembering complete and of itself, locked in a time past, past the point
of remembering – as if finished – no more need for deep thinking. The
trails are made anew, time and time again. Colonisation has not left this
land and so, theoretically, Aboriginal peoples have the right to query why
there is a post in postcolonisation. Colonisation continues and the white
nations’ stories of imagined freedom and liberation for Aboriginal peoples
through being made civilised are told to sooth the pillow of a denying
(white) race. Think of the Emergency Response in the Northern Territory
( HREOC, 2007 ), which sought to “stabilize” Aboriginal communities and
“address” family violence and child abuse. In this, we as Aboriginal peo-
ples see yet again the sinuousness of colonising effect to administrivia – a
new Aborigines Protection Act; new ways to initiate new forms of control
through the introduction of the BasicsCard; new forms of dispossession
from land ownership under Aboriginal community control for promised
but forever-eventuating housing reform; new forms of welfarism that did
away with the Community Development Employment Program for the
harshly enforced Work for the Dole Programs; and new forms of “caring”
for the condition of the “Aborigine” through heavy-handed alcohol restric-
tion and compulsory health checks on children. And again, the trails are
deeply imprinted with passive violence on Aboriginal bodies and minds.
The basic tenets of the story of colonisation in Australia do not change
across time, place and space. The story generates its own momentums
through cycles and renders its presence from behind a mask, to distort the
senses, disavowing Aboriginal truths. It is a story with devastating conse-
quences, however, for Aboriginal peoples. Why does this story not change?
Is it because Aboriginal truth speaking is a humanity that displaces the
face mask of colonisation, revealing white nation building as an enterprise
Locating self in storying 37
traced with untruths and violence? Which our grandmothers lived with.
Which we all (Aboriginal and white) live with. Transforming this story
will require constant courage and conviction – a warriorship of the soul.
Perhaps, in the remembering of our old people, in knowing our ancestral
stories, more is evoked than the telling of stories.
Louise
Embodying ancestral stories has sprouted a deeper sense of where I come
from in the troubling of uncertainty (of self and place) as a white occupier
on stolen land. I have known my genealogy for 30 years, but the proposi-
tion of locating self in ancestral storying has provoked further connection
with a great-great-grandmother. I have dug beyond facts to sense her lived
experiences, to be there with Nancy Ann. Sensing every cut for every line
of each inked initial ingrained into her skin. I have held the puncturing of
needle into flesh through stitching the initials into fine cloth. Pulling at the
weft and warp threads with a felting needle to embody and hold the ongoing
abuse – the wear and tear of a harsh life. Submerging in tea – to reflect the
aged stain of a convict record.
I have held the heart-wrenching pain of Mary Adams desperate plea
to keep her daughter with her in Belfast. By disrupting time as continu-
ous (chronological), from a quantum physics position I feel the entangle-
ments of my life, my body with Mary’s and Nancy Ann’s. In quantum dis/
continuity there is no overarching sense of temporality, of continuity, in
place. Each scene diffracts various temporalities within and across the field
of spacetimemattering. “Scenes never rest, but are reconfigured within, dis-
persed across and threaded through one another” ( Barad, 2010 , p. 240).
I walked the paths that Nancy Ann treaded in Hobart when she arrived
in Van Diemen’s Land – the grounds of the Female Factory, the neighbour-
ing streets and lanes. I sensed Nancy Ann’s focus on the task at hand (be it
washing, cleaning, collecting groceries), and her tenacious resilience. Only
the surrounding walls of the Female Factory remain, though the embedded
pain in stone walls lingers and a dark, heavy cloud of deep misery weighs
heavily over the site. Scenes that never rest.
By threading past, present and future through one another, an integrative
depth of sense of self and place is woven. “ The ‘past’ and the ‘future’ are
iteratively reworked and enfolded through the iterative practices of space-
timemattering” ( Barad, 2010 , pp. 260–261). Locating self in ancestral sto-
rying is an iterative reworking and enfolding of past, present and future, that
is, spacetimemattering.
But what lingers most is the soullessness of ontological emptiness – the
hardened disconnect of the colonial subject – of feeling unloved and unable
38 Locating self in storying
Figure 2.3 Stitched armband of initials and hearts on Nancy Ann’s left arm.
Photograph taken by Tracey.
to love. Feminism, sisterhood and stories have given me some sense of
belonging, some sense of joy, values and passion that are coldly absent from
the colonial subject. And I have sought, throughout my adult life, to nurture
embodied and spiritual connections to the land and waters upon which I
live, work, walk and visit. I have sought out the wisdom of this ancient land,
by seeking out the ancient stories that tell of how this place came to be, how
each creature came to be and their relationships with each other. I have done
this by listening to Elders about how to feel every breath of every living
thing, and by completing every Aboriginal studies unit that was available in
my undergraduate degree. I have soaked up the great wisdom and pleasure
of walking country with dear Aboriginal friends. In essence, to locate some
sense of belonging I have sought out (and continue to seek out) the ancient
wisdom of the land, a recommended remedy for displaced people to nurture
belonging ( Blackie, 2016 ).
Further holding of the past in the present through storying is reflected
in the metonymic logos epitome of “cinders there are” proposed by Der-
rida (1991 ) for “which holds all beings and entities in the presence” (p. 1)
Locating self in storying 39
– though they are only momentarily in the present, as a cinder “immediately
incinerates in front of your eyes” (p. 35), its delicate tenderness diminishing
to dust. In storying, the people, places and time are alive – full embodied
sensation and perception. Then the dust settles and lingers. Places occur
so they will be understood. “Cinders there are: Place there is” (p. 37). The
cinder is suggestive of what lurks beneath – “Incubation of the fire lurking
beneath the dust” (p. 59). The energy of the storytelling (the fire) retreats,
leaving the cinders, the diminishing dust, as the intensity of the story’s pres-
ence dissipates but never completely vanishes: cinders remain. Derrida, like
Barad, read the world as entangled matter:
Our entire world is the cinder of innumerable living beings; and what is
living is so little in relation to the whole, it must be that, once already,
everything was transformed into life and it will continue to be so.
(p. 69)
Through storying, we come to live, breath and feel deep penetrating under-
standings of identity and place.
Together/two-gather
Storying our ancestral stories has been a process that has spanned months,
years. A process of gathering data from family members telling us stories,
from searching in archives and reading historical fiction and nonfiction
from times and places of our ancestors. Then mulling over these pieces of
data across days, weeks, months. The mulling seeds questions and makes
links between pieces of data. We verbally story the data with others. And in
time, when the energy of the stories demands, we start to compose words on
pages. At first loosely mapped, and then revisited again and again, slowly
fleshing out the heart and soul of the story.
Locating self in ancestral storying feeds into what is referred to as a
research positionality or standpoint, so that the reader knows what position
you bring, what standpoint you take to the phenomena of inquiry. Yet it
yields so much more. As Pinkola Estes (1992 ) explains, so many of us are
lost, hungering for numinous experience, exacerbated because we have lost
our ancestors, not knowing names and origins beyond grandparents, and not
knowing family stories, values and practices. She declares that “spiritually,
this situation causes sorrow . . . and hunger” (p. 208). With the strength of
entanglement with ancestors and a myriad of other beings, we declare the
standpoints we bring to storying. We stand for human rights, not a liberal
individualist view of rights but a collectivist view for children, for women,
for Indigenous peoples, for refugees. Our reflections on ancestral storying
40 Locating self in storying
here have led us to think through what can be the principles for storying
which we speak to in the following chapter.
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3 Principles of storying
So far you have come to know that we connect through story. We understand
self, country/place and others through story. More and more academics are
using the term storying in titles to describe their work. There are thousands
of entries in online searches. More and more research students across the
globe are being drawn to storying. The practice of storying is emergent
and responsive, so we purposefully refuse to offer a prescriptive formula
for storying. Yet we are well aware that when starting out as a researcher,
guidance and direction are sought. Consequently, from mulling over what is
central to storying for more than a year, we have located five principles of
storying. They are (1) storying nourishes thought, body and soul; (2) story-
ing claims voice in the silenced margins; (3) storying is embodied relational
meaning making; (4) storying intersects the past and present as living oral
archives; and (5) storying enacts collective ownership and authorship. This
is not a definitive list. We propose these principles as prevalent to our story-
ing work at the time of writing this book. In the emergent practice of story-
ing, we acknowledge that these principles will continue to morph slowly
through intersections with others. But what remains constant and integral to
all of these principles is place or country. Stories and storying are located.
Country and place provide the fertile soil for the stories to seed. Country
and place holds the stories. But first, Tracey stories.
Tracey
On a visit to my daughter’s families in the desert we stopped at the art
co-op and bought Kathleen Wallace’s book, Listen Deeply, Let These Sto-
ries In. A precious book, full of Kathleen’s artwork, stories, language and
photographs. I know my daughter holds a deep admiration for Kathleen,
who is an artist and educator, just as my daughter is. In the foreword of her
book, Kathleen eloquently speaks about many of the notions of what we
are calling the principles of storying. In seeing and hearing her words there
DOI: 10.4324/9781315109190-3
44 Principles of storying
is nourishment for the body and soul, and embodied meaning making. The
past combines with the present to be a living archive and there is collective
authorship. Kathleen writes,
The stories I’m sharing with you in this book . . . don’t belong to me
alone. They were told to me by my grandparents . . . and by some of
my aunts and uncles – and other elders too, such as my husband . . .
and his father . . . There were many of our old people living here in the
old days and these stories come from all of them, from their ancestors
and before that from the altyerrenge, the time when the first beings cre-
ated Arrernte people and our world. They’re stories from my grandpar-
ents’ country, our homelands . . . from all those places and other places
around here. The stories I’ll tell you are about some of these places,
the ancestor days, the spirits of those places and something of my life
as I grew up . . . I listened to a lot of the stories and I remembered
many of them – I let those stories come into me. I thought really hard
about them. They taught me many things. They stayed with me when I
was living out bush as a young person, they kept me going, surviving,
and knowing my own family and culture. The stories taught me about
myself too. When we lost our bush life, they held me together through
all the changes.
(pp. ix–xi)
Our work is emplaced in Australia and notions of country, known and
understood in Aboriginal senses, with deep connections of body to land
being situated beside white senses of the notion of place. The density of this
relationship is in a state of constant becoming; however, with generosity of
spirit, Kathleen’s words invite the reader to engage, to be present, to learn
of self, to learn in stories from the stories of First Peoples – an invitational
and methodology for sharing.
Principle: storying nourishes thought, body and soul
What ought to be interesting . . . is the unfolding of a lived life rather than
the confirmation such a chronicle provides for some theory . . . Let the story
itself be our discovery.
(Coles, 1989 , p. 22)
We experience stories as theories and, like Devika Chawla (2011), locate
our “theoretical roots in a storied world” (p. 13). We know we are not alone
(e.g., see Chawla, 2011 ; Quintero & Rummel, 2015 ). We are drawn into
stories. We imagine that we are there, and through that vicarious encounter
Principles of storying 45
are affected and wonder. The stories that we encounter stay with us and
we muse over them, new insights unfurling over time. We make meaning
through story. The metaphors and motifs of stories offer layers of symbol-
ism that we unwrap over time.
Theory is often argued for and presented in masculine ways in academia.
Its presence is demanded and forced: “You’ve got to have theory.” “It has
no weight if there’s no theory.” We recognise that for many, theory is unkind
and exclusionary. For example, Devika Chawla (2011 ), a South Asian Indian
woman living in middle America, wrote of her “resistance/s to theory” and
her “leanings toward ‘storying’” and the ongoing struggle to reside in the
liminal space between stories and theories (p. 6). As she later explains,
I was not born into theory. I don’t believe that theory was embedded
into the world in which I grew up. If it was then I remained unaware of
it. At the same time, I was also not raised in a home environment where
the word “theory” was ever a part of spoken vocabulary.
(Chawla, 2011 , p. 13)
Chawla declares her resistance to theory as rooted in her family and educa-
tional heritage. Theory is language of the intellectual elite, and our movement
to storying is to enable accessibility to theory – to give uplift to stories as the
tools of research. Our claim is that storying has long read the world, and in its
existence there is theory. Cultures across times have ontological stories (e.g.,
Aboriginal Dreaming stories, Greek myths, Hindu myths) that are passed
from generation to generation and communicate theories of how to live, how
to be human. They are timeless stories that are layered with meaning through
symbolism and metaphor. They are theories used to explain phenomena.
There is a cautionary note here in the use of the concept of “Dreaming”,
which is often mobilised in simplistic and incorrect ways within dominant
ways of knowing Aboriginal peoples, traditions and practices. These deny
Aboriginal meanings and understandings through a discourse that reduces
the phenomenon of Aboriginal spirituality being to the “mythical and not
real” – that is, the Aboriginal Dreaming of a past and imagined spiritual life
that supposedly no longer has relevance in “modern” times and spaces. We
do not agree with this viewpoint. Stories matter and endure.
Irene Watson, Tanganekald and Meintangk woman of the Coorong, law-
yer and academic, invokes the ancient law story of the greedy frog who
drank up all the water in her essay “Aboriginal Laws and the Sovereignty
of Terra Nullius” (2002). The spirits who lived with the greedy frog suf-
fered without the water and made the decision to make the frog laugh to
release the water back into the land. Watson, in her writing, demonstrates
the greed and thoughtlessness of krinkri (white) law. Despite the 1992 legal
46 Principles of storying
decision of Mabo that placed the colonising story of terra nulliusinto fic-
tion, multiple manifestations of the legal doctrine of terra nullius continue.
Krinkri law remains unsatisfied – the frog keeps on drinking and the First
People of spirit, Aboriginal peoples, remain thirsty for rights. The primary
meaning mapped into the law story of the frog speaks to the life value of
sharing, that greed as a dominating ethos denies and subjugates and to be
lawful is to be embodied in country. The law connects to people, and people
to land. Stories are a central means of defining law and remembering tra-
ditions among Aboriginal people. The message in this story is a reminder
that in Aboriginal law there is thoughtfulness for the body and soul which
in turn is inextricably connected to land. In neglect, Aboriginal and white
positions in relations of power in contestations over who has sovereignty
in land/country are left unbalanced through the construction and mainte-
nance of difference and separation. Jo-ann Archibald of the Stol:lo nation,
in her seminal work Indigenous Storywork, reminds us that stories have the
power to make our hearts, minds and bodies work together (2008, p. 12).
Remembering the story of the greedy frog has significance beyond dream-
ing/Dreaming the mythical, and as Watson demonstrates, the story has deep
and theoretical meaning.
Political philosopher Hannah Arendt’s work (1906–1975) has contrib-
uted significantly to the foregrounding of story in academia. Hannah was
widely known for her love of telling stories:
A charming disregard for mere facts (se non e evero, e bene travoto
[even if it is not true, it is well conceived]) and unfailing regard for the
life of the story . . . her stories and her sayings were the threads with
which she wove her conversations and her works.
(Young-Bruehl, 1977 , p. 183)
From the dark times she lived in (she experienced the holocaust as a Ger-
manic Jew), she gathered threads (thought fragments) to create stories that
were “dynamic, and illuminating” (p. 183), offering astute observations
(aphoras). This is what we mean by storying as theory. Storying has the
capacity to activate a plurality of possible meanings that multiplies signifi-
cance, yet resists closure. This is the beauty of storying. There is no one way
to understand the theory stories offer – the integrative nourishment offered
to mind, body and soul.
In research through, with and as storying, control over the story’s mean-
ing is relinquished, with listeners/viewers/readers welcomed to bring their
own interpretations, understandings and sensibilities to bear on the story
told ( Barone, 1995 ). In storying we are engaging in analytical thinking, we
are selecting data, we are interpreting, we are evoking theory and crafting
Principles of storying 47
stories to make meaning. We argue that stories tell what “no amount of
theorizing or recitation of statistics” could reveal – they offer insight that
generates empathy and builds social bonds ( Duncan, 1998 , p. 107). Com-
pelling stories connect personal experience to broader societal discourses
( Berger & Quinney, 2005 ). Stories become embodied, challenge our think-
ing and nurture our spirits.
Tracey
I have had the fortune of watching Louise tell the following story, and in the
performance I have seen the audience captured. Louise uses her body to shape
the winds of dislocation and throws herself literally to land with a thud on
the floor. Stories are not often told in academic settings. In this instance – a
national conference – there is rupturing of the rigidity and formality of these
spaces, yet there is a genuine appreciation by the audience of being caught up
in the words, to hear, feel, guess at where this story is going and why.
Louise stories: “The Man Who Had No Story”
This is an Irish story from the Irish tendril of my ancestry. It was not passed
down, but located in The Penguin Book of Irish Folktales ( Glassie, 1993)
that I purchased in a village on the east coast of Ireland more than 20 years
ago. It’s the last story in the book. I can’t recall if I read every story in the
book, but I more suspect that I was drawn in by the title for its absurdist
proposition – “The Man Who Had No Story”. An imagined impossibility
or an absurdist piece on a droll life. I relished every word when I read it,
and thus chose to add it to my storytelling repertoire for adult storytelling
gatherings and for opening workshops on storytelling with children. The
embedded provocative messages resonated, offering ontological and epis-
temological theories. I have probably performed this story a hundred times
now. Though I drew from Glassie’s versions, my hands are all over the story
now, shaped with my worldview and words. Here goes:
There once was a man named Brian. He lived in Ireland when times were
really tough. The English had taken over everything. Brian wove baskets for
a living, but it had become harder and harder to source wicker or rods to
weave with, because as I said, the English had taken over everything. Now
Brian knew of a faery glen where he was sure he would find plenty of wicker
and rods. You know the faeries I mean. The wicked Irish faeries. But Brian
daren’t go in there for fear of what the faeries might do to him. And so Brian
searched high and low for wicker and rods until it came to the time when
there was no other choice but to go into the faery glen. He declared to his
48 Principles of storying
wife his intentions and she kindly packed him some lunch (wives did such
things back then), which he bundled up with some rope and a hook and then
he set off into the faery glen. Now he didn’t get far into the glen before a fog
set in, and he thought he would stop and eat his lunch in the hope that the
fog would lift by the time he finished. However, by the time he finished, he
couldn’t even see his own hand in front of his face. Then suddenly, a great
wind came and blew him this way and that and landed him with a great thud
on the ground.
Brian looked around to see if he could see anything and in the distance,
he saw a light. Now he knew that where there was light there must be peo-
ple, so he walked slowly towards it. As he got closer he saw a house, and
when he got to the entrance he saw an old man and an old woman sitting by
a fire. She beckoned for him to come and sit with them. Once he was seated
she said to him, “Now have you got a story tell us then, love?” Startled by
the request Brian promptly replied, “Nay. I’ve never told a story in m’ life.”
“Well, take this bucket down to the well and fill it for us, dear.”
“Aye,” Brian nodded, anything but tell a story. And so, he took the bucket
down to the well and filled it, and just as he was steadying it on the side of
the well, a great wind came and blew him this way and that and he landed
with a great thud.
Brian looked around to locate himself. And he saw a light. Now he knew
that where there is light there must be people. So he walked towards the
light. And as he got closer he saw a longhouse, and when he got to the
doorway he saw people sitting all around the edges of the long room. A
young lady with curly black hair gestured to him to come and sit beside her,
which he did rather coyly; he was a married man after all. The young lady
explained to Brian that this was a wake for a very important man of the vil-
lage. The big man of the gathering came over to say that he was going into
town to get a fiddler, as it was going to be a long night. The young lady said,
“O, there is no need. We have Brian here tonight.”
“Nay!” Brian declared. “I have never played the fiddle in my life.” But
before he knew it, they thrust a fiddle into his hands. And he played and he
played the most delightful tunes, and everyone danced and danced. And
they all declared Brian the greatest fiddler in the whole of Ireland. Then the
big man said the dancing must stop because it was time to get the priest for
the funeral service. The young lady said, “O, there is no need we have Brian
here tonight. He tells the finest funeral service.”
“Nay!” said Brian. “I’ve never been to seminary school or anything.”
But before he knew it, they had placed a priest’s holy vestment across his
shoulders and he began to speak the most beautiful words. Everyone had
tears streaming down their cheeks. And they all applauded his sermon as
the finest they had ever heard.
Principles of storying 49
Then it was time to carry the coffin to the cemetery. And as the pallbear-
ers gathered it so happened that one pallbearer was much taller than the
others. The young lady with the curly black hair declared that there was
naught to worry about as Brian was here and he is the finest surgeon in the
whole of Ireland.
“Nay!” said Brian. “I’ve never been to medical school or anything.” But
before he knew it, they placed a scalpel in his hand and laid the tall man
down. Brian cut a section from both the tall man’s calves and restitched
them together with stitches so fine that you would never know there had
been an incision. The whole funeral procession declared Brian was the fin-
est surgeon in the whole of Ireland. And the pallbearers regathered – now
all of equal height – and carried the coffin to the cemetery. Brian was last
in the funeral procession. They had to climb over a stone wall to enter the
cemetery and when Brian was on top of the wall, a great wind came and
blew him this way and that and then he landed with a thud.
He looked around to locate himself, and there was the well, with the
bucket he had filled still perched on the rim. He collected it and took into
the old woman and man. And the old woman said, “Well, have you got a
story to tell then, love?”
“Aye, aye,” said Brian and he told them the story of where he had been
and what had happened. The old woman and the old man thought it was the
greatest story they had ever heard. They gave him some food and he rested.
When he awoke he was in the glen and beside him was his empty lunch
container and his rope, wound around a great bundle of rods and wicker.
He picked them up and set off home. When he got home he told his wife the
story. She too thought it was the greatest story she had ever heard. And so,
when he went to the markets to sell his newly made baskets, Brian told many
market-goers the story, and pretty soon Brian became known as the greatest
storyteller in the whole of Ireland.
The theory this story speaks to me has evolved over time, and varies accord-
ing to my presence of mind when being with the story. The most resonant
theory is that of risk, of trying the new against your beliefs that you do not
know or cannot do. What psychologist Susan Jeffers’ Feel the Fear and
Do It Anyway (1987 ) took a whole book to discuss and unpack, “The Man
Who Had No Story” offers in a 10-minute story. Following on from the
theory of risk is the theory of entering dark, unknown spaces on a quest – a
common motif in narratology and folklore, and a good storytelling tech-
nique to build suspense, but also symbolic of working through uncertainty
and mystery. There is the tease and taunt of treading the fine line between
pleasing or displeasing the faeries, and in turn, being rewarded or cursed.
The presence of the faeries cranks up the intensity of life’s performance,
50 Principles of storying
inviting an increased consciousness of actions to consider others. And in
being comfortable in the unknown, I see the theory of being open to trying
roles beyond our scope – even what might seem the impossible (e.g., cutting
a section of a man’s legs off and having him immediately walking again).
The accompanying theory of encouraging nudges supports those leaps of
faith. These theories are punctuated with a theory of wind-spurred displace-
ment, and closes with a theory of hope for unassuming greatness.
Okay, the sceptic reader might be thinking, these are just the morals
or metaphors of the story. Morals and metaphors explain something just
as theories do, but through implicit illustrative experiences. The intent of
theory is to explain. The intent of story is to illustrate through symbolism
and invite the listener/reader to ponder, to draw out the theories that are
relevant to them. I avoid the use of the word moral as it suggests a lesson in
a didactic and moralistic sense. And I avoid stories of such nature, such as
biblical tales. Rather, I am drawn to stories with more suggestive, obscure
symbolism in which the listener/reader has agency. Stories with subtle sym-
bolism can be used to generate theory from “ordinary experiences” ( The
Res-Sisters, 2017 ), as well as the extraordinary.
In sum, we relish storying for the integrative nourishment offered for
our minds, bodies and souls. We argue that it has a place in all sectors of
society. Storying is not less-than in academia, but actually equal-to. In fact,
for the connoisseur of theories beyond the well-worn, storying research is
more-than. There is theory, there is rigour, there is trustworthiness, there is
validity, but there is also pleasure. Storying is enjoyable to read, view and
listen, and storying unashamedly honours emotions and spirit (expressions
often taboo in academic circles). Through storying, we then can develop
deeper, more complex understanding of phenomena.
Principle: storying claims voice in the silenced margins
We see storying as practice that can claim voice in the silenced margins and
counter metanarratives. That is, it offers a legitimate alternative to widely
held narratives such as “ ‘monovocal’ stories about the low educational
achievement and attainment of students of color are told” ( Solórzano &
Yosso, 2002 , p. 27). In his critique of modernism, Lyotard (1984 ) explained
how metanarratives shape knowledge, and grow in strength having oppres-
sive, exclusionary and totalising effects as they work to explain a concept
rather than just tell the story of an event. We see potential in stories, par-
ticularly stories from the margins, as pushing back against oppressive and
exclusionary metanarratives, be they about research, academia or society at
large. The work of counter stories does this.
Principles of storying 51
Chicana feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa (1990) adds her voice to this
argument. She writes,
Social issues such as race, class, and sexual difference are intertwined
with the narrative and poetic elements of a text, elements in which the-
ory is embedded. In our mestizaje [mixed ancestries] theories we create
new categories for those of us left out or pushed out of existing ones.
(p. xxvi)
And more pointedly, Solórzano and Yosso (2002 ) note that counter stories
are stories of people on the margins. We use critical theories to frame story-
ing research. Given the racialised nature of Australia, critical race theory
(CRT) gives us voice to interrogate the intersectionalities of race and power,
to make known Aboriginal standpoints for exposing the everyday racisms
and privileges of whiteness. Ladson-Billings (1998 ) nominates that “this is
important as social reality is constructed by the formulation and exchange
of stories with the ‘voices’ of raced/marginalised groups being able to name
lived realities” (p. 13). Counter stories are not created and voiced only in
response to metanarratives or majoritarian stories. By doing such, those
grand narratives still dominate the discourse ( Ikemoto, 1997 ; Solórzano &
Yosso, 2002 ). We, like Solórzano and Yosso, look to a broader appeal of
counter stories in which the histories and lived experiences of people on the
margins are shared to “strengthen traditions of social, political, and cultural
survival and resistance” (p. 32). Drawing from Delgado (1989) and Lawson
(1995), Solórzano and Yosso (2001) also identify that counter stories can
perform “at least four theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical func-
tions”, in broad brushstrokes, they build community; challenge perceived
wisdom; open windows to the realities at the margins and show possibilities
for those at the margin; and they teach others to construct another world that
is richer than either the story or the reality alone (p. 475).
There are many counter stories that speak back to metanarratives of
Aboriginal peoples. The stories are an intended disruption to dominant
practices for knowing Aboriginal peoples. They demonstrate how struggles
inform identities and agencies necessary to counter those representations
that seek to limit. Through these stories, there is a critical unravelling of
what it means to identify as Aboriginal in Australia. These stories are an
important centring of Aboriginal critical voices that speak to lived expe-
riences, contributing to understandings of power in, and over, Aboriginal
lives. The holding of stories in heads and hearts and the telling of these
stories about power have been fundamental to Aboriginal cultural and
political survival. These stories, shared between and across generations,
52 Principles of storying
inform Aboriginal knowing and being. White people are too often the only
authorities of Aboriginal lives and histories. So powerful is the dominant
colonial storying of Aboriginal peoples that the possibility of Aboriginal
people having their own stories – and moreover, stories that are imbued
with theoretical positions – is rendered impossible, flung to a margin to be
out of sight and out of the colonisers’ minds or, when heard, disavowed.
Aboriginal people are not all assimilated and have not all forgotten. In this
book, Aboriginal stories are intentionally privileged.
Tracey stories: “Taken”
In 1929 a black mother, desperate, powerless and tormented, came to the
local white legal authorities. She carried with her the unfathomable guilt
and shame of a crime committed by her spouse. She held to the belief that
treading a path to the door of the gunjis would hold to the real possibility
that her family would be protected from the violence within. An impossible
possibility to believe that a white system’s love of its own superior sense of
reasoning would reach across and seamlessly meld with her aching need.
The pain in her heart disavowed risk. A desperate black mother enacting an
aching need in desperate times, desperately wanting to rewrite the colonial
script that hung ominously in her life, sometimes as backdrop, sometimes
threatening to smother all of her life.
In this colonial script, the words Aboriginal and mother spoken in the
same breath were treated with scepticism. Black mothers were neglectful in
mothering. This was an often-cited verse of white logic, shaped in a con-
tinuing colonising context that could not – and would not – meld with the
illogical coupling of “the black” and “the mother”. The risk, initially dis-
avowed, that was held silently within the black mother, rose quickly, visibly,
to its full height. Torment added to torment. What answers could the white
system of policing and justice provide for her pain? How to alleviate the
pain? With more pain? An ordinance was drawn decreeing that the three
eldest children needed to be “taken”.
A small ramshackle house of rusting corrugated tin, slapped-together
old timber boards for walls and a dirt floor could be found down the bush
track. It is away from the town that bustles with its own importance and only
becomes known, is seen, when the lives inside the shack have percussion with
the important things of that town where white people live. The bush track,
lined with white gums and scrubby bush that have taken shape from too many
battles with the wind, travels parallel to the sea. Pale-blue skies, slow-moving
puffed-up clouds and a taste of salt in the air paints a picture complete.
The shack ordinarily holds a messy tangle of children, lean of body and
light of feet. Some of that messy tangle is outside, playing imaginary games
that will keep them occupied for hours and days and weeks. Inside, on
Principles of storying 53
the iron-framed bed strangled tight with a grey blanket, GOVERNMENT
stamped in red, sit the three.
The youngest is aware that this not another ordinary day. If it were, she
would be outside with the other siblings. Her oldest brother fixes his eyes to
look at nothing but everything in particular. There is not much to look at. Her
older sister is almost silently crying. Tears well up and roll down, leaving
track marks on her cheeks. She watches how the tracks are made, following
the shape of her sister’s face, down her cheeks to the jawline, to be soaked
up in her skin or to be wiped away by a torn square of once white-coloured
rag that doubles for a handkerchief. The youngest looks for answers. What
makes her older sister cry? What makes her older brother’s face so resolute?
Her mother, tall and white haired, holds her pannikin of tea with both
hands, and from her position at the table looks out the only window to the
track outside in the bush. Even with the little light that seeps through the
glass pane of the window, she can tell that her mother’s face is off-colour.
Today it holds an ashen grey in the thin folds of deep-brown worry. Think-
ing the answer is outside, the youngest stretches her neck and looks in that
direction too. There is nothing to see but the same old bush, so she gives up
straining and instead concentrates on her feet as she makes them methodi-
cally swing up and back from the edge of the bed. She won’t fall; she has her
sister’s hand to keep her steady.
Her concentration is broken by the movement of her mother’s chair. Her
mother shifts her body and simultaneously motions her legs out from the
table. As she rises, the youngest knows that this is a response to the car
engine she hears, they all hear, making its way down the track. Stretching
her neck again she sees a black car with silver trim bumping along, and
her younger brothers and sister racing to meet it. Her sister’s hand that
holds her own grows tighter and she feels her fingers crushing. Her sister’s
other hand reaches for their eldest brother, but he has already moved off the
bed and towards their mother. Together, the four make their way out of the
house, outside into the brightness, and to the sound of tyres padding the dirt
as the car comes to come a stop.
A white man opens the car door, steps out and makes his way to her mother
with a piece of paper in hand. His clothes and manner mark him as impor-
tant. The importance of the white town has come to her family. With her elder
brother and sister, she climbs into the back seat of the car. Her sister’s crying
is now inconsolable sobs. The white man driving navigates the car back onto
the track and they leave the bush and the sea, the younger brothers, sister
and mother behind. She has been taken. The three have been taken away.
Standing at the end of that dirt track, she watches as the three are being
taken from her life. Taken to be given an education, taken to be civilised,
taken “for their own good”. A white system, objective in its reasoning,
brought justice for her, for her first three. How? Where is the logic? A logic
54 Principles of storying
that is limited to itself, a logic that lacks. A logic without the possibility to
embrace the desperate desire of the black mother to care for her children.
On the colonial orders of providing the three with “protection” and “edu-
cation” they were taken by white authorities south to Brisbane, and then
west to the Salvation Army–managed Aboriginal mission of Purga, located
outside of Ipswich. On arrival, the three who had endured a strange and ter-
rorising kidnapping were separated again. The oldest boy was placed in the
boys’ dormitory, whilst the two girls were placed in another dormitory. The
youngest of the three had arrived in Purga. It was her birthday. She was 7.
This is the story of my mother. It was she who was taken with her brother
and sister. I have reproduced the archival documentation – the orders to take
my mum, aunt and uncle, as follows:
Archival Transcript
30/4542 Industrial School
Brisbane District
Caboolture Station.
15th July 1930.
Relative to having the three children referred to in the attached report
brought before the Children’s Court at Caboolture on the 14th instant, in
compliance with Inspector Farrell’s minute on the attached reports.
Sir,
I beg to report in compliance with your minute on the attached report, I had
the three children, Douglas Kearns, Mary Elizabeth Dalton and Nellie Ella
Dalton brought before the Children’s Court here on the 14th instant, before
Mr G.E. Harwood, J.P. and Mr E. Kemp, J.P.
. . . [section not quoted or made visible on original copy above to keep
matters private] . . .
Evidence in support of the charge was given . . . After hearing the evi-
dence tendered I asked that these children be sent to the Aboriginal Home
at Purga, Lizzie Kearns the mother stated that she had no objections to the
children being sent to this home, as she was satisfied that it would be in their
best interest to have them sent there.
The Bench then decided to have them sent to this Home until they attain
the age of 18 years.
These children were conveyed to the Brisbane Watch House by Con-
stable Devantier on the 14th instant together with warrants of detention duly
signed by the adjudicating Justices for their detention at the Purga Aborigi-
nal Home.
Principles of storying 55
I issued the mother of the three children with a requisition to Brisbane for
to enable her to catch the Boat to Bribie Island as there was no other mode
of conveyance from here to her home at Toorbul Point. I did not issue her
with a requisition for her return by boat from Brisbane, as she did not know
when she would return to Bri bie, arrangements were made for her at the
Depot for her at Brisbane.
I have also made arrangements for her return at Toorbul Point when she
arrives at Bribie.
(Sgd). T. J. Hogan,
A/Sergt.1051.a
The old people I write about in this story are gone now. Being raised by
these old people in an extended family taught you the honesty and deepness
of relationships. As I grew older and had earned the right to sit at the table,
we would talk stories whilst sucking guppatea after guppatea. Each would
contribute to tellin’ stories; fragments of fragments would come together
to be made whole. Aboriginal readers will see their own family members
in this story for there is commonality, a tragic historical reality that every
Aboriginal person has been impacted by the Stolen Generations. Laguna
storyteller Leslie Silko (1997 ) says,
They [stories] aren’t just entertainment. Don’t be fooled. They are all
we have, you see. All we have to fight off illness and death. You don’t
have anything if you don’t have stories.
(p. 2)
I lean into bell hooks’ (1990 ) theoretical insights of living and being in the
margins as sites of radical possibility (p. 341). The story of three children
being taken is a story I hold tenderly and in many respects, its theoreti-
cal underpinnings seem obvious. Acts of dispossession – from lands, from
families, from self – to occupy the margin has been, and continues to be, a
site of struggle, fear and terror, and sadness and pain. These sites, however,
are not fixed locations, and Aboriginal agentic being has recast the margin
time and time again.
The children I speak of, my old people, were not well educated in the
schooling sense; however, their hunger for knowing was drawn of the
world. As adults, recalling the lives of the child within, their analysis of
power was astute. As incarcerated children and enslaved teenagers and
young adults, those old people keenly observed the mechanisms of white
supremacist power at close quarters. In reflective worldliness, those old
56 Principles of storying
people embodied resilience as a tool of self-determination, a tool to decolo-
nise. In living, breathing, feeling and thinking about the margins, those old
people, as with many other Aboriginal peoples, have come to claim this site
as their own. I tell this story, standing in unison with the three so that this
story is known. So that their lives matter. To claim voice in the margins.
Principle: storying is embodied relational meaning making
The body, through its states of arousal, awareness, and sensory experiences –
such as listening to music, for instance, or hearing a loved one’s voice or
smelling a certain fragrance – has the ability to transport us elsewhere.
(Pinkola Estes, 1992 , p. 205)
Through embodied storying we can transport to the lived experience of
others. As Walter Benjamin (1968/1999 ) wrote, “the storyteller takes what
he tells from experience – his own or that reported by others. And he in
turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to the tale” (p. 87).
Storying evokes transportation into that moment – to weep, to yearn, to
see, to hear, to pain, to taste, to love with the protagonists. Through such,
stories can elucidate “powers of intuition, insight, sensory healing, and the
rapture hidden in the body” (Pinkola Estes, p. 206). As Clarissa Pinkola
Estes explains earlier, “the body is no dumb thing from which we struggle
to free ourselves”; it is “a tangle of neurological umbilici to other worlds
and experiences” (p. 205). Through embodied storying, we privilege sensa-
tion, emotion and spirit to actively create, interpret and decipher symbols as
sensory beings through awakening, reclaiming and retaining memories that
evoke joy, laughter, tears and thoughtfulness, and nurture our emotional,
intellectual and spiritual selves.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ (1992 ) sharing of La Mariposa, Butterfly woman,
beautifully illustrates the power of embodied storying. It is her experience
of witnessing a Hopi La Mariposa dance, “the wildest of the wild, a liv-
ing numen” (p. 209) at Puyé, New Mexico. Anticipation for the Butterfly
woman is built across pages with audience members’ wild and beautiful
imaginings. Those who are not familiar with La Mariposa are surprised by
her age when she arrives.
It is fitting that Wild Woman/Butterfly Woman is old and substantial, for
she carries the thunderworld in one breast, the underworld in the other.
Her back is the curve of the planet Earth with all its crops and foods and
animals. The back of her neck carries the sunrise and sunset. Her left
thigh holds all the lodgepoles, her right thigh all the she-wolves of the
world. Her belly holds all the babies that will ever be born. Butterfly
Principles of storying 57
woman is the female fertilizing force. Carrying the pollen from one place
to another, she cross-fertilizes, just as the soul fertilizes mind with night-
dreams, just as archetypes fertilize the mundane world. She is the center.
She brings the opposites together by taking a little from here and putting
it there. Transformation is no more complicated than that. This is what
she teaches. This is how the butterfly does it. This is how the soul does
it . . . She is shaking her feather fan, and she’s hopping, for she is spill-
ing spiritual pollen all over the people who are there . . . She is using her
entire body as a blessing, her old frail, big, short-legged, short-necked,
spotted body. This is woman connected to her wild nature, the translator
of the instinctual, the fertilizing force, the mender, the rememberer of old
ideas. She is La Voz Mitologica . . . The butterfly dancer must be old . . .
because she is allowed to touch everyone: boys, babies, men, women,
girl children, the old, the ill, and the dead.
(p. 211)
We acknowledge the Hopi peoples for their profound storying wisdom
in the La Mariposa dance that we look to as a provocative illustration of
embodied storying. Clarissa describes the woman’s body who performs La
Mariposa as storied, her body reflects place and her shaking, hopping and
touching spread embodied storying to all present. The spread of pollen is
the sprinkling of tiny seeds to spur thought, to spur identity work, to feed
relations to others, to feed connection to place, to feed the soul.
Embodied storying, in turn, provokes relationality: to feel and know
another. Story nurtures understanding of others. The complexities of human-
ity are not always visible in everyday interactions. Yet as Nussbaum (1997 )
claimed, the understandings of humanity can be reached via the training of
the imagination that storytelling fosters. People in stories are imagined, then
understood “as spacious and deep, with qualitative differences from oneself
and hidden places worthy of respect” (p. 90). Storytelling cultivates a deeper
understanding of difference that nurtures respect for others. Through the
embodied relational meaning making of storying, complexities of humanity
(such as perseverance and injustice) can be grasped, and understanding and
compassion for others nurtured. To be compassionate, Nussbaum claims,
requires “a sense of one’s own vulnerability to misfortune” (p. 91) by imag-
ining that this suffering could be happening to you. This is what Nussbaum
referred to as sympathetic imagination, and it requires “imaginative and
emotional receptivity” and the demonstration of “a capacity for openness
and responsiveness” (p. 98). Thus, we argue that embodied relationality of
storying has profound capacity to nurture heartfelt understanding of anoth-
er’s position, another’s lived experience, another’s tragedy, another’s joy
and wonder.
58 Principles of storying
Louise stories
Here I offer an example of storying as embodied meaning making in written
form. The piece is from sensory ethnographic research of the social practice
arts project The Walking Neighbourhood (in which children lead walks of
local neighbourhoods as public performance) in Chiang Mai, Thailand . T o
heighten the connection to embodiment, I draw on animic ontology ( Ingold,
2000 , 2011 ), sensory ethnography ( Pink, 2009 ) and agential realism ( Barad,
2007 , 2010 , 2012 ). From Ingold, I understand animic ontology as a way of
being within a complex network of reciprocal interdependence, sustained
through perpetually drawing on the vitality of others. All forms are tran-
sient and ephemeral that “meet, merge and split apart again, each taking
with them something of the other” ( Ingold, 2000 , p. 113). Barad’s (2007 )
agential realism offers a mechanism to explain how matter meets, merges
and splits apart again. Matter is understood as an active participant in the
world that “is a dynamic intra-active becoming that never sits still” (p. 170).
Agential realism’s concept of “intra-actions” enables the reading of distinct
entities, agencies and events emerging from actions, not on the preexis-
tence of predetermined meanings of constructs. Agencies are only defined
in relation to their reciprocal interconnection. This defining is enhanced
through focussed attention to the sensorial, drawing from Pink’s (2009 )
principles for sensory ethnography (perception, place, knowing, memory
and imagination).
With limited knowledge of Thai language, I let go of privileging meaning
making through words and actively heightened my sensory awareness to
make meaning through entwined visual, auditory, tactile, gestural and olfac-
tory modes. I embrace openness to being “alive and open to a world in
continuous birth” (Ingold, 2011, p. 64), engaging with the world as a source
of astonishment. Such a way of being is curious and welcoming of the new
and unknown. Through a more open (animic) and sensorial way of being,
I endeavoured to welcome all that the Walking Neighbourhood child hosts
wanted to share of the neighbourhoods of Old Chiang Mai. Allow me to take
you on a walk with 6-year-old Seemie in Old Chiang Mai.
With a sparkling smile, Seemie, dressed in a pink dress topped with a
crocheted white bolero and wide koala-shaped thongs, held her hand out to
accompany me. I entered the walk with openness – letting go of preexisting
conceptions of Seemie as child and me as adult, of me as foreigner (farang)
and Seemie as a local; rather we were beings engaging with the streets of
Old Chiang Mai. Seemie wrapped her hand in mine to take me on the walk.
I felt the delicate nature of Seemie’s small hand in mine. My senses alerted
to the weight, texture and warmth of her hand, that is neither a subject (i.e.,
to be used for a purpose, e.g., to guide me in direction of the walk) nor
Principles of storying 59
an object of observation. I sensed a “proximity of otherness that brings the
other nearly as close as oneself. Perhaps closer . . . an infinity of others –
other beings, other spaces, other times” (Barad, 2012, p. 206). Her hand is
matter intertwined with the matter of my hand, engaged in the intra-activity
of handholding. The affect of connection to another is created. My embodi-
ment was integrally entangled with Seemie’s. I attended to the wave of sensa-
tions: warmth, softness, tenderness and delicacy. In that moment of my hand
being taken in Seemie’s I had an ethico-onto-epistemological awakening that
opened corporeal awareness of connectivity and entanglement: entangle-
ment of alterity, generations, of child and adult, of interculturalism.
Seemie was leading the walk; she was responsible for me. Or as an adult,
does the default for responsibility always defer to me? In agential realism, I
am embodied, I am with Seemie, I am not an outsider observing in, I am in
the moment with Seemie, I am engaged in walking along streets of Old Chi-
ang Mai with Seemie. I am adult and child at the same time; binaries blur.
Our only shared words were greetings (sawatdee-ka) and gratitude (korp-
kun-ka). By not sharing a language, the emphasis on words diminished; mate-
riality and performativity claimed more space. My senses heightened to the
new urban landscape. All I knew from an adult’s explanation before we set
off on the walk was that Seemie was taking us to a mermaid house. Fresh to
a foreign city with sensory ethnographic sensibilities, I existed in the inde-
terminacy of quantum causality at the heart of Barad’s (2007, 2010) concept
of intra-actions. With openness to instability and impossibility, I searched for
some threads of stability and possibility in my sensory memories – for balance,
for meaning. A mermaid house – what could that be? I imagined what a mer-
maid house might be. A museum where Thai folklore of mermaids was stored
and documented? Was it someone’s home inspired in design by mermaids? A
building with a mermaid painted on it? Being in touch with more-than-human
imaginings in intercultural folklore – images of half-fish, half-human beings
across cultures floated in and out of my mind as Seemie led us onwards.
As we walked down narrow footpaths frequently obstructed by obstacles,
such as electricity poles, trees and rubbish, I wanted to engage with Seemie
to make conversation, such as “How much further?” “Where is the mermaid
house?” I guess driven by previous patterns of walking with another, you
converse. Without Thai, all I could do was point and Seemie smiled and nod-
ded. Committed to holding my hand, Seemie led the way. With the anticipa-
tion of the unknown and unfamiliar and the rising temperature and humidity,
sweat slipped between our hands, yet Seemie continued to carefully attend to
holding my hand. Beads of sweat developed on her petite forehead.
Touching, sensing, is what matter does, or rather, what matter is:
matter is condensations of response-ability. Touching is a matter of
60 Principles of storying
response. Each of “us” is constituted in response-ability. Each of “us”
is constituted as responsible for the other, as the other.
(Barad, 2012, p. 215)
I felt for Seemie and her commitment to being responsible for me and the
group. She was diligently committed to holding my hand and leading the
walk to her desired mermaid house. I wondered if she was perspiring from
the heat alone or whether she anxious about leading the walk and having
responsibility for a farang. She continued to smile sweetly at me and care-
fully hold my hand.
The entire group of 11 followed Seemie’s lead. I had no idea where we
were going, yet was comfortable in the adventure of being led to the unknown
by a young child. Well, aside from the prickly discomfort of the heat. We
crossed the road and turned into another road where Seemie stopped across
from a carpentry workshop, let go of my hand to approach the translator,
Kimmim, and spoke in Thai, which Kimmim, relayed as “It’s not there!”
An agential cut, the indeterminate phenomena of the mermaid house
became determined through local causal structure (Barad, 2007). Though
determined as absent – as missing! Our willing curiosity to see the mermaid
house was stumped. Could this, what appeared to be a manufacturing work-
shop, have been differently materialised as a mermaid house at another point
in time? Spacetimemattering – that is, the differential patterns of mattering
across different times and spaces (Barad, 2010) –rearticulated this workshop
as the mistaken mermaid house. A few of us took photos to archive this puzzle.
I responded with empathy to Seemie’s disappointment, through a con-
vivial offer of a grimace. She shyly smiled, seemingly unfazed by not locat-
ing her mermaid house. The workshop to which Seemie had led us had a
panel near the roof, with a shadowed mark suggesting a previously adhered
decorative piece, but it was dirty and well-worn and looked like a well-
established workshop for construction. It was puzzling that it could have
changed from a young girl’s perception of a mermaid house within 2 days,
when she located the mermaid house as a destination for her hosted walk.
The accompanying translator and Australian arts worker (Nathan) talked
about what to do. Nathan suggested they talk about it at the group debrief
on return.
Sai then led the group onto his destination. Seemie retrieved a camera
from her cloth shoulder bag. We then shared intra-activity between human
and nonhuman apparatuses (i.e., cameras). This became our new way of
being, a shift from the physical connection of handholding to sharing visions
of interest. Seemie photographed lotus flowers in a decorative pond on the
footpath, sparkly signs, gates, flowers . . . flowers and more flowers all
within two blocks. I focussed on visual data with a view to glean insight into
Seemie’s interests, to know her connections with matter in public spaces. I
Principles of storying 61
photographed her aiming her camera at matter, noticing her connections
with places.
I regarded matter that I would have otherwise passed. Seemie taking
photos of matter in the urban environment physicalised her connection to
the neighbourhood, and my taking photos of Seemie connecting to matter
drew me in as another thread in a web of entangled connections, so that
we become with the data (Hultman & Lenz Taguchi, 2010, p. 534). I visu-
ally honoured with Seemie what she deemed worthy of archiving. Then we
crossed the road and turned up a narrow road and Seemie suddenly stopped.
I saw her looking at a large copper mermaid painting on a black wall behind
a gate. “Is this the mermaid house?” I asked, and she nodded affirmatively.
The open arms and curving body of the mermaid were alluring. Seemie
smiled delightedly, yet she dutifully did not pass the gate. Seemie knew the
boundaries of space; even the tantalising enticement of her object of desire
(the mermaid) did not intercept her compliance with the public/private
space divide. (This story is an adapted excerpt from Phillips, L. G. [2016].)
Our storying in this book is limited to the two-dimensional form of words
on pages, with a sprinkling of images. To emphasise embodiment and
relationality in this principle, stories of dance, touch and sensation were
selected. Yet in the flesh, in the intimacy of teller and listener in the same
space, embodied storying is penetratingly felt, not through words, but
through bodies communicating with bodies, by a look in a teller’s eye, the
subtlety of a nod, infectious laughter or the enticement of raised eyebrows.
We argue, no matter what mode storying takes, embodiment and relational-
ity are central and not just for the hell of it, but because together they actu-
ally work to produce deeper understanding of phenomena.
Principle: storying intersects the past and present
as living oral archives
When we connect to stories of the past, we embody them, gifting past and
present together to give meaning today. Storying feeds embodied connec-
tion to world views. “Embodied storying is the active and continual, flesh
and bone practising of stories – as both tellings and theorizing – that shows
the production of cultures, identities, histories and rhetorics” ( Cobos, 2012 ,
p. 23). Stories aren’t just for the mind. They are theories to feed and nourish
the whole of being. They are created and received through whole-of-body
meaning making. Storying is about walking with others. There is no clinical
scientific distance. Rather, we are emplaced and embodied in lived stories
regardless of time. As researchers, we are integrated perceptual beings with
others, who honour the intimate sharing of matters, such as love and hate,
affect, aesthetics and spirituality, that are vehemently outcast in positivist
62 Principles of storying
research ( Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007 , p. 44). The quality of storying is indi-
cated through the potency of the storying to arouse vivid sensorial imagin-
ings of lived experience ( Denzin, 1997 ).
In Chapter 2 we have told ancestral stories, melding our family oral her-
stories with archival research. Storying research through this technique is a
potent connection of intersecting past and present in creating new archives,
new stories to tell and document.
Tracey stories: “This Young Boy”
I share a further story. This time, of the young boy who stood in the Depart-
ment of Native Affairs with his mother awaiting permission to travel from
the authorities. In coming to first know this story I knew I had been given
a gift with the words leaving the mouth of the storyteller, floating in space
and falling onto my skin and into the heart and soul – fuel for the spirit.
The act of telling, receiving, keeping, remembering and telling again is the
essence of one life giving purpose to the other. It is a constant and invisible
resuscitation of life that gives purpose to the generations that follow. It is a
story of being at one with the present in the past.
I see this young boy in my mind’s eye. Maybe he is 10 – maybe a little older,
maybe a little younger. It is hard to tell. He is bony and barefoot. His clothes
mark him as poor. A slight sheen of pale-coloured dust covers the exposed
skin of his legs and arms. His dark hair masses in loose curls on the top
of his head and some cascade towards the centre of his forehead. With his
head bent slightly forward, these locks of hair shield his eyes and allow him
to survey his surrounds without being seen. He digs at the ground, alternat-
ing the rhythm with the large toes. It is not a desperate digging, just slow
and deliberate. It gives the boy time to contemplate. Through his curls he
sees the white-painted wood home; the shed, bigger than the house; fenced
paddocks; and open land. He takes in the clusters of gums, the rise of the
land in the distance, the dams on the flat, and contours of crumbling sand-
stone that once held the creek flows. It is a warm sun that shines down on
him, but he knows that he will be sweating before the day is finished.
A white man appears at the fence in front of the shed. A lined face makes
him older than he actually is. Brown leather straps are in his hand. He
motions the boy towards him with his free hand and calls out, “Boy”.
“Boy” is not his name but he hears white people call him this all the time.
The young boy takes up a canter and moves easily across the dirt towards
the white man who calls. His muscle movements give up a slight hint of the
man-body yet to come. He stops short of the white man with the leather
straps in his hand. Without another word, the white man turns and walks
toward the plough in the paddock. The boy, also silent, follows. They crouch
Principles of storying 63
under the top rail of the fence and negotiate the gap to step into the pad-
dock. The white man pulls up at the plough and fixes the leather straps to
it. He works quickly. The boy watches and knows that the white man has
done this many times before. The white man again calls “Boy”. The young
boy steps closer. The white man grips a shoulder of the young boy and man-
ages his body to turn. The young boy is now facing the other direction and
stands still whilst the white man positions the straps over his shoulder and
around his body. The young boy feels the weight of the white man through
the plough, through the leather straps. The white man tugs the straps whilst
simultaneously calling the boy to motion. The straps slap the back of his
shoulders.
This young boy of 10 – maybe a little younger, maybe a little older – grits
his teeth. An unfathomable anger takes hold of his bony body and it sets
his jaw tight. In the moment that it takes him to discard the straps and step
away from the plough, he has turned and looked at the white man – hard
and deliberate. His eyes burn a fierce indignation that catches the white
man off guard. This child will not plough this paddock today or any other
day. He walks away, the calling of “Boy! Boy!” becoming fainter with each
step. It was not the boy’s first act of resistance and would not be his last.
How are we to read this story? The story of the young boy informs
Aboriginal senses of sovereignty that are found in having identification
with country, a land to come from, a place to stand on, a standpoint position
( Haraway, 1991 ). An Aboriginal standpoint epistemology, derived from
standing on and in country, embodies stories across the generations to pre-
serve and protect Aboriginal sovereignty. Remembering the stories of previ-
ous generations, engaging in resistances to power that seek to subordinate,
developing an art for survival and resilience, looking at and learning about
colonisation in all its forms constitute a theoretical life. The theorising of
our lives through storying provides part of the impulse for the way in which
I wrote my thesis and write this book.
There is in storying an unravelling of the complex space where we, as
Aboriginal peoples, stand alone or with other Aboriginal peoples and hold
to a hope that white systems, ideologies and individuals offer possibilities
for liberation. The historical and contemporary experience of subjugation,
denial and indifference tells a different story. A story difficult to shake, to
disrupt. My storying is not meant to stand for all of Aboriginal Australia.
Too much homogenization of our Aboriginal being has already occurred.
Storying told by Aboriginal peoples speaks of experiences of whiteness for
the ways in which it has sought to construct us. It is a collection of stories
that document our cultural and intellectual warriorship ( Moreton-Robinson,
2000 ) in these white spaces and in these times, whilst acknowledging the
cultural and Aboriginal knowledge legacies given to us by of our old people
for coping.
64 Principles of storying
This story is now a generation removed from the Aboriginal warrior boy
child. I keep this story close to me; it is a story of a life lived, rarely voiced.
It is a gift given. It is fuel for the spirit. In the act of telling, receiving,
keeping, remembering and telling again, it is the essence of one life giving
purpose to the other. It is a constant and silent act of resuscitation of a life,
giving purpose to the generations that follow. In its totality, it is a story of
heartbreaking sadness, of unexplainable inhumanity, and of struggle that
heralds a celebration for survival. It is a story similar to the many stories
given to us by our old people who lived in the racialised spaces and times
before us.
Principle: storying enacts collective ownership and authorship
Storying is a collective process. Stories are collectively created and collec-
tively interpreted. The knowledge in a story is not owned by one, but many.
There is no one author, but authors.
Stories resist the ravages of time. Aboriginal Australians are the greatest
custodians of stories to have ever walked this planet, recalling the longest
oral histories ( Cane, 2013 ). Stories of giant marsupials aren’t fantasy – they
are lived experiences of coexisting with megafauna, passed down gen-
eration after generation. Stories are experiences “passed from mouth to
mouth . . . from the speech of many nameless storytellers” (Benjamin,
1968/1999 , p. 84). Across history, across cultures, across the world, arti-
sans and travellers have shared stories with those they have met, travelling
from home to home, village to village, group to group. European women
in particular would gather to spin and weave and make baskets and cloth-
ing, exchanging tales of their lives and others ( Haase, 2008 ). As Benja-
min described, stories claim places in the memory of the listener, so that
it becomes integrated into their own experience, so then they are inclined
to repeat it to someone else. Stories passed on from one to another accu-
mulate traces of each storyteller: “traces of the storyteller cling to the story
the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel” ( Benjamin,
1968/1999 , p. 91). There is no one author but many, with each storyteller’s
world views and lived experiences shining through. “Storytellers tend to
begin their story with a presentation of the circumstances in which they
themselves have learned what is to follow” (Benjamin, p. 91). The context/
circumstance of coming to know the story locates and roots the knowing.
Yet academia heralds the works of individual scholars – especially white
male scholars – so that adulation is widespread. The Foucault fan club,
Bourdieu fan club, Deleuze fan club and so on – academic idolation of these
white male scholars is widespread and disturbing. Collective ownership and
authoring of storying counters the privileging of individual authorship in
Principles of storying 65
academia, and foregrounds place and the value of Aboriginal story in coun-
try. We do recognise that many white male scholars offer insight into phe-
nomena, though we argue for equitable sourcing of wisdom, and we hope
you have recognised throughout the book that we have looked to Aboriginal
and white, female and male, global north and global south wisdom. Here
in this moment, to enhance the point of foregrounding place, we do so in
acknowledgement of connection to country in Aboriginal wisdom. We do
this as an antidote to Doreen Massey and Pat Jess’ (1995 ) caution of the
placelessness of modern western society and in appreciation of Jacques
Derrida’s (1991 ) epitome: “Cinders there are: Place there is” (p. 37): beings
come and transpire, but place remains. We foregrounded our relations to
country/place in the opening of this storying book, and each story that we
have shared we have commenced by locating the story.
Publishers demand author names, and promotions committees and grant
applications demand an individual’s list of publications. How to reconcile
collective ownership and authoring in academia is problematic, though coau-
thored papers are common. Six seems to be the acceptable maximum, with
referencing styles such as APA (American Psychological Association) substi-
tuting et al. for all authors listed past the sixth name, always privileging the
first in this competitive space. Academic portfolios demand the percentage
input for coauthored publications. How can such be measured? Of course,
you may consider the proportion of how much you wrote, but that is honour-
ing the written form of authoring alone. Some author more through ideas and
through spoken words, some through imagery, some through song and so on.
We recognise that academia is a much larger beast than a dynamic duo
espousing the wonders of storying. We are pressured to assert individual
authorship (especially in the tenuous position as an early career academic)
to develop a “track record” – to prove national and international recogni-
tion. However, there are ways to foreground the collective voice. Here are
a few that we have located in the development of this book. Those who
are asserting the collective voice in academia are in the main women and
feminists. As noted by Haraway (1991 ) in Chapter 1 , “we [feminists] do
need an earth-wide network of connections, including the ability partially
to translate knowledges among very different – power-differentiated –
communities” (p. 187). Collectives provide networked connections and are
a mechanism for women to resist the whiteness and maleness of neoliberal
academia.
Some of the examples of collective authorship that stand apart from group
authoring (a.k.a. et al.) include J. K. Gibson-Graham, the Res-Sisters, the
Great Lakes Feminist Geography Collective, and the Women Who Write
Collective. J. K. Gibson-Graham is the morphed pen name of two academ-
ics in human geography – Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson – formed in
66 Principles of storying
1992 (Rose, 2013, n.p.). Their collective authorship through J. K. Gibson-
Graham commenced in 1996 with their first book, The End of Capitalism
As We Knew It. They continued to write and publish as the collective pen
name for 14 years, until sadly, Julie Graham passed away suddenly in 2010.
J. K. Gibson-Graham continues to publish, as Katherine Gibson still feels
that many of the things she is thinking and talking about are in conversa-
tion with Julie (Gibson & Rose, 2013, n.p.). The Res-Sisters are a recently
formed feminist collective of early career academics in the United Kingdom
in the fields of sociology and cultural studies of education and youth. They
aim to challenge inequality in (and out of) academia, to resist the neoliberal
agenda and to make space for alternative voices to be heard (Res-Sisters,
n.d.). Their name reflects their “shared occupational and political identities:
as feminist academics engaged in and committed to research, resistance
and sisterhood” ( The Res-Sisters, 2017 , pp. 268–269). The Res-Sisters col-
lectively author as a political act of resistance to “the hyper-individualised
and competitive modes of working that academia encourages” (p. 269). In
following collective principles of distributive leadership, there is no “lead
author”. Instead, they all contribute through discussion, writing and editing,
acknowledging that different members have different capacities to contrib-
ute at different times. The collective of nine holds space for locating agree-
ment and differences, for spurring ideas that bounce of each other and even
for completing each other’s sentences. What is central to their practice is
kindness – a much-needed antithesis to the cold, harsh conditions of com-
petitive individualism in academia.
There are other feminist academic collectives emerging across the globe.
The Great Lakes Feminist Geography Collective foregrounds slowness for
“both a commitment to good scholarship and a feminist politics of resistance
to the accelerated timelines of the neoliberal university” ( Mountz et al., 2015 ,
p. 1238). They too emphasise care and kindness. In their storying, at first
individual stories of isolation are shared. Then they move to “a more col-
lective form of response and action” from “experiences that cut across mul-
tiple trajectories representing different times in our lives” (p. 1239). Slow
scholarship as collective action, they argue, “enables a feminist ethics of
care that allows us to claim some time as our own, build shared time into
everyday life, and help buffer each other from unrealistic and counterpro-
ductive norms that have become standard expectations” (pp. 1253–1254). In
this space, knowledge production is conducted with care.
The Women Who Write Collective, a group of female academics based
in Australia in the fields of education and the creative industries, also fore-
grounds an ethics of care and look to like-minded groups, people and places
of connection and belonging, for sustenance, nourishment and energy (The
Women Who Write, n.d.). They have purposefully chosen to write, share
Principles of storying 67
and coexist among collective stories. They liken their practice of collec-
tively authoring to the bird practice of flying in a V formation. This fly-
ing formation is learned from observing and responding to each other, with
frequent shifts in who is leading at the apex, and through collaboration,
cooperation and relationship, endurance for long hauls is enabled ( Black,
Crimmins, & Jones, 2017 ).
These are examples of academics purposefully choosing to collectively
author, though what we argue is that storying enacts collective authorship,
and ownership of storying defies individual authorship. We see that place
and others have their hands all over each story. It is arrogant and selfish to
claim a story to one name. In our own storying work, we weave collective
authors into the storying so that their presence is felt. As storytellers, we set
the scene for the stories – where we were, who we were with, what provoked
the knowing. Country and place owns/holds the story, rather than people.
Tracey stories
In fact, one aspect of the Indigenous worldview is that it takes a thousand
voices to tell a story.
(Wilshire, 2006 , p. 160)
I led a small research project in 2012–2013. The project aimed to tell sto-
ries about teaching from the perspective of initial teacher education stu-
dents, classroom teachers and academics. Setting aside the inflexibilities of
a project – grant application writing and accounting, meeting milestones,
producing research outcomes, writing publications, managing budgets
and so forth – there was belly laughing, fussing, tellin’ stories in stories
that meant talking over one another . . . loudly, more laughing, serious-
ness, shame-job moments, heads together solving issues, bucketloads of
pride and celebration. It wasn’t a thousand voices, though on some days
it felt like this. This was a majority-Aboriginal project from myself as the
leader, to the producer, camera operators (some of our Aboriginal media
students) and research participants (some of our teacher education students
and a few of our academic staff). The synergies of our own kinship systems
easily melded into our working relationships, emphasising respect, sharing
knowledge, listening to knowledge holders and caring for each other. Our
Aboriginal world views were in research action and it was a deadly story.
Louise stories
To illustrate how storying enacts collective ownership and authorship, I share
with you a brief vignette from research with the project Walking Borders:
68 Principles of storying
Arts Activism for Refugee and Asylum Seeker Rights (http://walkingbor
ders.net). The work was initiated by arts activist Scotia Monkivitch and sup-
ported by many other artists and activists. The storied vignette that follows is
an excerpt from an article coauthored with Cate Montes. Cate and I walked
the borders with Scotia and many others, and composed storied vignettes in
the article through merging self-storied journalling with stories we heard from
Scotia and other participating arts activists. The stories had no one author, but
many. Here, we collectively story the power of the motif of the paper boat, to
provoke reflection on asylum-seeker politics in Australia:
A woman waiting for a bus glanced down and, on noticing the deli-
cate boat at her feet, wept. The delicate little boats provided a stark
contrast to the policing harshness of authoritarian blue, impenetrable
fencing, and the constant alarming hum of helicopters; they softened
the edges. Though Walking Borders spoke out against the violation of
asylum seekers, it seemed that approaching this from a point of quiet-
ness and beauty offered an alternative provocation for attention to the
dissensus. Through aesthetics of the political dimension, the paper boat
communicated fragility, the line – unrelenting repetition . . . a trace of
political poetics. The ephemeral nature of the work added to the aes-
thetics: the transience of the provocation – to be felt – not to be grasped
or recorded.
(Phillips & Montes, 2017 , p. 8)
Figure 3.1 Walking Borders paper boats aligning security fencing at the G20 Summit,
Brisbane.
Photograph taken by Scotia Monkivitch; permission to reproduce granted.
Principles of storying 69
We acknowledge the contributors to the stories throughout the article by
quoting participants and explicitly noting that the vignettes are co-storied.
In this case, key contributors to the stories were happy to be named in the
published article, but there are times when contributors to stories choose not
to be named, or are no longer with us. In these moments, I take my role as
guardian for the collective story seriously, and consider carefully the posi-
tion of the silent, unnamed author and place myself in their shoes and ask,
“Would I want this story in the public eye?” and if so, “What do I want to
have heard?” Ethical questions are ever present in the collective ownership
and authorship of storying.
Together/two-gather
In sum, we offer these five principles as a conversation starter in the work of
research through, with and as storying. Those of you who story may agree,
dispute and add to these principles. We hope those of you who are fresh to
storying may see these principles and illustrative examples as offering guid-
ance to your emergent practice.
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4 Storying ways
Storying is emergent and responsive, so it is not possible, nor is it line with
the essence of the liveliness of storying, to prescribe a process. What we
offer here instead are conversational reflections on how we story. To frame
this conversation on process, we talked over lunch, mulling over what the
questions we are interested in when coming to understand more about our
practice are. And over time we identified a series of questions to ask each
other. Before any research is considered, we recognised that we need to
consider the integrity of our work, so first we asked questions of ethics –
who are we in storying and how do we engage with others? Then we looked
to origins, asking, where do your stories come from? But it is not just the
origins that matter, but rather how we hear (how do we really hear what
matters) the stories that we need to hear from the people and places we go
to locate stories. From the stories that we gathered through emergent and
immersed listening, we then asked, how do you bring stories to life? We
reflected on how we storied together all the stories that we heard to make
them alive for others to feel. And finally, we talked about stories as gifts:
how are stories gifted?
Ethics: which way?
The question of which way is more than a directional request. The first time
Tracey heard this speaking was when she was with members of the Torres
Strait Islander community, and since that time, whenever she is in the pres-
ence of Torres Strait Islander individuals, she hears these words as a first
point of conversation. The words are at once a greeting but simultaneously
ask questions, from speaker to listener, of where have you been, what for,
what are you/we doing, how and why and when? We borrow this phrasing,
as there is an essence of research framing in the intent of the words. We lean
into its multiple-questioning technique to think through our positionalities
as Aboriginal and white researchers and our intersubjective relationships
DOI: 10.4324/9781315109190-4
74 Storying ways
with both Aboriginal communities for conducting research and for the sto-
rying of research.
Tracey
There are many issues that need to be addressed within Aboriginal
communities – matters of health, education, housing, legal matters, pres-
ervation of languages, Indigenous knowledge systems and so on. All are
critical to sustaining the well-being of Aboriginal peoples, societies and
cultures, now and into the future. And the reality is that, as a consequence
of colonisation and its devastating effect on our communities, there is an
urgency to finding answers, appropriate responses and strategies for these
matters. Surviving, recovering from and living through colonisation in its
various assumptions and technologies has generated various responses.
Certainly, Aboriginal responses may well be found within our own commu-
nities; however, we may need to look outside our communities for knowl-
edge, support and expertise. Research can be helpful to the strengthening
of our communities.
It is from my dual location of being an Aboriginal woman and being in
the academy that I now write about the process of “doing” research with
Aboriginal people with all of the satisfaction, troubling, messy tangling and
transformational possibilities that this can bring. In part I borrow from my
doctoral studies (2014) to inform this writing about what constitutes ethi-
cal research with Aboriginal communities. As I have previously pointed to,
it is important to be mindful of how the historical context, alluding to the
relations of power – signified in the question “Who gets to do research?” –
has worked to exclude and devalue Aboriginal authoritative engagement in
research. The production of knowledge about us occurs through research
processes that have not / do not come from spaces that seriously consult us .
I remain open to hopefulness in the momentum for change.
Colleagues will often approach me for advice regarding research within
Aboriginal communities. This is as it should be. Gaining advice from
Aboriginal peoples is a solid and respectful starting point for those who
want to engage in Aboriginal research. It is the case too that these research-
ers will be white and well intentioned. Well-intentioned white researchers
are enthusiastic about the possibilities that researching in Aboriginal com-
munities offers. From this point onwards, the dialogue can often become
tangled and messy. There are complexities inherent. These types of con-
versations known by Aboriginal peoples throughout the academy elucidate
the white researcher–Aboriginal research conundrum to sometimes reveal
misrepresentations, presumptions and misguidedness. The unspoken ways
in which white patriarchy informs research, and compels researchers (in
Storying ways 75
this situation, white researchers) to do and to educate, caution, protect and
resist (as Aboriginal researchers and as members of Aboriginal communi-
ties do), is felt in the dialogue.
Many white researchers have little understanding of Aboriginal peoples’
and communities’ lived realities, and give little thought for how their not
knowing is problematic for Aboriginal peoples. Research must be a tool
which assists in the uplift of communities, truly committing to community
development as defined by the community and not by an external force.
Having relationalities of meaning with Aboriginal peoples is a necessary
precondition for deep thinking, through the racialised space of research in
this context and the power differentials that exist. In the presence of deep
thinking and resultant demonstrations, white researchers are better informed
and received when entering Aboriginal communities, and research engage-
ments are strengthened to benefit Aboriginal communities.
Entering Aboriginal communities, even when an Aboriginal person, and
even where there are families and friends, is to be mindful of the protocols
for entry onto Aboriginal land. If these protocols are confounded, then there
is the risk of big shame, of being myall (“ignorant” in Aboriginal vernacu-
lar), and devaluing important relational capacities in engagements from the
outset. As Ngarrindjerri scholar Darryle Rigney (2010 ) asserts,
Indigenous worldviews and knowledge systems have significant
implications for ethics processes in universities . . . in the discourse of
research ethics, the researcher is often positioned as “objective” and
charged with the power and the knowledge to determine what should
be researched and who could be “consulted” in Indigenous research
projects. This is a problematic positioning, focussing on the rights of
the individual rather than the collective.
(p. 3)
It is worthwhile noting that as Aboriginal peoples, we are not without agency.
This means we are not sitting around waiting for the white researcher to
come and solve our issues. What becomes critical in the research and even
in initial dialoguing are the genuine intentions to share power. A failure to
share in ways that make it possible for Aboriginal peoples and communities
to feel safe in research is a failure in research ethics. Power sharing, respect
for community, showing generosity and operating with a sense of care add
to relational and positional capacities within the terms of Aboriginal ways
of knowing. Breaches of Aboriginal protocols will weaken the trust needed
in the research relationship. It is critical that research with white people
will not injure. As Smith (1999) reminds us, “The terms research and prob-
lem are closely linked. For many Indigenous communities, research itself is
76 Storying ways
taken to mean problem – the continued construction of Indigenous people
as the problem” (p. 91).
There are critical and proactive purposes in which Aboriginal people
feel called, on behalf of our communities, to engage in conversations about
research and to do research, often in efforts to solve white-created prob-
lems in which we struggle with regimes of past and present historical con-
tainment and control. There are serious questions formed and forming in
the phrase which way? used to title this section. Such questions focus the
ethical-epistemological tensions associated with white researchers in the
Aboriginal community space. Hard conversations are, in some respects,
inevitable. There are so few informed white researchers of Aboriginal epis-
temologies. White researchers do need to experience equivalent ethical
struggles when undertaking research that seeks to engage Aboriginal com-
munities, rather than the tendency to gain/create knowledge from and about
Aboriginal social spaces. Given the seriousness and urgency of issues in
Aboriginal communities, conversations can ill afford to be shallow or emo-
tionally laborious for Aboriginal discussants. Deeply respectful listening
about Aboriginal ways of knowing and being is critical for white research-
ers to try or find ways to understand and conform to Aboriginal ways of
being, in relation to country and to the people of country. See also Freder-
icks (2007 ); Dudgeon, Kelly, and Walker (2010 ); Vivian, Jorgensen, Bell,
Rigney, Cornell, and Hemming (2016 ); Martin (2010 ) and Rigney (2006)
for further understandings of researching with, about and in Aboriginal
communities and ethical practice.
Louise
I am a white researcher who has spent years listening and learning and
asking myself and coresearchers, “Which way?” though of course with not
such exquisite provocative succinctness; rather, I’ve fumbled with redun-
dant verboseness. Even in writing this section, I proposed the questions
of “How do you attend to others in storying?” and “Who are you as a sto-
rying researcher?” Then Tracey proposed the beautiful simplicity (yet all-
encompassing) of the question “Which way?” I am constantly blown away
by this quality in Indigenous world views, to nail the essence of a phenom-
ena with such precision.
My “which way?” storying is on my experience as a non-Indigenous
academic leading the Australian investigation of an international research
project on children’s citizenship with an Aboriginal community. I offer this
story to provide some transparency about my ethical questions, issues and
dilemmas in storying with a community when an outsider. I share think-
ing and actions on decisions of “which way?” to enter community, to
Storying ways 77
build relationships and to seek approval, and the ongoing ethical tensions
between what is happening in community and institutional research agen-
das. Scientific research has a legacy of tyranny for colonised peoples across
the globe. Aboriginal children have been part of the Aboriginal Australian
experience of being overresearched, “without the permission, consultation,
or involvement of Aboriginal people”, “generating mistrust, animosity,
and resistance” in communities (Martin, 2003, p. 203). Researching young
children can, and often is, a colonising practice, through unequal power
structures with adults determining what, how and who are researched, often
subjectifying and oversimplifying children for adult knowledge gain ( Can-
nella & Viruru, 2004 ). With grave concern and sensitivity to these human
rights cautions, the methodology for a study on young Aboriginal children’s
civic action and learning foregrounded relationship building over research
agendas. Acutely aware of my whiteness and outsider positioning, I was
invited into the community by an Aboriginal colleague, Kerryn Moroney
(a proud Luritja country woman) who had a 6-year-plus relationship with
the childcare community as a mentor. We visited a couple of times to get
to know each other, talking about the centre, community, early childhood
education and the project. Kerryn and I referred to the project in terms of
children having voice, rights and being active contributors to community.
Supportive of the project, the director took Kerryn and I to the home of
an Elder who was executive on the centre’s committee, to talk about the
study and her thoughts on the project. It was a very humbling experience
to be welcomed into an Elder’s home. I have never been to the homes of,
say, principals of schools in which I have researched. I was struck by the
intimacy and generosity of this encounter. The Elder agreed, on behalf of
the community, to approve the study taking place. I understood that her
decision was guided by the physical presence of the director and Kerryn
standing beside me on this project.
Kerryn and I visited a few more times across a year to build relationships
with educators and discuss what children’s rights and citizenship means
to them. I would have visited way more if they were closer, though the
community is half a day’s travel away. It wasn’t until 15 months after I
had first visited the community that we entered classrooms to spend time
with children and seek their consent. To decolonise conventional research
methodologies, in which the researcher must not influence the research con-
text and participants are surveilled as specimens ( Smith, 2012), we became
involved in their everyday practices. Kerryn and I are both early childhood
teachers, so we joined in the children’s activities and co-played, building
relationships and getting to know the children. We played with the chil-
dren and took part in all the day’s activities – playing inside and out, set-
ting up equipment, comforting children, serving food, cleaning and settling
78 Storying ways
children to sleep. We did everything the educators did. I understood this as
a cultural value – if you are there you are responsible, you contribute. After
a few days, we introduced the video camera – showing the children what
it did and asking if they wanted to be filmed. With the use of the camera’s
built-in projector, we played footage back to the children at group time,
gleaning their feedback and response. The children could see and comment
on what we were doing. To nurture reciprocity, we did what they did – so
they did what we did – cameras were shared with the children. Our note-
books were also shared – the children too wanting to make notes. We also
had a university ethics committee–approved consent form with pictures of
children decorating a box, a camera, video camera, an audio recorder and a
hand writing, asking them to tick what they agreed to in data gathering of
the project. But it was in their actions that they really communicated their
consent and trust in our presence and the project. Such as running to hug us
on arrival, and calling us both Aunty, inviting us to film their activities, and
my most treasured moment, when one 4-year-old boy, who carried his small
backpack of toys everywhere, chose me to look after it when he wanted to
enter a spontaneous soccer game outside.
Our research design originally was for children to initiate and engage in
three civic action projects (one class based, one centre based, one commu-
nity based). For months Kerryn and I endeavoured to support civic-action
projects taking place with the kindergarten group: through conversations
with educators about what we observed and what issues could be explored
further, through sharing Aboriginal children’s literature as provocations,
through community walks, through inviting the children to take pictures
of what they don’t like – what they feel uncomfortable about – to see if
any of these may incite a project. And across 4 months there were multiple
changes to the teaching team, with at least eight different educators. The
constant rupture in the teaching team meant they were in survival mode
with no space to be proactive. As Linda Tuhui Smith (2012 ) noted, the
lived reality is that “Indigenous peoples are not in control and are subject
to a continuing set of external conditions” (p. 206). We became acutely
aware that the research agenda was not aligned with the community’s
pressing needs and reality, though they so wanted the children to engage
in civic action. The constant barrage of crises demanded urgent attention.
And what was more important was for us to show support and be there for
community.
Kerryn and I talked for hours and hours, and we talked for hours with
the director and pedagogical leader, and we read Indigenous and non-
Indigenous female scholars to locate possibilities for making meaning with
ethical and culturally sensitive sensibilities that did not add to the colonis-
ing project, but rather offered hope for justice to come.
Storying ways 79
With heartfelt sensitivity for the beautiful people of the community, we
foregrounded relationship building over research agendas. To be with the
children and community and to fully commit to ethical research, I drew
from Barad (2007 ) and asked, “What is being made to matter here?” and
“How does that mattering affect what is possible to do and think?”
Drawing from Smith’s (2012 ) lived wisdom, we sought to decolonise
our research by seeking to understand the colonising experience, valuing
Aboriginal knowledges and ways of being, and questioning what we have
to do to reframe knowledge and knowledge making. To do this, we sat and
listened to Elders, to educators, to families, to children – hearing their sto-
ries of discrimination, of hurt, of illness, of loss, of struggles, of wins, of
hilarious misadventures, of love for others and country. Through these sto-
ries and witnessing the children’s actions, we came to know core values that
guide Aboriginal knowledges and ways of being. We came to see that the
children were initiating civic action projects on daily basis. To really see
what citizenship meant to young children, we noticed how they negotiated
coexistence with each other in the shared space of an early learning centre.
We let go of adult assumptions, definitions and directions.
We shared videos of children’s actions and the writing of the stories with
children, educators and families, to hear their readings of what mattered – what
was valued – and have foregrounded community value of readings of chil-
dren’s citizenship in the publications from the research. Across the ongoing
years of this research, we have questioned how the knowledges of this com-
munity can reframe what citizenship is, and what it can be for children. From
years of listening and letting go of a research agenda, and all prior identities
and just simply being there with community, I have been gifted with profound
wisdom that I carry like a fragile ancient egg, wrapping for protection in tran-
sit and carefully, consultatively and collectively choosing where and when to
place in public. It takes time and it takes patience, and pushing back against
institutional deadlines and time frames.
Where do stories come from?
The question of “Where do stories come from?” purposefully has no owner-
ship embedded. This is not simply a pragmatic location question, like “What
is the source of your stories?” to trace data. Rather it is also an existential
question that poses thinking about origins, like we asked of ourselves in
locating self in place and ancestral storying in Chapter 2 . Looking to the ori-
gins of where also brings in the how and the why. Our ethics, informed by
“Which way?” very much informs each of our thinking to “Where do sto-
ries come from?” Our “Which way?” values and thinking informs our pur-
pose (why) and our practices (how) for locating, gathering and responsibly
80 Storying ways
caring for locating stories. We hope that our conversation offers a diverse
range of thinking about the origins and sourcing of stories that provokes
further thinking for other storyers.
Tracey
If I think about where my stories come from, they come from that lived life
of my family or my friends or my colleagues. And in the telling of stories,
there’s a responsibility that I have in listening, particularly when I have an
intention to retell that story. I can’t do that story a disservice. If it is that I am
present in the space of telling stories, it will be because, in most instances,
I have relationality to the storyteller. So, I must take the story, at the very
least, and hopefully tell it with the same effect, even when I have placed
my own touch onto it. In turn, when I share the same story with others, who
have relationality with me, a rhythm forms from the sharing. I reiterate, the
stories I tell are the stories of our life since colonisation. Aboriginal people
love stories and love to laugh at the craziness of ourselves in situation with
colonising circumstance and the craziness of whiteness. Paul Collis (2016 ),
Barkindji scholar, writes the following:
Other storytellers, moved between two worlds – between the Whitefullas
world and our world. Those storytellers use Western ways and differ-
ent languages and shape-forming techniques, making use and sometimes
making fun of the Whitefullas as they performed, dancing and speaking
their way through their observations. In doing so, they made comments
upon those who tried to hold power over us Blackfullas. Sometimes, the
storytellers acted out the voice and presence of a policeman, or some
other person of authority. Those old storytellers never missed a trick.
They’d only act the vagabond in the world whilst collecting their stories.
The stories of colonisation were born of necessity, to understand, to protect,
to resist, to battle, to adapt, to not adapt, for compassion, for kindness and
for loss. I recall being told a story about our mob telling stories about white
people on the east coast. This story travelled across this land and reached
northern Australia to Aboriginal people there long before white people did.
In telling stories, we are making meaning for ourselves, to be able to be in
this space, our land.
Louise
In thinking about this question of where stories come from, I refer to my
research with children. It’s very much about this practice of being with
Storying ways 81
the children and listening, not just with my ears, but with my heart, and
my soul, and all my senses. I recognise that the children aren’t necessarily
going to verbalise a story, but that their stories are embodied and enacted in
how they engage with the world. And the stories that I listen to and gather
are about rewriting the public discourse about how children are perceived.
I seek to share stories that challenge perceptions of children as innocent,
as vulnerable, as incompetent. The stories are sourced and created through
listening very carefully, and reflecting very carefully, and thinking over
time. It requires a lot of mulling and thinking over time. I do a sketch of a
story quite immediately and come back to it sometime later, with thinking
from theory and literature. And here I don’t just mean academic literature,
but also literary literature and folklore literature. For example, in com-
ing to understand my great-great-grandmother’s convict experience, I read
historical nonfiction of women sent to Van Diemen’s Land. And since my
love of story and storytelling commenced, I have looked to folk tales from
around the world for their metaphoric and symbolic interpretation of life,
the universe and everything. And so over time, the story gets more and
more flesh added to it, slowly bringing it to life, with energy from multiple
sources.
Tracey
Since you’ve been talking/writing, I’ve been thinking further about that
notion of “Where do these stories come from?” And if I’m naming this
as our lived life within colonisation, I am acknowledging that these are
the stories at the interface ( Anzaldua,1990 ; Nakata, 2007 ). At the interface,
the story that the dominant tell is the story that becomes the truth. And as
researchers, we are aiming to take the stories of our mob and we work to
disrupt, or make deeper, those understandings of children, of Aboriginal
adults and of our communities. A story by the dominant has the potential
for greater distribution and currency because it latches onto existing stories
of so-called Aboriginal abnormalcy – the traces of which are left in the
sinuous trails across the country. As I am writing, I am reminded of the
dominant story of Aboriginal welfare dependency. This story has enormous
power within the wider Australian society, and through telling a fragment
of the broken-up story of my grandmother, it is evident that the source of
welfarism within Aboriginal communities resides in the colonising ethos
of control, income management and containment in the lives of the previ-
ous generations. Storytelling in Aboriginal communities was and is an oral
practice, but today in the writing and in the theorising of our stories, we are
countering dominant knowings, and this is a critical tactic for breathing,
feeling and sustaining our humanity.
82 Storying ways
Louise
My intent with storying is to craft deeper, richer, embodied sensorial, rela-
tional understandings of phenomena that invite readers/listeners to come to
understand another position for those whose rights we advocate for.
The stories don’t come from one source alone, to build these fully
fleshed-out stories, but rather multiple, diverse, carefully selected sources
gathered over time. For example, with my grand-mothering story in Chap-
ter 2 , that was pieced together over decades. I didn’t grow up being told
stories of our old people. As I explained earlier, I went searching once I was
confronted by the question “Where do you come from?” And then it was
about finding fragments and looking further to find more to try and get more
of a context. Across the years I have been ever so slowly drip fed small por-
tions of stories of ancestors from various relatives. And it’s about piecing
those together, not just to compose an individual’s story, but an individual
experience within broader social, cultural and political events and thinking.
For white occupiers on stolen Aboriginal land, it’s about knocking grand
notions of white Australian heroes off their pedestals and ripping back the
carpet and exposing all those insidious secrets.
Tracey
And in putting those fragments together, the gift of storying helps us imag-
ine a differing truth to fill the void where Aboriginal voices have not been
invited, have been rendered silent. That’s the gift that stories bring. And it
rewrites that critique of storying research that it is not intellectual, creative
but not scientific. In piecing together all of those fragments, you do need to
know your herstory, where you are from, and the agency that can be brought
to shifting power relations. Let us be honest; if as Aboriginal peoples we
story this land, then whitefellas also need to show truth in speaking to the
first research questions that asks, “If you are not of this land then where is
it that you come from?” and “Who are your mob, your people?” Storying
research makes visible a differing flesh – the theoretical muscle, blood and
sinew coming from and attached to the storying bone. Speaking truth in
Aboriginal ways of knowing is a much more respected positionality and the
sharing of story, in research and other spaces, shifts the paradigmatic ten-
dencies of whiteness away from control and containment towards a kinder,
new story for freedom, compassion and justice.
How do we listen to stories?
Once we have clarity on the purpose and practice of where we locate sto-
ries, we consider how we listen to stories. This is not a question of prag-
matics, but rather one in which we explain our values and positionality in
Storying ways 83
listening to stories. Storying is a multidirectional process of meaning mak-
ing: of receiving and creating stories. Our practice of listening and receiv-
ing stories informs how we (re)create stories. We see both as very attuned
emergent and responsive praxis.
Tracey
One of the most supportive methodologies in Aboriginal storytelling,
when shared in the confines of family and community, is that there will
sometimes be more than one person who knows the story, who was pres-
ent at the event/happening that is the source of the story and, as witness, is
able to relay the story from their perspectives. On these occasions the sto-
ryteller, the one who is speaking, may be offered correctives, small details
and emphasis that have been missed in the telling to the listener(s); thus
there is added depth. For those of us who engage in research, these moments
have equivalence to data/evidence verification. To be able to hear the story
with that added richness, coming from more than the one storyteller, has
further effect for a methodology of hearing. The dynamism of simultaneous
multiple tellings of a story in one sense imprints on the listener’s ears the
importance, the urgency, the relevancy of the story for hearing, remember-
ing, thinking about and archiving the story. It is also a dynamism for actu-
alising Aboriginal relationality. What is it that the I of the listener needs to
hear as the part of the we in belonging to family and community, keeping
in mind that I am using community in a broad interpretation? For example,
an Aboriginal familial community of immediate kin and friends as kin, or
perhaps a scholarly Aboriginal community. Also, keeping in mind that I am
speaking of stories in relation to colonisation – the observed behaviours
and actions of the coloniser and the subsequent analysis and responses by
Aboriginal people to those colonising behaviours and actions. Within this
contextualisation then, my positioning of the I of the we cannot be separated
from a politics of identity that acknowledges that I am bringing to the sur-
face a component of the contextualisation which often remains unspoken.
That is, identifying as Aboriginal is political in this country. Listening, then,
is a methodology for merging into the story and with the storyteller, affirm-
ing the we in the I and the I in the we in shared community, within country/
space and across times – a positionality and movement that enables the
individual I agentic push from within and for the we collective.
Articulating meaning of emergent/immersed listening is a challeng-
ing task. Again, I refer to Paul Collis (2016 ), who provides the following
insight:
Those old storytellers, the same people who white governments dis-
missed as “un-knowers”, they had power. Appearing at times to the
84 Storying ways
white world as “no-bodys”, they were intelligent, gentle and responsi-
ble people. They looked “outward” upon the world and made comment
of the world in their art, leaving indelible marks upon my memory. In
their voice, they brought to life the imagined and the “un-imagined”,
making them believable to me and to the others who listened. Those old
people taught and entertained.
Stories cannot be unheard and nor should they, for underneath lies a subtle
message, a learning for our lives.
Louise
To hear the stories, I mean to really hear the stories, I listen intently to
those whose perspectives I seek, to see what emerges. I am inspired and
aligned with what Bronwyn Davies (2014 ) refers to as emergent listening, a n
approach that draws from Henry Bergson’s (1911) theory of creative evolu-
tion and Barad’s (2007 ) theory of agential realism and diffractive analysis.
It involves noticing what emerges from what becomes automated, such as
our taken-for-granted practices and assumptions, which Bergson refers to
as lines of descent that “might be accomplished almost instantaneously, like
releasing a spring” ( Bergson, 1911/2007 , p. 7). So it is about noticing the
slip into the automated and refraining from an assumption and sitting and
being fully present to sense what really matters here. Sitting with questions,
sitting with discomfort, sitting with the unsettling. An inner work of ripening
or creating is welcomed, what Bergson refers to as lines of ascent. As Bron-
wyn Davies (2014 ) explains in her application of Bergson’s thinking, lines
of descent and ascent continually affect and depend on each other. Though
“lines of descent may foreclose the emergence of new thought,” through
recognition of such “they also create a coherent space in which the new can
emerge,” space for lines of ascent which “are life-giving and powerful, but
they are not always good and may sometimes be sad and even dangerous”
(Davies, p. 8). With consideration of Bergson’s ideas and Davies application,
I seek to let go of prior assumptions and categories and strive to be fully pres-
ent to notice what emerges as mattering to those who tell me their stories.
I am also listening to my own internal dialogue, noticing thoughts as
they pass in and out – letting go of desire to fixate – noticing how ideas,
stories and observations affect each other. And when I research with young
children, much of their stories are heard by reading their bodies in action
with environments. I see and feel their stories played out before and in and
around me.
I share what I hear with what others hear around me, who were there in
the story moment too. Further perspectives flesh out what is heard. The
Storying ways 85
intent is not to story accurate accounts of events (though I admit I do often
spend time searching contextual factors to support accuracy) but rather to
story deeper understanding. To honour the principle that storying gives
voice to the silenced margins, I share my storying back with those who I
have listened to, to check whether it is the story they wanted to be heard.
How do you bring stories to life?
This is a question of creativity. “How do you bring stories to life?” is also
a question of “How do you (re)create a living story?” It is about our cre-
ative practice in storying: a poetic endeavour – a poiesis (making) with
aesthesis (sensation that produces affect). We are creating to bring stories to
life, so that the stories are felt as the lived experiences of the audience. We
describe how we create to address and meet specific audiences. Our framing
of “Which way?” has lead us to ponder “What are our responsibilities in and
to story making?” “What medium do we use to bring stories to life?” “Have
we done the stories right?” “Is the flesh fleshy on the bone of the medium?”
and “Are we practised as story artisans?”
Tracey
My first serious research effort in storying was in my doctoral studies. When
I reflect on this time I acknowledge and appreciate the extent to which one
has to be immersed, moving from text to text to draw out the theories and
concepts that would best work with the research. And during this process
you have to be focussed, keeping yourself apart, away from distractions. I
came to live in my head, in this isolated, nerdy cocoon with the thoughts
and words of theorists – white theorists, black theorists, women of colour
theorists, and Indigenous theorising. I found “aha” moments in the work
of theorists who wrote to decolonisation, antiracist strategy, the unpacking
of white race privileges and so on, and I found style in those who wrote
poetically, lyrically with and through theory. In taking myself into the text,
the ways in which I was reading and understanding the messages, the word
crafting, was something that I recognised, something I knew deep within
my body. I was familiar with this skill. The familiarity came in the stories
that my old people had told me. Another “aha” moment slapped me up the
side of the head. The old people’s telling of stories were theoretical texts
too, and I wanted to give them equal value in my research. This is a long-
winded response to how I bring stories to life, but an important first step is
to make the stories known with all their vibrancy and verve.
The benefit I had is that I knew the stories by heart; they were told to
me again and again and again. But what I had to do was to give the stories
86 Storying ways
another skin, to find the way in which the story would survive the transfer
from oral to written, from the private to the public, from Aboriginal audi-
ences to highly likely white readers, without losing its essence. So I wrote
creatively, imagining myself of the time and the moments, with the char-
acters and the events. I placed myself in the story to imagine/observe what
could and should be seen. In the written telling of the story, I wanted to draw
the reader, sensually and carefully, into lives that are generally not known.
My word crafting had to mirror the oral performances of those old people –
the talking hands, face shapes and body nuances. The crafting was not easy.
Through words I wanted to show the gasp of a breath in the horror of a story,
in the drop of a tear the sadness of a story, in the slow nodding of a head, lips
pursed upwards a thoughtfulness for the story, and the eyes wide crinkling
of a forehead “I hadn’t thought of that before” in a story. The crafting is not
easy. It takes time – carefulness for holding something tender, a coaxing of
the words to bring the light and make anew.
Louise
I bring stories to life through embodied, emplaced storytelling. To me sto-
ries are most alive when performed. I struggle with the two-dimensionality
of written stories. In the flesh, I can bring stories to life by changing the
tone, pitch, volume and pace of my voice at carefully selected moments to
create mood, emotion and affect. By embodying the story, I am there in the
story and seek to making it the experience of those who are listening to the
tale ( Benjamin, 1968/1999 , p. 87). In embodying the story, I am “an actor,
an agent, a translator, an animator, and . . . a thief who robs treasures to give
something substantive to the poor” ( Zipes, 2005 , p. 17). Zipes defines the
collective pool of stories of humanity as treasures. As a storyteller, I collect
stories that appeal, then transform them with my personal and ideologi-
cal viewpoints to verbally and kinaesthetically bring these treasures to life
before a chosen audience.
I bring stories to life by sharing something of myself, by looking into the
eyes of the audience to see what makes their eyes sparkle. Looking into the
eyes of each other creates intimacy, drawing the listener in, as she identifies
her life with those in the story. There are points of connection that resonate
with listeners, for they may have had similar experiences or they can imag-
ine that the same could happen to them. This intimacy can invoke a web of
human relationships ( Arendt, 1958/1998 ), as the connection between story-
teller, story and listener cultivates connections with each other.
The relationship with others is at the core of bringing stories to life. It is
about “inter-being” ( Kristeva, 2001 , p. 15) – the life of a story depends on
being with others.
Storying ways 87
When storying in written form, the intimacy is cultivated through
unashamedly using I, for they are the stories on which I have greatest
authority – the ones I have lived – the ones in which I am embodied and
emplaced within. I seek to bring the stories to life, through my voice inter-
changing with others, through tantalising sensorial descriptions, in the hope
that the readers imagine they are there with me.
How are stories gifted?
Once stories are brought to life, here we consider our practices of gifting
stories. We name the practice of dedicated sharing as gifting to honour age-
old tradition, the intimacy and bonding that deliberately shared storying
nurtures. We don’t just throw stories out into the ether. Our ethic is transgen-
erational movements for storying. We see stories as treasures and storying
as reciprocal. The gifting is honoured with due protocol and responsibility,
and crafted to specific audiences.
Tracey
There are many gifts in storying. At an aesthetic level, whether through tell-
ing and performing, or through writing stories, there is entertainment – the
sheer enjoyment of taking in a story that has not been heard before to learn
something new or for affirming knowledge. The gift of being able to share
stories creates bonds between the teller and the listener/reader. My inten-
tions in gifting will vary with the audience. In Aboriginal social circles,
storytelling is a shared responsibility. Having said that, not all people are
storytellers, and different people will have different stories. The stories I
have shared in this book are hopefully seen as gifts to members of my own
family for remembering our old people and the lives which they were forced
to live, allowing the descendants to learn from those times – to have new
and hopefully uplifting stories. For other members of the Aboriginal com-
munity, my stories will have resonance, connecting through commonality
of experiences, affirming our identities and strengthening our positionalities
in a world that is not always safe nor sensitive. For the students of research,
I share my work so that you have confidence to take on this approach of
storying research as a legitimate form of knowledge production. There may
be gifts also for those who are othered in the stories, offered to take strength
from our differences. And for white academic readers, particularly those
who struggle to have meaningful relationships with Aboriginal peoples and
their place in this country as stolen lands. The meta-story about Aboriginal
people needs to change. Have courage. Tell a different story. In Aboriginal
principles of reciprocity, gifting has its responsibilities – to gift back.
88 Storying ways
Louise
There is a certain selflessness with storying. As the consistent thought when
storying is of others – the careful guardianship of others’ stories and the
carefully packaging of these stories to gift to other readers/listeners/view-
ers. Storying comes with tremendous responsibility, because through story-
ing you seek to nourish thought, body and soul; claim voice in the silent
margins; invite embodied relational meaning making; intersect the past and
present as living oral archives; and honour collective ownership and author-
ship. Storying gift giving is actually the most thoughtful gift I can imagine.
Those stories that speak to you stay with you throughout your life, offering
pearls of guiding wisdom at much-needed opportune moments. For exam-
ple, I think of the Thai folk tale “The Freedom Bird” ( Hartley, 1996 ) that I
first heard Jewish storyteller Donna Jacobs Sife share. At the close of the
story, she dedicated the story to people of Tibet and their fight for freedom.
This stayed with me. It made me think about freedom, and the “sense and
hold the fire in your belly” enduring fight for freedom. The story tells of
how a hunter does every violent act he can think of to silence a bird because
he does not like the bird’s song: “naa-naa-na-na-naa – blrrrrrrrr” – a story
we have seen played out throughout human history through genocide and
ethnic cleansing. In time, the bird gathers with others and sings its song
hundredfold. The surprising magnitude of numbers triggers a realisation by
the hunter that you cannot “kill freedom”.
The simplicity of the story makes it accessible to young children, and
at first the gift they take is the joy of the bird’s song – as they join in and
laugh and continue to sing the bird’s song all day. And then, say a year
older, they start to ask questions like “Why does the hunter kill animals?”
and “Who protects the animals from the hunters?” and make declarations of
“We have to help save the animals” and “The freedom bird was trying to say
something” ( Phillips, 2010 , pp. 112–113). Questions and understandings
of freedom injustices start to emerge. And a few years later, tweens start to
correlate the symbolism in the story with contemporary freedom struggles
they are familiar with, such as asylum seekers in offshore detention centres.
The story keeps giving. And for me personally, I have carried this story with
me for nearly 20 years, gifting to children, teachers and student-teachers,
provoking conversations on silencing, on language, on freedom struggles,
on the power of collective voice. It was the first story I told in my practice
of social justice storytelling, that I studied in my PhD. It began the conver-
sation of injustices with 5-year-olds, to hear how they may seek to redress
injustices through active citizenship. So many stories, inquiries, presenta-
tions, publications and achievements have been launched by that one story.
Most recently I have been filmed telling that story, gifting it to children in
detention in Nauru with hope for their freedom.
Storying ways 89
My research through, with and as storying is gifted performatively in pre-
sentations, so the audience is taken into the experience, into the wonderings,
into the troublings. With published, written storying, I seek to gift it to those
whose stories are there, and to those who I sense would appreciate, and to
those who may learn from the storying.
Together/two-gather
In this chapter, we two have gathered our thoughts to dialogue our approach
to storying research. Our conversation commences with the important mat-
ter of ethical approaches to research with Aboriginal communities and
with children. Our key message: do no harm. Through developing substan-
tive relationships with Aboriginal Elders, professional staff, community
members and children, for guidance and navigation, this objective can be
attained. In discussing the source of storying, we find the source in our
professional connections and the relational embodiments we are able to
develop. The stories shared in Chapter 2 reveal the importance of our fami-
lies’ herstories as a source of storying, piecing together fragments through
research to make whole, make richer. We detail how we use our tools of
listening and enlivening stories, our techniques to story in research imag-
ining, embodying, performing and writing. Finally, we lead our dialogue
to storying as gift – our knowings of what it means to receive, to share, to
pass on, to give back. Next, we share the diverse ways those in our commu-
nities story. In the final chapter, we revisit the key issues we have raised,
speaking again of the principles, and end with an invitation for those who
read this book.
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5 Sharing through storying
This chapter is designed as a sharing space. In the spirit of collectivity, we
have brought together examples of storying from the communities we are
connected to in Australia. The idea is to provide readers with a diverse range
of examples to see and feel how some others share storied research, and
to showcase the great storying work happening in Australia. It is through
these examples we hope readers new to the idea of storying begin to imagine
the possibilities. Examples were selected to provide a good cross-section of
modes (visual, music, dance, drama, film, oral and written storytelling) and
platforms (academic and public, published and live). In a way, what follows
is an annotated bibliography, with a brief description of each work to guide
you in your choice of works to locate and read (or view to see), and under-
stand further what storying can be. The examples of research through story-
ing are organised into two main sections: performed, visual and embodied
storying (e.g., storied sculptures, film, dance, verbatim theatre, walks) and
written storying (e.g., storied written works). Each section provides storying
that has been shared across diverse platforms, from the conventional aca-
demic platforms (e.g., theses, conferences, academic journals and books), to
a diverse range of public platforms (websites, public performances, films and
walks). For each section, examples are listed alphabetically, with Aboriginal
Australian examples that Tracey has carefully selected from her networks,
and non-Indigenous examples that Louise has selected from her networks.
In honouring the influence of place and heritage in storying, we acknowl-
edge the heritage of each storying author. Our selections are largely informed
by innovation and draw from emerging scholars (to seize an opportunity to
showcase the innovation of their new work).
Performed, visual and embodied storying
We have grouped here examples of storying research that have been per-
formed, are visual or offer some embodied interaction with storying. We
are foregrounding diverse modes of storying to purposefully disrupt the
DOI: 10.4324/9781315109190-5
92 Sharing through storying
privileging of the written word in academia. The works include storying
through visual art, film, dance, verbatim theatre, sculpture and performa-
tive walks, music and photography. However, there is an inherent prob-
lem here in translating such three-dimensional work into two-dimensional
words on pages. For some, we have been able to provide images and URLs
to video footage and websites to enhance insight of what the performed,
visual or embodied storying looked and felt like. For many of these storying
examples, however, you really had to be there for the embodied emplaced
experience of meaning making. As Joanne Archibald (2008 ) noted, when-
ever Indigenous oral tradition is presented in textual form, the text limits the
level of understanding because it cannot portray the storyteller’s gestures,
tone, rhythm and personality (p. 17). And as Louise noted in her PhD thesis,
Storytelling is a live experience. In this thesis I have included tran-
scripts of the stories that I shared, but this is only part of the story. Like
the accompanying video footage and audio recordings, they cannot
capture the whole experience. Storytelling is an aesthetic encounter, so
it was the sensory and affective expression between teller and audience
that were difficult to capture. It is only through live experiences of sto-
rytelling that the nuances between teller and listener can be seen, heard,
and felt all at the same time. For these reasons I am acutely aware that
readers experience only part of the stories through transcripts.
(p. 12)
These frustrations over the limitations of the written word on the page in a lin-
ear book have been felt throughout the development of this book. We hope that
the words and images chosen provoke imaginings of lived embodied experi-
ences. All of the examples in this section are by artist-researchers or arts-based
researchers, and so they show storying rather than tell or explain storying.
Balla, P., & Delany, M. (Curators). (2017). Sovereignty. Australian Centre
for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, Australia. Find out more at https://
acca.melbourne/exhibition/sovereignty/
Paola Balla is a Wemba Wemba and Gunditjmara woman of Italian and Chinese her-
itage. She is a practising artist who curated Sovereignty with ACCAArtistic Director
Max Delany. The curation of the storied exhibition sought to compose culturally
and linguistically diverse stories of self-determination, identity, sovereignty and
resistance from both contemporary and historical works of First Nations peoples of
South-East Australia. Sovereignty was a platform for Indigenous community expres-
sion, and was accompanied by an extensive programme of talks, forums, screenings,
performances, workshops, education programmes and events.
Black, A. L., Crimmins, G., & Henderson, L. (2017, June). Storied, slow, aesthetic,
relational: Awabi-sabi approach to doing and writing “research”. AARE Theory
Workshop, Southern Cross University, Gold Coast. Find out more at www.aare.
Sharing through storying 93
edu.au/data/Secretariat/Theory_Workshops/Gold_Coast/Workshop_bried_
and_bio_notes_v_3.pdf
Through the concept of wabi-sabi, the Japanese art practice of honouring imper-
fections (cracks/breaks) in crockery, this workshop storied the cracks and crevices
and rot of lived lives in academia. Ali, Gail and Linda storied their lives as women
in academia, then invited participants to story their academic lives through words
scribed on ceramic dinner plates. In small groups, storied lives in academia were
shared, framed by the words scribed on the plates. Plates were then fragmented
with the smashing force of a hammer and gifted to others in the group to each piece
together a composite storied plate. The cracks of the composite plates were hon-
oured with kintsugi-like golden repair, ethics of care, slow scholarship and story.
Figure 5.1 Wabi-sabi storying.
Photograph taken by Ali Back; permission to reproduce granted.
Figure 5.2 Wabi-sabi storied plates.
Photograph taken by Ali Back; permission to reproduce granted.
94 Sharing through storying
Bunda-Heath, N. (Choreographer). (2017, August). Blood quantum. Arts House,
Melbourne.
This work is an exquisite piece of embodied intergenerational storying, blending story
that is voiced over the choreography. Ngioka, Ngugi/Wakka Wakka and Birapi woman,
has choreographed a duet that tells her matrilineal grandmother’s story as written by
her mother, Tracey Bunda. The dance work is a story that references eugenics for
ascribing Aboriginal peoples and cultures as fragments of fragments. It is a story often
hidden, but its telling allows Aboriginal people to heal from the legacies of colonisa-
tion. Through Blood Quantum, Ngioka is honouring her grandmother, and educating
those who do not know about the history of the Stolen Generations in Australia.
Figure 5.3 Blood Quantum dancers Josh Twee and Claire Rodrigues.
Photograph taken by Bryony Jackson; permission to reproduce granted.
Figure 5.4 Blood Quantum dancers Josh Twee and Claire Rodrigues.
Photograph taken by Bryony Jackson; permission to reproduce granted.
Sharing through storying 95
Figure 5.5 Blood Quantum dancers Josh Twee and Claire Rodrigues.
Photograph taken by Bryony Jackson; permission to reproduce granted.
Barker, L. L. (Writer/Director). (2014). My grandmother’s country [Motion pic-
ture]. NSW, Sydney, Australia : Metroscreen, in association with Earthstar
Productions & Screen NSW. To watch, go towww.sbs.com.au/ondemand/video/
549148227796/Desperate-Measures
Through film, Lorina Barker, Wangkumara and Muruwari woman, tells her grand-
mother’s story of being trucked off Tibooburra country to Brewarrina Mission in
the 1930s, making self-sufficient people ration dependent. The storied film has been
pieced together from audio and photo archives, woven in with footage of Lorina’s
extended family’s recent retracing of the journey back to her grandmother’s country,
to bring her spirit home.
Ration Shed Museum Initiative. The Cherbourg Memory. Find out more at
http://cherbourgmemory.org
The Cherbourg Memory is an online database of memory storying of the Cherbourg
community, a community formed as a government settlement under the Aboriginal
Protection Act in 1904. Community members and descendants actively participate by
adding their stories, searching for others and connecting with Cherbourg people. On
this site you will find stories of dormitory living, black diggers, enforced labour, cul-
ture and language, and education and prominent people. Aboriginal readers, as lovers
of photographs and stories, will be lost for hours. The stories shared are difficult and
sometimes sad stories, but they are essential stories of survival and hope. The website
is a critical contribution to the power of Aboriginal memory for the nation.
Coleman, K. S. (2017). An a/r/tist in wonderland: Exploring identity, creativity
and digital portfolios as a/r/tographer (Doctoral thesis). University of Mel-
bourne, Australia. Find out more at www.artographicexplorations.com and
http://hdl.handle.net/11343/124239
96 Sharing through storying
This thesis is an extraordinary artistically storied treat by white Australian feminist,
artist, researcher and teacher Kate, who was born and raised in Eora nation, and now
lives and works in Kulin nation. Informed by theorists in critical, social and visual
cultures in art education, Kate stories – through visual art and written words – how
learning in and through a personalised portfolio, as both process and product, affects
creativity and identity as an artist. The research is a/r/tographic (from the standpoint
of artist-researcher-teacher). It embodied in its storying the importance of under-
standing creativity and creative practice for students as art makers and responders
to art, as makers, historians, theorists and critics. The thesis as a whole provides
storying of practice-based pedagogies through embodied praxis, portfolio pedago-
gies, storied personalised curriculum and creative and aesthetic digital curation for
self-discovery and creativity.
Cooper, J. (2015). Co-creating with, and in, a southern landscape (Doctoral the-
sis). Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia. Find out more at http://vuir.
vu.edu.au/30165/
As an artist and musician, white Australian Jayson entwines “place” in his creative
work and thinking through arts-based autoethnography and music-based research.
Jayson stories his place sense-making of Kulin nation’s seven seasons through photog-
raphy and music. He draws embodied sensorial connections as an artist, researcher and
educator in relation to the conceptual and physical local landscapes of the colonised
city of Melbourne that he moves through. The thesis presents an intertextual artistic
and written celebration of the Wurundjeri landscape (a southern landscape), whilst
Jayson critically gazes at his whiteness in relation to land, people, climates, skies,
waterways and animals as he co-creates with, and in, the south. Through complex
polyphonic layering and re-presentation, this thesis seeks to find ethical and inclusive
overlaps between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal knowledge and perspectives through
genuine engagement with Aboriginal knowledge and culture, whilst maintaining con-
sciousness and criticality of his whiteness.
Crimmins, G. (2014). An arts-informed narrative inquiry into the lived experi-
ence of women casual academics (Doctoral thesis). University of the Sunshine
Coast, Australia. To watch these representations, visit the following links:
Scene 1: https://era.library.ualberta.ca/downloads/bm326m184m
Scene 2: https://era.library.ualberta.ca/downloads/bmg74qm16h
Scene 3: https://era.library.ualberta.ca/downloads/sf268796c
Scene 4: https://era.library.ualberta.ca/downloads/bpr76f347p
Scene 5: https://era.library.ualberta.ca/downloads/0z709019x
Epilogue: https://era.library.ualberta.ca/downloads/bvq27zn47c
Welsh woman Gail (now living on Gubbi Gubbi country) explored the lived experi-
ence of women casual academics in Australia. Using storying, the emotionally and
cognitively lived experiences of six women casual academics were re-presented
through story drama of proto-verbatim theatre (in which the words and stories of the
participants are theatricalised). This genre of performative storying makes explicit
the constructedness of the re-presentation, and cognitively and emotionally engages
Sharing through storying 97
an audience in the stories of others. Gail purposefully selected the storying form for
its congruency with the fully embodied stories of the research participants and their
doubly othered status as women and casual academics. In Gail’s written thesis she
explains story-gathering processes and principles. She argues a case for the more
feminist analytical practice of restorying, and the specific nuances of restorying into
verbatim drama. The videos illustrate performative storying not only through drama
but also through filmic devices, through the use of lighting, focus, angle and position-
ing, to subtly reflect the isolation and exploitation of casual academia for women.
Foley, G., & Hawkes, J. (2012). Foley. Ilbijerri Theatre Company, Melbourne.
Find out more at http://ilbijerri.com.au/event/foley/
Gumbainggir activist, historian and warrior scholar Gary Foley provocatively sto-
ries untold black Australian history. He stories the lives, organisations and events of
the Australian Black Power movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, from his
own lived memories as a key activist in the movement, interwoven with personal
and fellow activists’ archives, media reports, academic accounts and recent publicly
available ASIO (Australian Security Intelligence Organisation) files. Gary Foley’s
composite storying reveals profound insight into land rights, native title, treaty,
reconciliation, referendum, tent embassy, black power and black pride. The per-
formance recounts his politically contextualised life as a riveting tale of resistance
and determination. This creative work was a performative publication of ideas and
arguments developed during his PhD candidature.
Heckenberg, R. (Creative director). (2016). Yindyamurra sculpture walk. Murray
River, NSW. Find out more at www.alburycity.nsw.gov.au/leisure-and-culture/
walking-and-cycling-trails/yindyamarra-sculpture-walk
Wiradjuri researcher and artist Robyn Heckenberg worked with a team of local Aborig-
inal artists to story the place that links Wonga Wetlands with the South Albury Trail.
Local people’s stories of their connections to the river were collectively told and shared,
and local artists worked with these ideas and their own lived experiences to create
sculptural works that story Wiradjuri Country. Each work tells its own stories, and col-
lectively the sculpture walk tells a larger story of Wiradjuri law, of Wiradjuri ways of
being and doing, of respecting country, of enacting UN Declaration of Rights of Indig-
enous Peoples and of Indigenous research methodologies.
Nanni, G., & James, A. (Playwrights). (2010). Coranderrk: We will show the coun-
try. La Mama Court house Theatre, Melbourne . Find out more at www.minute
sofevidence.com.au/performance/
Italian and South African writer-historian Giordano Nanni (now living in Kulin
nation) and Yorta Yorta playwright Andrea James – as members of the Minutes of
Evidence project team – collaborated to story the 141-page minutes of evidence
of the 1881 Parliamentary Coranderrk Inquiry into a verbatim-theatre performance
script. The Coranderrk Inquiry was a rare occasion in 19th-century Victoria when
there was an official commission that heard Aboriginal witnesses on their calls for
land and self-determination. The performative storying of the inquiry was designed
to expose broad audiences to this rare moment in Australian history, and to provoke
98 Sharing through storying
public conversations on questions of structural justice and reconciliation within, and
between, Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. The play has had five sea-
sons and multiple one-off performances, and an annotated version of the script has
been published with Aboriginal Studies Press in 2013. The website documents the
prolific range of outputs from this provocative storying that brought together law,
history and social sciences researchers, educators and artists.
Phillips, L. G., Owen, A., Borland-Sentinella, D., & Peirano, E. (2016, 7–8
May). Walk with me [Performative walk of walking research findings]. Any-
where Festival . Brisbane. Find out more at http://louptales.education/walk-
with-me-anywhere-festival/
A performative storied walk experience which explores how walking can culti-
vate ethico-politico-urban wonder through awareness and interactions with oth-
ers and public spaces. The walk was designed to provoke experiential encounters
that foregrounded key concepts gleaned from Louise’s research of walking arts
projects. Accompanied by a duo of improvisers (Alice Owen and Deanna Borland-
Sentinella, European Australians) in role as mad research assistants, Dr LouP facil-
itated walking encounters to activate embodied sensorial, exploratory and political
awareness of self and others in public spaces. Provocative clues of a missing person
spotted along the walk storied the concept of indeterminacy, leading to a rare sight-
ing of a mermaid (Elena Peirano, Uruguayan) on the banks of Brisbane River, and
meeting the local councillor to reflect on storied learnings of ethico-politico-urban
wonder.
Figure 5.6 Dr LouP greets walk participants.
Photograph taken by Martin Ambrose; permission to reproduce granted.
Figure 5.7 Orleigh Park Manifesto launch.
Photograph taken by Martin Ambrose; permission to reproduce granted.
Figure 5.8 Mermaid on the bank of the Brisbane River.
Photograph taken by Martin Ambrose; permission to reproduce granted.
100 Sharing through storying
Written storying
Here, we have gathered a selection of written forms of research through,
with and as storying across largely traditional research-output forms of arti-
cles, theses, books and book chapters. This selection is from our communi-
ties in Australia. Many of the authors are colleagues or recommended by
colleagues. Most of the examples are largely recent works that illustrate and
explore storying concepts of collectivity, place, identity, embodiment and
intersecting of the past and present. The authors are diverse across origins,
and the storied topics explore a range of prevalent topics that include aca-
demia, archaeological records, belonging, connection to country, domestic
violence, marginalisation, black-white race relations and sacred storytell-
ing. We hope that amidst these examples of written storying, you see diverse
possibilities of theorising and enacting storying.
Birch, A. (2002). Framing Fitzroy: Contesting and (de)constructing place and
identity in a Melbourne suburb (Doctoral thesis). University of Melbourne,
Australia. and Birch, A. (2015). Ghost river. Brisbane: University of
Queensland Press. Find out more at https://thegarretpodcast.com/tony-birch/
Tony Birch is a well-known Aboriginal writer, activist and academic, and currently
holds the position of professor at Victoria University. When Tony wrote his doctoral
thesis at Melbourne University (2002), he theorised the negative social construction
of the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy. Tony continues his storying of living in the
margins in his novel, Ghost River, which won the 2016 Victorian Premier’s Liter-
ary Award for Indigenous Writing. His other award-winning works include Blood,
which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. He is also the author of Shad-
owboxing, and two short-story collections, Father’s Day and The Promise.
Black, A. L., Crimmins, G., & Jones, J. K. (2017). Reducing the drag: Cre-
ating V formations through slow scholarship and story. In S. Riddle, M.
Harmes, & P. A. Danaher (Eds.), Producing pleasure in the contemporary
university (pp. 137–156). Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense Publishing.
Ali (English-French heritage), Gail (Welsh heritage) and Janice (Scottish-Irish heri-
tage) liken their practice of collective storying to how flying birds cooperatively
work in energy-boosting V formations. Learning by watching the one in front, and
sensing what is happening in the surrounds and responding accordingly, the authors
note the conditions that support their writing flow. Locating pleasure, connected-
ness, interest and joy in their collective deliberate storying and re/de/storying of
lived experiences, the authors resist the insidious, diminishing drag of managerial-
ism, comparison and metric-based audits of productivity and outputs. They recog-
nise the joy and pleasure of responding to longings to connect, to “care for self and
others”, and to “be” differently in academia through collective storying found in
opportunities to listen and to converse in meaningful ways – ways that give time to
reflection and relationship, ways that enable cooperative work and speaking lives
into the academy.
Sharing through storying 101
Cutcher, A. J. (2015). Displacement, identity and belonging: An arts-based, auto/
biographical portrayal of ethnicity and experience. Rotterdam, the Nether-
lands: Sense Publishers.
Story is a central motif of Lexi’s arts-based auto/biographical inquiry of belong-
ing and identity as a second-generation Hungarian-Australian. Lexi stories her and
her family’s cultural and displacement identities through family stories, memoirs,
artworks, photographs and poetry. Through stories and self-created artworks, Lexi
elicits provocative reflections and interrogations of ethnicity, migration, place,
marginalisation, memory and self, drawing on historical, cultural and political per-
spectives. Lexi’s storying and collage work evokes emplaced visceral intimacy of
each family member’s lived experience, like a living, breathing photo album. Dis-
placement, Identity and Belonging is a beautiful example of storying as theory, as
research, as art and as a good story.
Gilbey, K. (2014). Privileging First Nations knowledge: Looking back to move-
forward (Doctoral thesis). Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Educa-
tion, Batchelor, Australia.
This thesis is a counter story to the dominant narrative of the Batchelor Insti-
tute being just another Aboriginal organisation that was run into the ground by
Aboriginal incapacity. It was written to highlight the subtle hidden ways that rac-
ist ideologies infiltrate an Indigenous tertiary-education workplace. Alyawarre
woman Kathryn has, through storying, highlighted critical moments of daily
interactions and encroachments on the operations of the institute to highlight the
small, myriad and complex ways that racist ideologies are enacted. It illustrates
how mimicry, interdiction, subjection and abjection are all tools that serve to
maintain ignorance, which in turn serves to maintain white privilege. Kathryn
argues that by trusting in old Aboriginal cultures that have never really disap-
pointed, Aboriginal people can regain pride and belief in this organisation as a
transformed First Nations site of scholarship, learning and cultural celebration.
Hardy, D. (2015). BOLD: Stories from older lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender
and intersex people. The Rag & Bone Man Press Inc, Panton Hill, Victoria.
Find out more at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIFxd5QrtGU
David Hardy is an Indigenous doctoral graduate of the Batchelor Institute (2015).
His book shines a spotlight on the stories of more than 50 older members of the
LGBTI community. The stories tell of first love, family, struggles and pride from
ordinary and extraordinary people from diverse origins. As such, it is an important
contribution to written storying and brings together a diverse group of people, often
on the silenced margins, to tell their stories.
Henderson, L. G., Honan, E., & Loch, S. (2016). The production of the aca-
demicwritingmachine. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodol-
ogy, 7 (2), 4–18.
Three white Australian women – Linda (living on Boonwurrung/Bunurong coun-
try), Eileen (living on Jagera/Turrbal country) and Sarah (living on Gadigal
country) – story the experience of the push to “publish or perish” in academic
writing. They story how they experiment with merging as LindaEileenSarah – an
102 Sharing through storying
academicwritingmachine. Using digital platforms, such as Instagram, story-sharing
conversations emerge from LindaEileenSarah with a differing rhythm created from
chaos, from resistance to the hyperindividualized neoliberal university. LindaEi-
leenSarah interrogate the machinic arrangements of the academicwritingmachine,
through collaborative, metaphoric and poetic writing of lived stories of negotiating
the counting of academic writing. The construction and constriction of the lived
experiences of presenting, rewriting, reviewing, rejecting and resubmitting is resto-
ried to craft imaginative, creative and joyous collective experiences.
Josephs, C. (2008). The way of the s/word: Storytelling as emergent liminal.
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education , 21 (3), 251–267.
White Australian artist, storyteller, educator and researcher Caroline stories her jour-
ney of becoming a storyteller, through personal reflections, drawings and dreams,
other writers and theorists, interwoven with the telling of a Japanese Zen story “The
Teaching”. It is a story about facing death. The symbolism embedded in “The Teach-
ing” illustrates principles of emerging methodologies and Caroline’s storytelling
learnings and being in the liminal – a transitionary phase of life. “The Teaching”,
like the other sacred stories Caroline worked with in her thesis, dealt with the lim-
inal space between that which is unknowable or inconceivable, to understand the
“sacred”. Caroline draws on all the senses to bring to life the storying processes
of weaving together memory, thought and what emerges and what departs in each
moment for the storyteller and story listeners, as a story is enacted and embodied.
Metta, M. (2015). Embodying Mêtis: The braiding of cunning and bodily intel-
ligence in feminist storymaking. Outskirts Online Journal, 32. Retrieved from
www.outskirts.arts.uwa.edu.au/volumes/volume-32/marilyn-metta
Chinese-Malaysian-born Australian woman Marilyn Metta draws from the sto-
ried wisdom of Greek goddess Metis (as the concept of embodied intelligence) to
poetically story her lived experiences of domestic abuse. Marilyn stories to reclaim
Metis/mê tis for its metamorphic power. She reads and engages with power as somat-
ically and materially experienced by bodies in ways in which language struggles to
define and describe. Metis/ mê tis is traced in her own poetic feminist story making
and knowledge making of domestic violence, analysed through the symbolism of
Greek mythology and Elizabeth Grosz’s notions of becomings and freedom. Her
poetic storying enacts embodied intelligence ( mê tis): “Mêtis resides in our breath-
work, our shadow-work, she slithers in between words and forms the slippery shad-
ows of breath.”
Moreton, R. (2006). The right to dream (Doctoral thesis). University of West-
ern Sydney, Australia. Retrieved from http://uwsprod.uws.dgicloud.com/
islandora/object/uws%3A2495/datastream
Dr Romaine Moreton is from the Goenpul Jagara people of Stradbroke Island and
the Bundjulung people of northern New South Wales. Her thesis, The Right to
Dream, proposes an Indigenous philosophy of storytelling and embodied knowl-
edge. It explores the impact of the English language upon the Indigenous body
affected through colonisation, offering an analysis of Aboriginality as a social
and political construct resulting in the imposition of an inauthentic subjective
Sharing through storying 103
experience on sovereign Indigenous peoples, investigating its temporal and bio-
logical consequence. The Right to Dream also explores the temporality of Indig-
enous ancient cosmologies, the intelligence inherent in Indigenous chosen modes
of communication and the ways in which Indigenous peoples “write” and “read”
the earth-space. It is, in other words, the treatment of Indigenous cosmological,
philosophical and religious practices as an expression of an Indigenous literature.
The Right to Dream also explores the development of western textual culture, lin-
earity and the invention of historicity as a way of controlling language, bodies
and land by restricting individual access to discourse. Other storying works by
Dr Romaine Moreton include a large-scale transmedia storytelling exhibition, One
Billion Beats, in collaboration with the Campbelltown Arts Centre (see https://
vimeo.com/121083217).
Wilson, C. J. (2017). Holocene archaeology and Ngarrindjeri Ruwe/Ruwar (land,
body, spirit): A critical Indigenous approach to understanding the Lower Mur-
ray River, South Australia (PhD dissertation, archaeology). Flinders University,
Adelaide, Australia.
Ngarrindjeri archaeologist Christopher Wilson stories a “Ngarrindjeri archaeologi-
cal standpoint”, through exploration of the researcher’s lived experiences and prior
knowledge and relationship to the Ngarrindjeri community, with critique of colonial
practices (archives, representations and scientific investigations). Through intersec-
tion of these multiple sources (in both written and visual form), he posits more
holistic interpretations of archaeological records. Christopher’s identity and lived
experiences as a Ngarrindjeri man enable Ngarrindjeri epistemologies, critical the-
ory, standpoint theory and Indigenous archaeologies to be foregrounded.
Wooltorton, S., Collard, L., & Horwitz, P. (2015). Stories want to be told: Elaap
Karlaboodjar. PAN: Philosophy, Activism, Nature, 11 , 3–18.
This article is an important Western Australian contribution to written storying
research. It investigates the many stories surrounding Elaap, the Leschenault Estua-
rine System. Elaap is a Noongar word which means “on or by the water”, refer-
ring to the people and their place. Nitja Noongar boodjar, derbal – this is Noongar
country and estuary. The authors purpose stories for defining relationality through
identity and positionality through place. Additionally, the authors consider stories
as lived, coauthored, embodied with land, and as tools for meaning making. They
see stories as discursively formed in the human/spirit project. The authors evoke the
story of Elaap for re-energising the land and its people.
Together/two-gather
We hope that in this selection of research through, with and as storying, you
see diverse ways and possibilities for storying. We searched across disci-
plines we engage with and deliberated for considerable time over selections
in order to provide diversity in modes and platforms, so that they also inspire
further innovations in storying work. The parameters of what is and isn’t
104 Sharing through storying
storying were constantly debated. The process was actually quite unsettling
and in many ways messed with central ideas of storying being fluid and
inclusive. So in no way is this list definitive. And many of the authors may
not name and claim their work as storying, but from our opening definition
of storying as the act of making and remaking meaning through stories, we
see that their work is illustrative of such.
In the final chapter, we revisit the principles of storying to propose ways
to continue enactment of these principles in research, and invite readers to
add to the ideas raised in this book.
References
Archibald, J. (2008). Indigenous storywork: Educating the heart, mind, body, and
spirit. Vancouver: UBC Press.
Phillips, L. G. (2010). Young children’s active citizenship: Storytelling, stories and
social actions (Doctoral thesis). Queensland University of Technology, Australia.
6 Ongoing advocacy for storying
We don’t see ourselves as experts in storying. Rather, we have sought to
create this book to carve a more recognisable space for storying in aca-
demia, and to have more focused conversations on what storying is, and can
be, across diverse communities. We have argued that storying, as the act of
making and remaking meaning through stories, is what researchers can, and
do, in the propositions/conceptualisations of research, in the gathering of
data with others, in the theorising and analysis of data and in the presenta-
tion and sharing of research. Storying is an ethically value-driven way of
being and knowing the world through story. The central concept to fore-
ground the word and form story is driven by motivations of inclusivity – to
welcome and broaden audiences.
We see storying offering imaginative agency that has resonance with
Appadurai’s (2004 ) arguments that acts of (re)imagining future worlds are
important social and material processes that create new “ethical horizon[s]
within which more concrete capabilities can be given meaning, substance
and sustainability” (p. 82). As such, they move us “away from wishful think-
ing to thoughtful wishing” (p. 82). For Indigenous peoples to exercise such
agency of thoughtful wishing within, and speaking to social spaces that
are inhabited – but which also displace us to the margins – offers substan-
tive possibilities to expand ethical horizons, pushing against those spaces to
grow larger in both vision and practice.
In our closing words on research through, with and as storying, we revisit
the five principles of storying that were discussed in Chapter 3 , to consider
ways on how to move forward through these principles – ways to advo-
cate further for the claiming of territory for storying. What we suggest are
beginning threads that we hope readers continue to add to by messaging
us through our Storying Research Facebook page at www.facebook.com/
storyingresearch/.
DOI: 10.4324/9781315109190-6
106 Ongoing advocacy for storying
Advocating for nourishing thought, body and
soul through storying
The people were one with the stories and the stories one with the people,
and every tale both embodied and sustained the whole.
(Kwaymullina, 2014 )
Such soothing words from Aboriginal academic, writer and illustrator
Amberlin Kwaymullina, touching on the ontological essence of Aboriginal
being – the first storytellers of this country. And it is in country that thought,
body and spirit are nourished. Storying our differences as Aboriginal and
white are well evident, but we do well to remember that in story there are
connections, moments when our shared humanity is mobilised, crossing the
divide of contestations and confrontations, moments that give us permission
to breathe and know that in stories there are many faithful followers. Stories
represent possibility for unity in our varied positions and a deep respecting
of the need to be separate, knowing that the project of pulverising sameness
drains our essence. Stories are sustenance and we all gladly partake.
Stories are warming, amusing, bemusing, intriguing, heavy-hearted and
so good to tell and hear. They invite us to take a moment out of constant
doing, to listen and feel another’s life – to remind us we are embodied, rela-
tional beings. When Louise was first awarded the title Dr, she celebrated
by putting a sign on her office door that read, “stories prescribed for most
every condition”. Though the sign was offered in jest, we see that stories
bring wisdom to situations, and Louise did wish she had a story to offer
every condition. As an antithesis to the meritocratic agenda of contempo-
rary universities always on the hunt for measuring impact, feminist circles
are starting to advocate for the creation and assertion of feminist metrics
that show acts of kindness and care (personal communication, K. Allen,
August 9, 2017). Perhaps the gifting of a story could be one of those acts of
kindness and care – a cup of tea and a story to ease your ails. The power of
the influence of stories should never be underestimated.
There is a growing trend, especially amidst feminist academics (such as
Henderson, Honan, & Loch, 2016; Black, Crimmins, & Jones, 2017, noted
in Chapter 5 ), of seeking to story about the lived experience of academia
collectively, to give space to weeping wounds, to air seething rage and in
the collectivity to be nourished through relationality and the comfort of “I’m
with you, sister.” Academics aren’t just storying about what they research, but
also about the experience of being an academic. Such storying is carving and
claiming moments of pleasure. Books such as Producing Pleasure in the Con-
temporary University ( Riddle, Harmes, & Danaher, 2017 ) provide an avenue
for pleasurable storying in the academy. Pleasurable (as in relaxed and rela-
tively unrestrained) storying is also effervescent through academic blogging.
Ongoing advocacy for storying 107
The agency of self-managed public platforms for dissemination, like blogs,
shake loose the shackles of restraint that academic writing imposes.
And so we encourage you to seek out stories and storying opportunities
to warm off the chilling effects of the neoliberal university (and society
at large), to provide nourishment and sustenance for the endurance of the
incessant demands that never stop and creep into every crevice of every
waking hour. More and more storying is entering conference presentations,
and as arts-based research gains more momentum, more diverse, innova-
tive and creative ways of storying research are emerging. Seek and create
nourishment for your whole of being through storied walks, films, websites,
drama, dance, songs, books and adventures.
Advocating for the silenced margins through storying
In Chapter 3 and in writing of this principle, Tracey offered the story of the
taking of her mother and her siblings – young lives sutured into the dis-
ciplining effect of colonisation. This story, brought forth from a historical
margin into the present, has purposefully taken the oral form into the written
so that Tracey’s old people’s voices could be heard beyond the safe confines
of family guppatea conversations. In the telling of our stories, in the speak-
ing of the words, decolonisation commences. In this country, in Australia,
deep understanding of Aboriginal people’s lives still remains easily negated
with a loaded dismissive, an “If only they were the same as us,” alluding to
intolerance. Aboriginal stories from the margin bear witness to a more com-
plete story of the nation, where its fullness offers the possibility of educative
effect, and where a willingness to learn from Aboriginal others is a talking
walk to epistemological change. Giving voice to our stories creates a healing,
a knowing that our voices weave back into age-old traditions, enabling our
bodies to thread seamlessly with the veracity of our spiritual selves.
The photograph shows my surgical scar after a heart attack. Oh my, my
heart was nearly silenced forever. I am wrapped in a woollen scarf knitted
by a member of my family, given to me by another member of my family.
I am wrapped in warm love and care. I had asked Paola to take the pho-
tograph not knowing that she was not well herself. From that moment of
deep vulnerabilities we have grown in strength – new stories have emerged,
stitched into our lives. My heart beats on.
Worby, with Anangu scholar Tur and Rosas Blanch (of Yidniji/Ybarbarm
peoples) (2014 ) writes of the preciousness of Aboriginal/black storying
from the margins:
Telling Black stories is important for historical, cultural, political and
personal reasons. Each act of creation or re-creation adds to a store
of precious resources which contributes to well-being, healing and the
108 Ongoing advocacy for storying
Figure 6.1 Embodied storying.
Photograph taken by Paola Balla; permission to reproduce granted.
capacity to imagine change. Stories sustain communities. Some writers
come from lines of story keepers, song makers and Elders on country.
With the authority of continuity, they write us forward. Other writers
lack that direct, guiding narrative authority and – beginning with only
fragments – write their way back to wholeness. At some point these
writing pathways meet to reshape or restore ideas of time, space and
country. They thread through all kinds of private and public, real and
imagined spaces – sea country, desert country, parks, lounge rooms,
sports grounds, libraries, classrooms – and those who travel with their
stories are not always writers in one medium. They sing, dance, paint,
and talk them as well. Each expression finds a new shape for dynamic
language and – sometimes – ways of sharing that language with writers
from other traditions.
(p. 1)
Ongoing advocacy for storying 109
Tracey recalls that when we commenced this book, she boldly claimed that
Aboriginal peoples talked in story all the time, noting it is the basis of con-
versations, fundamental to Aboriginal ways of being and knowing. There is
a cacophony of Aboriginal voices at the margin – stories are all around, in
dance, in art, in performance and in writing. The extent to which Aborigi-
nal people story research to each other is self-evident. Common histories,
embodiments of shared experiences, inform collective senses of what it
means to be Aboriginal. There is a honey-lined richness in those voices.
The value of Aboriginal stories for those who are outside our circles of
storying – at the white centre – will be found in whether or not Aboriginal
stories can be heard. For white readers of this book, there are lessons in lis-
tening. Hone the aural senses, allow Aboriginal words to lay upon your ears,
to seep in – morph into a new skin. For Aboriginal readers, and particularly
those who do not see themselves as writers or theorists, take courage. Your
words, your stories, are important. Dominance understands the power of the
written word. We do not advocate a black versioning of storying to replicate
dominance in a different colour. We advocate because in writing, in taking
black thought, words and stories to the white page, there is liberation.
Advocating for embodied relational meaning making
through storying
In celebrating and claiming research through, with and as storying, we
assert the foregrounding of bodies (of the somatic, of the corporeal) and
relationality to provoke deep, whole-of-being understanding of phenomena
that can speak to audiences across sectors of society. We especially assert
the welcoming of more performative, visual and embodied research through
storying across a breadth of modes, as provided in the illustrative examples
in Chapter 5 . Break away from the dominant dissemination pattern of aca-
demic articles and books. Relish the greater embodied meaning that imag-
ery and live performative interactivity can offer through, say, a single-hand
gesture or dancing eyes. Position and frame bodies as agential and active
entities in storying that can resist the operations of ideologies and forces of
power. And when traditional platforms (e.g., books and articles) are chosen,
the place of bodily sensation and emotion is integral in the storied words.
We encourage proliferation of research through storied films, dances,
theatrical pieces, exhibitions and walks, so that innovation and relational-
ity of phenomena with broad audiences is celebrated and maximised. Arts-
based research is forging the way in this space. In arts-based educational
research (ABER), both the American Educational Research Association
(AERA) (www.abersig.com) and the British Education Research Asso-
ciation (BERA) (www.bera.ac.uk/group/arts-based-educational-research)
110 Ongoing advocacy for storying
have well-established, specifically focused arts-based educational research
groups. Canadian artist-researcher-teacher Rita Irwin has recently initiated
the Network of Arts-Based Educational Research (NABER; see www.
facebook.com/NetworkABER/) as a space to share ABER publications, the-
ses and events, avenues and institutions supportive of ABER. In the Aus-
tralian review of excellence in research, arts-based research outputs are
classified as “Non-Traditional Research Outputs” and are required to have
accompanying research statements that indicate research questions, contri-
bution and significance if nominated for ERA (excellence in research for
Australia) peer review ( http://www.arc.gov.au/sites/default/files/filedepot/
Public/ERA/ERA%202018/ERA%202018%20Submission%20Guidelines.
pdf ). NABER also seeks to share how arts researchers have successfully
used research statements to argue the significance of the creative work by
mapping circles of influence. By being embodied and relational, we see
great potential in storying communicating deep, resonant meaning to broad
audiences – not just academia, but the general public – across ages, across
classes, across cultures.
We also advocate for being fully present in being with storying others.
Seek out others who embrace embodied storying, and be and soak up the
vibrant energy of that whole-of-being meaning making. For about 10 years
now, Louise has been meeting up with a group (mostly women known as
Wunderfools; www.facebook.com/Wunderfools/) on a relatively weekly
basis, in the central room of a community house, to share improvised sto-
ries through movement. The group takes turns to perform for each other,
inviting others into their stories as they choose. Sometimes a soundtrack to
the performance is chosen by the lead performer/storyer, defined through a
single word (e.g., still). The embodied stories emerge. They are created in
the moment, through performers responding to each other’s offers. At the
close of the performance, the performer and those who have watched the
emergent storying then share what they liked about the performed storying.
This is a delightfully nurturing space, in which the group completely sub-
merges in embodied relational storying, in which members have laughed
and cried so much that their bodies ache.
Advocating for intersecting the past and present title
as living oral archives through storying
In our research for this book it became abundantly clear that Aboriginal peo-
ple story. Storying research is an emergent trend. In the academy, Aboriginal
scholars and students’ works will be situated with stories – writing vignettes
to tell of country, the history of country and what happened to country;
to have locatedness with family; to apply theories to data collections; to
Ongoing advocacy for storying 111
centre their thinking. Tracey’s story of her father as a young boy offered
in Chapter 3 represents these elements, and we remind the reader of the
Aboriginal contributions to the scholarly works of storying in Chapter 5 of
the book. Paola Bella, Wemba Wemba and Gunditjmara warrior woman, as
cocurator of the exhibition Sovereignty (2017) brought forth stories in art
of a critical issue at a critical time in our lives, when constitutional reform
is a contemporary and contentious (in both black and white senses) topic
on the nation’s political table. Storying of sovereignty, self-determination
and resistance are agentic acts of being Aboriginal, discursively formed
from the point of first (black/white) contact, which has not dissipated with
time. In the Victorian Museum, the Sovereignty exhibition (2017 ) had syn-
ergy with Warriors of Aboriginal Resistance, enacting sovereignty through
protest in the heart of Melbourne on Flinders Street. Lorina Barker’s film
My Grandmother’s Country (2014 ) is a remembering, a piecing together
of the fragments of fragments of her grandmother’s story – an oral archive
to story her spirit into country. Lorina continues the trend of storying in
the medium of film, following in the footsteps of other Aboriginal women
filmmakers such as Muruwari woman Essie Coffey. The Cherbourg Mem-
ory speaks back into living memories to document stories across time and
into the light, free from the dark spaces of silence and forgetting. As with
other Aboriginal keeping places, the Cherbourg Memory is an important
theoretical and physical artefact for remembering. Robyn Heckenberg’s
Yindyamurra Sculpture Walk (2016 ) is a facilitation of stunningly beauti-
ful sculptural works through working with Aboriginal community, and has
brought to life the storying of long-held and loving connections to country,
framed within a rights discourse. Wiradjuri oral archives breathe into the
sculptures, resuscitating stories of the past into the present. In her doctoral
thesis, Privileging First Nations Knowledge: Looking Back to Move For-
ward (2014 ), Alyawarre warrior woman and scholar Kathryn Gilbey has
storied research from the perspective of educational self-determination,
in all its complexities, to form a new archive entry of resistance within
Aboriginal community agentic being. Goenpul Jagara Bundjulung scholar
Romaine Moreton uses her PhD thesis, The Right to Dream (2006 ), to offer
the reader storying research through an Aboriginal philosophy to redream
our being, dedicating her work to the ancestors before, after and in the sub-
liminally named space of the everywhen. The Nigerian storyteller Ben Okri
(1997 ) offers the following wisdom:
In a fractured age, where cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we
live by stories, we also live in them. One way or another we are living
the stories planted in us early or along the way, or we also living the
stories we planted – knowingly or unknowingly – in ourselves. We live
112 Ongoing advocacy for storying
stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaningless.
If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.
(p. 46)
As Aboriginal peoples, the embodying of stories from the oral to the writ-
ten, performed, painted and danced, are respectful acts of remembering the
teachings of ancestors, living oral archives linking the past with the present.
Aboriginal ancestors’ agencies for survival should be honoured, particularly
when conventions are disrupted and norms challenged. Storying research
does this. It is a breaking of tradition, yet easily lends itself to the gifts of
Aboriginal stories. We advocate for the creation of safe and sensitive spaces
for this to be realised. In reference to the academy, Aboriginal engagements
can be fraught. Tracey’s colleague who engaged in her doctoral studies
(2014) as a research participant and who Tracey named, in relational terms,
as Deadly Tidda Far South and Far West of My Country, named “universi-
ties as frightening, dangerous places” (p. 102). If Aboriginal entry into the
university is to have real meaning, then there needs to be real respect for
the stories that Aboriginal people carry, stories that will knowingly bring
change to the way in which knowledge is (re)produced.
Advocating for collectively owned and authored
stories and storying
Though the contemporary university is built on the neoliberal individual,
collectivity nurtures belonging, strengthens voice and ethically honours all
contributors. We ethically argue for honouring the collectivity of storying,
and seeking and claiming ways to enjoy collective storying. And in these
troubled times, as Harraway (2016 ) contends, we need to “stay with trou-
ble”, which requires “unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot
compost piles” (p. 4). So, we recommend being open to unexpected bed-
fellows in collaborative storying. “Hot compost piles” imply the bringing
together of layers of organic matter, of biodegradable waste that heat up and
decompose. Louise has a newly found ritual of taking her family compost to
a local community garden every couple of days. It’s about a 10-minute walk
down a hill, trespassing through a school, across a field and over a creek, to
then reveal a hidden playfield and community garden. When the communal
compost bin is reached and the lid lifted, the heat and odour is immediately
sensed. Sensory memories of other places and times are evoked. Louise
tips her organic matter on top of her neighbours’ heating, festering fruit and
vegetable waste. A momentary noting of the array: egg shells, banana skins,
eggplant . . . Over time the combined organic matter heats, ferments, bio-
degrades and merges. Then when the time is right, someone will dig it over
Ongoing advocacy for storying 113
and dig it into the communal vegetable, fruit and herb gardens to enrich
growth. The metaphor of the communal hot compost pile offers rich under-
standings and provocations for advocating and enacting collective storying
in contemporary times. It is not easy. It is not at our doorsteps (for conve-
nience). We have to commit time and mobility in emplaced connection to
neighbourhoods to get to the place of collectivity (and maybe it requires
traversing private or prohibited spaces). So we have to look outwards and
make time for, and move to be with, others. The matter that nurtures us is
the same matter that nurtures the merging of collective contributions for
collective storying. Like the decomposing process, collective storying takes
time, heat, fermentation and sensation. Though the potential rich luscious
growth makes it oh so worthwhile.
Slow scholarship ( Mountz et al., 2015 ) provides the ideal conditions for
collectively owned and authored storying, and “good scholarship requires
time: time to think, write, read, research, analyze, edit and collaborate”
Figure 6.2 Storied growth from hot compost piles.
Original Artwork by Louise.
114 Ongoing advocacy for storying
(p. 1237). A commitment to work collectively and to claim due time is a
political act in these neoliberal times. And combined with slowness is care:
care for self, care for collaborators and care for the work to give it due time.
The Women Who Write Collective (n.d.), who collectively story, care for
each other by taking turns to lead the storied writing in a synergistic way,
responding to each other’s demands and needs through an ethic of care.
The Res-Sisters too enact care through their collective storying, through the
collective decision that their collective work can be counted by whichever
member of the collective needs the publication to count to support job secu-
rity and progression (personal communication, Kim Allen, August 9, 2017).
To sustain the collective voice in neoliberalism, we encourage looking out-
wards, taking time to meander, to relate and sensate – making and honouring
those rich, slow, pungent, hot composting piles.
Together/two-gather: storying reflections and actions
We would really welcome your readers’ responses to what we have offered
in this book. This is a starting conversation that builds on the legacy of
many previous conversations of those who have storied before us.
References
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Balla, P., & Delany, M. (Curators). (2017). Sovereignty. Australian Centre for Con-
temporary Art.
Barker, L. L. (Writer/Director). (2014). My grandmother’s country [Motion Picture].
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Bunda, T. (2014). The relationship between Indigenous peoples and the university:
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Australia.
Harraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene.
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Heckenberg, R. (Creative Director). (2016). Yindyamurra sculpture walk. Murray
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in-on-power-privilege-and-being-an-indigenous-writer
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Moreton, R. (2006). The right to dream (Doctoral thesis). University of Western
Sydney, Australia.
Mountz, A., Bonds, A., Mansfield, B., Lloyd, J., Hyndman, J., Walton-Roberts,
M., . . . Curran, W. (2015). For slow scholarship: A feminist politics of resistance
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http://cherbourgmemory.org
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the contemporary university. Rotterdam: Sense Publishing.
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Index
Page numbers in italic indicate a figure on the corresponding page.
Aboriginal; census classifying
Aboriginality 21–22; language for
naming property 25–26; readers 11,
55, 95, 109; term 20; welfare 27, 29,
81; women 11, 17, 74, 111
Aboriginal communities: ancestral stories
of 36–37; grave records of 27; research
in 74–76, 89; storying as living oral
archives 110–112; storytelling in 81,
83, 87
Aboriginal Elders 38, 77, 79, 89, 108
Aboriginal peoples: racialised language
of 23–24; racialised space of research
75; story and storytelling 8; voice in
narrative 6–7
Aboriginal Protection Act 36, 95
Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of
the Sale of Opium Act (1897) 21–22,
28–30
Aboriginal Reserves 20, 22
Adams, Mary 32, 37
Adams, Nancy Ann 31–35, 37;
Permission to Marry record 33, 34;
stitched armband of initials and
hearts 38
administrivia 30, 36
advocacy for storying 105, 114; for
collectively owned and authored stories
112–114; for embodied relational
meaning making 109–110; for
intersecting past and present as living
oral archives 110–112; for nourishing
thought, body and soul 106–107; for
silenced margins 107, 109
agential realism 58, 59, 84
age-old tradition 8, 87, 107
“aha” moments 85
Allen, Kim 106, 114
Ambrose, Martin 98, 99
American Educational Research
Association (AERA) 109
animic ontology 58
Anywhere Festival 98, 98, 99
Anzaldúa, Gloria 51
APA (American Psychological
Association) 65
aphoras 46
archaeological records 100, 103
Archibald, Jo-ann 46, 92
archives, basket of entangled 18
Arendt, Hannah 10, 46
artefact 111
arts-based education research (ABER)
109
arts-based research/researchers 6, 92, 96,
101, 107, 109
atopos 25
Australia: Aboriginal voice in history 6;
colonization of 24–25, 36, 63; First
Nations 26, 92, 101, 111; racialised
nature of 51
Australian Black Power movement 97
Australian Security Intelligence
Organisation (ASIO) 97
Balla, Paola 92, 108
Banks, Joseph 26
Barambah/Cherbourg Aboriginal
Reserve 20, 29
Barambah Settlement 21
118 Index
Barker, Lorina 95, 111
basket: of entangled archives 18; Tracey
on 17–19
Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary
Education 101
Benjamin Walter 10, 56, 64
Bennett, Gordon 26
Bergson Henry 84
Birch, Tony 100
Black, Ali 92–93, 100
Blackie, Sharon 12
black-white race relations 35, 100
Blood (Birch) 100
Blood Quantum (Bunda-Heath) 94;
dancers 94, 95
BOLD (Hardy) 101
Borland-Sentinella, Deanna 98
British Education Research Association
(BERA) 109
Bunda, Tracey 94; see also Tracey
(Bunda)
Bunda-Heath, Ngioka 94
Bunder, Vincent 22
Butterfly woman (La Mariposa) 56–57
Chawla, Devika 7, 36, 44, 45
Cherbourg Memory 95, 111
Children’s Court 54
citizenship: children’s, with Aboriginal
community 76–77, 79–80; declaration
of Australian 24; seeking to redress
injustices through 88
Coffey, Essie 111
Coleman, Kate 95–96
Collis, Paul 80, 83
colonisation: of Aboriginal peoples
74, 80; of Australia 24–25, 36,
63; disciplining effect of 107; of
Indigenous peoples 103; legacies of
94; of Aboriginal peoples 20, 35–36;
stories of 80–81, 83
Community Development Employment
Program 36
convict experience 31–34, 37, 81
Cook, James (Captain) 18, 26–27
Cooper, Jayson 96
Coranderrk Inquiry 97–98
counter metanarratives 50
counter stories 50–52, 101
creativity, bringing stories to life
85–87
Crimmins, Gail 92–93, 96–97, 100
critical race theory (CRT) 51
Cutcher, Alexandra J. 101
Dalton, Mary Elizabeth 54
Dalton, Nellie Ella 54
Davies, Bronwyn 84
decolonisation 24, 85, 107
Delany, Max 92
Department of Native Affairs 22, 28, 62
Derrida, Jacques 38–39, 65
Displacement, Identity and Belonging
(Cutcher) 101
Dreaming stories 8, 45–46
Elaap, story of 103
Embodying Mêtis (Metta) 102
Emergency Response in the Northern
Territory 36
emergent listening 73, 83, 84
End of Capitalism As We Knew It, The
(Gibson-Graham) 66
ethics 73–79; Louise on 76–79; Tracey
on 74–76
family history 20, 25, 27
farang 58, 60
Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway
(Jeffers) 49
Female Factory 33, 37
feminism 11, 38; feminists 51, 65–66,
96–97, 102; theory 11–13
fetishsisation 23
First Nations 26, 92, 101, 111
First Peoples 44, 46
Foley, Gary 97
Framing Fitzroy (Birch) 100
“Freedom Bird, The” (Thai folk tale) 88
genealogies 2, 20, 27, 37
Gibson Katherine 65–66
Gibson-Graham, J. K. 65–66
gifting stories 87–89
Gilbey, Kathryn 101, 111
Graham, Julie 65–66
grandmothering stories 27–32; Louise
on 30–32; Tracey on 28–30
Index 119
Great Lakes Feminist Geography
Collective 65, 66
Greek mythology 45, 102
Grosz, Elizabeth 102
Hardy, David 101
Heckenberg, Robyn 97, 111
Henderson Linda 92–93, 101–102
historia, Latin word 5
history, narrative and 5
Holocene archaeology and Ngarrindjeri
Ruwe/Ruwar (Wilson) 103
Honan, Eileen 101–102
hooks, bell 19, 55
human, defining in storying 8–13
identity: Louise on naming ourselves
24–27; Tracey on naming ourselves
19–24
immersed listening 73, 83
Indigenous 7, 11, 39; communication
modes 102–103; knowledge systems
74; oral tradition 92–93; term 20;
tertiary-education workplace 101;
theorising 85; UN Declaration of
Rights of Indigenous Peoples 97;
wishful thinking 105; worldview 67,
75–76
Indigenous Storywork (Archibald) 46
interbeing 10, 86
Irwin, Rita 110
James, Andrea 97–98
Jeffers, Susan 49
Jess, Pat 65
Jones, Janice 100
Josephs, Caroline 102
Kearns, Douglas 54
Kearns, Lizzie 54
King, Thomas 4, 7
krinkri law 46
kulgoa 25
Kwaymullina, Amberlin 106
Kwaymullina, Blaze 19, 35
La Mariposa (Butterfly woman) 56–57
LGBTI community 101
LindaEileenSarah 101
lines of descent 84
Listen Deeply, Let These Stories In
(Wallace) 43
listening 89; to Elders 38; emergent 73,
83, 84; immersed 73, 83; and learning
76, 79; Louise on 84–85; to music 56;
respectful 76; to stories 2, 7, 19, 56,
67, 73, 82–85, 83; Tracey on 83–84
Literary Award for Indigenous Writing
100
Loch, Sarah 101–102
logos 38
Louise (Phillips) 1; artwork by 113 ; on
bringing stories to life 86–87; and
colleague Kerryn Moroney 77–78;
early childhood and arts education 1;
enacting ownership and authorship
67–69; on ethics 76–79; on gifting
stories 88–89; on grandmothering
stories 30–32; on listening to stories
84–85; on love of stories 2–7; “The
Man Who Had No Story” 47–50; on
naming ourselves 24–27; on source of
stories 80–81, 82; storied growth from
hot compost piles 113 ; on storying
across cultures, times, place and
space 37–39; storying as embodied
meaning making 58–62
love of stories: Louise on 2–7; Tracey
on 2
“Man Who Had No Story, The” 47–49
Massacres to Mining (Roberts) 24
Massey, Doreen 65
Metta, Marilyn 102
Monkivitch, Scotia 68, 68
Montes, Cate 68
Moore, Sharman 31, 32
Moreton Romaine 102–103, 111
Moroney, Kerryn 77–78
naming ourselves: Louise on 24–27;
Tracey on 19–24
Nanni, Giordano 97–98
narrative: pretension and over-
intellectualization of term 4; term
4–6; word 4
narrative inquiry, definition of 7
narrative research, term 5
120 Index
Neighbour, William: Nancy Ann and
33–35; Permission to Marry record 34
neoliberal: academia/university 65–66,
102, 107, 112; neoliberalism 114
Network of Arts-Based Educational
Research (NABER) 110
Nitja Noongar boodjar, derbal 103
Okri, Ben 111
One Billion Beats (Moreton) 103
ontological emptiness 24, 27, 37
Owen, Alice 98
Peirano, Elena 98
Penguin Book of Irish Folktales, The
(Glassie) 47
Phillips, Louise Gwenneth see Louise
(Phillips)
Pinkola Estes, Clarissa 39, 56
Possession Island (Bennett) 26
principles see storying principles
Privileging First Nations Knowledge
(Gilbey) 101, 111
Production of the academicwritingmachine,
The (Henderson et al) 101–102
property, Aboriginal-language names
for 25–26
Queensland: Barambah Settlement 21;
colonial frontier of 23; Legislative
Assembly report on (1874) 28–29
Queensland Department of
Environment 20
Queensland Education Department 17
race: black-white relations 35, 100;
critical race theory (CRT) 51; racial
hierarchical systems 22; racialised
language of Aboriginal peoples
23–24
Ration Shed Museum Initiative 95
recolonisation 8, 24
Reducing the Drag (Black et al) 100
Report on the Books and Accounts of
the Cherbourg Aboriginal Settlement
(1933) 29
Res-Sisters 50, 65–66, 114
restorying, word 7
Reynolds, Henry 24
Right to Dream, The (Moreton) 102–103,
111
Rigney, Darryle 75, 76
Roberts, Janine 24
Rodrigues, Claire 94, 95
sensory ethnography 58–59
Sife, Donna Jacobs 88
Silko, Leslie 55
Slack, John 25
Smith, Linda Tuhui 78–79
sovereignty: Aboriginal 46, 63; enactment
of 31; power and 46; white 35, 46
Sovereignty (exhibition) 92, 111
spacetimemattering 37, 60
sticks and stones, from storying
workshop 3
Stolen Generations 55, 94
Stories Want to be Told (Wooltorton et al)
103
story/stories: grandmothering 27–32;
word 4
storying: across cultures, times, place
and space 36–39; defining the
human in 8–13; definition of 7–8;
embodied 56–57; objectivity of 11–12;
performed, visual and embodied
91–98; subjective world of 11–12; term
43; together/two-gather through 1, 13,
103–104; word 7; written 91, 100–103;
see also advocacy for storying
storying principles 43, 68–69; embodying
relational meaning making 56–57;
enacting collective ownership and
authorship 64–67; giving voice to
silenced margins 50–52; intersecting
past and present as living oral archives
61–62; nourishing thought, body and
soul 44–47
story/ing research see narrative research
Storying Research Facebook 105
storying ways: bringing stories to life
85–87; ethics of 73–79; gifting stories
87–89; method for listening to stories
82–85; source of stories 79–82
storying workshop, sticks and stones
from 3
Storytellers’ Guild 3
storytelling: Aboriginal 83, 87;
imagination of 57; love of story and
2–7, 81; quality of 10; social justice
88; wabi-sabi 93; see also storying
sympathetic imagination 57
terra nullius 26, 45–46
the Act (Aboriginal Protection and
Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act
1897) 21–22, 28–30
together/two-gather 1; diverse ways
for storying 103–104; principles of
storying 68–69; reflections and actions
114; storying 103–104; storying
ancestral stories 39–40; storying
research 89; through storying 1, 13
Tossa, Wajuppa 9
Tracey (Bunda) 1; Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander education
1; on basket 17–19; on bringing
stories to life 85–86; on enacting
ownership and authorship 67; on
ethics 74–76; on gifting stories 87;
on grandmothering stories 28–30; on
listening to stories 83–84; on love
of stories 2; on naming ourselves
19–24; principles of storying 43–44,
47; response to Louise’s ancestral
storying 35; on source of stories 80,
81, 82; on storying across cultures,
times, place and space 35; “Taken”
52–56; “This Young Boy” 62–64
Trask, Haunani-Kay 19
Twee, Josh 94, 95
two-gather 1; see also together/two-gather
University of Sydney 21
Van Diemen’s Land 31–34, 37, 81
Victorian Museum, Sovereignty
exhibition 111
Index 121
Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for
Indigenous Writing 100
wabi-sabi: concept of 92–93;
storytelling 93
Walker, Alice 11
walk experience, Anywhere Festival
(Brisbane) 98, 98, 99
Walking Borders: Arts Activism for
Refugee and Asylum Seeker Rights
(research project) 67–68, 68
Walking Neighbourhood, The (social
practice arts project) 58
Wallace, Kathleen 43–44
Warriors of Aboriginal Resistance 111
Watson, Irene 45
Way of the S/Word, The (Josephs) 102
Wemba Wemba 92, 111
white Australia 25, 31
white Australian 24–25, 82, 96, 101
white feminisms 11
Why Weren’t We Told? (Reynolds) 24
Wilson, Christopher 103
womanist, term 11
Women Who Write Collective, The
65–66, 114
Wooltorton, S. 103
Work for the Dole Programs 36
written storying 91, 100–103
Wunderfools 110
Yindyamurra Sculpture Walk
(Heckenberg) 97, 111
“Young Boy, This” 62–64
Yugara people 25
