Content uploaded by Louise Gwenneth Phillips
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Louise Gwenneth Phillips on Apr 28, 2022
Content may be subject to copyright.
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.
References
Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 (Qld). Retrieved
from www.foundingdocs.gov.au/resources/transcripts/qld5_doc_1897.pdf
Alexander, B. (2005). Performance ethnography: The reenacting and inciting of cul-
ture. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research
(pp. 411–441). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread
of nationalism (2nd ed.). London: Verso.
Arbon, V. (2008). Arlathirnda Ngurkarnda Ityirnda: Being-knowing: Doing-decolonising
indigenous tertiary education. Brisbane: Post Pressed.
Arendt, H. (1998). The human condition (2nd ed.). Chicago: The University of Chi-
cago Press (Original work published 1958).
Benjamin, W. (1999). Illuminations (H. Zorn, Trans.). London: Pimlico (Original
English version published 1968).
Berger, R. J., & Quinney, R. (2005). The narrative turn in social inquiry. In R. J.
Berger & R. Quinney (Eds.), Storytelling sociology: Narrative as social inquiry
(pp. 1–11). Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers.
Blackie, S. (2016). If women rose rooted: The journey to authenticity and belonging.
London: September Publishing.
Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of
theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). New York:
Greenwood Press.
Bristow, W. (2017, Summer). Enlightenment: The Stanford encyclopedia of philoso-
phy. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/enlightenment/
14 Beginning stories and storying
Bruner, J. (2003). Self-making narratives. In R. Fivusch & C. A. Haden (Eds.), Auto-
biographical memory and construction of a narrative self: Developmental and
cultural perspectives (pp. 209–225). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Bunda, T. (2014). The relationship between indigenous peoples and the university:
Solid or what! (Doctoral thesis). University of South Australia, Australia.
Chawla, D. (2011). Between stories and theories: Embodiments, disembodiments,
and other struggles. In D. Chawla & A. Rodriguez (Eds.), Liminal traces: Sto-
rying, performing, and embodying postcoloniality (pp. 13–24). Rotterdam, The
Netherlands: Sense Publishers.
Clandinin, D. J. (2013). Engaging in narrative inquiry. Walnut Creek, CA: Left
Coast Press.
Clandinin, D. J., & Murphy, M. S. (2007). Looking ahead: Conversations with Elliot
Mishler, Don Polkinghorne, & Amia Lieblich. In D. J. Clandinin (Ed.), Handbook
of narrative inquiry: Mapping a methodology (pp. 632–651). Thousand Oaks:
Sage.
Clandinin, D. J., & Rosiek, J. (2007). Mapping a landscape of narrative inquiry:
Borderland spaces and tensions. In D. J. Clandinin (Ed.), Handbook of narrative
inquiry: Mapping a methodology (pp. 35–76). Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Connelly, F. M., & Clandinin, D. J. (1990). Stories of experience and narrative
inquiry. Educational Researcher, 19(5), 2–14.
Davies, B., & Gannon, S. (2006). Doing collective biography. Berkshire: Open Uni-
versity Press.
Dodson, P. (2007). Whatever happened to reconciliation? In J. Altman & M. Hink-
son (Eds.), Coercive reconciliation: Stabilise, normalise exit Aboriginal Australia
(pp. 21–30). North Carlton, Australia: Arena Publications Association.
Dudgeon, P., Kelley, K., & Walker, R. (2010). Closing the gaps in and through indig-
enous health research: Guidelines, processes and practices. Australian Aboriginal
Studies, 2, 81–91.
Ellis, C. (2004). The ethnographic I: A methodological novel about autoethnogra-
phy. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.
Fisher, W. R. (1987). Human communication as narration. Columbia: University of
South Carolina Press.
Frank, A. W. (2010). Letting stories breathe: A socio-narratology. Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press.
Gilbey, K. (2014). Privileging First Nations knowledge: Looking back to move
forward (Doctoral thesis). Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education,
Australia.
Gottschall, J. (2012). The storytelling animal: How stories make us human. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the
privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 574–599.
Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, cyborgs, and women. New York: Routledge.
Herbert, J. (2010). Indigenous studies: Tool of empowerment within the academe.
Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, 39, 22–31.
Beginning stories and storying 15
King, T. (2003). The truth about stories: A native narrative. Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press.
Kristeva, J. (2001). Hannah Arendt: Life is a narrative (R. Guberman, Trans.). New
York: Columbia University Press.
Leavy, P. (2014). Method meets art: Arts-based research practice. New York: Guild-
ford Publications.
Martin, K. L. (2008). Please knock before you enter: Aboriginal regulation of out-
siders and the implications for researchers. Teneriffe: Post Pressed.
McIntrye, S., & Clark, A. (2003). The history wars. Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne
University Press.
Moreton-Robinson, A. (2013). Towards an Australian indigenous women’s stand-
point theory: A methodological tool. Australian Feminist Studies, 28(78), 331–347.
Morley, L. (1997). A class of one’s own: Women, social class and the academy. In
P. Mahony & C. Zmroczek (Eds.), Class matters: Working-class women’s per-
spectives on social class (pp. 109–122). London: Taylor and Francis.
Nakata, M. (2007). Disciplining the savages: Savaging the discipline. Canberra:
Aboriginal Studies Press.
Native Names. (1898, December 17). Evening news (Sydney, NSW: 1869–1931),
p. 8 (EVENING NEWS CHRISTMAS NUMBER). Retrieved from http://nla.
gov.au/nla.news-article114041354
Nussbaum, M. (1997). Cultivating humanity: A classical defense of reform in liberal
education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Online Etymology Dictionary. (2017). Story. Retrieved from www.etymonline.com/
index.php?term=story
Phillips, L. G. (1999). The role of storytelling in early literacy development. Rattler,
51, 12–15.
Phillips, L. G. (2010). Young children’s active citizenship: Storytelling, stories and
social actions (Doctoral thesis). Queensland University of Technology, Australia.
Richardson, L. (1994). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lin-
coln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 516–529). Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage.
Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.
Schamberger, K. (2006). 150 years of the NSW registry of births, deaths and mar-
riages.Retrieved from www.australianhistoryresearch.info/150-years-of-the-nsw-
registry-of-births-deaths-and-marriages/
Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonising methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples
(2nd ed.). London: Zed Books.
Smith, W. (2007). Origin of the word ‘story’. Retrieved from www.waitsel.com/
screenwriting/Story.html
Sobol, J., Gentile, J., & Sunwolf. (2004). Once upon a time: An introduction to the
inaugural issue. Storytelling, Self, Society: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Story-
telling Studies, 1(1), 1–7.
Tossa, W. (2012). Global storytelling and local cultural preservation and revitaliza-
tion. Storytelling, Self, Society, 8(3), 194–201.
16 Beginning stories and storying
Trask, H.-K. (1993). From a native daughter: Colonialism and sovereignty in
Hawai’i. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Walker, A. (1983). In search of our mothers’ gardens: Womanist prose. San Diego:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
White, J. (Ed.). (2016). Permission: The international interdisciplinary impact of
Laurel Richardson’s work. Innovations and Controversies: Interrogating Educa-
tional, Change, 4. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers.
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.
References
Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 (Qld). Retrieved
from www.foundingdocs.gov.au/resources/transcripts/qld5_doc_1897.pdf
Ahmed, S. (2005). The politics of bad feeling. Australian Critical Race and White-
ness Studies Association Journal, 1, 72–85.
Ahmed, S. (2014). Willful subjects. London: Duke University Press.
Archives Office of Tasmania. (2007a). Digitised record item: CON40–1–2. Retrieved
from http://search.archives.tas.gov.au/ImageViewer/image_viewer.htm?CON40-
1-2,266,24,F,60
Archives Office of Tasmania (2007b). Digitised record item: CON19-1-3. Retrieved
from http://search.archives.tas.gov.au/ImageViewer/image_viewer.htm?CON19-
1-3,230,135,F,52
Archives Office of Tasmania (2007c). Digitised record item: CON31-1-33. Retrieved
from http://search.archives.tas.gov.au/ImageViewer/image_viewer.htm?CON31-
1-33,152,57,F,60
Archives Office of Tasmania (2007d). Digitised record item: CON52-1-2p069.
Retrieved from https://stors.tas.gov.au/CON52-1-2p069
Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2006). Census history in Tasmania. Retrieved from
www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/7d12b0f6763c78caca257061001cc588/7ece0
45bc4080344ca256c320024164d!OpenDocument
Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. (2017).
Research. Retrieved from http://aiatsis.gov.au/sites/default/files/docs/family_
history_kit/Sources-birth-death-marriage-records.pdf
Barad, K. (2010). Quantum entanglements and hauntological relations of inheri-
tance: Dis/continuities, spacetime enfoldings, and justice-to-come. Derrida Today,
3(2), 240–268.
Barnard, S. (2016). Convict tattoos: Marked men and women of Australia. Melbourne,
Australia: Text Publishing.
Beaglehole, J. C. (Ed.). (1955). The journals of Captain James Cook on his voy-
ages of discovery, Vol. 1, the voyage of the Endeavour, 1768–1771. Surrey, UK:
Hakluyt Society.
Blackie, S. (2016). If women rose rooted: The journey to authenticity and belonging.
London: September Publishing.
Blake, T. (2001). A dumping ground: A history of the Cherbourg settlement. St Lucia:
University of Queensland Press.
Bunda, T. (2007). The sovereign Aboriginal woman. In A. Moreton-Robinson (Ed.),
Sovereign subjects: Indigenous sovereignty matters. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen &
Unwin.
Bunda, T. (2014). The relationship between Indigenous peoples and the university:
Solid or what! (Doctoral thesis). University of South Australia, Australia.
Locating self in storying 41
Champney, J., & Pickering, J. (1997). One hundred and forty years of our brook
family in Australia 1856–1996. Australia: Author.
Chawla, D. (2011). Between stories and theories embodiments, disembodiments,
and other struggles. In D. Chawla & A. Rodriguez (Eds.), Liminal traces: Story-
ing, performing, and embodying postcoloniality (Vol. 72, pp. 13–24). Rotterdam,
The Netherlands: Sense Publishers.
Colebrook, C. (2008). Narrative happiness and the meaning of life. New Forma-
tions, 63, 85–102.
Derrida, J. (1991). Cinders (N. Lukacher, Trans.). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Estes, C. P. (1992). Women who run with the wolves: Contacting the power of the
wild woman. London: Rider.
Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, cyborgs, and women. New York: Routledge.
hooks, b. (1995). Writing autobiography. In M. Blair, J. Holland, & S. Sheldon
(Eds.), Identity and diversity: Gender and the experience of education (pp. 3–7).
Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. (2007). Social justice report
chapter 3: The Northern Territory emergency response intervention (Report
No. 1/2008). Retrieved from www.humanrights.gov.au/publications/social-justice-
report-2007-chapter-3-northern-territory-emergency-response-intervention
Keirs, R. G. (1997). A promised land: A family history of early Queensland settlers
(2nd ed.). Lidcombe, NSW: Author.
Kristeva, J. (1981). Women’s time (A. Jardine & H. Blake, Trans.). Signs, 7(1), 13–35.
Kwaymullina, B. (2007). Introduction: Listening through the heart. In S. Morgan,
M. Tjalaminu, & B. Kwaymullina (Eds.), Speaking from the heart stories of life,
family and country. Fremantle, Western Australia: Fremantle Arts Press Centre.
Langton, M. (1993). “Well, I heard it on the radio and I saw it on the television”:
An essay for the Australian film commission on the politics and aesthetics of film-
making by and about Aboriginal people and things. North Sydney, NSW: Austra-
lian Film Commission.
Lawlor, R. (2012). Crime in nineteenth-century Ireland: Grangegorman female pen-
itentiary and Richmond male penitentiary, with reference to juveniles and women,
1836–60 (Doctoral thesis). National University of Ireland Maynooth, Ireland.
Logan City Council. (2017). Slacks Creek. Retrieved from www.logan.qld.gov.au/
about- logan/suburbs/slacks-creek
Native Names. (1898, December 17). Evening news (Sydney, NSW: 1869–1931),
p. 8 (EVENING NEWS CHRISTMAS NUMBER). Retrieved from http://nla.
gov.au/nla.news-article114041354
Nicolacopoulos, T., & Vassilacopoulos, G. (2014). Indigenous sovereignty and the
being of the occupier: Manifesto for a white Australian philosophy of origins. Mel-
bourne: Re.Press.
Nye, A., Barker, L., & Charteris, J. (2016). Matrilineal narratives: Learning from
voices and objects. Hecate: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Women’s Liberation,
41(1/2), 180–190.
Queensland Legislative Assembly. (1874). Aborigines of Queensland: Report of the
commissioners. Retrieved from http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-53959500
42 Locating self in storying
Radstone, S. (2010). Nostalgia: Home-comings and departures. Memory Stud-
ies,3(3), 187–191.
Renwick, W. (Ed.). (1991). Sovereignty and indigenous rights: The treaty of Wait-
angi in international contexts. Wellington: Victoria University Press.
Reynolds, H. (1999). Why weren’t we told? A personal search for the truth about our
history. Ringwood, VIC: Viking Press.
Roberts, J. (1981). Massacres to mining: The colonisation of Australia. Blackburn,
VIC: Dove Communications.
Swiss, D. (2010). Tin ticket: The heroic journey of Australia’s convict women. New
York: Berkley Publishing Group.
Trask, H.-K. (1993). From a native daughter: Colonialism and sovereignty in
Hawai’i. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Van Diemen’s Land Database. (2017). Nancy Adams entry 811. Retrieved from http://
itsfilemaker2.its.utas.edu.au/fmi/webd#Female_Convicts_in_VDL_database
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