ABSTRACT
Like many colonial descended people across the globe, my places of intimate habitation are scarred by a genocidal and ecocidal past. The little block of land where I grew to understand myself and the world was stolen from a people who were targeted for annihilation. This deeply uncomfortable awareness calls upon me to engage in what Deborah Bird Rose terms ‘recuperative work’,1 as an act of place fidelity – to be true to the original storying of the place where my own stories were born. In the following pages I work towards understanding how my own stories are entangled with Indigenous Australian stories, including the tragic stories of colonisation. Mark Tredinick writes:
our true names, the only proper way to describe ourselves, are all the storylines we carry, of places and peoples, of histories, cultural and natural . . . To know ourselves we’re going to need a literacy that is ebbing: words and songs for landforms and lifeforms, for clouds and watercourses, for family history and places on maps, for love and grief.2
