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Griffith Review #76
Griffith Review 76 Acts of Reckoning
Truth-telling in a post-truth world.
Four years on from the Uluru Statement from the Heart, there’s a clear divide between the groundswell of popular support to recognise the rightful place of First Nations people in Australia’s democratic life and ongoing political inertia in the same space. Griffith Review 76: Acts of Reckoning is a wide-ranging discussion of the multifaceted issues at play in Australia’s fraught journey towards a full settlement with Indigenous peoples. What might be possible for Australia’s narrative when reconciliation between the world’s oldest continuing culture and one of its newest nation states is achieved? And how can this take place in an era of quick assumptions and divides, alternative facts and cancellations? Examining questions of history, truth-telling and decolonisation and revisiting colonial figures and assumptions and their ongoing legacies – in Australia and beyond – Acts of Reckoning reframes the past in order to form new futures, and celebrates how much work is already underway.
Four years on from the Uluru Statement from the Heart, there’s a clear divide between the groundswell of popular support to recognise the rightful place of First Nations people in Australia’s democratic life and ongoing political inertia in the same space. Griffith Review 76: Acts of Reckoning is a wide-ranging discussion of the multifaceted issues at play in Australia’s fraught journey towards a full settlement with Indigenous peoples. What might be possible for Australia’s narrative when reconciliation between the world’s oldest continuing culture and one of its newest nation states is achieved? And how can this take place in an era of quick assumptions and divides, alternative facts and cancellations? Examining questions of history, truth-telling and decolonisation and revisiting colonial figures and assumptions and their ongoing legacies – in Australia and beyond – Acts of Reckoning reframes the past in order to form new futures, and celebrates how much work is already underway.
323 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2022
About the author
Ashley Hay
43 books224 followersAshley Hay’s new novel, A Hundred Small Lessons, was published in Australia, the US and the UK and was shortlisted for categories in the 2017 Queensland Literary Awards.
Set in her new home city of Brisbane, it traces the intertwined lives of two women from different generations through a story of love, and of life. It takes account of what it means to be mother or daughter; father or son and tells a rich and intimate story of how we feel what it is to be human, and how place can transform who we are.
Her previous novel, The Railwayman’s Wife, was published in Australia, the UK, the US, and is heading for translation into Italian, French and Dutch. It won the Colin Roderick Prize (awarded by the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies), as well as the People's Choice award in the 2014 NSW Premier's Prize, and was also longlisted for both the Miles Franklin and Nita B. Kibble awards.
Her first novel, The Body in the Clouds (2010), was shortlisted for categories in the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the NSW and WA premier’s prizes, and longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Her previous books span fiction and non-fiction and include Gum: The Story of Eucalypts and Their Champions (2002), Museum (2007; with visual artist Robyn Stacey), and Best Australian Science Writing 2014 (as editor)s
A writer for more than 20 years, her essays and short stories have appeared in volumes including the Griffith Review, Best Australian Essays (2003), Best Australian Short Stories (2012), and Best Australian Science Writing (2012), and have been awarded various accolades in Australia and overseas. In 2016, she received the Bragg UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing.
Set in her new home city of Brisbane, it traces the intertwined lives of two women from different generations through a story of love, and of life. It takes account of what it means to be mother or daughter; father or son and tells a rich and intimate story of how we feel what it is to be human, and how place can transform who we are.
Her previous novel, The Railwayman’s Wife, was published in Australia, the UK, the US, and is heading for translation into Italian, French and Dutch. It won the Colin Roderick Prize (awarded by the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies), as well as the People's Choice award in the 2014 NSW Premier's Prize, and was also longlisted for both the Miles Franklin and Nita B. Kibble awards.
Her first novel, The Body in the Clouds (2010), was shortlisted for categories in the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the NSW and WA premier’s prizes, and longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Her previous books span fiction and non-fiction and include Gum: The Story of Eucalypts and Their Champions (2002), Museum (2007; with visual artist Robyn Stacey), and Best Australian Science Writing 2014 (as editor)s
A writer for more than 20 years, her essays and short stories have appeared in volumes including the Griffith Review, Best Australian Essays (2003), Best Australian Short Stories (2012), and Best Australian Science Writing (2012), and have been awarded various accolades in Australia and overseas. In 2016, she received the Bragg UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
September 18, 2022
This was my first Griffith Review, and it did not disappoint. It took me a very long time to read, and it was quite laborious reading, but it's very academic and designed to be that way. It was also very, very rewarding.
What's quite clear is that a Reckoning is coming, from the First Nations people whose lands were stolen by white people and non-Indigenous people on the land we now call Australia. It's coming from all sides, and the complexity of the various essays in this anthology makes that very clear. I don't espouse to know anything about the First Nations knowledge shared in this book, but I am extremely grateful to have been able to read and engage with it.
I had a few favourite essays, stories and poems, but one in particular stuck out because it was relevant to me, and it was the one about which I had the most understanding, as a lawyer who works in the immigration space. I wrote my law school thesis on the concept of "belonging" in the case Love; Thoms v Commonwealth from 2020, and really appreciated and understood the "God powers" essay by Peter Prince and Eve Lester. I'd been reading the Griffith Review like a novel, from front to back, and when I hit this essay in the middle of the book, I was thrilled to be able to engage deeply with the subject matter.
What I've learned from my experience of this edition of the Griffith Review is: first of all, I am so very grateful that publications like the Griffith Review exist, to academically challenge the existing status quo, and to do so from a place of well-justified knowledge, from various scholars and people with important insights into issues that are relevant to modern Australia. Secondly, I feel like I know a lot more now about the Reckoning that is coming, and I feel more prepared to understand what I might hear on the radio about the Voice in the next year or so in the lead up to a referendum. Thirdly, I loved it, but my brain hurts. Considering how academic my day job is, I need to read a bit more light fiction in my time off!
Anyway, I truly recommend the Griffith Review, and this edition in particular - it is packed full of important truths that we all need to know going forward.
What's quite clear is that a Reckoning is coming, from the First Nations people whose lands were stolen by white people and non-Indigenous people on the land we now call Australia. It's coming from all sides, and the complexity of the various essays in this anthology makes that very clear. I don't espouse to know anything about the First Nations knowledge shared in this book, but I am extremely grateful to have been able to read and engage with it.
I had a few favourite essays, stories and poems, but one in particular stuck out because it was relevant to me, and it was the one about which I had the most understanding, as a lawyer who works in the immigration space. I wrote my law school thesis on the concept of "belonging" in the case Love; Thoms v Commonwealth from 2020, and really appreciated and understood the "God powers" essay by Peter Prince and Eve Lester. I'd been reading the Griffith Review like a novel, from front to back, and when I hit this essay in the middle of the book, I was thrilled to be able to engage deeply with the subject matter.
What I've learned from my experience of this edition of the Griffith Review is: first of all, I am so very grateful that publications like the Griffith Review exist, to academically challenge the existing status quo, and to do so from a place of well-justified knowledge, from various scholars and people with important insights into issues that are relevant to modern Australia. Secondly, I feel like I know a lot more now about the Reckoning that is coming, and I feel more prepared to understand what I might hear on the radio about the Voice in the next year or so in the lead up to a referendum. Thirdly, I loved it, but my brain hurts. Considering how academic my day job is, I need to read a bit more light fiction in my time off!
Anyway, I truly recommend the Griffith Review, and this edition in particular - it is packed full of important truths that we all need to know going forward.
Displaying 1 of 1 review