Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
Edited by Ashley Hay, Griffith University, $27.99.
Contributing Editor Teela Reid joins Editor Ashley Hay as Griffith Review 76: Acts of Reckoning opens a dialogue for diverse voices, opportunities and perspectives to be articulated, examined and assessed.
It’s a wide-ranging discussion of the multifaceted issues at play in Australia’s fraught journey towards a full settlement with Indigenous peoples.
GR’s engagement with ideas of reckoning stems partly from its commitment to Australia’s first Nations voices and perspectives in its editions. A more authentic story, and a story that makes sense. There’s more to any reckoning than stories – there’s the urgent need for systemic change that undoes gaps, discrimination and statistics; for an end to structural violence and inequity; for voice, treaty, truth in this instance and in that order. But stories stand as part of that whole and a necessary way towards it.
Truth-telling in a post-truth world. Five years on from the invitation of the Uluru Statement from the Heart and its rejection at the highest levels of politics, tensions continue between long denials and new possibilities: when will Australia heal its brutal legacy of settler colonialism? The Statement calls for the ‘establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution’.
This edition examines this reckoning and raises questions that cut to the heart of the legitimacy of the Australian nation state.
According to GR76, 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.
“Examining questions of history, truth-telling and decolonisation, and revisiting colonial figures and their ongoing legacies, Acts of Reckoning reframes the past to imagine new futures – and celebrates how much work is already underway. We are in the reckoning.”
