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Quarterly Essay 64 The Australian Dream
In a landmark essay, Stan Grant writes Indigenous people back into the economic and multicultural history of Australia. This is the fascinating story of how fringe dwellers fought not just to survive, but to prosper. Their legacy is the extraordinary flowering of Indigenous success – cultural, sporting, intellectual and social – that we see today. Yet this flourishing co-exists with the boys of Don Dale, and the many others like them who live in the shadows of the nation. Grant examines how such Australians have been denied the possibilities of life, and argues eloquently that history is not destiny; that culture is not static. In doing so, he makes the case for a more capacious Australian Dream. ‘The idea that I am Australian hits me with a thud. It is a blinding self-realisation that collides with the comfortable notion of who I am. To be honest, for an Indigenous person, it can feel like a betrayal somehow – at the very least, a capitulation. We are so used to telling ourselves that Australia is a white country: am I now white? The reality is more ambiguous … To borrow from Franz Kafka, identity is a cage in search of a bird.’ —Stan Grant, The Australian Dream
Talking to My Country
An extraordinarily powerful and personal meditation on race, culture, and identity. When Stan Grant was born in Australia in 1963, the national census classed him and his family among the country’s flora and fauna. As Aboriginal Australians, their history and culture had been suppressed for centuries. A legacy of racism stood between him and the opportunities that white Australia - the so-called Lucky County - seemed awash with. But Grant was lucky enough to find an escape route through education. Finding early inspiration in the writing of James Baldwin and fellow indigenous activists at the Australian National University, on completing his studies he went on to become one of the country'...
Australia Day
'As uncomfortable as it is, we need to reckon with our history. On January 26, no Australian can really look away.' Since publishing his critically acclaimed, Walkley Award-winning, bestselling memoir Talking to My Country in early 2016, Stan Grant has been crossing the country, talking to huge crowds everywhere about how racism is at the heart of our history and the Australian dream. But Stan knows this is not where the story ends. In this book, Australia Day, his long-awaited follow up to Talking to My Country, Stan talks about our country, about who we are as a nation, about the indigenous struggle for belonging and identity in Australia, and what it means to be Australian. A sad, wise, b...
With the Falling of the Dusk
A deeply powerful, poetic and compelling book on the challenges facing our world, from one of Australia's most experienced journalists and international commentators, Stan Grant. History is turning. In only a few short decades, we have come a long way from Francis Fukuyama's declaration of the 'end of history' and the triumph of liberal democracy in 1989. Now, with the inexorable rise of China, the ascendancy of authoritarianism and the retreat of democracy, the world stands at a moment of crisis. This is a time of momentous upheaval and enormous geopolitical shifts, compounded by the global pandemic, economic collapse and growing inequality, Islamist and far right terror, and a resurgent wh...
On Identity
Why does identity demand a choice between black and white? Tribalism, nationalism and sectarianism are dividing the world into us and them. Are we hard wired for hate? Stan Grant argues that it is time to leave identity behind and to embrace cosmopolitanism. On Identity is a meditation on hope and community. 'Love is always the answer, it is said. Not if you are trying from somewhere in the Aboriginal domain to answer the cruel question, "Are you black or white?" Mapping family ties or finding a sense of self should be about love, but in the end, it is too often about politics. You must read this book if you have wondered why we make the choices we do.' MARCIA LANGTON
Tell It to the World
As an Aboriginal Australian, Grant has had to contend with his country's racist legacy all his life. Born into adversity, he found an escape route through education, going on to become one of Australia's leading journalists and a correspondent for CNN. Here, he presents an extraordinarily powerful and personal meditation on race, culture, and identity.
On Thomas Keneally
Keneally’s caricature of a self-loathing Jimmie Blacksmith is a lost opportunity to explore the complex ways that Aboriginal people . . . were pushing against a white world that would not accept them for who they were; that would not see them as equal; that, in truth, would not see them as human. Acclaimed journalist Stan Grant weaves literary criticism, philosophy and memoir to shed light on The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. Drawing parallels with Indigenous writers Tara June Winch and Bruce Pascoe, Grant brilliantly re-examines Keneally’s novel, raising questions about identity, modernity and storytelling. In the Writers on Writers series, leading authors reflect on an Australian writer who has inspired and fascinated them. Provocative and crisp, these books start a fresh conversation between past and present, shed new light on the craft of writing, and introduce some intriguing and talented authors and their work. Published by Black Inc. in association with the University of Melbourne and State Library Victoria.
Murriyang
Stan Grant is talking to his country in a new way. In his most poetic and inspiring work yet, he offers a means of moving beyond the binaries and embracing a path to peace and forgiveness, rooted in the Wiradjuri spiritual practice of Yindyamarra – deep silence and respect. Murriyang, in part Grant’s response to the Voice referendum, eschews politics for love. In this gorgeous, grace-filled book, he zooms out to reflect on the biggest questions, ranging across the history, literature, theology, music and art that has shaped him. Setting aside anger for kindness, he reaches past the secular to the sacred and transcendent. Informed by spiritual thinkers from around the world, Murriyang is a Wiradjuri prayer in one long uninterrupted breath, challenging Western notions of linear time in favour of a time beyond time – the Dreaming. Murriyang is also very personal, each meditation interleaved with a memory of Grant’s father, a Wiradjuri cultural leader. It asks how any of us can say goodbye to those we love. This is a book for our current moment, and something for the ages.
The Tears of Strangers
A family memoir, charting the political and social changes of Aborigines over the period of 40 years. This is a story, spanning the generations of the 'Wiradjuri people'.
The End of Days
Winner of the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize From one of the most daring voices in European fiction, this is a story of the twentieth century traced through the various possible lives of one woman. She is a baby who barely suffocates in the cradle. Or perhaps not? She lives to become as an adult and dies beloved. Or dies betrayed. Or perhaps not? Her memory is honoured. Or she is forgotten by everyone. Moving from a small Galician town at the turn of the century, through pre-war Vienna and Stalin's Moscow to present-day Berlin, Jenny Erpenbeck homes in on the moments when life follows a particular branch and 'fate' suddenly emerges from the sly interplay between history, character and pure chance. The End of Days is a novel that pulls apart the threads of destiny and allows us to see the present and the past anew.
