Telling Stories Different

In order for Australia to become truly postcolonial, narrative models need to be transformed. Political responses to contemporary Australia must acknowledge writing as a site to listen in to contemporary Australia and also as a productive force. Lisa Slater has assembled three texts, Kim Scott's Benang, Stephen Muecke's No Road and Margaret Somerville's Body/Landscape Journals, to perform what she argues is a contemporary dialogue. These three texts attempt to generate a postcolonial Australia through composing nomadic, dialogic and anti-colonial forms of storytelling. In turn, the re-forming of Australian textual landscapes participates in the remaking of the country and its people. In drawing these works together, Slater argues that Scott's, Muecke's and Somerville's writing practices, in all their difference, are fuelled by an ethical imperative to face the implications of living in a contested country, and also to generate anti-colonial ways of being in the world.