21 August

What aboriginal Australians know and we don’t, is that the world isn’t made of facts. It’s made of stories. Every fact is a story, it only makes sense within a narrative framework. Nicolas Rothwell, a writer, travels remoter parts of Australia, and has fascinating ideas about Australia. One, that Germaine Greer was shouted down for saying years ago, is that Australian narratives are shaped by the landscape and aboriginal people, without us even realising. And how Australia is resistant to the traditional novel form, to the framing of existence in novel-type stories. There’s a fascinating convergence between Australian story-telling, and Aboriginal stories. As Greer also said, we are more Aboriginal than we realise, so much of what being Australian means we took from them, and the landscape.