By Simon Luckhurst
Aunty Barbara Nicholson has been publishing the voices of First Nations inmates from Junee Gaol for over a decade. This year sees the launch of Volume 11 in a series known as Dreaming Inside. And this year she’s supported by one of Australia’s strongest advocates for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament: Professor Tom Calma, AO.
Tom will be launching Dreaming Inside Volume 11 at Wollongong Art Gallery, Burelli Street, Wollongong on Thursday, 25 May at 6pm.
Tom is a Kungarakan/Iwaidja man. He’s Chancellor of the University of Canberra and only the second Aboriginal person to hold the position of Chancellor in Australia. He was Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner from 2004 to 2010. He’s co-chair of the Australian Literacy and Numeracy Foundation and was awarded the Order of Australia because of his work as an advocate for human rights and social justice and distinguished service to the Indigenous community.
More recently he’s been co-chair of the Senior Advisory Group of the Indigenous Voice to Government. In this year of the Voice, he’s here to launch another in a unique series of books that un-silences the voices of so many people whose voices have been silenced for so long.
Aunty Barb quotes Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz who once said of biographies: "Biographies are like shells; they don’t tell us much about the molluscs that live in them." She argues that this observation does not apply to autobiographical works in the pages of Dreaming Inside.
"They are not molluscs inside shells. These sometimes ever so brief pieces reveal a great deal about the authors themselves, and a great deal more about the injustices of colonisation and its legacies in relation to the lives of the First Australians."
She adds: "No mollusc ever had a voice this loud or this important."
The launch of Dreaming Inside is an opportunity to celebrate First Nations culture.
As well as the launch of the books, there will be a cultural dance display, and an auction of inmate artwork to raise funds for the programme. Poems will be read and there is an opportunity to purchase the books. Entry is via a gold coin donation.
You can obtain tickets at events.humanitix.com/dreaming-inside-11
