‘That’s Not A Story I Could Tell.’ Commemorating the Other Side of the Colonial Frontier in Australian Literature of Reconciliation

Abstract

On 15 February 2010, exactly two years after Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd offered the Apology to Australia’s Indigenous People as the first act of the reconvened parliament, Australian author Kate Grenville was invited to contribute an opinion piece to the Guardian. In her article, Grenville looked back on the progress that the project of reconciliation had since made and conceded that, while there had been some movement, ‘the Rudd government can’t point to any spectacular policy changes or huge improvement in outcomes’. Rejecting the notion, however, that the Apology had been just ‘hot air, a cynical exercise in spin’, Grenville discussed the difficulties faced by the government’s housing programme for Indigenous communities as one example of ‘just how tangled the problems are’. While symbolic acts were never enough, she concluded, the Apology remained an ‘overdue and necessary first step’.1