The first Keynote in Conversation event for Australian Literature in the Shadow of Colonial Patriarchy: Archival Poetics and Memorywork (24 October)

For Indigenous people the "archive" is a critical site of contradiction and double vision, it is both a traumatic space of colonial violence, and a repository of restorative family history. As such the responses of Indigenous writers and artists to the documents, institutions, and structures of the settler-colonial archive are saliently structured by the oppositional priorities of refusal and recovery. These antithetical purposes are manifest in an Indigenous archival poetics which extend the uncanny temporal structures of the archive conceptualised by Jacques Derrida in Archive Fever (1995), and dramatize some of the inherent contradictions of Indigeneity in relation to settlement. These are dynamic tensions however, a critical stimulus towards decolonial working-through and political protest, rather than the closures illustrated by the contradictions of the colonial deficit narrative.

In this discussion, Alice Te Punga Somerville (Te Āti Awa, Taranaki), Natalie Harkin (Narungga) and Jeanine Leane (Wiradjuri) consider diverse and experimental modes of archival, documentary, and memory poetics in a discuss their critical and creative practices of responding to the archive.

The second Keynote in Conversation event for Australian Literature in the Shadow of Colonial Patriarchy: Remembering for Our Futures (25 October)

Australian literary culture has a longstanding hostility towards First Nations stories and storytellers. In recent years there has been a radical shift in the recognition and centring of First Nations literatures in festival programs, publishing lists and prizes. These gains have been hard-won by First Nations writers, publishers and arts workers, but have not been evenly spread amongst all communities, and older, female emerging writers in particular have been excluded from popular literary spaces and opportunities. This conversation between three esteemed elders of First Nations literature will discuss the history and future of our storytelling cultures, and will consider what future work is needed to better support the First Nations female writers in our communities who are still being unheard.

Jackie Huggins, Jeanine Leane, and Jennifer Kamarre Martiniello in conversation.