While thinking about this huge subject of silencing, the muting of voices, and bullying tactics used to oppress, humiliate, manipulate, create fear and exclude, I thought about how to tell this story about censorship in another way – by visualising an extreme situation where the world was stopped from telling stories. Let’s say we lived in a story-less world where our rich literary traditions no longer existed, and have been excised from memory.

A world without stories. What would this world look like? Would we become even greater strangers to each other? How would I know who you are or how you felt, or what you thought, or what it is like to be you in a world that is in desperate need of creating greater world competency in our understanding of each other?

‘It’s important because the Waanyi language is a really threatened language. There has been a lot of work done to develop a Waanyi dictionary to teach schoolchildren in communities like Doomadgee in the Gulf of Carpentaria, but places like Doomadgee also have children who speak other threatened languages. Doomadgee was once a mission, so there are Waanyi, Gangalidda and Garawa people, and that makes it difficult.’