One Aunty says — / I don’t remember. Her mother says / she was only half. The other Aunty says / we’re nearly white.

The Voice referendum is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for the younger demographic to shape the future of the nation. Future generations of younger Australians will have to live with the outcome of October 14 for quite some time. If the referendum is defeated, it mean a nation was given the opportunity to recognise its First People and refused it.

Judges notes from the 2021 Kuracca Prize for Australian Literature.

Of the many stories we read, ‘The Case of G: A Child Raised by Trains’ was easily one of the most original takes on the travel theme. Framed as an article for an academic journal, Dearborn’s story follows the case of an impoverished child found living among trains. One of those trains in fact—the 6.55 am from Greenhill Station—the young girl has taken to calling ‘ma’.

The 'white imagination' imagines itself as limitless – boundless, colourless, neutral and universal. Within the white imagination there is an invisible charter of rights that I hear frequently quoted, touted, lauded: it is my right to imagine whatever I want! My imagination is free!

Black child — born deviant from norms of western culture. Dispossessed like a refugee in a sea of white divisiveness where cognitive capabilities are measured on a colour scale according to my phenotypic reality.

Vale Kuracca, Aunty Kerry Reed-Gilbert, as you fly high and safe on the journey back to your Dreaming. Under your wings is the strength of us as Black writers.

In 1857, English journalist and author Frank Fowler visited the colony of NSW and wrote with much excitement that ‘our fictionists have fallen upon the soil of Australia, like so many industrious diggers and though merely scratching and fossicking the surface have turned up much precious and malleable stuff.’ Fowler’s brief nineteenth-century summation of the Australian literary landscape still resonates today.

All five poems on this year’s Nakata Brophy Prize shortlist – Jazz Money’s ‘as we attack’, Kirli Saunders’ ‘A dance of hands’, Laniyuk Garcon’s ‘Remember’, Raelee Lancaster’s ‘haunted house’ and Susie Anderson’s ‘revolve’ – are testimony to the diverse work of emerging Indigenous poets, not only in the Nakata Brophy Prize submissions, but more broadly across the country.

They come out to the community in a big four-wheel drive – towin’ flash campin’ gear – looked like they’d be stayin’ awhile – set up camp. The historians – they said they were – come out to help us tell our story.

In the late 1960s, when I was about eight, I announced to my aunt that I wanted to be white. If I were white, I explained, I would see myself everywhere – on television, on posters, in magazines, in books. Even at that young age, I knew I was unlikely to recognise myself in a book. If I did, it would be as a primitive, half-naked, thieving, violent savage, or the tragic drunken relic of a civilisation on the brink of extinction, or the wanton woman – Venus half-caste.