The past is always with us and carried over into the future, and this was evident in all submissions to the Mildura Indigenous Writers Award. The writing was diverse, engaging and overall very moving. History as ‘past-present-future’ was a strong theme.

When I’m asked why I write poetry, what drives my writing, my answer usually settles on notions of responsibility that are not straightforward or easy to define. It can be a cathartic-compelling, a way of processing and responding to unexpected triggers, or reading and experiencing the work of others.

It is spring. Thirteen-metre waves pummel our South Australian coastlines. Jetties collapse and oceans crash into beach-shack loungerooms. Riverbanks slide and dams burst towards unprecedented floods and emergency warnings. Gale-force winds rage over one hundred and forty kilometres an hour, and eighty thousand-plus lightning strikes fell transmission towers. Tornado-like conditions knock out the grid, triggering chaos and a statewide blackout.

I have spent many hours in outpatient triage-madness, where so many of our elders die way too young from the heaviest of loads, and my heart still lurches when I drive past this hospital. Being anywhere near it triggers ‘re-memory’: the feeling of an uncanny repetition, an encounter with something deeply social and collective. Toni Morrison speaks of re-memories being ‘out there in the world’, waiting for us to bump into them so we can read the signs and know ‘the things behind the things’. Re-memories help us know the whole story.

‘What did it mean for a Black woman to be an artist in our grandmother’s time? It is a question with an answer cruel enough to stop the blood,’ wrote Alice Walker in her 1974 article ‘In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: The Creativity of Black Women in the South’.

Personal narratives are often shared at considerable risk. But they continue to be shared because of their ability to resonate, to inform something much larger, something beyond the self. They counter Australia’s national – at times wilful – amnesia and offer a potential shift toward ‘something else’.