31 A remnant of my own past

The project, Storying the Archive: Evoking the Fryer Library Indigenous Collection, the brainchild of Professor Tracey Bunda, is special. Building a bridge and helping people walk over it into collections by and/or about Mob is necessary. Sandstone buildings typically host these collections. Sandstone stolen from stolen lands.

The culture constrained in the collections is not always. Not always stolen, that is. Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Indigenous-led governance of culture in sandstone-held collections is turning the tide on centuries of theft.

Still, imagine my surprise when I saw a remnant of my own past in one of those durable square cardboard boxes. A salty memo I’d composed and delivered last century. It was not handwritten, although my Cc was. The font looks like Times New Roman, and it looks like I had used a manual typewriter. A book editor likes to know these things.

My single page memo, dated Friday 2 May 1997, concludes that the manuscript I reviewed is ‘disturbing, unethical and unpublishable’; ‘racist’ too. I wrote it while training in-house as a book editor with a university press. At the time I was a sole parent of two offspring who were about to turn four and three. I couldn’t drive. I pushed the children around in a twin pram. I cycled to work. I could swim 50 laps of a 50-metre pool.

Man, I was on fire – body, mind, and soul. And 26 years later, I’d write that memo again.

*                            *                            *

Biography

Wakka Wakka/ Goreng Goreng Professor Sandra Phillips is Honorary Associate Professor in UQ’s School of Communication and Arts. After serving as Associate Dean (Indigenous Engagement), Humanities and Social Sciences, she left in 2023 to take up the role of Associate Dean (Indigenous) in the Faculty of the Arts at the University of Melbourne. She is conducting two ARC-funded research projects, investigating how community groups in regional Australia are using digital technologies to publish and distribute books, and how Indigenous literatures address issues of climate change and sustainability.  Her many years in the publishing industry as manager of Aboriginal Studies Press (Canberra) and  editor with Magabala Books (Broome) and University of Queensland Press (St. Lucia), informed her PhD, which examined Indigenous writing and the Australian publishing industry. Professor Phillips’s extensive contribution to the creative arts sector includes her appointment as Deputy Chair of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board of the Australia Council for the Arts. She has been a member of the Library Board of Queensland, was twice-elected Chairperson of the First Nations Australia Writers Network (FNAWN), and has served as a trustee of the Queensland Performing Arts Trust.