Telling Stories Different

In order for Australia to become truly postcolonial, narrative models need to be transformed. Political responses to contemporary Australia must acknowledge writing as a site to listen in to contemporary Australia and also as a productive force. Lisa Slater has assembled three texts, Kim Scott s Benang, Stephen Muecke s No Road and Margaret Somerville s Body/Landscape Journals, to perform what she argues is a contemporary dialogue. These three texts attempt to generate a postcolonial Australia through composing nomadic, dialogic and anti-colonial forms of storytelling. In turn, the re-forming of Australian textual landscapes participates in the remaking of the country and its people. In drawing these works together, Slater argues that Scott s, Muecke s and Somerville s writing practices, in all their difference, are fuelled by an ethical imperative to face the implications of living in a contested country, and also to generate anti-colonial ways of being in the world.