Alison Whittaker

For years, my emotional needs have been tended to by people on the internet who do not know me.

The Colonial Fantasy could have been a book that shaped how future settler publics saw their predecessors – it’s what I hoped for when I opened it – but that ambition falls flat. And as she asks her peers to pull out of governing us, is Maddison not doing her own supplanting?

Terra Nullius is terra nullius, but not as we know it. It’s colonisation, this continent, time, place, Country, race – but not quite as we know it.

For all the not-hereness, not-thereness of Aboriginality under colonisation, it seems that Redfern is the best place in Sydney to find what it means to be neither here nor there. A place to build an Indigenous self and community from what is physically and conceptually displaced.

Whittaker uses English as both an object of ridicule and a tool of empowerment. In subverting the conventional rules of usage, she makes it her own. In her hand, English does and says and tells a different story. Audre Lorde said that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. And they won’t. But Blak writers like Whittaker use these tools to carve out their own spaces to build other story – to re-story Country with the old stories, and to create new ones.