Mindy Gill
Mindy Gill is the recipient of the Queensland Premier’s Young Writers and Publishers Award, and has received fellowships from the Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship and the Australian Poetry/NAHR Poetry Fellowship in Val Taleggio, Italy, amongst others. She lives in Brisbane, where she is Peril Magazine’s Editor-in-Chief.
Photo: Jeet Thayil
All essays by Mindy Gill
Long After You Have Left This World
History runs in parallel tracks: there is the way things have been told, and the way things were. As in: not colonised, but civilised. And to be made civil, to be made ‘adequate in courtesy and politeness’, as Merriam-Webster defines it, makes it sound like a favour. Language obfuscates. It’s a way of controlling the narrative, forcing the eye into a narrow aperture. A single perspective becomes the singular perspective, which is how colonial literature came to skew mainstream cultural understandings of that period. Mirandi Riwoe seems determined to widen that aperture and, then, to shift the perspective entirely.