True Stories: History, Politics, Aboriginality

In 1999 Dr Inga Clendinnen delivered six lectures as part of the Boyer Lectures, a series broadcast nationally on ABC radio. True Stories is those lectures in essay form, released by Text for the first time since Inga was recognised with the title Officer in the Order of Australia in 2006.

In True Stories, Inga declares her belief that democratic peoples need true stories about their past and urged responsiveness to a multiplicity of stories catching the experiences of different individuals in different situations.

The reader catches the experience of individuals through fragments – a woman being manhandled on a beach, an old man remembering the hard lessons of his boyhood in a Jesuit mission, an old woman urgently dancing the history of her country – and is given a frank and challenging review of race relations in Australia. True Stories allows us to better understand how this nation has come to be what it is today.