Tell It to the World: an indigenous memoir

By Stan Grant

As an Aboriginal Australian, Stan Grant has had to contend with his country’s racist legacy all his life. Born into adversity, he found an escape route through education and the writing of James Baldwin, going on to become one of Australia’s leading journalists.

As a correspondent for CNN, he travelled the world, covering conflicts everywhere, from Baghdad to North Korea. Struck by how the human spirit can endure in the face of repression, he found the experiences of individuals he met spoke to him of the undying call of family and homeland. In the stories of other dispossessed peoples, he saw that of his own.

In Tell it the World, Grant responds to the ongoing racism that he sees around him. He writes with passion and striking candor of the anger, shame, and hardship of being an indigenous man. In frank, mesmerizing prose, Grant argues that the effects of colonialism and oppression are everyday realities that still shape our world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribe Publications
• Release date: Aug 27, 2019
• ISBN: 9781925938005

Stan Grant

Stan has been a professor of Indigenous Belonging at Charles Sturt University and in August 2023 was appointed as the inaugural Director of the Constructive Institute Asia Pacific in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University, dedicated to working with media organisations, citizens and advocacy groups, faith-based organisations, thought leaders and political figures to improve the quality of public discourse.

Book preview

Australia.

PART ONE

I want to tell you about the road that leads to my parents’ house. It was here my people were murdered.

Today it is marked with a sign that reads: Poison Waterholes Creek. I could not count the number of times I have passed by here. Now I have brought my youngest son to sit by the cool water, under the shade of the trees. It is time he learned the truth of our history.

He is of an age now when he would become a man in the law of our ancestors. He would be put through the burbung – a secret and sacred ceremony to have the markings of manhood carved on his body. Now I am initiating him into the story of this land.

I was raised here: this place is alive to me. I have been gone for so long, but it still envelops me. The effect it has on me is physical. When I am home I breathe more deeply. I sleep long and still. I wake to the morning more slowly.

I like nothing more than to stand alone outside and feel the soft warm breeze on my skin. My eyes rest on detail that I am blind to in the city where I now live. I like the way an old nail protrudes from a wooden plank in my parents’ shed. I like the way the corrugated iron roof – rusted and worn – bends at the corners. This is how a place bends over time. I like that spot where the dirt laneway meets the grass. I like the crunch of gravel under my feet. These things – little things – remind me that we live here; that we have shaped this place to fit us.

This country has shaped us too. It breathes in and out folding us into the empty spaces, each generation becoming part of the land itself. We are buried here, gravestones marking our resting places. We count the years in life and loss and our attachment grows deeper and stronger.

My people have been here forever. If I travel just a few hours I will come to a place where we fished, danced, sang, celebrated life and buried our dead with great ceremony. There was once a mighty lake here. Now it is dry with waves of sand frozen in place and craters like the surface of the