A couple of years ago, I designed a creative writing course for a family history diploma at university. My cohort of amateur sleuths was passionate and proud, but with mostly British and European heritage. So I decided to encourage a more inclusive approach to the topic.
I wanted my students to reconsider their predominantly colonial perspectives, and to produce more varied and representative accounts of the past. I developed a reading list of novels and memoirs by Aboriginal writers and migrants from culturally and linguistically diverse communities, some of whose ancestors had arrived in Australia as asylum seekers.
