The Stories We Tell

Reflections on writing Australian stories from the Sydney Writers' Festival 2025

The problem with living in a very walkable neighbourhood, is sometimes you just have to walk. Rain or shine. Rain, in this case. Torrential rain.

I was thrilled when I learnt the Sydney Writers’ Festival not only happens in my suburb, but only 750 metres from my house. I booked for a session on a day my toddler is in childcare, and made confident plans of strolling down, maybe grabbing a coffee.

Instead, it was a dash through puddles and downpours, before turning up as a bedraggled, sodden mess. A hot coffee did help, as did a chance to comb the water out of my hair in the bathrooms. But I still looked less like someone who had taken a leisurely morning amble and more like a slightly drowned rat in fogging up glasses.

But my morning at the festival was wonderful. I heard one of my favourite authors speak (and got a book signed!), wandered through the bookshop and added to my library holds, and was generally encouraged to be a person who is writing and reading here in Sydney.

Kate Grenville speaking on her new book Unsettled at the 2025 Sydney Writers’ Festival. Image my own.

But I also left with big questions, questions it feels like so many Australian writers are wrestling with.

How do we write stories about our country? A land whose history is filled with untold stories, but stories they may not be ours to tell. When the First Peoples of this country have had their stories taken away and rewritten for them, how do we honour and respect their right to tell those stories and still work and live as writers and storytellers?

Does the writer only write what they know? What they have lived? Or can we write beyond our own experience as a way to learn? Can writing be a way to step into the shoes and experience of another person? Or is that best left for reading, to hear others tell their own stories?

When it comes to Australian history, who gets to tell the story? Whose perspective is heard? The invaded? The invaders? The later arrivals who benefit from the invasion? I don’t have the answers to any of these questions yet.

But also: this is my home. It’s the only land I’ve ever known. I’ve lived an unsettled existence up and down the east coast of Australia, but I have at least always know, when asked where I come from, that I can say I am Australian. A non-indigenous Australian, a descendant of Welsh, Scottish, Irish and German (that I know of) arrivals, but an Australian.

Today I heard Kate Grenville, a writer whose work I have devoured, and a writer whose work and process I really respect, talk of her own journey to sit with the discomfort of her family’s history here in Australia. Grenville’s story is more clear cut in that her direct great-great-great grandfather took land – stole, invaded, occupied – directly from Aboriginal Australians who had lived and cultivated that land. She has written many stories about this family history, and how she has reckoned with it.

I promise that really does say Kate Grenville. Image my own.

But I know there are skeletons in my own family tree, if I am brave enough to look. I know enough snippets of the past to know if I wanted to dig deeper there are stories there to be told. Maybe not as history, but as the starting place of other stories at least.

The Sydney Writers’ Festival was a thought provoking, damp, exciting interlude in a life of writing on the couch during nap time or before childcare pick up, and has started many trains of thought. Maybe I’ll write about them one day. Maybe they’ll stay in my drafts forever. But the writing, the process, is where all the good stuff happens.