Steve Dow

1 week ago | theguardian.com | Steve Dow

Kate Grenville crouches down on a rock on Sydney’s lower north shore, feet bare, next to a Cammeraygal engraving of a whale. The writer is careful not to trespass on the art. “You can just see the little figure,” she says, pointing to a faint outline of a mysterious tiny human with outstretched arms and legs in the leviathan’s belly. Ten-year-old Kate was first brought to this coastal Waverton site on a school excursion almost 65 years ago, but remembered only the big whale, not the little human.

2 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Steph Harmon |Jack Callil |Steve Dow |Fiona Wright |Dee Jefferson |Celina Ribeiro | +2 more

Unsettled by Kate GrenvilleNonfiction, Black Inc, $36.99 Illustration: Black Inc BooksTwenty years after she fictionalised her ex-convict great-great-great-grandfather Solomon Wiseman in The Secret River, speculating he took part in killing Dharug people, Grenville makes a pilgrimage through the landscape of northern New South Wales to better understand more than two centuries of suffering by Indigenous people dispossessed by colonisation.

3 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Steve Dow

On a Friday night in April 1966, 16-year-old Norma Ingram was one of seven young Aboriginal women formally “presented” as part of the inaugural Sydney Indigenous debutante ball at Paddington Town Hall. “It was a lot of that old English stuff, ‘coming out into society’,” the Wiradjuri woman says of the event, which was attended by some 200 Aboriginal people. Revellers passed under a boomerang arch to enter the hall, which was festooned with Indigenous motifs in ochre colours.

2 months ago | theguardian.com | Steve Dow

As a child in the 1950s, growing up on a cattle station in the dusty red Kimberley, Mervyn Street remembers finding a rock in his mother’s kitchen, with numerical markings on one side. This, he would learn, was a “black penny”. “My dad had, on the back of the penny, three ones – 1, 1, 1 – I didn’t know what that meant,” he recalls now, wearing a worn bush hat and sitting at Mangkaja Arts Centre near his home in Muludja community, east of Fitzroy Crossing.

2 months ago | theguardian.com | Steve Dow

At 91, Elizabeth Cameron Dalman dances in nature at her bushland retreat outside Canberra, Mirramu Creative Arts Centre, surrounded by writers, singers and visual artists stoking their respective muses.