Sue Joseph

Stan Grant and cultural memory: Embodying a national race narrative through memoir

As a journalist for more than 30 years, his face and voice are immediately recognisable. But throughout the 1990s to many in Australia – watching Stan Grant anchor a commercial television current affairs programme every night as they ate their dinner – no one could guess at his untold story. He has written two memoirs. The first is the voice of a confused, angry, perhaps fearful young man. This voice melds his personal story as quest – of family, loves, pain, career and torment – into the national race narrative. For Stan Grant is a proud Wiradjuri/Kamilaroi man and his story importantly 'untells' much of the white Australian history of central and south western NSW, before disclosing his own struggle with race and racism in his land. Ten years later and in response to a notorious moment in 2013 on an Australian sporting field, Grant writes a newspaper column1 which attracts more than 100,000 hits on social media. He follows this with his second memoir. This voice is calmer, less angry but perhaps sadder. It performs a collective and cultural remembering of the Australian First Nations and implicitly, an advocacy manifesto to a nation still struggling with racial tensions. Through textual analysis of both texts, and with the inclusion of further epitextual material, as well as his Quarterly Essay, this paper sets out to discuss Grant's application of life writing/memoir practice to penetrate the race debate in Australia in an attempt to effect change

Keywords: race; racism, Australia, Wiradjuri, Kamilaroi, Stan Grant, Adam Goodes, manifesto

Note on the contributor

A journalist in Australia and the UK for eighteen years, Sue Joseph (PhD) began working as an academic, teaching print journalism at the University of Technology Sydney in 1997. As a Senior Lecturer, she now teaches journalism and creative writing, particularly creative nonfiction writing, in both undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. Her research interests are around sexuality, secrets and confession, framed by the media, ethics and trauma narrative, memoir, reflective professional practice, ethical HDR supervision, nonfiction poetry and Australian creative non-fiction. Her fourth book, Behind the text: Candid conversations with Australian creative nonfiction writers, was published in October 2016. She is Reviews Editor and Joint Editor of Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics.