How do we gather strength for the journey, when some of the ones we travelled with have fallen behind? It is in the returning again each year, or in one moment of the day, to say the names and to tell the stories. This is what the Gumatj people believe and what we also believe. These losses tie us to the past, they tie us to the future, and they tie us to each other. They tie us to the life of strangers. We tell our own stories only to find that it is exactly what a very lost someone needs to hear. It may be what a very lost society needs to hear. The full text can be found here
