Held on Wulgurukaba Country in Townsville over two days, the First Nations Writers Festival brought together Indigenous writers to spotlight each other's work, discuss the issues facing their communities and the importance of recording and expressing Indigenous knowledge through writing.
Represented at the festival were writers from Fiji, Hawaii, Papua New Guinea, Finland, New Zealand, USA and Australia.
The annual event hosted a number of talks, panels and writing workshops aimed at encouraging the attending writers to hone their craft, and persist with their work.
Waanyi Garawa Gangalida man, Alec Doomadgee, who was a previous MC of the festival, said that the festival is a platform to tell First Nations stories, where historically they've been repressed.
"We've lost a lot," he said.
Our stories are getting told from our tongue and our lived experience.
"We've lost our tongue [and] when you take [someone's] tongue you take his identity.
"We've lost our children, we've lost our Country, ceremony, culture."
He says the festival provides an opportunity for First Nations writers to get published, and spread their printed works to the world.
"So that our stories are getting told from our tongue and our lived experience."
Why is Indigenous story-telling important today?
Oral story telling is a tradition that is shared by many Indigenous groups across the globe.
Before colonisation, the practice continued unbroken for thousands of years, capturing and communicating complex kinship systems, knowledge and language.
Today, however, those same communities are facing the threat of their knowledges and languages dying out.
Writer and festival award winner Paul Puri Nii from Papua New Guinea says that the recording and expression of these stories are key.
"Indigenous writing is very important because we need to preserve and keep our culture alive. Oral history fades away as time goes by so we don't want that to happen."
Fijian writer and short story award winner at the festival, Paulini Turagabeci, says that unless something is done, those stories, knowledges and language will quickly fade away.
"We [Fijian's] number close to a million and a lot of us now live in the diaspora, so when we migrate to other countries I can't say we that we always take our stories," she said.
"We assimilate to a new culture, a new language, a new country, and in the process we lose out on our traditional knowledge - we have children who grow up in a society where they don't practise their mother tongue."
This is why I write so that our kids in the diaspora can hold onto their identity hold on to their language through a book.
Cross cultural collaboration and sharing
Turagabeci says the cross cultural sharing was a big part of the festival.
"We have a shared experience of colonisation. We had to adopt a different language and different values."
"How do you live in a fast evolving society where everything is becoming digitised and preserve your identity and preserve your language."
"So it's not only a space to share our stories, but to encourage each other that our stories matter."
