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As the National NAIDOC Principal Media Partner and official Education Partner, National NAIDOC Week will be celebrated across all SBS channels and platforms, including an exclusive NAIDOC collection of series and films available to stream on SBS On Demand and NAIDOC education resources via .
In this special NAIDOC edition of The New Writer's Room podcast exploring the idea of 'literature as resistance', SBS Voices speaks to Dr Larissa Behrendt and Jazz Money.
The episode is an extension of this year's NAIDOC Week theme, 'Get Up, Stand Up, Show Up', as the two First Nations writers discuss how literature can be used to re-centre Black experiences, capture forgotten histories, assert sovereignty, and how writing and truth telling is such a vital part of their work.
"When I was growing up, there wasn't the depth of First Nations writers that there are now," says Dr Behrendt. "I knew a political history that wasn't taught, and understood concepts like land rights and sovereignty that wasn't taught in school. I started to feel the disconnect between the oral histories and the conversations and my family and community, and what was available to me in the classroom."
And for Money, truth telling is one of the motivations behind her poetry. "There is so much truth writing in this place that is coming from First Nations people," she says. "I realised if I was going to write, it had to be to honour my family and legacy and to honour truth. And that is as a First Nations and a queer person, both communities that there have been very concerted attempts to write those legacies out of the history books."
Both writers also share what sparked their love of reading, their relationship with literature, the importance of storytelling and challenges of writing prose versus writing poetry.
The episode will also take a deep dive into their latest literary works, Dr Behrendt's and Jazz Money's . We explore love, family, history and power; and even futurism and ask our guests what inspires them; and who are their favourite writers and influences.
This episode features a special poetry reading from Money of her poem 'Gadi' from how to make a basket.
Larissa Behrendt. Source: ABC Australia
Dr Larissa Behrendt
Larissa Behrendt is a filmmaker, broadcaster, academic and the author of three novels: Home, which won the 2002 David Unaipon Award and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book; Legacy, which won the 2010 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Indigenous Writing; and the bestselling After Story published in 2021 by University of Queensland Press. She has published numerous books on Indigenous legal issues and the influential history book Finding Eliza: Power and Colonial Storytelling. She was awarded the 2009 NAIDOC Person of the Year Award and the 2011 NSW Australian of the Year. She is the host of Speaking Out on ABC Radio and is Distinguished Professor at the Jumbunna Institute at the University of Technology Sydney.
Jazz Money. Source: Anna Kucera
Jazz Money
Jazz Money is a Wiradjuri poet, artist and filmmaker currently based on sovereign Gadigal land. Her practice is centred around storytelling while producing works that encompass installation, digital, film and print. Jazz's writing has been widely performed and published nationally and internationally. Her David Unaipon Award-winning debut poetry collection how to make a basket was published in 2021 by University of Queensland Press. Trained as a filmmaker, Jazz is currently working on WINHANGANHA, a feature-length cinematic journey through visual archives, commissioned by the National Film and Sound Archive.
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