Tiwi Story

Tiwi Story: Turning History Downside Up (New SouthPress, 2023) is a groundbreaking work of history that spans from Deep Time to the present. Applying a range of historical methodologies, it centres Tiwi oral histories and visits key episodes that include the creation stories of the islands, trade relationships with Macassans and Japanese, the failed British colonisation attempt of the 1820s, Tiwi experiences of World War II, and the enduring influence of the mission founded by Catholic priest Francis Xavier Gsell.

The Tiwi Islands are situated north of Darwin at the outer reaches of Northern Australia, but the accounts shared in this book offer vital lessons for makers of First Peoples history across the region. Women’s experience, intercultural relations and religious conversion all become ripe for reappraisal in this rich, multi-vocal work.

In this interview, co-editors and authors Mavis Kerinaiua and Dr Laura Rademaker talk to Dr Alexandra Roginski about the ‘canon’ of Tiwi stories, book making as community process, and the place of the work within a wider project of recording and strengthening Tiwi culture.

Interview biographies

Mavis Kerinaiua is a Tiwi historian, educator and researcher. She has contributed to historical exhibits at the Northern Territory Library and the Patakijiyali Museum and worked as a researcher for the Australian National University and Flinders University. She has worked in cultural liaison for the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and in education on Bathurst Island. Creator of the Turtuni Framework for research practice, Kerinaiua is an expert in culturally responsive and appropriate research.

Laura Rademaker is a historian of Aboriginal Australia and religion with a PhD from the Australian National University and an interest in oral history. She is the author of Found in Translation (University of Hawai‘i), shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Australian History Prize and awarded the Australian Historical Association’s Hancock Prize.

Dr Alexandra Roginski is a historian, writer and heritage practitioner based on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country. She is the author of two books: Science and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Tasman World (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and The Hanged Man and the Body Thief: Finding Lives in a Museum Mystery (Monash University Publishing, 2015).