Opinion
On After Story
7th Jul 2022
‘Law school teaches you about law; it doesn’t teach you about people. It teaches you about the rules of evidence, but it doesn’t teach you about what it’s like to be a victim of crime, to live with the impact of a brutal murder. It teaches you about the factors that can be used to mitigate responsibility for a crime or lessen a sentence, but it doesn’t teach you how to understand a client who has been accused of the worst kind of violence’ (20).
Jasmine, a young lawyer, fresh out of university, new to working at Legal Aid, struggling to come to terms with a gruesome case, and badly in need of a holiday, and her mother, Della, grieving two deaths – one recent, one long ago, but present in every heartbeat – go on a journey in After Story, Larissa Behrendt’s latest novel.
After Story is a book about women: aunties, mothers and daughters; sisters who bicker, who take charge at times of crisis, who rely on each other to stay alive; women like butterfly specimens, struggling against the labels pinned to them.
Distinguished Professor Larissa Behrendt is a Eualeyai/Kamillaroi woman and a legal academic, filmmaker and award-winning author of both fiction and non-fiction titles. In the Telling Hard Stories and Re-Grounding in Culture session at the South Coast Writers Festival last month, Larissa called After Story her most autobiographical novel to date. She also said she doesn’t think it’s amazing that Aboriginal people have survived for 65,000 years; she thinks it’s amazing that they’ve survived the last 200.
After Story takes us from a small fictional town in NSW, Frog Hollow, once a Government Reserve, to the streets that moved Dickens to find ‘through his writing … a way to facilitate profound social change’ (75), to the garden shed where Virginia Woolf wrote Mrs Dalloway, to the British Museum where the head of Pemulwuy is said to be kept, and beyond.
This is Larissa in conversation with the canon of English literature, and through Larissa, the women of her mother’s and grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s generations, who bring a wisdom not found within the walls of any institution. It’s an ‘uncovering of the other side of the story, the story that’s been supressed, written out or wilfully misinterpreted’, an unearthing of ‘the human stories that lay hidden under numbers and graphs, buried underneath, waiting to be found’ (251).
‘There’s something about keeping and collecting not just objects but bodies that seems to be part of the colonising process,’ says Jasmine, Larissa’s serious, bookish protagonist.
‘The right to take, to rename, to catalogue, to hold in the name of the advancement of your own theories, knowledges and sciences … When Auntie Elaine would talk about it, our culture felt alive, the sowing of possum cloaks, the knots of weaving, the sweeping brushstroke of painting, the gift of telling stories. They were living and breathing, not relics of the past frozen in time’ (212).
Jasmine describes herself and her friends at university as ‘learning the tools so we could change the way history was told and how the law treated us.’ For Jasmine, ‘Getting into institutions that my parents hadn’t had access to was its own act of decolonisation’ (213).
But it’s Della who steals this story, Della who appreciates every detail – her first passport, her first flight, the Yew tree as old as Winchester Cathedral – Della who knows what it means to be an emu woman, who knows that places consist of everything that’s happened there, and who knows, all too well, that ‘there is often silence about the thing that people are thinking about the most’ (45).
Yuin writer Gary Lonesborough, author of young adult novel The Boy from the Mish, who sat on stage beside Larissa at the Festival, said something to which the audience breathed a collective murmur of agreement.
‘I could listen to Larissa talk all day.’
After Story is an opportunity to do just that.
The ALA thanks Tess Kerbell for this contribution.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of the Australian Lawyers Alliance (ALA).
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