Flock: First Nations Stories Then and Now

Flock: First Nations Stories Then and Now is a 2021 anthology of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander short stories spanning 1996 to 2021, edited by Mununjali Yugambeh writer Ellen van Neerven. Six of its stories are prescribed for the HSC English EAL/D Common Module: Texts and Human Experiences.

Flock: First Nations Stories Then and Now, published by UQP in 2021, gathers previously published Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander short stories from across a quarter-century, 1996 to 2021 - the "then and now" of the subtitle. Its editor, Ellen van Neerven, is an award-winning writer of Mununjali Yugambeh and Dutch heritage, and the title honours Aunty Kerry Reed-Gilbert, the Wiradjuri writer whose obituary recorded kuracca, the sulphur-crested cockatoo, gathering at her home the morning she passed. Birds flock together, van Neerven observes, and there is strength in numbers: the anthology's very form is that argument.

The HSC EAL/D course prescribes six stories. Adam Thompson's "Honey" follows a Palawa man through an afternoon of casual racism beside a white beekeeper, until Country settles its own account. Ellen van Neerven's "Each City" is near-future speculation in which a queer Aboriginal artist flees political persecution, leaving her partner behind. Melissa Lucashenko's "Dreamers" is a circular historical fiction that opens and closes on an Aboriginal woman refused the sale of an axe. Mykaela Saunders' "River Story" holds a dying mother and her grieving daughter beside the river that will receive her. Melanie Saward's "Galah" reads a young woman's trauma through a dead bird on a footpath, and Jeanine Leane's "Forbidden Fruit" bottles an unlived life into a pantry of preserved apricots. Different in mode and generation, the stories answer one another: Country as living kin, family carried across removal and loss, and storytelling as the practice by which a people survives.

"Honey" is the anthology's study in casual racism and the commodification of culture. Its white characters treat Aboriginal culture as something to be extracted on demand, and contempt arrives as sociable anecdote rather than confrontation. Thompson locks the focalisation to his Palawa protagonist and gives him almost no direct speech, so his body carries what politeness forbids, until Country settles its own account.

"Each City" moves dispossession into the near future, denying the reader the comfort of thinking removal is a finished story. The first-person narrator praises the state she is fleeing, so reassurance becomes indictment, while love is measured in small domestic absences.

Grief in the anthology circles rather than resolves. "Dreamers" begins and ends on the same racial refusal, "Nothing good could come of any Abo girl holding an axe.", so thirty years of loss read as one continuous injury, and Lucashenko's foreshadowing, "Eric was at home in the world, because the world had shown him only love and tenderness.", turns "the world" into a double thing, loving Country and cruel society at once. In "River Story", culture is relocated from the failing body into consciousness, an inheritance that passes from mother to daughter through presence rather than words.

The quieter stories work through controlling symbols. In "Galah", a dead bird on a suburban footpath gives a young woman's private brokenness a visible shape, and recovery is the slow, unglamorous labour of a friendship that stays present rather than intervenes. In "Forbidden Fruit", jar after jar of bottled apricots becomes the ledger of a deferred life - proof that healing in Flock is rarely timely, and often decades overdue.