If festivals are any barometer of culture then the recent Byron Writers Festival should have readers and creators of First Nations writing feeling pretty good about things. 

Returning to Bundjalung Country August 26-28, following the covid-hiatus, the festival delivered a program infused with more than 20 blak voices. The celebrated champions of blak writing were there. Rhoda Roberts, Melissa Lukasheno and Bronwyn Bancroft were among the wordsmiths whose works were given voice as performances or readings. Academic writers including Jackie Huggins, Marcia Langton, Bruce Pascoe and Paul Callaghan discussed the current political, historical and social debates concerning and affecting the lives of Aboriginal people,. Newer writers included Ella Noah Bancroft, Kylie Caldwell, Daniel Browning and Evelyn Araluen, whose genres range across politics to poetry, Country to comedy, their young, proud, black voices signalling that there is so much more to come…