From little things

One of the tools I try to promote at work is narration. A good story, well told is a very powerful thing. It sticks with the audience long after it's told and is often passed on. Narration has a very strong history, long before people started writing.

The story that sticks most with me is the one told in Paul Kelly and Kev Carmody's song "From little things, big things grow", which was brought again into the public light earlier this year when a bunch of Australian musicians released a new version of it, to tie in with Mr Rudd's Apology to Aboriginal Australians. I watched it on youTube at the time, bawling my eyes out on the couch in our London flat, and in fact get teary everytime I think of it. For those of you who don't know it, it's a ballad telling the story of Vincent Lingiari and the Gurindji strike in the 1960s, which started off as a dispute over wages and conditions and turned into the first of the great land rights battles in Australia. In 1975 part of the land was handed back to the Gurindji people in a deal brokered by the Whitlam government. In the ceremony Mr Whitlam poured a handful of sand into Vincent Lingiari's hands.