Abstract:
Public historians work with the explosive content of contested histories when they research
collaborattvelv at communitv level, where class, cultural, and racial divides intersect.
The naive optimism of the 1970s, which held that oral history methodologies would
allow a transparent and unmediated path for minority voices to be heard, has been rightly
challenged. In Australia, Indigenous historians rejected the underlying racism of much
Anglo-authored work, producing a rich flowering of lndigenous-authored narratives as
they reclaimed the right to tell their own stories. Yet the realities of "in-real-life" activism
and community work continue to be cross-cultural and multi-racial. How then can the
narratives of such cross-culrural experience be written? This essay reviews one collaboration,
the life storyo f Isabel Flick, Indigenous activist and educator, as Isabel co-authored
it with Heather Goodall, white Australian academic and activist. Drawing on the work of
Michael Frisch and Linda Tuhawai Smith, Goodall argue's that the tensions in the process
opened up many questions, and perhaps suggested some answers, about the dilemmas of
doing and retelling cross-cultural work.
