The text books refer to humans as Homo Sapiens - Man the wise - but there are many who think we are better named as Homo Narrans - Man the storyteller. How crucial to each of us is our story - who we think we are, where we think we came from, and where we think we are going.
If you don't think this is so, consider the orphan - how often people who discover that they are orphans will go to incredible lengths to find their biological parents. The library shelves are thick with books describing the journeys of people in search of their stories, their ancestry, their families; fiction, non-fiction, memoir, or biography, they are among the most borrowed books in the collection.
Perhaps, deep down, we all have an instinct for just how much of our family story - our people's story - has gone missing in transmission. Stories are lost when illness, accident, plague, war, or disaster come unexpectedly upon a people.
If you are the bearer of a name such as Griffiths, Weekes, Weadon, Jones, or Davies, then there will be gaps in the stories of you and your past, as the Cymro went through a time, not so long ago, where they were forbidden the use of their own language even in their own land, Cymru, and thus, the proper telling of their stories. Even now, most of us will call your ancestors The Welsh - a name derived from a Saxon word for foreigner - thus naming them as strangers in their own land, as less worthy than those who conquered.
Are you perhaps a Campbell, a Riley or a Munro? How many stories were extinguished from among the tales of your ancestors as the armies of the Romans and the Danes and the Saxons and the Norman kings marched to and fro across the green hills or Britain and Ireland. How many more stories were wiped from memory in the mud of Flanders, or The Blitz, or on the beaches of Normandy?
How fascinated have we been, over the years, by the books and movies that tell us some part of those stories that have fallen out of our family trees? How many peoples, all around the world, are presently struggling to keep alive their story, their tongue, their tales - often in the face of conquest either military or economic?
There is hardly a place on this planet that has not suffered the bitter storms of conflict and conquest at some time in recent centuries, many are presently in the throes of such horror as we sit here - and in most of those places, there are survivors, trying desperately to keep their story alive. Their stories are no less worthy of being told or being heard because they or their ancestors were outnumbered or outgunned or susceptible to the deseases brought by the invaders.
In Australia, the descendants of those who were here before 1788 have kept alive a wonderful fund of stories to offer to the national story, despite the terrible holes torn in the ranks of their story tellers by bullets, germs, poison, and dispossession. It is terrible to think of how much was lost during those times.
There are many still living among the First Peoples who recall being punished for speaking in their own language, just as the Welsh were, years ago, in Wales, and so many others were, or are, in other places around the world. It is not the only place such things have happened, and, sadly, it is likely to happen again in other times and places.
Here in Australia, on Australia Day, there are still those - even among those who govern - who are trying to pretend that the voices of those that were here before 1788 should not be heard, that their stories should not, or need not be told, or, if they feel they must tell them, that they should speak them softly, so as not to offend. The nation would be a richer and better place if all its stories, of all its people, were given equal places in the greater tale that is Australia.
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