Tell Me Again by Amy Thunig

About the author

Amy Thunig ia Gomeroi/Gamilaroi/Kamilaroi woman, writer and academic, whose forthcoming collection of personal essays Tell Me Again, explores the importance of culture and extended family networks in the face of poverty, disadvantage and discrimination; and the power of stories to shape and sustain us, even when they involve hardship and struggle. Amy is an academic in the Department of Educational Studies at Macquarie University, where she is also undertaking a PhD in education with a focus on Sovereign/Indigenous women in academia. In 2019 Amy gave her TEDx talk ‘Disruption is not a dirty word’. Amy is also a freelance media commentator and panellist, writing for publications such as Buzzfeed, Sydney Review of Books, IndigenousX, The Guardian, Junkee, Women’s Agenda and regularly appearing on programs such as ABC’s The Drum to discuss education, politics, and Indigenous-specific matters.

Review

Amy Thunig’s Tell Me Again. Gemma Nisbet, January 28, 2023. The West Australian.

In the first chapter of Tell Me Again, we meet not one but multiple versions of Gomeroi writer, academic and media commentator Amy Thunig: an adult taking their children camping on Country; a child asking for the umpteenth time to be told the romanticised story of their birth; an older self, existing chronologically somewhere between the other two, finally hearing the truth of that night.

This approach, in which short chapters incorporate memories from childhood, adolescence and adulthood alongside one another to suggest resonances across a span of years and kilometres, reflects a conception of time that is key to Thunig’s memoir. “As Indigenous peoples we are raised to understand time as circular,” they write. “Within a circular understanding of life: time, energy and generations coexist.”

It’s also indicative of an approach to writing about trauma that seeks, as Thunig says, to recognise that “lives are built of messy interactions, exchanges and experiences”. This comes to the fore in their depiction of their family — “filled with love, even amidst brokenness” — and their upbringing as the child of parents “stuck in a vicious cycle, trapped in the push-pull of poverty and difficulties that arise from complex circumstances — some of their own making, others completely out of their control”.

Thunig doesn’t shy away from depicting their experiences of homelessness and family estrangement as a teenager, and their parents’ struggles with addiction and incarceration. But they also write with a keen understanding of the influence of factors such as systemic injustice and intergenerational trauma, and of the ways in which, as they put it, “the same people who in many ways failed me - who struggled with their addiction only to repeatedly succumb - also built me up and taught me the lessons and qualities that have led to my success”.

The result is a moving and empathetic memoir that seeks, as Thunig says, “to humanise that which is too often dehumanised, and highlight that which is too often erased”.