It’s November 2017 and Shauna Bostock, a Bundjalung woman, and PhD student at Australian National University at the time, is speaking at the Related History Conference at the National Library in Canberra. In a large auditorium, surrounded by not only academics but historical societies and genealogists alike, she is not nervous. While this is the biggest audience that she has ever spoken to, she is determined to make her mark. Squeezed into the presentation schedule around renowned historians and professors, Shauna seizes the 10 minutes of time she has. “I nailed it, I really did,” she says. A good thing too, because in the audience was a woman called Babette Smith, a convict historian.
When Shauna emerged from the auditorium, eager for a bite to eat, she was shocked to find a group of people waiting to speak with her. A woman elbowed her way through the crowd and marched right up to Shauna. Wagging her finger in the air, Shauna recalls, Babette said “I loved your presentation; I loved what you had to say and I’m going to help you. Your story should be told. I’m going to tell my publisher about you because she needs to know.”
At the time that Shauna began to research her family’s genealogy, it was believed nobody had done a multi-generational story of Aboriginal history. “I just thought ‘well, I need to do a book’. I really felt like God wanted me to do this and that it was important for national history,” she says.
Contact is made
In February 2018, after a few months of skeptical waiting, Shaune finally received an email from Elizabeth Weiss, the nonfiction publisher at Allen and Unwin in Sydney. “I just thought, ‘holy guacamole. That is amazing’,” Shauna says. “She sounded really serious, and it really frightened me.”
After preparing a small script, Shauna had a phone call with Elizabeth. “It was just the most wonderful back and forth… by the end of the conversation we were laughing like old mates,” she says. While most writers must go through the tedious process of writing manuscripts and submitting to publishers only to be rejected repeatedly, Shauna did not. Allen and Unwin took her on after a two-and-a-half hour conversation. All she had to do was prove to the publisher that she could write her family history, not as an academic book, but as a narrative for the general reader. “I nearly fell of my chair because I thought, ‘that is exactly what I wanted’.”
“My purpose is to teach the nation the truth about Aboriginal history,” she says. What better way to do that than to ensure that her book would not only be read but also enjoyed by the general reader.
Shauna finished her PhD in July 2021 and signed a book deal with Allen and Unwin in February the following year. Shauna finished writing her book a year after the deal was signed.
From thesis to book
Reaching Through Time is a conversion of Shauna’s PhD thesis, which she turned into a manuscript and then into her book. Published in July 2023, Shauna’s book is a testament to her passion for the conservation and sharing of Aboriginal history with the nation. In 2024, Shauna accepted her dream job and is now working for the Australian Dictionary of Biography at the Australian National University as the Indigenous research editor. “This role makes it possible for me to bring Aboriginal people out of history and out of the archives,” she says. “I am so passionate about historic Indigenous lives being included, recorded, respected and revered in the annals of Australia’s nation history.”
Since publication, Shauna has been awarded the 2024 New South Wales Community and Regional History prize, 2024 New South Wales Premier’s History award and has been shortlisted for the Marl and Evette Moran Nib Literary Award.
“I felt as though my ancestors where in the room tapping me on the shoulder saying, ‘take note of this’. If there was an invitation to go somewhere or to speak somewhere or to apply for something I felt a real presence of my ancestors saying, ‘go for it’, and then I’d win it.” Recently, Shauna won a spot in the humanities section of the ABC Top 5. This will allow her to go to Sydney to complete a two-week residency with the ABC next month where she will receive training in media skills. Shauna hopes to pitch a documentary to the ABC that will allow her to take her research to a wider audience.
“My book was called Reaching Through Time because I felt like I was reaching through time and pulling my ancestors out of the darkness of the archives, bringing them under the spotlight so that I could tell their stories for them, so that their humanity is restored and counteract their erasure from Australian history.”
