I was fortunate enough to be asked to present some opening remarks about the event I’m curating for the Melbourne Writers Festival on its opening night at the resplendently dilapidated Athenaeum Theatre on Thursday. I was given a chance not to only speak about the event, but to speak about the moment Treaty finds itself in.

DJ x

The Athenaeum Theatre 07 May, 2026

Good evening.

I’d like to begin by acknowledging the Traditional Owners of the land we meet on tonight, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. I pay my respects to their Elders, past and present, and to all First Peoples here tonight.

It is a great honour to be here on the opening night of the Melbourne Writers Festival.

A writer’s festival is, in many ways, an act of faith: faith that words still matter, that stories can still move people, and that a room full of strangers can gather in the dark and leave with some new understanding of themselves, each other, and the world they have inherited.

This year’s theme, I’m told, is Visions and Revisions, and I love that, because every act of writing asks us to look again: at what has been written, what has been remembered, what has been left out, and what has been deliberately obscured.

For First Peoples, this is not an abstract question.

So much of this country has been built on stories told too narrowly, by those who mistook possession for truth and power for permanence.

The story of Victoria, the story of Australia, has been written as a march of arrival and settlement, of progress and prosperity, of maps drawn, cities raised, laws passed and futures promised. There’s something in that for those who benefited from it. But beneath the confident language of nation-building, another story has always endured: older than the state, deeper than the archive, and more truthful than the version we were taught.

It is the story of sovereign peoples whose law, memory and knowledge endured invasion, the false promise of places once imagined as safe harbours, and the long forces of forgetting. Through it all, families found ways to carry what mattered and pass it on.

And now, in Victoria, we are living through a moment where that deeper story is not just being remembered. It is being written into the civic and cultural life of this state.

Treaty is often spoken about as a legal or political process, and of course it is both. But it is also a literary and moral act. It asks us to return to the founding story and see it more clearly; to imagine a different relationship between First Peoples and the state; to understand history as something still moving through our institutions, our suburbs, our language, and our sense of what is possible.

And we should be honest about this moment: decades of aspiration and the last ten years of hard graft are not safe from the laziest instincts of politics. Treaty will be tested by those who find opportunity in fear, operatives who reach for division because it is easier than truth, and who would turn a historic act of repair into another weapon in the culture wars; divisive rhetoric sprayed at us, in lieu of policy. But that only reveals the seriousness of what is at stake. Treaty asks more of us than slogans. It asks for patience, courage, and a willingness to stay with the truth.

That is why the event I’m curating for this Festival, Making the Victorian Treaty, matters so much to me.

At high noon on Saturday at the State Library, I’ll be joined by two people who have been central to this moment: Ngarra Murray, a Wamba Wamba, Yorta Yorta, Dja Dja Wurrung and Dhudhuroa woman and former Co-Chair of the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria, and Nerita Waight, a Yorta Yorta and Narrandjeri woman, CEO of the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service and lead negotiator for the Assembly in its work with the state.

Together, we’ll look beyond Treaty as a landmark and consider the generations of labour that brought it into being: the relationships, responsibilities and hard-won truths carried into the room by people who imagined this moment before it was politically convenient, legislatively possible, or widely heard.

And that, to me, is where the festival’s theme becomes so powerful.

A vision is more than a dream; it is something you keep faith with, even when the world is not ready for it. And revision does not mean erasure. At its best, it is the courage to look at the old version and say: this was incomplete, this caused harm, and this cannot be the story that carries us into the future.

So we must write again.

That is why writers and storytellers are the tip of the spear when it comes to this work. They sense when an old story can no longer hold, give language to what has been carried in silence, and help a community imagine itself anew. That is the work before us: to listen more deeply to what has survived, to make room for truths that were pushed to the margins, and to find the words that might help carry us into a more honest future.

My hope for the Treaty event is that audiences come not only to feel the weight of this moment, but to understand the human work behind it. I hope people leave knowing Treaty is not something separate from them. It belongs to the story of this place, and to all of us who live here and are willing to face what that means.

Opening nights are usually about beginnings, but tonight I’m thinking about continuities: the stories that began long before us, the stories we inherit, the stories we revise, and the stories we now have a responsibility to carry forward with greater honesty, courage, and care.

So let this Festival be more than a celebration of books and ideas. Let it be a place where we practise the kind of attention this moment asks of us, where we listen more deeply, resist the comfort of old evasions, and leave with a renewed commitment to the stories that might yet make us larger, braver, and more truthful than we have been.

Because words can open something in us; they can move us out of comfort and towards a future worthy of those who fought to bring us to this point. And perhaps that is the true promise of Visions and Revisions: not simply to see the world again, but to find the courage to remake our place within it.

Thank you to Melbourne Writers Festival for making space for this conversation.

And thank you all for being here through its continuum.

Thank you.

In the team meeting, when the human was being built, were they serving whiskey? Or sucking on some opium. Or, worse, was it the scene of bureaucratic mediocrity where it was left to a committee? However it was done, the scenes must have been wild because the whole thing is made up of all these little functions that make little sense, except within their own reality. Why do our ears wax? Our noses leak? Our skin shed? Our bowels expel? No, I have not studied human biology but, yes, I am confident to suggest that while the system relies upon all these functions to survive, it was a pretty dud blueprint.

The mysteries are many, but none stranger than that mop of hair atop the head. It has confused us. What do we do with it, we have wondered for millennia? And for millennia we have tried to work it out. A little research indicates that we evolved to grow it so that we would survive on this god forsaken planet that had the potential to burn us to a crisp with its sun. But I ask you simply – if you are building a human maybe make the skin on top of the head capable of surviving the harsh, unbidden world you’re about to put it on. Why make them have push dead cells out of their scalp to do the job. Any efficiency review would have knocked this on the head before production, but as I mentioned, there must have been substances being used.

We’ve moved through fashions and techniques to tame, harass, colour, cut, windsweep and coiffe these strands of dead cells. It dominated all the conversations of the 90s when the heads with the right kind of hair all wanted a ‘Rachel’. Before then, it was the beehive, the shag, the mullet, the pixie, the Farrah flip. Early hair was about height, and powder, ringlets and decorations. How did the prehistoric heads of hair cope without conditioner?

I grew up with a romantic concept of rebellion through the UK punk lens – shocking colours, shavings, spiking. It was a moment of anti-fashion that is likely one of the more enduring fashions of our time. But as with other eras, like the time the hippies were like, ‘I’m not cutting my hair dad,’ the UK punk scene sent a message to the government of the day, via excesses of gel, that they weren’t gonna take it no more. How surreal to imagine that hairstyles have been effective forms of political and cultural resistance. Was this what the committee envisaged when they greenlit it?

My hair forced me to make decisions about some of my fundamental core beliefs. Mine was a head of hair that had been troubled through its time with me with thinness and knotting. It would be that I would walk out into the throws of Melbourne weather and come back with dreadlocks. So intricately entwined were the three strands of hair on my head after a brush with wind, so knotted and tightly woven, I decided there was no point wanting a Rachel, when I was follicly challenged.

The dreadlocks gave lean to the 90s hippy scene. Big pants made of old bed spreads, consciously unconscious pattern clashing, natural fibres, bright colours and a bong not too far from reach. But having only the capacity to produce three dreadlocks with my thinning locks – I just couldn’t make it work. But this period of time and its romance of political resistance through hair anger, set a tone for the rest of my life. My hair and I were just not going to cut it in the world of the Rachel – so at a philosophical level, forced by inadequacy, I made a lifelong commitment to denying it a coiffe, a blow, a braid, a brush, an oiling. My resistance was a political act to assert that shit hair also deserves its measure of respect.

Its been difficult to live as a ‘shit hair proud’ individual when you enter the world of Big Hair. Big Hair – run by companies and individuals who believe they are doing the work of the hair gods, do not realise they are contributing to the oppression of an entire society. Entering a hairdresser means that you are subjected to the full weight of Big Hair coming down on you. Sitting in those plush chairs availing my head of hair to the scrutiny of one that has been corrupted by Big Hair, has been a life of battling for shit hair dignity.

It started as soon as I stopped cutting my own hair and thought I might try one of these ‘hairdressing’ places – some time in my late 20s. The look of disappointment – nay disgust- that the eyes of a hairdresser can land on you with their expertly positioned mirrors, is one I have had to endure. It always goes like this, ‘Do you dye your own hair? {insert sad eyes} Oh… There’s a lot of breakage. Do you want to cut it all off and start again?’ I wait til they’re finished and then launch into my treatise on my right to disregard the quality of my hair. We will square eyes and I will be forced to say, ‘I don’t care about my hair like you do.’ And we both engage in an act that feels dirty for the both of us.

This week I decided to break the toxic relationship I had developed with hairdressers all over town. My hair has gone from mid length to short, due to the pain that hairdressers feel at the sight of my split ends and so it occurred to me that my hair length might make me eligible to attend a barber. Short of hair. Short of time. Short of patience for the kind of discrimination I had been subjected to. So, I walked into my local, pointed to my hair, and said ‘Dude hair, dude prices?’ He nodded and I took my place in his plush chair ready for a quick and dirty haircut where I wouldn’t be subjected to the judgement I had endured.

His first words to me were, ‘it looks a bit damaged, mate.’ Bless him. The innocent fear in his eyes when he received the what the full weight of shit hair discrimination has been to me. Yes, I might have been a little hysterical. Yes, I may have uttered these words, ‘I’m here because I thought you might be less judgemental – but no – you’re all the same. I like my hair, mate, in fact I like everything about me…’ I actually said, ‘I like everything about me…’ – this was genuinely embarrassing. But I held my ground and he softened his judgey, judgey eyes and invited me to sit down. I bubbled away under my breath throughout the cut, but slowly became intrigued with his fancy blade work, his uninhibited use of the scissor, his instincts calling him to cut a bit here and then cut a bit there.

Slowly, we came to some kind of hair harmony. He was from London, so we spoke about the golden era of hair, back at home, when the kids were cutting their own – the Chelsea, the Mohawk, Liberty Spikes, the Sooo Catwoman and the Dragon mullet. I was so engrossed that I hadn’t noticed what he had been constructing on my hair with his Edward Scissorhands artistry

He held the mirror at the back of my head. ‘The Sid Vicious’, he said. Then he showed me how to maximise the use of hairspray and I walked out of there feeling like a middle-aged woman that looked more current day John Lydon than Sid Vicious – but slightly renewed.

For all of you, who value the role of your hair to keep you from sizzling to death under the blaze of the sun, but care less for its quality, this haircut is for you. Let’s fight for shit hair dignity – let’s not be bullied into unknotting the knots just because we look like we’ve been living in a garbage bin. Let’s fight for the right to dye our own hair, but only the bits that we can see in the mirror – we all know getting to the back is too hard. Let’s snip it, shave it, scratch it, let it fall out on our pillows, turn grey, coarsen with years – it’s time for the shit hair revolution.

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