The potential for Australian literature to address the history of colonised people in this country and elsewhere is of great consequence. New perspectives not only rewrite history to include ‘herstory’, but also reconsider what we believe and broaden our view of ourselves as active contributors to our collective and individual past. A spate of recent books has attempted to do this: Anita Heiss’s Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray: River of Dreams (2021) and Geraldine Brooks’s Horse (2022) are two that come to mind.

Mirandi Riwoe, author of four books and a crime fiction series published under the pseudonym M.J. Tjia, has, with lyrical beauty and passion, been recreating history too few of us know. For me, her latest novel, Sunbirds, lacks cohesion as the narrative flow is deliberately disrupted with abrupt jumps in the timeline and shifts in point of view and setting.