This article is based on my oral, archival and literary research into the history of Cape York Peninsula. In working with these oral histories I have become convinced that we need to approach the relation of truths and fictions in our histories as an open-ended and complex issue. To ‘read’ history as literature helps us to understand the complexities and ambivalences of human history as it is experienced and lived. Jon Simon asks, with reference to the work of Michel Foucault:

There are inescapable fictions in our stories of romance. As in literature, our imagination is invoked to help us make sense of our experiences. As in literature, the use of fiction gives us access to other truths. ‘It seems to me that the possibility exists for fiction to function in truth, for a fictional discourse to induce effects of truth, and for bringing it about that true discourse engenders or ‘manufactures’ something that does not yet exist.’^[3] I would suggest that fiction’s access to truth is also a way of bringing to light the emotional and psychic truths so often denied in rational discourse.

Reading history, or more accurately and broadly, reading our past, then becomes an act of ‘rewriting’. This opening of the possibilities of our understanding of the past to the imagination is akin to the ‘perpetual rewriting’ described by Simon as parallel to the ethic of permanent resistance.^[4] Interpretations of the past explore our ethical being and reality, both for individuals and collectively. This attempt at a deeper understanding of human history is what I am engaged in as an oral historian when I tell stories. The particular histories of the people of Cape York Peninsula are connected to shared human experiences of love and relationships, through the universalising themes of philosophy and poetry and the empathic identification of the reader.