I know why old people tell repetitive stories, over and over, to people they know have heard them before and are not interested in hearing them again. I learned this from my mother, who told repetitive family stories, over and over to a daughter she knew had heard them before. I have heard folk tell of their frustration hearing stories they’ve heard a thousand times from the old one or old ones in their life.
All my life, in storybooks and now on social media, people have shared tales and now memes from Indigenous lore. They are exotic. They belong to the clan. They tell of times past. We laud them as wise. We – the ones raised in nuclear families disconnected from ‘the past’ – lament the passing of our own traditions into the mists of time. We fetishise the starry skied campfire, emblem of the lost days, romanticising the circled clan entranced by the wisdom of the old ones.
Old people know it is their job to pass on the family lore. It is as true for the nuclear-familied old ones of the contemporary world as it is for Indigenous people still connected to land and clan. Old people have a job to do. They know it. Our frustration/boredom is not their problem. They know they have a job to do and, with our without our interest, they will do it. I am beginning to feel the stirrings of this responsibility in my own bones. The wilful telling to bored faces of the stories that were passed to me, stories of people nowhere in sight to the young/er ones, the old ones who live on in time only because I remember them. Their place in the ancestral lineage is now mine to tell.
This explains a workday mystery for me: it is why everyday people who do not identify as writers flock in droves to our writing workshops. In ten years on The Write Road, at a rough guess I’d say 75% of participants come along for guidance and support to write family and community stories. They know the dispersed clan is not interested in listening, and/or is ‘too busy’ to listen, and they know this because they didn’t listen and/or left it too late to listen. They write “so they’ll know who I am”. This has been stated many, many times in the workshops. They write in the hope, or just case, someone further down the ancestral line may one day wonder: who was she/he? Or ‘what was this world/community like before me’?
There is another reason, and it has everything to do with the stories families tell that miscast us in everyday narratives. The miscasting might villainise us or disappear us, rendering us unrecognisable or invisible to ourselves in our world. It’s incredible how many people in the workshops say they want to write “who I know myself to be”, or to “set the family record straight”, or at least add their voice to the dominant family chorus.
Or, they want to write so the ones further down the line know who they are. And this, in the end, is why old people tell stories. So the rest of us, including and especially the unborn, know who we are. Self-published personal, family and community stories are the campfires of our times.
Stephanie Dale is an award-winning journalist, author, researcher and founder of the International Wellbeing-through-writing Institute. In 2014 she launched The Write Road, a wellbeing-through-writing initiative for rural and remote Australians. She is passionate about pilgrimage, and in 2017 initiated Walk&Write holiday writing adventures.