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In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Shauna Bostock, a Bundjalung woman and historian, chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting Reaching Through Time: Finding My Family’s Stories.
Winner: Community and Regional History Prize, 2024 NSW Premier’s History Awards
Shortlisted: 2024 Mark & Evette Moran Nib Literary Award
Reaching Through Time:
Late one night, Shauna Bostock’s phone rang unexpectedly…
‘Guess who our white ancestors were?’ chuckled her Uncle Gerry. ‘They were slave traders!
A couple of generations of slave traders!’
With this startling revelation, Shauna was determined to find out more. She discovers her ancestor Robert Bostock arrived in Sydney in 1815 convicted of slave trading in Africa, and his grandson Augustus John married Bundjalung woman One My. Battling restrictions on access to government archives, Shauna pieces together her family’s stories.
Reaching Through Time reveals the cataclysmic impact of colonisation on Aboriginal families, and how this ripples through to the present. It also shows how family research can bring a deeper understanding and healing of the wounds in our history. ‘I am a proud Aboriginal woman who has always wanted to make a stronger connection to my cultural heritage’, Shauna writes. ‘I experienced an inner yearning to find out about my ancestors and what they experienced in life. This is the story of my journey.’
Deebing Creek Aborigines Reserve, near Ipswich, QLD. Shauna’s great-grandfather, Sam Anderson is the boy seated, far right.
As Bostock studied archives and oral histories spanning 200+ years of her family’s past, she realised her family history was an important contribution to national history. In blending memoir, oral history, biography and political analysis, Reaching Through Time reveals chapters of Australian history too often hidden from the official record: dispossession, frontier violence, stolen children and life under the Aboriginal Protection Board. For Bostock, uncovering her ancestors’ stories was not just personal; it became a political and historical act of truth-telling aimed at setting the record straight.
Emotional Toll and Resilience
Shauna Bostock admits that no-one can truly prepare for the emotional weight of confronting the intergenerational pain she uncovered during her research. ‘There really isn’t any preparation you can do’, she said. ‘As a truth seeker, I had no choice other than to process the emotions that family history evokes’, she explains.
Box Ridge Aborigines Reserve, near Coraki, NSW. Shauna’s great-grandmother, Mabel Anderson is seated with scarf around her head.
Yet it was in facing these painful truths that Bostock also found pride and resilience. Discovering ancestors who survived and resisted oppression transformed her perspective. Rather than seeing her people merely as victims, she began to see them as heroes. ‘They were the ultimate survivors of horrendous hardship, and I am bursting with pride for them’, Bostock reflects. ‘I’m no longer feeling like Aboriginal people were the victims of history, but rather we were heroic and brave survivors of history.’ Her ancestors’ fights for freedom, dignity and a better future became a source of strength that buoyed her through the darkest moments of her research.
Shauna’s First Nations Ancestors were Heroic, Brave Survivors of History
Truth-Telling as Healing
Reaching Through Time is a powerful act of truth-telling, with broad social impact. Its publication comes at a time when Australia is grappling with how to honestly acknowledge the atrocities of colonisation. Bostock stresses that truth telling is not just a woke or a trendy catchphrase. ‘It’s a means by which we can heal intergenerational trauma and inherited pain.’ By bringing long-suppressed stories to light, Reaching Through Time contributes to the national conversation about truth, justice and reconciliation. Crucially, the act of truth-telling proved healing for Bostock and her family. Reclaiming her ancestors’ narratives enabled her to restore their humanity and lay old spirits to rest.
Shauna’s Aunt Phemie Bostock and Grandmother Edith (Cowan) Bostock.
In her epilogue, Bostock writes that researching her ancestors’ lives spiritually unshackled them, and in doing so, ‘I too am unshackled, freed from the emotional sadness that I carried for their pain and suffering’. Through truth-telling, trauma begins to transform into healing and pride. Bostock’s family journey, once fragmented and hidden, is now preserved as part of Australia’s collective history, a testament to Indigenous resilience and an inspiring example of how uncovering the truth of the past can help heal wounds in the present.
Reaching Through Time demonstrates the power of biography as a tool for truth-telling. It stands as a moving contribution to First Nations’s history and a beacon of hope that understanding our true history, no matter how painful, paves the way for collective healing.
Praise for Reaching Through Time
Bostock’s history appears as a breakthrough, a next-level intervention in Australian historiography. She writes as an academically trained and rigorous historian with an absolute and unshakeable accountability to the family and community she comes from. And this positioning is combined with a rare capacity to connect directly with her readers, whoever they may be.
Victoria Haskins
Compelling and courageous truth-telling.
Dr Jackie Huggins AM, historian and author
This brilliantly researched, difficult-to- put-down history demonstrates how five generations of a multi-talented Aboriginal family made their worlds anew.
Professor Ann McGrath AM
Children stolen, homes resumed, authorities spying, ASIO snooping. Bostock’s family has it all, yet she can still see the funny side. This is why we need family histories. This is why we need truth-telling.
Professor Peter Read AM
Erased from history, dispossessed, forgotten – her ancestors came alive in the archives as if they had been waiting for someone to find them there, to tell their stories.
‘Reaching Through Time’ is the epitome of Indigenous family life writing...Bostock’s storytelling is engaging and compassionate. She has invited us into her family's conversations and into the kitchens and loungerooms of her family's homes.
Reaching Through Time Interviews
‘They were slave traders’: how an Indigenous historian found peace by unearthing her family’s past’.
Susan Chenery, The Guardian
Jacinta Walsh, Australian Book Review
Dr Shauna Bostock is a Bundjalung woman whose research focuses on the multi-generational history of her Aboriginal ancestors. Shauna has traced her four Aboriginal grandparents’ family lines back to the settlement of Northern New South Wales. Placed within the context of Aboriginal and Australian history, her family history research is a chronological narrative of five generations of Aboriginal experience.
Shauna’s doctoral thesis was titled, From Colonisation to My Generation: An Aboriginal Historian’s Family History Research Past to Present, and she graduated from Australian National University (ANU) in 2021. She is the author of a book titled Reaching Through Time: Finding My Family’s Stories (Allen & Unwin, 2023) and in September 2024, her book was awarded the 2024 NSW Premiers History Award for Community and Regional History.
Shauna is the Indigenous Research Editor at ANU’s Australian Dictionary of Biography.