(Re)membering in the contact zone : telling, and listening to, a massacre story

This paper has been jointly produced by an Aboriginal storyteller and a non-Aboriginal listener. It seeks to explore the meaning making generated in an oral storytelling exchange involving a massacre story. The paper is based on a series of interviews and ongoing conversations that took place in two sequential research projects between 1995 and 2005. We use the idea of the contact zone to frame the exchange as an in-between space where the main purpose of communication is to keep meanings open, 'to preserve the intervals of difference'. We use a mixture of transcript quotes from interviews and an experimental writing form in order to enact the ideas we are trying to explore in the form and structure of the paper.