Stan Grant needs no introduction. When he retired from the ABC in 2023 after a string of racial abuse, just months before the Voice to Parliament Referendum, he said, ‘Don’t mistake [First Nations Australians’] love for weakness – it is our strength. We have never stopped loving and fighting for justice and truth – the hard truths – to speak in our land.’

In Murriyang, this love takes the lead. Grant weaves together stories of his father, prayers to Baiyaame (God), reflections on the Voice, and his love for his Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi communities, to preach a philosophy of love. Politics and reason cannot be enough, Grant argues – we need art, God, poetry. We cannot research physics only because it is useful, but also because it is beautiful; we cannot reduce time to clocks but understand it as eternal; we cannot reduce ourselves to a nation that hates but become a people that love.

Grant here tells a history that is both national and personal. We learn of his mother’s coffee drinking and of Empire. In blurring these categories, Grant suggests that the political cannot be devoid of feeling, and feeling cannot be devoid of the political – this modernist separation fails us. The language of politics is impersonal, but Grant treats all language as personal – his father was tasked with the revival of the Wiradjuri language, which today has hundreds of fluent speakers. He saved the language, kept it alive – how could anything alive be impersonal? With language, there can be memory, with language we create time, with language there can be a voice.

Unfortunately, language does not beget a Voice, and with discussions of the Voice, Grant turns to grace. Gracefully, lyrically, Grant writes like a song, like a prayer: ‘I pray that our worst memories fade. I pray that each rising sun bleaches our scars. I pray kisses number more than tears. I pray silence is peace.’