lutruwita Love Stories

Clarence Plains has published ‘lutruwita Love Stories’ ❤️🥳

lutruwita Love Stories is a book written by more than forty community members in Clarence Plains,

Who shared their love stories of connection, culture and sharing as part of 26TEN & Indigenous Literacy Day.

The book is also illustrated by children from Clarence Plains.

Kate is the 26TEN Coordinator for OCT, who helps to improve literacy & numeracy in Clarence Plains. 

She shared a little bit about the project with us: 

“lutruwita Love Stories came about from a simple post-it note from my colleague Nerissa, stuck to my computer screen that said simply “Indigenous Literacy Day.

At the time I was reading Trent Dalton’s book; “Love Stories”, in which Trent set up a typewriter on the streets of Brisbane and asked anyone who passed by for a love story. He typed the stories up on the spot and ended up with a book.

Both Nerissa and I loved the idea that you could empower anyone passing by to be an author.  We agreed that this would be perfect for the Clarence Plains community with its high percentage of people who identify as Aboriginal.

This book would be by the community, for the community.

To encourage people to contribute to lutruwita Love Stories, we offered storytellers a cupcake in exchange for a story. As the stories rolled in, Nerissa and I realised that we had stumbled on something really very important.

Each story had us thinking, laughing, talking and wondering, some leaving us deeply moved, often to tears. People would come in wondering why the Child and Family Learning Centre staff were all red eyed and blubbering!”