Maryrose Casey's Telling Stories expands the territory of her ground-breaking book Creating Frames (2004), which traced the history of Indigenous Australian theatre from the 1960s to 1990 for the first time. In Telling Stories, Casey shifts her focus from script-based drama to traditional and historical Indigenous performance practices, where song, dance, storytelling and visual arts combine in dynamic interchange between spiritual ceremony and secular entertainment.

Casey takes us into spheres of firelit, body-painted, multimedia performance that may be sacred or secret, characterized by hunting scenes, ghost ships, wimmin's business, shark men or war stories, yet the authorial tone is respectful rather than exoticizing. The word ‘respect’ reverberates through the book: as Indigenous artists respect the cosmos and their ancient performative legacy, so Casey constructs her thesis with integrity. At times, she seems more storyteller than researcher, enhancing crisp performance description and analysis with illuminating commentary from her interviews with artists and elders. These voices infuse the book with poetic intelligence, such as Stephen Page's image of ‘a community of the soul’ and Frances Rings's sad comment on the fallout of atomic bomb tests: ‘to be denied the land is to die a slow death’. While acknowledging the contributions of Western anthropologists, Casey reframes Aboriginal performance in relation to Indigenous epistemologies. An appendix of Web-based and audio-visual resources will be a vital resource for further study and increases the visibility of work, which Casey argues has been ‘erased from the social memory’.

Beginning with an introduction to Indigenous Australian cultures, Casey moves on to examine the frequency and variety of Indigenous performances in the colonial era, arguing that, since the late eighteenth century, Indigenous performance has been a crucial part of cross-cultural communication in Australia. Casey digs into fresh scholarly ground in a chapter on distinctive Torres Strait Islander dance traditions that have not been documented to the same degree as Aboriginal work. Torres Strait choreographer Elma Kris's aesthetic engagement with her culture in Emeret Lu (2007) for the Bangarra Aboriginal Dance Theatre convincingly illustrates Casey's thesis of continuous innovation in Indigenous performance. Bangarra was also the force behind Frances Rings's X300 (2007), a multimedia work on the contamination of Aboriginal land following 1950s British atomic bomb tests in central Australia, demonstrating how contemporary performance has become a potent means of expression for communities dealing with ‘loss, grief and trauma’. Finally, Casey considers the popular phenomenon of Indigenous autobiographical monodramas as ‘necessarily political acts of self-determination and self-representation’. Her focus on solo works by three outstanding male performers illustrates how the presence of the Indigenous performer ‘contests generalizations at the heart of racism’.

Casey follows ethical research practices in consulting widely with Indigenous communities and artists, and in Telling Stories she takes the extra step of handing over the final say to an Indigenous practitioner/scholar, Liza-mare Syron. Syron's Afterword is a self-contained essay that speaks eloquently to the themes developed by Casey. She highlights the role of theatre/performance in revealing an invisible black history to the Australian public, emphasizing that contemporary performance continues cultural practices that have existed in Aboriginal society for 40,000 years. Syron concludes the book by looking to the future, noting that Indigenous theatre is at a ‘crossroads’: one road leading to higher-profile mainstage production, the other back into Aboriginal communities. Telling Stories is an exemplary artist–scholar collaboration avoiding past traps of categorization and othering that have made ‘researcher’ a dirty word in many Indigenous communities in the Pacific.