The Conspiracy of the Insignificant

Recording old-timers weathered by Outback summers in 1980’s Bourke taught me the value of a single life story. Two decades later, half a world away at a film studio in Vermont on the East coast of the USA, the historians who scripted the award-winning documentaries The Civil War and The West told me the same thing. Their secret was to tell the big story through carefully tracking the small stories. I learned that in a sense there are no ordinary people – each has a story unique to them. One day we might be surprised to find that a humble man like Frankie Faulkner had quietly played a part in a grand narrative.