Come visit the Territory with Laura Jean McKay.

Hear how a visit to community on Australia's fringes and a real – stranger than fiction – experience inspired this story, how giving voice to the voiceless has become part of Laura's practice, and why the voice we gave her story caught her off guard. 

Listeners are advised that this episode of Unfolded comes with a language and content warning. 

About Laura Jean McKay

Laura Jean McKay is the author of The Animals in That Country which won the 2021 Arthur C. Clarke Award and The Victorian Prize for Literature.

Her latest collection is Gunflower.

She is the 2025 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellow and teaches Creative Writing at Massey University.

Unfolded is produced with support from the Melbourne Public Humanities Initiative, on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Eastern Kulin Nation.

The producers would like to pay their respects to the traditional owners, to their Elders past and present, and to acknowledge their storytelling history, which goes back tens of thousands of years.