In mid-2024, to coincide with Children’s Book Week, Brisbane Youth Education and Training Centre (BYETC) launched its inaugural volume of
Dreaming Big: Voices from the Brisbane Youth Detention Centre.
This book features the poetry of 30 of our First Nations students and is the result of a collaboration with Aunty Barb Nicholson and Luke Patterson from the Ngana Barangari Group, who are best known for their work
Dreaming Inside: Voices from the Junee Correctional Centre, which has been produced annually for 12 years.
Throughout 2024, Aunty Barb and Luke worked with students at BYETC to share their stories. Students were encouraged to dig deep within themselves, to be courageous and to find something they wanted the world to know about them.
The voices in the book are raw. The original spelling, grammar and punctuation have been untouched unless the student asked for their work to be edited. This is a deliberate stylistic feature and is common to all the previous works in the
Dreaming series. Not editing the contributions has been done to ensure the original voice is heard—to ensure the voices of older, non-incarcerated people do not colonise the work of our up-and-coming poets.
Many of the entries are brief but readers are cautioned into believing that you need a lot of words to convey a powerful message. Some of the briefest works are the most powerful.
Dreaming Big is the first of the
Dreaming series to be produced outside New South Wales and the first to feature the voices of incarcerated youth.
BYETC would like to acknowledge all of the people who contributed to making this project a success.
Copies of
Dreaming Big can be purchased from the
South Coast Writers Centre.