Lighting the Way: Reconciliation Stories captures the spirit of reconciliation. It is a collection of honest and engaging stories about individual and community acts of reconciliation. Each story is personal and immediate. Some trace families and relationships over generations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. The book shows what reconciliation means and why so many wish to achieve it.

Table of Contents

Foreword - Linda Burney, Director General, NSW Department of Aboriginal Affairs

Sharing the Spirit
The Precious Waterhole of Illmargani
Bunjil and the Barber Shop
Fighting with Joy and Laughing
The Serpent Cope
Fire in Ice
Sea of Hands in the Mist
Painting Partners

Recovering History
Protecting the Warrior Spirit
Remembering Myall Creek
The Torchbearer

Saying Sorry
The Legacy of a Tribal Foremother
Jonah's Pride and the Magpie
The Healing House
Mirrilingki

Taking Sides
Raising the Flag
Stolen Pencils
The Sacred Lagoon
A Win for the Mutawintji Mob
Walking the Land

Celebrating Diversity
The Clasping Hand
The Poisoned Well
When I Grow Up
Coexistence
The Giant Coolamon

"Lighting the Way tells of a sustained, entrenched denial of much of the history of colonial Australia, a denial which characterises our society. The paucity of recorded history of Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal relations and the failure to teach it in any substantial way are evidence of this denial. Behind the inspiring individual stories in Lighting the Way is a 'larger' story in which the task of recognising and confirming essential parts of Australia's history has fallen on and been taken up by ordinary people in local communities. Johnson has ensured that their stories will not be lost to the twilight-world of unrecorded history.
Lighting the Way also tells a second 'larger' story - that of people experiencing the shock of realisation, the personal discovery of official brutality, deceit and the pervasive denial, extending even to today's governments and institutions. The cavalier loss of so many languages and so much culture, the abandonment of so many Aboriginal people to poverty and despair and, perhaps above all, the on-going failure to identify at the personal level with Aboriginal suffering, are also aspects or consequences of this entrenched denial.
Discovering this betrayal can be deeply challenging. Some so challenged - the Myall Massacre descendants, for example - have responded in defiance of the denial with remarkable gestures. As have Tasmanian Debra Chandler, grazier Camilla Cowley and many others whose stories are told in Lighting the Way. Dianne Johnson captures not only the people but the common spirit which has found expression in unrelated actors and different places. It is a rich and revealing story."

-- Civil Liberty, September 2002