Albert “Poppy” Gondiwindi says that the word Ngurambang or “country” can allow someone to time travel, with old words allowing people to reach through time. This starts off his discussion of his life and his life’s work—his Wiradjuri dictionary. He writes of his parents’ deaths and his own approaching death, seeing it as a transformation. Looking back on his life, he says that as a young man, he decided to “be” even though he was “in a country where [they] weren’t really allowed to be” (11).

Poppy tells the story of how his wife, Elsie, bought him his first dictionary. He expounds on the stories that a dictionary can record and says that he is writing to record his own stories and the stories of the place and culture he is a part of. Poppy remarks that although the “time of the church” (i.e., the Western concept of time) is against him due to a terminal cancer diagnosis, he is writing about a much larger idea of time. He wants to pass on everything he can remember.