From First Nations Writers Festival 2024 - Short Story Award winners with their magnificent contributions to literature in the Greater Pacific. The unexpected thematic in all these stories? The intellectual arc stretching between the ancient knowledge that created cultural laws and protective myths, and the new colonial influence. Each story flows from the protections of cultural and environmental laws, and the adaptation required for colonialisation. Of terrible loss, and heartening opportunities, of personal growth to legend, and a forging of the old and the new as a platform for the future. What is the future? You decide.