Ninety-six-year-old Wes Marne has been telling stories, he says, “since Moses played fullback for Jerusalem”.

But the Aboriginal elder worries about the future of storytelling.

“You can talk as much as you want, but if no one’s going to listen ...”

As our networked devices ping with global stories told from multiple perspectives, there’s a risk that certain voices might be drowned out – or lost completely in the noise. How do you maintain the storytelling traditions and the spoken literature of an oral culture in the digital era?

That’s the challenge we set when developing Blak Box – an architect-designed listening space to project the stories of the First People developed by Urban Theatre Projects, which opens this week at Sydney festival.

Marne’s voice is one being projected in the box. He speaks matter-of-factly as he recounts moments in his epic life story, which tracks from his childhood in the bush to his droving and fencing days in far western Queensland.

His bittersweet, often surprising personal story is a counter-narrative because it challenges what we think we know about Aboriginal lives, and the past century of Australian history. Undeniably, Marne is the boss of his own story. That is significant: after centuries of being written about, Indigenous people are staking a claim to subjectivity and ownership of story.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Uncle Wes Marne’s epic life story has been captured in Blak Box at Sydney festival. Photograph: Joshua Morris

Born in 1922 on his Bigambul country in southern Queensland, Marne is a highly regarded elder in the Aboriginal communities of greater western Sydney – a region with a high concentration, and growing population, of Indigenous people.

Marne learnt the art of storytelling around the campfire and in the bush listening intently to his revered grandfather, who he describes as “a master of the spear and the woomera”. An initiated man who danced at the last great gathering of the border tribes in the early 20th century, his traditional name was a Bigambul term for “white water man”.

At the age of nine, Uncle Wes and his family moved south on to the oddly named Deadbird mission, near Ashford on the New South Wales northern tablelands. He has worked as a drover, a fencer, a miner, a tannery worker and served in the Korean war, coming to Sydney in the early 1960s.

Uncle Wes remembers when he was first asked to speak in NSW public schools 16 years ago. The invitation came with a warning: no talk of massacres or genocide or stolen children. “Only dreamtime stories,” he says.

It’s never been easy to tell the truth about Australian history, and the centrality of Indigenous people in the narrative. That doesn’t mean people haven’t tried to share their own stories.

Over the past two decades, there has been a wave of first-person storytelling in the form of life writing, with small independent publishers such as the Aboriginal-owned Magabala Books and the UQP imprint Black Australian Writers fostering a “new” Indigenous literature.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Daniel Browning, whose sound installation Blak Box features at Sydney festival.

Follow The Rabbit Proof Fence by the late Doris Pilkington Garimara bridged the gulf of national forgetfulness and denial in a universal story of homecoming. Speaking to a Fairfax Media journalist in 2002, Pilkington concluded that “this forgetting, the absence of memory” was one of the biggest legacies of the stolen generations.

Perhaps the finest but least conventional ripple in that wave of Aboriginal life writing is Tracker by Alexis Wright. Although published in book form, Tracker could still claim to be a “spoken” literary work: a political history as much as a biography, the “story” of the land rights campaigner and Aboriginal statesman Tracker Tilmouth is told through multiple voices and from multiple angles, forensically transcribed from field recordings by the author herself.

But while there is a wealth of Indigenous life writing, what of the spoken word?

The spoken literature of an oral culture – such as dreaming stories, language and oral history – represents a body of cultural knowledge that will disappear without our intervention. These stories are the collective memory of hundreds of generations and can unlock what it means to be on this continent, at this moment in time.

As a radio journalist and broadcaster I’ve tried to capture the stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people honestly. In my opinion, these stories and oral histories are social documents, every bit as instructive as a book. With every iteration of Blak Box, we create an intangible but permanent record of lives that would otherwise be lost to history.

But Wes Marne fears even if they’re captured digitally, the stories that his grandfather told him will be gone when he dies – because there is no one listening.

“They don’t want to listen to culture. It’s too busy – there are many other distractions out there,” he says. “Instead of listening to a story, they’ll go down to McDonald’s and join the boys and the mob down there. Or walk the streets all night. And there’s no future there.”

Like a finely tuned musical instrument, the human voice is capable of an extraordinary range of emotional tones. When we listen closely to the voice, we can hear subtle variations in tone, a lingering breath, an editorial cough or a sudden inhale. But there’s an entire vocabulary of non-verbal communication – posture, eye and hand movements can be as expressive as the spoken word. There is something about being in the presence of a storyteller as they yarn.

It is not enough to just simply record the stories and deposit them in a library for future generations – because the telling itself is part of the story.

• Four Winds – the latest iteration of Blak Box, by Urban Theatre Projects – runs from 9 January until 2 February at the Blacktown showground precinct, as part of Sydney festival 2019

• Daniel Browning is an Aboriginal journalist, radio broadcaster and sound artist, and the curator of Four Winds