The Story Only I Can Tell is the creation story of Yang’s life. His forebears migrated from China to Australia more than a hundred years ago and subsequent generations adapted to western culture. His story is about his struggle with his identity as an Australian-born Chinese man. Yang grew up in North Queensland on a tobacco farm, and has made his way in the world as an architect, playwright, photographer, visual artist, film-maker, and story-teller.

This event will start with the first public performances of four local storytellers who have been mentored by Yang, and end with a longer presentation by him.

William Yang is a pre-eminent Australian photographer known for an intensely sustained body of work that examines issues of cultural and sexual identity, and which unflinchingly documents the lives of his friends and community and his own lived experience with curiosity, sensitivity and humour. He is known in particular for his documentation of the Sydney LGBTIQ+ community from the 1970s onwards, and for photographic series engaging with his sense of identity as a Chinese-Australian, his family history and the history of the Chinese in Australia in general. Yang’s work has won numerous awards and accolades, and is held in the collections of all major Australian institutions. Over his forty-year career as a photographer, he has worked alongside artists including Patrick White, Brett Whiteley and Jenny Kee.