To tell a true story is to gamble a little, to take a risk. It is a performance of a sort. True stories cost. And true stories never end. You can't encompass true stories in a six volume History of Australia or an Oxford or Cambridge Companion to this and that.
True stories are mysterious.
There is no closure to true stories. There is always another true story to be told. In the last sentences of her Boyer Lectures, Inga Clendinnen suggests that the endlessness of story-telling is not a progressive march forward. It is a 'crabwise approach, eyes swivelling sideways, backwards, forwards, with equal intensity, because while the past is past, it is not dead. Its hand is on our shoulder'.