In the final leg of the Edinburgh World Writers' conference, the Aboriginal writer Tony Birch muses on post-national literature
I discovered the post-national novel on Melbourne's North Richmond railway station in 1971 when I was 15 years old. I had been expelled from school after falling through a shop window in a fight with another boy. I was slightly built but never bullied, as my father had taught me to box above my weight. Although I learned little in high school, I was a voracious reader. I'd held a public library card from the age of five, and picked up secondhand paperbacks whenever I could. My train was cancelled that day and I had a further half hour to wait. I retrieved a novel from my bag that I had borrowed from the library.
Barry Hines's A Kestrel for a Knave was published 1968. It is set in a depressed working-class area of northern England, a long way from inner Melbourne. Those around him – a bullying older brother, schoolyard thugs and psychopathic teachers – repeatedly whack Billy Casper, the slightly built boy at the centre of the novel. He finds salvation from violence through his love for a bird, a headstrong but graceful kestrel, and in the wonder of a nearby wood – itself a relief from the grime of coal mines, slag heaps and the overcrowded terraces of the town.
I had read many novels by the time I picked up Kes, devouring my older brother's English school, including Salinger's The Catcher In The Rye, Graham Greene's Travels With My Aunt and Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird. No book left the impression on me that Kes did. I was convinced that it had travelled the globe to find me. From the first pages, when Billy wakes in the early morning in his damp, crowded room and is teased and abused by his brother, I felt more than empathy for him. I was sure I was Billy.
As my experience of Kes shows, good writing migrates and finds a home. Therefore, we don't require a national literature to draw attention to issues of the human condition – or the heart – in Australia. Granted, in recent years there have been significant novels published in Australia that draw attention to important issues from a domestic perspective. Michelle de Kretser's multi award-winning Questions of Travel is such a book. And of course, it will travel and will have an impact on readers worldwide who are interested in good writing and the troubles of the globally stateless.
A particular issue in any discussion of both national and post-national fiction in Australia is Aboriginal writing and writing about Aboriginal people (which may be both interrelated and mutually exclusive). Historically, Aboriginal writers of fiction have produced, if not definitively anti-nationalist writing, a sharp critique of an inclusive and collective sense of identity throughout popular culture and the politics of populism.
White Australia's approach to the "Aboriginal problem" in the 20th century was dominated by the twin policies of child removal and limited assimilation. In attempts to legitimate dubious and often cruel policies, successive governments, national and state, utilised the spectre of the "half-caste menace" to support the violence underpinning assimilation.
Not surprisingly then, Aboriginal writers have often focused on issues of identity, the politics of colour, and the hypocrisy of miscegenation, first interrogated in the seminal Wild Cat Falling, by Colin Johnson, in 1965; an unflattering and tragic portrayal of the modern "half-caste", understood through the experiences of a young man who is emotionally and culturally detached from society.
The novel represents the failure of an obsessive national identity project. No other writer in Australia, Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal, would apply a similar literary critique to the assimilation project until Kim Scott's award-winning Benang was published in 1999. This novel, which ranges across the period of "Aboriginal Protection" under the leadership of AO Neville, the chief protector of Aborigines in Western Australia in the first half of the 20th century, is subtitled "From the Heart". And it is with heart and humour and pathos that Scott lances the festering sore of assimilation, exposing its devastating impact on individuals, families and communities.
Since then, other Aboriginal writers have produced intelligent and engaging portraits of the nation, through fiction that defies it. This list includes Alexis Wright, Bruce Pascoe and Melissa Lucashenko, among others. Wright, in her novels Carpentaria (also a Miles Franklin winner), and recent The Swan Book, challenges Australians to come to terms with the impact of British occupation on Aboriginal land and people. Her writing provides far more than a critique of a dominant national story. She offers another way to engage with place and people, be they the first inhabitants of this land, or – as with de Kretser's work – the plight of the displaced. Such novels are perhaps a version of national fiction looking beyond the nation.
In recent years, the wider literary community in Australia has celebrated Aboriginal writing, although it also continues to be received and consumed defensively, within a mindset stuck in the colonial imagination. I call this the "disloyalty effect", whereby some critics, commentators and readers respond to what they feel is a negative critique of the national story: an act of ingratitude. The degree of disloyalty is compounded when delivered by "mixed-blood" Aboriginal writers, who are, after all, the wayward children of the benevolent nation.
Of course, there are those who understand the potential for Aboriginal writing to productively shift the national story. Geordie Williamson, literary critic of The Australian newspaper, in his review of Wright's The Swan Book, commented on the "urgent importance'" of the novel and the themes it tackles, going far beyond the borders of a national story, dealing with issues such as climate change, refugees, and the outsider.
The Swan Book is an ideal example of post-national fiction. Both Scott and Wright are read widely outside Australia, particularly in Europe, where their work has been translated. A global engagement with Aboriginal writers increasingly locates the writing in a global context.
Let me be clear, Aboriginal writers in Australia are not alone in this achievement. However, too many Australians remain ignorant of the creative and intellectual reach of Aboriginal writing, knowing little beyond the degree to which it serves us and fits within a national narrative.
In February, Screen Australia invited me, along with a group of Aboriginal writers, to spend a week at Uluru with the film writer and novelist, Guillermo Arriaga. He has visited Australia previously, and has a passionate interest in Aboriginal storytelling, through both writing for film and fiction. In several conversations between us, Guillermo returned to the same point. While he is excited that Aboriginal writing has introduced him to Australia's domestic story, it has resonated with him most directly by providing him with an additional insight into the story of his own country, Mexico. He was not referring to indigenous issues, but human issues. Aboriginal fiction, he said, "speaks to the world".
I have taught at university for almost 20 years now. I also regularly appear at writers' festivals. It is rare for an event concerned with Aboriginal writing to pass without the question coming from the floor: "Can non-Aboriginal people write an Aboriginal character?"
Non-Aboriginal authors written about Aboriginal people for more than 200 years and will continue to do so. Many would-be writers who ask the question are seeking absolution and endorsement; a misguided notion on two counts. If the Aboriginal writer endorses their "right to creative expression", a beaming smile appears on the face of the writer. He or she has been saved, cleansed and is now "entitled". If I were to offer advice, it would be that the responsibility for what is written sits with the author. Totally. Whenever I feel uneasy about subject matter, I come to a clear decision to tackle the material and, hopefully do it justice. Or leave it alone when I don't feel equipped to write well. (This is the reason I don't write about sex.)
There are many non-Aboriginal writers in Australia who have produced important novels that deal with Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal relationships. They include Randolph Stow, Alex Miller, Kate Grenville and Peter Goldsworthy. Other writers have failed miserably in the task, unable to rise above two-dimensional stereotypes, sentimentality, moral superiority or guilt, sometimes in one book.
Our measuring stick must be novels of quality, the stories that attempt to question and shift the culture. I like stories about this place, this country, but not those that do little more than mimic the rah-rah of the sporting field. Nor those that want to uphold a shallow lie about this country, even when posing as fiction. I also want to read stories that travel, like a bird I adore, the Arctic tern, which bravely navigates the globe each year to nest on the beaches of southern Australia.
Finally, I want to mention two heroes. When I read Junot Diaz's first book, his 1996 linked story collection, Drown, I had a similar experience to that on discovering Kes. I was a lot older, calmer and more settled. Here was a book set in the Dominican Republic and New Jersey that again spoke to my heart and head. Once I put the book down, I understood that it was time stop scribbling the occasional poem and short story and try to become a writer. For better or worse, Diaz is partly responsible for my first book, Shadowboxing, a linked story collection that follows the life of Michael Byrne, from the childhood badlands of inner Melbourne to an adulthood of resolution.
While preparing for this festival, I have been reading a new book, Ali Alizadeh's Transactions. It is a story cycle that traverses the globe, dealing with the greed and cruelty of rampant capitalism, the displacement and exploitation of vulnerable people, and the yearning for a home that exists, not in a slogan, a T-shirt, or a pledge of loyalty, but in the blood that flows through the body, in the spiritual resonances that we sometimes attempt to deny. While Transactions has been favourably reviewed in Australia, we have also been reminded that it is "bleak". It is not. It is a book of love that refuses an easy exit. It is fiction that exposes the prejudices and violence of society. In doing so. Alizadeh generously offers us a better way of seeing the world and ourselves. It is truly a book without borders.
This is an edited extract of a keynote address given in Melbourne as part of the Edinburgh World Writers' Conference. Click here for full transcripts of all the speeches.
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