← A Podcast of One's Own with Julia Gillard
A Podcast of One's Own with Julia Gillard
Alexis Wright on activism, Indigenous land rights and breaking down literature stereotypes
00:34:01
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A
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I didn't want to be contained in what was expected of me to do of what, you know, Australian literature is and how it should be written. And I thought, no, I'm not going to do that. And probably that's the story of my life.
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C
My guest today has been lauded as arguably the most important Australian writer alive today. Her work is not only award winning, but it's breaking new ground and challenging the publishing industry. Alexis Wright made history as the only writer to have won both the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Stella Prize, and this year she became the first person to win the Stella twice. Her most recent book, an epic work of fiction called Praiseworthy, has been heralded by critics around the globe and as genre bending, an epic of classical proportions and the most ambitious and accomplished Australian novel of this century. After recording this episode, Alexis won this year's Miles Franklin for Praiseworthy as well. But despite more than four decades of writing, this proud Wanyi nation woman didn't grow up with books. She says it was her inquiring mind and taking notes during community meetings in outback towns that led to work in research and advocacy and eventually writing. I certainly enjoyed learning more about Alexis life, what has caused her to write, the way she thinks about her writing and her reflections on the novel Praiseworthy. Alexis, in talking about Praiseworthy, does canvas themes associated with suicide and also the impact of the Northern Territory intervention by the Howard government, which was in response to allegations of child sexual abuse. I hope you enjoy listening to Alexis as much as I did. Alexis, congratulations on the incredible success of your novel Praiseworthy, for which you were awarded your second stellar prize. That's a remarkable achievement. I've got a copy of Praiseworthy here. I've just finished reading it and I'm really looking forward to discussing the book. But before we get there, I want to start at the very beginning and talk about your childhood. You were just five years old when you lost your father and you and your sister were raised by your mother and grandmother. Can you tell me A little bit about your childhood growing up.
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B
Thank you, Julia. It's a real pleasure to talk to you this evening. So, yes, My father passed away when I was about 5 and he was a cattleman. He come from a family of cattle people, graziers in northwest Queensland. My sister was a year and a half older than me. My sister's passed away now. That left us with our mum. She was bringing us up in Cloncurry. And he spent a lot of his time on the cattle property. And he would come in to town, but he was often away. That's my memory. He was. We didn't see him all the time. When I was about three, I used to run away from Mum. I used to go. I deeply love my grandmother. And my grandmother was really kind and remarkable woman. And I think probably I was just a child who'd like to argue and maybe try to get my own way, or not necessarily get my own way, but just to. I think I needed a lot of freedom. And she was trying to keep us tightly reined in. And, yeah, this is my memories of growing up with my mother. And she was very strict. And so I would, just as soon as she turned it back, I would just be over the front fence and off down to my grandmother's place. Her place was. It was just a retreat. It was just an oasis in a way. You know, she was a really great gardener and she grew everything. And she'd be up at the crack of dawn and there was not a weed in her garden. And she was always arranging pot plants and mango tree, you know, and growing mango trees or pawpaw trees and things like that. But I was one that decided I was going to cling to my grandmother. And it was only just a corrugated iron place. Part of it had dirt floors and she had no electricity, just, you know, hurricane lamps, things like that. She walked to town every day virtually, because she had no electricity to buy food, you know, to. To cook and. But she'd cook what she needed every day. And she had all these vegetables in the garden and a Chinese cabbage. She was always making cabbage stew and rice. But she was the head of our family. She wasn't a bossy woman or anything like that. I don't remember her as being bossy with the family, but the family had enormous respect for her. And I just loved being with her. So that was a great saving for me, I think, to have had a grandmother like that. I've seen in my life a number of children who haven't had a grandmother close by. And I Think that was the saving of me to have had that really loving and remarkable and wise grandmother. And she taught me a lot about, you know, a different way, you know, a cultural way of seeing the world, because that's how she, you know, she saw the world and how she spoke about it. So she was incredible. My mother, I think, was more affected by the simulation era of that time. I think my grandma was just oblivious to a lot of. A lot of people who might have given her trouble or. You know, I didn't even know what racism was until I was much older. So this was my early years of having that very close relationship with my. With my grandmother. And my mother was always trying to pull me in and she was trying to bring us up in a town. There was quite a divide there on racial lines and. And not just only on racial lines, but on social lines as well, you know, on. On who had more, you know, who are richer than other people or who had status. So that was difficult, you know, to have that. That sort of upbringing. But to have the grandmother who was, you know, the. This loving and kind and saw the world in a different way, it was. It was. It was. It was good. And I think that really did help me a lot in life and to this day.
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C
And can I ask you. I'm really loving the image of the slightly disobedient young girl popping over the fence to go down and see her grandmother. That's a wonderful image. And your grandmother was of both Aboriginal and Chinese descent, wasn't she? So you've talked about her making. Making the Chinese cab in this family setting. I mean, obviously racism and divisions around race were visible in your township. What about a sense of being a girl? Was there a time when you first realised that girls got treated differently to boys? Was that when you went to school or at some other point?
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B
Yeah. What I could say about my family is it was very matriarchal. See, I had my grandmother. There was no grandfather. You know, he'd passed away before I was born. And it's a big family and they were mainly girls, you know, so I had a lot of aunties, you know, and they were all. They were all their own person. I actually grew up at that, in that early stage of my life with women, you know, with. With my grandmother, my mother and, you know, it was very strong and, you know, in her own right. But there was this thing with my grandmother who was head of family, and with these aunties who. I don't know. This is a family about 11 or 12 and only two of those were boys.
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C
Looking back on that period growing up, where did your interest in the world of literature and books come from? I mean, from that background to become the writer that you have been across your life. Can you join that up for us? How did that happen?
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B
Well, it certainly didn't happen then. In fact, I started Catholic school and had a very old, an elderly nun who taught first grade and I was naturally left handed and she would rap me over the knuckles until I learned to write with my right hand. And so writing was not something I enjoyed. And when I went to high school I had the English teacher who would often write disparaging notes on my essays and assignments. I remember clearly one time he sprawled across the bottom. This writing is pathetic. Pathetic. And so. Ouch. So I had no idea. And, and, and my mother wasn't able to, you know, in all that schooling years she had very little education and she, she wouldn't have been able to, to confront people about things that might have been going wrong for us. Not, not easily. And then when I, after some years I, you know, turned my attention to my own traditional homeland, our one year homeland in the Gulf of Carpentaria and because this was something about my grandmother as well that she had, she had to leave, you know, our traditional country. And a lot of people did because of, you know, the cattle properties were locked places, you know, you couldn't just go on there, you could get shot going. So I turned my attentions back to the things that were happening to our own people and I got a lot of support from older people in our world and I was very, very lucky because they took me under their wing. I became involved in things that were happening in Aboriginal legal service in Mount Isa and living on Mornington island for a while. And I ended up in Canberra. I was working with the National Aboriginal Conference when it was still in existence years ago. I was head of research there. You know, we were going for things like national land rights at that stage and that was defeated and worked in the Northern Territory. I lived in Alice Springs for a long time and I worked there. And so I worked in karma for a while and that was fun. And I worked for, you know, did projects for Central Land Council. I organized Aboriginal constitutional conventions. When we had in Tennant Creek called Today, we talked about Tomorrow and another one in Kalgorengi talking about ideas. There's so many issues that we were fighting for over the years about land rights. And you'd know all that struggle of the land rights cases, some lasting 20 years or more. And so I work with a number of elders from across Central Australia on issues of Aboriginal governance. It wasn't a fashionable thing that people wanted to talk about, so there's just been that deterioration and because of government policies, and it's a sort of constant failure.
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C
So you're a young activist, you're doing incredible work on behalf of your community, Aboriginal Australia generally. But there does seem still a big gap between that and sitting down and writing fiction. So can you tell me about that?
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B
What happened right from the start? When I was working with organizations way back in Mannai's Mornington island, places like that, people were having a lot of meetings all the time, and they wanted to bring their young people in, like myself. And we generally had a little bit more schooling than they had, so they wanted us to do the reading and the writing. So one of my main jobs was to do things like the minutes of meetings, and the meetings would go on for hours. And in those days, they would want to have you write down everything that was said in the meeting, not just the decisions that were made, not like today, because some of those meetings could be quite heated, and there's reasons for that and about ways of shall we do things this way or that way, and trying to reach a consensus and all that. But they wanted a record of what was said. And nobody thought, we'll go out and buy a tape recorder. And maybe we couldn't afford a tape recorder, but anyway, you could afford a voluntary young person with a better education to write down every word. So that became a. A standard job for me, and I could do that. And particularly in Queensland, where we talk a little bit slower the further north you go. And it was quite easy to write everything down. Later in life I thought about that, and what they were really doing is teaching a young person like me, who was a bit of a hothead in those days, they were teaching you to listen and to understand. And it was a very good lesson, I think, so, from someone who couldn't care less originally about reading or writing became quite something that I became very interested in. And doing that research of searching constitutional issues or what were other indigenous people doing across the world, et cetera, et cetera. And I worked really hard on some of the projects and things that, you know, issues that we were fighting. And I thought one day that, you know, maybe I would write. And eventually the day came, I think, you know, that I thought, you know, it came gradually that I would try and do some, you know, some writing, and I became a great reader of literature. Across the world to try to figure out how to I would write, you know, how could I try to attempt to write the sort of stories that I thought were necessary to write for, you know, for this country, if you're going to write at all. And that's where it started and has built up over the years. You know, from very early books like Plains of Promise and then Grog War, you know, the issues about excessive amount of alcohol that was sold at a place like Tennant Creek and what the people at Moromangu people did there to try and you know, prevent and lessen the amount of alcohol sold in that town. And I just couldn't believe it myself. And they wanted me to write Grog War for them and they were just remarkable people. You know, when I went up there to tenant and to do some of the work there and it just, I was treated so well and taken all around the country, showing the country what a beautiful place. And then came Tate Power and for the Central Land council to commemorate 20, 20 years of land rights struggle in central Australia. And then onto Carpenteria Swan Book Tracker and praiseworthy. But you know, it doesn't seem like many books. There's, you know, I probably missed out. Yeah, I did miss out a few. But some of those books, big books and they take a long time. It takes me a long time to write the type of writing that I'm doing.
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C
And talking about a book, for example, your award winning novel Carpenteria, it won the Miles Franklin and yet it was rejected by most major book publishers who thought that the public wouldn't be interested in a long and literary first nations novel because. But it was published and found this remarkable success. Can you tell us about your original intersections with the publishing industry? I mean having determined that you were going to write and you were going to write fiction, how hard was it to get a book through and get it to an audience?
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B
Well, I decided really early on, Julia, I think after you, you know, my first book Plains of Promise and Plains of Promise is still, you know, it's still published and but I, I decided that I didn't want to be contained in what was expected of me to do of, of what, you know, Australian literature is and how it should be written. And I thought no, I'm not going to do that. And that's probably that's story of my life and I don't like to be contained in, in someone else's box and, or in, in the publishing industry's box or at what they expect, you know, what literature is going to be in this country and what the standard is. I wanted to explore, you know, things a little bit more deeply with Carpenteria. You know, I spent a long time trying to figure out how to write that book. And it troubled me. It really troubled me and because I had a manuscript there, but I didn't feel it was doing the right thing. Then it struck me that I should be writing this book in the voices of elders or older people, senior people, and these are the voices that nobody will listen to or what they have to say. And I'd seen it over and over and of, of our senior people wanting to, to explain well something really important and people just not listening, you know, just. Oh yes, yes. And hadn't heard them at all. And so this has, this book should be written in the way that they speak. And you know, I thought of Gabriel Garcia Marquis, you know, writing, you know, he had that sort of thought too when he wrote 100 Years of Solitude that he had to that book in, you know, in, in the voices of, you know, his aunties, you know, the older people in his family. And I thought this is the way I have to do this book. And so I went home and I knew that if I wrote the book and I had to rewrite the book and taking a lot of time and not, you know, holding down a, you know, a full time job, which I didn't tell my husband that I'm going to take some, some risks with this book. And, and because I knew if I wrote it in the voices of, of our old people, it may not, not get published. And, and if there, and, and I, I struggle with that, I, I, you know, every, every morning I'd get up and work on this book and, and, and I'd like have to dismiss it and say, well, this book has to be written in this, in this particular way. And so I did that and then continued on until I finished the book. So it was rejected by most publishers or practically all except one in the country. And not that we had at that time a lot of publishers anyhow. Another friend, Nicholas Jose, who has been a friend through all my literary career, he said why not send it to Ivor and Dick at Giramondo? And Ivor was just starting up his publishing industry, his publishing company, and he was handpicking what he wanted to publish and in the few books that he would publish a year and I thought, you know, he probably won't want to publish this book and he'll like the other publishers who, you know, they, they do want to make some Money out of what they publish. And. And he has to, too. And so he probably won't want to publish it. I was still living in Alice Springs at that stage, and he sent me an email and asked me a number of very hard questions about why I wrote the book, how I wrote it, and which I answered the best I could. And he. And I thought this was really the last I'll hear from him because I didn't know Ivor at that stage. And he came back and he said, I want to publish this. You know, I'm really happy to publish it. And it was. He was fantastic. And it was a relationship that was built up from there. And the book went on. It won, I think won five major prizes that year, including the. Miles Franklin.
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C
I'm so glad you mentioned 100 Years of Solitude. That's one of my favorite books of all time. It's fabulous.
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B
Yeah, well, mine too.
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C
Let's come now to Praiseworthy, your most recent book and the Stella Prize winner. I'm holding it up. It's a big book in every sense for our listeners who haven't heard about it, haven't read it. Can you just give a taste of what Praiseworthy's about so people can understand and can go and get the book themselves?
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B
Well, what can I say? It's a very good book. Well done. Your publisher will be happy.
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C
And of course, the Stella Prize judges agreed with you. It's a very good book.
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B
It's a book that it took ten years to write. And mind you, I was doing other things at the same time. I was working on Tracker. I started Tracker in Braidsworthy at the same time. Tracks was quite ill. And Tracker is a big book too. It's a collective memoir of Tracker's life. He was quite a really. Well, he was exceptional. He was exceptional in every way. So that was a big, big task. But I wanted to finish that first. And then it came out. And at the same time, when it was finished, I took on the position of Babovia Chair in Australian Literature at Melbourne University. So I continued.
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A
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B
Praiseworthy. In all that time of, you know, those two Two, two big things. And yeah, it's a big book in every way. And I wanted to try to capture the spirit of the times. I was really, really concerned about a number of things. I was concerned about global warming, you know, in 10 years ago and to this day it's more apparent to everybody in the world I think that we've got a situation here, you know, with global warming and we've got an emergency situation but we're not dealing with it too well. So I was concerned about that and I was concerned about our own aboriginal world and our capacity to develop our own future. And combining those two things together I developed a story about trying to examine those questions. What capacity do we have or poor people, millions of poor people across the world have to work towards the future in a global warming situation? And how will the rest of the world, the north, treat the poorer people of the world as the situation becomes more urgent and a problem? And there may be, you know, millions more people who become refugees across the world who become landless and there could be all sorts of issues in terms of land being stolen from them. All sorts of things could happen and how do we deal with all that? So anyway, putting the story into a, a story of a family, an Aboriginal family here on a community and it turned to examine that community's ability, a place called Praiseworthy, its ability to work towards its future. And you know, and you have a main character, a man called sometimes Widespread, sometimes Planet and or Cosman Steel, who is asking the question what's plan A or what's plan B? You know, do we have a plan at all? And he's trying to figure out how can he take his people over the burning planet and to be able to tell, to survive, to be able to tell the tale on the other side. He's going to build this transport conglomeration and so he sets off and he's going to use his own brain power and very little else to capture this right donkey that's going to lead this transport conglomeration and he's only got a clapped out falcon to get around on a really rough terrain in northern Australia and across different places to capture Donkey one by one. You know, it's a book is also talks a lot about the intervention years in, in the country and, and, and how that was rolled out originally. And there was a lot, a lot that was said about it and said about Aboriginal people very really bad things in, and, and, and, and to destroy our confidence and our trust and to, to take down what, you know, had been Built up in terms of ideas of reconciliation, etc. Yeah, it's a good book. I worked hard on it and worked hard on it for 10 years. And even while I was doing other things, there's not a day or a time that went by that I wasn't thinking about this book and how to do it and how to make it stand up.
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C
How did it feel when you got told you'd won the Stella prize, having won it once before, to win it a second time?
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B
Well, you don't expect these things to happen at all. And, and you'd be a fool to, to expect anything to happen in terms of literary prizes or things like that. And, you know, I don't write for those prizes. You know, I write for, you know, the challenge that I set myself and, and to you to see what I can do and, and work hard at it and, and I think they're important. I really think, you know, works of scale are really important in this particular time that we're heading into because it's so confusing, it's complex and we don't know where we're going. And we need to develop more empathy and compassion for each other, for all people. And because we're going to be able to, we're going to need to be able to work towards that type of future where, you know, we have, we can try and understand what we've got in common rather than what we, you know, don't have in common. So I really believe that we need a, you know, we have to work harder towards having a literature literate world where it's, it's. People are compelled to write works of scale and people are compelled to read more deeply into what's happening to us. And we can't just get it in sound bites and we can't just let, you know, people who work in that type of way of just creating division on no basis. So anyway, those are the reasons that I believe works of scale and deep thinking is really the order of the day for this era that we're moving into.
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C
Well, thank you for praiseworthy. Which is a work of scale. I can think of no better way of concluding our talk together than referring to Virginia Woolf. Of course, as you would know, this podcast is named for Virginia Woolf's very famous statement that if a woman is to write, she must have a room of one's own. And so I want to use a Virginia Woolf quote and get you to respond to it. Virginia Woolf says books are the mirrors of the soul. What would you say?
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B
No, I think that's that, that's, that's, that's right. And, and certainly that's. I think it's soul work that you're doing as a writer and when you put the time and, you know, and deep thought into what's happening, you're looking really deep in your soul and your consciousness and to try to work out what's going on and, you know, what's possible and what's stopping things from being possible. And I think from going back to the young woman who thought, why can't things be fixed up today, you know, or not tomorrow? You know, it doesn't take too much to fix up a problem if you put your mind to it. I like that.
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C
Writing is soul work. Alexis, thank you for this conversation. I very much enjoyed it and thank you for praiseworthy.
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B
Thank you, Julia. I really appreciate and love talking to you and a great pleasure to meet you and I wish you well.
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D
A Podcast of One's Own is created by the Global Institute for Women's Leadership at the Australian National University, Canberra, with support from our sister Institute at King's College, London. Earnings from the podcast go back into funding for the Institute, which was founded by our host Julia Gillard, and brings together rigorous research, practice and advocacy as a powerful force to advance gender equality and promote fair and equal access to leadership. Research and production for this podcast is by Becca Shepherd, Alice Higgins and Alina Ecot, with editing by Liz Keen from Headline Productions. If you have feedback or ideas, please email us at giwl at anu. Edu Au. To stay up to date with the Institute's work, go to giwl. Anu Edu Au and sign up to our updates or follow us on social mediaulanu. You can also find A Podcast of One's Own on Instagram. The team at A Podcast of One's Own acknowledges the traditional custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to landscape, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders, past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples listening today. Thanks for listening and we hope you'll join us next time.
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