Ramona Koval interviews Kim Scott, co-winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award for Benang.

Ramona Koval: Did this book come out of your own anger and resistance?

Kim Scott: Yes, and some confusion perhaps and then I got into the archives, trying to work out my own family history, since there wasn’t an oral history at that stage that could help me out that way. When I started reading the historical stuff, Neville’s stuff and native welfare and the local histories, and started to think about myself in an historical position, then there was a lot of anger and bitterness. It’s inevitable, I think. Then you feel like you’ve been duped or you feel like there is all this history, knowledge and information that I’d been cut off from. So there was anger and the need to resist those processes, to resist being caught up in any way and entangled in that sort of social engineering and that history that’s about forgetfulness, that genocidal stuff.

RK: The narrator wants to fail at the task of being the first successful white man born out of his grandfather’s scheme. There’s a huge ambivalence about what is success and what is failure, as if to succeed in white terms is to embody the very genocidal ideas that set things going in the first place. That must be a very precise and difficult personal struggle.

KS: I’m always a bit concerned about the ambivalence. I write the ambivalence and speak the ambivalence a little bit more than I feel it, I think, in terms of who I am. Amongst my people, there are very few of us that write and because of the damage done in the last few generations, there’s not a lot of people reading either. So I immediately think things like who am I writing for? Who am I benefiting, writing this sort of material? And partly for those reasons, I think that I start this book out the way I do, to make sure, I hope, that it is done with integrity. Even though it is fictional, I still make myself vulnerable positioning myself like that.

RK: Vulnerable to what?

KS: Many things. I think I am in danger of reanimating some of those ways of thinking, which I think are still present but I am in danger of giving them a bit of energy – that sort of caste talk.

RK: Like this bloke is the product of a white education or a university education and is working in the white area of writing, so therefore...

KS: That wasn’t what I was meaning to say but I follow that along. That’s one of the dangers. Within my community, people will wonder who’s that fellow? He’s set himself up too flash. Is that what you were meaning?

RK: I was thinking that you’d be seen as a success, whose writing this novel in the right way.

KS: I hope so but that will take time to filter through, I think, because there is not a lot of people among my community that will read it initially. They will be reacting to other people that have read it and they will be talking in lots of ways, working out where I fit in, before they’d rate it a success. They’ll be interested and particularly in its starting out that way which is to not claim a lot of traditional connections for oneself. I hope still to make a powerful and important story starting from that position, which is about the damage done, and about white madness, and about survival. I think that will be important to people. One of the issues is that, with visual arts or with writing, you get manoeuvred by media interest into being some sort of spokesperson. And I don’t want to get into that. I want to make it a singular voice even though that goes against conventions, a singular voice speaking just for myself and making a quite strong claim about having an Aboriginal identity, taking on all that rhetoric and all those racist sorts of discourses and using white voices.

RK: I don’t want to get away from the fact that it’s a beautifully written novel but I just want to talk about some of the poignancy in the notes from the character Jack Chattalong whose trying to convince the Department that he’s not black enough to come under the control of the Department, trying to argue for a certificate of exemption. Are his letters straight out of the files or out of your mind?

KS: They’re the sort of stuff I came across repeatedly including from my own family, when I was researching this book. I looked at the place that I am descended from, that country I am descended from, and found any paper work associated with it and then I looked for my family names and this is the sort of thing I was coming up with. What you see are people having to work within ways of thinking that are the only ones left available to them to participate in their society. Working with those sorts of tools, you can see a divide and conquer thing going on, a separation of Aboriginal people from one another – I think that’s all part of the genocidal stuff and that’s painful stuff to encounter and to work through when you are writing stuff inspired by family history. Normally the statistics talk about things – and I think this applies even more so to the country I am from – within fifty years of first white contact, that ninety-five per cent of the indigenous population had gone, had been wiped out. So heroes of mine are those people – it’s sort of like a post–Holocaust thing, that might not be the best phrase to use, but it’s like that, after great decimation. So there’s five people for every hundred still standing up and still wanting to stand up for themselves and who they are and all those countless generations before them. The way to do it, to take on power – since a lot of physical resistance has proved impossible – is a man standing up and saying ‘I have as much right as any of you people and how come you’re cutting me out?’ There’s not a lot of my people living in their country, which is to do with massacres there twenty, thirty years previously. There’s also this legislation which is if you are mixing with Aboriginals – part of that ultimatum that was delivered to an Aboriginal person – was become a white person or you’ll die.

RK: That awful, ‘I don’t mix with them, so why I should I be one of them’, taking on the view of the white people.

KS: To some extent. I would say it’s not completely taken on but there are certain instances where that’s occurred. One of the reasons – and wanting to write this with a narrator starting this by saying I may be the first white man born, and making it a singular voice and not speaking for anyone else but myself and maybe my blood line, my family – is to take on some of the difficulty and the damage in the psyche that comes from being manoeuvred and manipulated, being encouraged to think in these sorts of ways. I want to work through that sort of damage and because I have got certain tools that a lot of others of my people haven’t, I feel obliged to take on this sort of thing and work through the damage. And still end up strong, that’s what I hope the book does.

RK: Kim, tell me about the magic realism in the levitation of Harley. He has a tendency to just float away sometimes. How did you come to write that in?

KS: That’s when I got some energy going. I talked before about being angry, angry reading the voices in the archives, and I wanted to take on Neville and defuse the potency of all the written stuff and that uplift and elevation, I thought, I’ll just do that. I’ll take it literally. That helped me get out of the straitjacket of staying within his terms. Then, as I kept writing, it seemed to make sense in all sorts of other ways as well.

RK: It allows you to take overviews, if you have your character flying in a way and people grabbing onto him and pulling him down. At times he finds himself being elevated beyond his wish. It’s actually a freedom in the writing.

KS: It’s freedom in the writing and it seems to be about being somewhat disconnected from place, from people and country – tenuous connections allow me to deal with some of that. And it allows me just in writing to get out of some of the limitations of Neville’s sort of language. Then later on it seemed to be able to speak – I think of one’s self being just one of many possible manifestations of country or a particular place and its related to traditional ways of thinking –and he is, as I am, just one of those many possible manifestations of place, even though initially it’s about his disconnectedness and its people pulling him back, as are the stories. That’s him, like a bird is an expression of a particular place in many instances but is not touching the land all the time. He is ambivalent. That seemed to me to fit with those sorts of traditional notions that there are all these different expressions of place inhabiting it, all these beings, and each person is just one possibility, so you can be unique and you can be different, but you’re still connected and still belonging in that place. Harley’s like that.

RK: Harley, the narrator of the book, is aware he is writing historical fiction. He even says that he acknowledges and nods to the demands of historical fiction. What do you see those demands as being?

KS: What I try and do is connect with all those other generations before the last few. I was thinking of things like Sir Walter Scott’s novels and how he did it. I was thinking how can I do historically representative forces, the big sweep? What are the things that are important to talk about? The Depression, the War. At one stage I wrote those in, had Harley thinking those things and I kept them in, because it seemed not too self-conscious. You inevitably do think about all those things when you’re working with sophisticated, white literary discourses – that sort of self-awareness needs to be there, even though it makes it harder in some ways to talk about some of the things you want to. Hopefully, by doing that it helps make you language conscious and aware, like getting things to speak from between the lines and from behind the language. I think this makes you confront and take on the history and that’s just the last few generations I’m talking about. It makes you stronger, that’s the healing thing that I talk about in the book as well. I think this applies to everybody confronting the history and looking, taking it on deeply and the damage done to the psyche, it makes you stronger. Not wanting to be too political, but it’s a great sadness that some of our non-Aboriginal leaders are too frightened to do this.

This is an edited version of an interview broadcast on Books and Writing, courtesy of Radio National.

McKenzie Wark

Some people only read novels; some people only fuck goats. The latter is an instance of a sexual fetish, where only one specific form of the act can furnish one’s jollies. The former is an instance of a textual fetish, which is pretty much the same thing. Not that I think there is anything wrong with fetishism. I’m broadminded. But where sexual fetishists don’t go round pretending to speak for the whole of sexuality, the boosters of Australian fiction get away with the pretence that they speak for the whole of literature. Australian literature is in the hands of compulsive goat fuckers. It’s not just that remarkable non­fiction and poetry stands always in the shadow of the goat. The very act of reading, the values and virtues it can encompass, end up being narrowly defined. It’s not just that fiction receives too much subsidy, too much publicity and too many prizes relative to goat-free reading experiences. It is that even when other genres of writing are celebrated and promoted, it is usually on the basis of a resemblance to fiction. That literature may aspire to quite other qualities, values and experiences is repressed in favour of a textual fetish. Novel fetishists, like most perverts of repetition, find it harder and harder to get off, and blame the novel itself for their jaded tastes. That’s their problem. It need not deter fiction writers from writing books that, to the non-fetishist, seem as good these days as they have ever been. But the literary world as a whole is in sad need of reform. Its other minorities need space and time and attention, in which to glisten in the light.

Katharine England

I think too much (mediocre) fiction is being published. For me, one of the oddest things is the chapter in all the writing manuals on generating ideas, thinking of something to write about. It confirms my impression that there are hordes of writers and would-be writers with nothing pressing to say. Another odd thing is the publishing practice of commissioning writers and celebrities to fill perceived gaps in the market. In the children’s area, a huge amount of mediocre fiction is produced on the questionable grounds that ‘at least it will get/ keep them reading ’. My fear is that the dross will drown books that may have proved to be significant. Publishers who commission ‘bestsellers’ are often also those who have given up reading unsolicited manuscripts. There is only so much time and so much shelf space:  ‘the canon’ changes and has anyway been in question for some years, but a society – a literature –needs to know its past, including its recent past, and as we publish more and more our significant past is squeezed out of print. I like the concept of the necessary novel – the one that nags its author to be written, that changes in even the slightest degree the way in which its reader sees the world. But it has to be admitted that different things are necessary to different people. There are also novels which, read with attention, read twice, grow on the reader, start to impress with their structure, balance, sense of place – or with the sheer investment of faith, time and energy on the part of author, editor (one hopes – another current commonplace is the promising first or second novel ripped from its author without the aid of editorial mid­wifery) and publisher that is a full-length work of fiction. If there is much that seems to me imaginatively impoverished or undercooked there is also much that seems exciting and good – and occasionally it is the same book over two readings.

James Bradley

I’m never quite sure how to respond to the ‘too many books’ argument. My response as an author is to feel a bit edgy and wonder whether my books might be part of this supposed torrent of mediocre novels. How would I know after all?

But my response as one of the wider community of writers is one of irritation. Contemporary Australian fiction is internationally successful in a way it has never been before, critically and commercially. And while this success is being achieved across the board, it’s particularly noticeable amongst younger writers. Yet back home there is little or no recognition of this. Instead the background burble is too many books, badly written, formulaic, overexposed, nothing but hype, blah, blah, blah. And ironically it’s a burble that grows loudest among the younger writers, and even louder around the younger women. Now I don’t accept that international recognition is the litmus test of success, but it’s certainly a respectable yardstick. Yet it’s a yardstick which many of our cultural commentators – call them senior critics or gatekeepers or what you will – only seems to apply when we’re talking about Murray Bail or Peter Robb or one of the other anointed repositories of our literary culture. When was the last time you heard about the (very real) success of Julia Leigh overseas? Or Nikki Gemmell? Or Eliot Perlman or Matthew Reilly or Michelle de Kretser? I could go on and on, but I won’t.

The thing is that it’s just silly to talk of too many novels. After all, how many is enough? Is there any consensus about which ones shouldn’t be published? And who forms that consensus? If fewer were published would the quality from the unpublished ones somehow move osmotically into the ones that were left?

No, what bothers people is the fact that in a vibrant culture lots of people talk at once, in lots of different voices, instead of a select few. And yes, a lot of what gets said is forgettable, and a lot of it is noise, but that’s always been the case. You need the noise to get the good stuff, because you never know whose signal will resolve out of it into something unforgettable until it happens. But one thing’s for certain: without the noise there’s nothing for anything to resolve out of.

Ramona Koval interviews Thea Astley, co-winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award for Drylands.

Ramona Koval: In a reversal of a trend in Australian fiction, which has novels set in wonderful little country towns with odd and amusing zany characters, you’ve set your new novel or collection of linked stories in Drylands, the town that everyone is dying to leave. Were you consciously aware of going against the tide in this particular setting?

Thea Astley: No, not at all actually. I’d just been motivated by constant newspaper stories of people living in the country and losing their services, and having to move out and towns dying as a result. I thought this is a very sad thing because I feel that the heart of Australia has depended for years, or the pulse beat of Australia, has been the work of pioneers who live in places that are almost inaccessible. Now they have cut out railways and there are few plane services that are regular and now they’ re removing banks, doctors, and hospitals. If the whole centre of the country dies, I think it would be appalling.

RK: Why do you think there is this city-based longing for these little country paradise towns that don’t really exist?

TA: Well they have existed. I don’t think people move inland they move to the coast after Sea Change. Everybody’s trying to get a little country town on the coast. They don’t want to go into the centre, perhaps because it is flatter, drier, and less picturesque.

RK: Well Janet Deakin says on the first page of Drylands that she has the wherewithal to write a book: table, typewriter, a new ream of paper and angry ideas. Do you agree with her? Is that what it takes to write a book?

TA: They used to say when I was a kid, one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration. I think perseverance is the thing you need to write a book and I think writers are people who have been lucky enough to be gifted with the perseverance gene that makes them keep going when everything seems terrible.

RK: But what about the angry ideas?

TA: I think that’s important in a way. They haven’t got to be angry, they can be amused ideas, but they have to be ideas that are motivating or strong enough to provide an impulse.

RK: The book is very much about reading and writing. Could you begin to talk about the structure of the book, linked stories, linked also by the thread of the woman who’s writing them, Janet Deakin. How did you come upon this structure?

TA: I think Henry Lawson was the first to do what Frank Moorhouse calls ‘discontinuous narrative’. Lawson wrote stories using the same setting and with some of the characters reappearing. It’s rather appealing as a technique. The reason I think I have been interested in non-readers or non-reading is having taught at a university for a while and seeing kids coming up from high school who were sub-literate in their droves. I wonder what on earth was happening at the primary level of education. Weren’t they being taught to read? They certainly had no grammar and didn’t know much about the structure of the English language. I thought this was rather worrying. I’m glad that the department is, I think, moving back to basics.

RK: I think that inability to read theme is apparent throughout the book. There’s Janet’s husband, Ted, whom she teaches to read. There are the townspeople who don’t buy any books from her. Janet remembers her mother saying, ‘The more illiterates, the easier for governments to supply slave labour to the wealthy.’ Is that something you agree with?

TA: The figures on sub-literacy in Australia have been increasing according to statistics you read in the paper. Yes I do think people are more easily manipulated when they don’t have access to books or newspaper articles. Of course they have access to radio and television, but I imagine if places are privately owned there’s severe editing goes on in what’s ex­pressed in news items. I don’t think the ABC does that but there’s always a bias. I think you’d have to be able to read to make up your mind around each side of a subject. Of course you’ve only got to think of the feudal system and just a few centuries ago in England where education was reserved for the wealthy, the privileged classes and schools didn’t offer much beyond the primary level. What interests me is the fact that when I was researching a couple of books I wrote a few years ago and I was reading letters written to local councils by people who had obviously left school at fourteen, they were impeccably written not a mistake in grammar, spelling or punctuation. They were infinitely better written than work I would get at university level.

RK: Janet Deakin also remarks about writing, ‘fly specks on white that can change ideologies or governments, induce wars, starvation or rare blessings’. Do you think they can?

TA: That’s what so marvellous about the printed word. I think the printed word is magic. Have you in tears or laughing uproariously. I think it’s wonderful.

RK: Something that nearly had me in tears was the story about Benny Showforth, the part Aboriginal man who was taken from his mother and then had almost everything taken from him by the people running the town. Tell me the story of Benny.

TA: Well the government was still removing children from parents in the middle 60s. When we were living on the banks of the Barron River outside Cairns some years ago, there was a little settlement of Indigenous Australians who’d been moved from Mona Mona mission. They were absolutely lovely people, very gentle, very quiet, and we always gave them lifts into town. I became quite interested in their quality of lifestyle. At that stage, the council had not connected the electricity because they said they would not pay their bills. There was an attitude all round that they were totally irresponsible. This annoyed me. I think Benny Showforth’s problem is probably basically quite true from all the stories I’ve read and heard and people I’ve spoken to.

RK: It seems that these stories are all related in some way to the seven deadly sins. Is that correct and can you explain how they relate to them?

TA: I had thought of the seven deadly sins when I’d started writing but I didn’t think I could handle them. And anyway people have done this before. I was just using incidents that I’d heard of in other places. I don’t even remember where some of the ideas came from. I do know that someone I knew once spent ages building a dinghy and his son burnt it, which came into the boatbuilding story.

RK: One of the characters says, ‘So little that is punishable in any ethical society is punished in this one.’ I had the sense that this was what you were saying. There’s a lot going on in Drylands that is really about people behaving badly.

TA: I think in smaller communities the misdemeanours and transgressions of local social people show up very promptly and because a community is small it’s more likely to bring some kind of retribution on the perpetrator, either verbally or physically. Whereas in big cities, probably why they are so popular, there is more anonymity.

RK: You write about creative writing classes, if we can come back to the writing. Evie comes to Drylands to teach a group of women to write, unleashing all kinds of miseries. The narrator says, ‘She was hating herself, these weary, expect ant faces. She hated herself and what she was supposed to be doing, floundering between their hope and their hopeless ness.’ It’s a pretty bleak view of the travelling writer who is coming to do a creative writing class in one of these towns.

TA: Later on in the story it says she was filling in for the regular tutor who went there now and again. Yes, I suppose it is bleak but I don’t really believe you can’t teach creativity, you can teach techniques and you can give people ideas of how to handle prose or poetry but you couldn’t teach Mozart to be a genius.

RK: Do you think there is folly in these kinds of classes?

TA: Not if they’re giving people a chance to get out and communicate with other people. I think that’s a very good thing. I don’t think it matters if people go to painting classes and can only paint stick figures and that would be me I think the fact that they are trying is something.

RK: The town Drylands is being outmanoeuvred by the weather, which comes through throughout the book. In a sense, it’s the thing that makes us realise we are all pretty vulnerable, all of us no matter who we are, whether we are insiders or outsiders.

TA: The whole of inland Australia is manoeuvred, manipulated by the weather and by seasons, especially if you are in primary industry. I always like the story, I was travelling north once on the plane and the person next to me said that they hadn’t had rain for seven years. They were living out around Mt Isa and the first time it fell, his five-year-old ran in screaming with fright. But that’s probably one of those north Queensland stories.

RK: Some people might say Drylands is a bleak book, bleak about small towns, bleak about the economy, about the falling literacy rate, about mean people. What would you say to that?

TA: I might have to agree. Maybe I was feeling bleak when I wrote it. I’m feeling bleak with these constant reports of towns closing down and that’s what stimulated me in the first place.

RK: Do you think this is about Australia in particular or about human beings in general?

TA: I think it’s more general. I think when humans are confronted with an almost political posse that’s bringing about the death of their small Eden, I think it applies generally.

RK: It is a deeply political book but it is actually written with a very light touch. It’s not a campaigning book.

TA: No it’s not. When I think of the joyousness with which I wrote a book like It’s Raining in Mango, I’ve always liked laughing and I like it to come through in my writing if it can. But I guess I didn’t feel much like laughing when I wrote Drylands.

RK: Finally, Thea, how do you feel about the Miles Franklin for the fourth time?

TA: Very surprised. Quite pleased and very surprised and very happy to be sharing it with Kim Scott. I have read Benang and found it very moving.