Brenda L. Croft is from the Gurindji/Malngin/Mudburra peoples from the Victoria River region of the Northern Territory of Australia, and Anglo-Australian/German/Irish/Chinese heritage. She has been involved in the Australian First Nations and broader contemporary arts and cultural sectors for more than three decades as an artist, arts administrator, curator, academic, and consultant. Croft’s artistic practice encompasses critical performative Indigenous auto-ethnography, Indigenous Storying, representation and cultural identity, creative narratives, installation, multimedia and multi-platform work. Croft’s work is represented in major collections in Australia and overseas. Croft is Associate Professor, Indigenous Art History and Curatorship at the Australian National University and Adjunct Research Fellow with the National Institute for Experimental Arts, UNSW Art and Design Australia, where she is completing creative-led doctoral research. She is represented by Niagara Galleries, Melbourne.

Artist’s Statement: Ghost tears #1 is a detail from the installation of twenty-one images titled Wave Hill/Victoria River Country, 2014, which was exhibited in Croft’s creative-led doctoral research project Still in my mind: Gurindji location, experience and visuality, 2017 (touring nationally until 2021) and Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial at the National Gallery of Australia, 2017.

The image was taken at the ‘top grid’ near Wave Hill on the Buntine Highway entry into the communities of Kalkaringi and Daguragu, located approximately 800 kilometres south-west of Darwin on 14 March 2016. It was nearby on 23 August 1966 that 200-plus Gurindji (Bilinarra, Nyarinyman, Malngin, Mudburra, Nyininy, Warlpiri, and associated peoples) stockmen and their families walked off Wave Hill Station, initially as an action against decades of maltreatment and abuse. This action developed into a statement of First Nations’ self-determination, instigating the birth of the national land rights movement, and garnering national and international support.

If the number of reviews and interviews are indicators of a new book’s impact, Tony Birch’s novel The White Girl has landed like a B-format sized asteroid. Birch’s publisher estimates a substantial number of reviews and other features since publication. I’ve consulted none of them. Usually I can’t help myself from immersing myself in any and all artefacts of literary reception. With The White Girl I wanted to stay with the work, stay with Odette Brown and with Sissy, stay on the fringes of the fictional town called Deane, stay on that train to the big smoke – stay with The White Girl and reflect on where it took me.

Set in early 1960s country Australia, The White Girl opens with Odette Brown rising with the sun, ‘as she did each morning’. One might call Odette a matriarch, but I simply want to refer to her as a woman I am familiar with. Odette (I am resisting the urge to refer to her as ‘Aunt’) is an Everywoman, an every Koori, Murri, Nyoongar, Nunga, Goorie, and every other kind of us-woman. Odette thinks deeply and does what needs to be done. She loves her family, those living and the ones who have already passed. Getting to know the deceased members of Odette’s family reminds me of my knowing since childhood my own maternal great-grandmother, although she passed away two months before I was born.

Wiradjuri writer Tara June Winch is not afraid to play with the form and shape of fiction. Her dazzling début, Swallow the Air (2006), is a short novel in vignettes that moves quickly through striking images and poetic prose. Her second book, After the Carnage (2017), a wide-ranging short story collection, is set in multiple countries. Winch’s new novel, The Yield, is partly written in reclaimed Wiradjuri dictionary entries.

Three different voices narrate The Yield in bite-sized chapters: dictionary maker and elder Albert Gondiwindi, his granddaughter August, and nineteenth-century missionary Reverend Greenleaf. It takes some time to get used to this structure, but ultimately it is rewarding. The different perspectives introduce us to life in the place where the Gondiwindi family live: Prosperous House, in the fictional town of Massacre Plains. Abbreviating, the Aboriginal characters call it ‘Massacre’. This contraction is pointed: Winch reminds us we are in a site of settler–invader violence, one without a treaty. Admirers of Kim Scott’s Taboo and Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip will enjoy Winch’s Aboriginal realism.

August, the main character in the present-day narrative, is in her early twenties but world-weary. She comes back to Country for Pop Albert’s funeral after spending a decade abroad, running away from a past. August never had a childhood, never had a break. Often said to be depressed, she sees her country in less than flattering terms: a ‘sparse, foreboding landscape’, dripping with ‘visual heat’, where everything is ‘browner, bone-drier’.

In contemporary Aboriginal fiction, a common theme is ‘returning’ – returning to Country, family, language, and culture, all of them intertwined. August’s family, on her return, is riven by an upcoming mining decision. There is a hole left by a sister’s disappearance: a mystery decades-old. August also comes back to an old love interest, Eddie; this ‘returning novel’ offers something new in its Wiradjuri framing, a language in a state of resurgence, with a growing number of speakers. The New Wiradjuri Dictionary by Dr Uncle Stan Grant Sr and Dr John Rudder informs the language in The Yield.

It was an effective move on Winch’s part to resist writing August in the first person. Through the third-person narration we are also able to get inside the heads of other characters, to see the place from multiple angles. It is a novel that rewards readerly patience; it takes a while to realise what’s at stake. Slowly, we become entangled in the characters’ lives. With August’s parents out of action – incarcerated on drug charges (‘never mean and bad parents, just distracted, too young and too silly’) – Winch deftly unpacks relationships between grandparents and grandchildren, aunties and nieces, and cousins.

As the tin-mining company claims a stake in Massacre Plains, as pipes and fences are secured, white environmental activists descend, calling into question black and green relations, the future of the environment and native title. August imagines herself free-falling to the bottom of a tin pit. The Yield is an anti-mining novel for the present day in the wake of the approval of the Adani coal mine in central Queensland.

Tara June Winch (photograph via Wikimedia Commons)Winch is highly skilled at creating portraits and at moving us forward into space. These are not static images. Albert’s commentary on his life makes enjoyable reading: gathering for bogong moths as a child (‘Everyone was there to cook and feast on buuyang – which tasted a little like a pork chop, but more nutritious. After that I felt strong walking back to the Boys’ Home’); fishing on the long Murrumby River, a fictional version of the tributaries of the Murray–Darling basin so vital to the Wiradjuri people and other neighbouring nations. Like many Aboriginal people, Albert is quite ‘worldly’, despite not having travelled overseas. Ancestors visit him every day, mob ravaged by gulgang-gulgang, smallpox sores in a haunting passage, mob speaking from the contact war that lasted one hundred years, all offering Albert guidance on how to continue Wiradjuri survivance.

Rich with cultural knowledge, Albert’s story-in-dictionary form shows us not only how to read Wiradjuri but also how to feel and speak and taste it; it decolonises the throat and tongue. Winch asks timely questions: What does contemporary use of language look like? What can it offer us in our lives? What can it do for the overall health of our country?

The Yield is about regaining more than language. There are odes to Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, with the pointed inclusions of bush food, bread, and fishing technology. There are only a few places where Winch’s delivery is too didactic, as when Nana tells August, the author speaking directly down the barrel to the reader, ‘we aren’t victims in this story anymore – don’t you see that?’

The Yield will appeal to many because of the way it unpacks complex themes in an accessible way. Australian rural novels are often humourless sketches with characters more like caricatures, grimly serious or full of despair. Refreshingly, the characters in The Yield are capable of communion, humour, and dignity despite tragedy, sexual violence, and substance abuse. In this deft novel of slow-moving water, they are borne by love, not pity.

In June 2019, Australian Book Review announced the ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellowship, an initiative generously funded by Peter McMullin in association with the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness (University of Melbourne). This initiative was not only created to highlight issues pertaining to displacement and exile, but also as an important act of naming in the face of a border regime designed to strip human beings of their personal identities and dignity. Behrouz’s work has meticulously illustrated how Australia’s border politics drives people into submission and insanity by systematically erasing their names.

The act of naming and of erasure has far-reaching, multidimensional impacts, and is often part of dynamic collective processes. Acknowledgment and support by ABR can be better understood in relation to Behrouz’s oeuvre of critical writing and creative resistance, and also in the context of the awards he has received in Australia and internationally. In order to appreciate the different functions and dimensions associated with this new Fellowship, it is helpful to consider aspects of the organised transnational strategy Behrouz has been developing in association with various collaborators and confidants.

In 2018 Behrouz Boochani won the Anna Politkovskaya Award for Journalism. The award, announced in Ferrara, Italy, was organised by Internazionale magazine. This was a significant moment for a number of reasons. The award was established in 2009 to acknowledge and support the courageous work of distinguished reporters struggling for justice and truth-telling. Named in honour of the Russian investigative journalist who was brutally killed in 2006, the award is a testament to the brave and unrelenting contributions made by many journalists the world over. The Anna Politkovskaya Award is a way of encouraging more critical journalism and opening spaces for radically new and innovative forms of reporting. The very name of the award has both political and epistemic consequences; the award makes a historical statement and helps shape the future of journalism. It also works to incorporate cultures of resistance into the social imaginary. By winning the 2018 Anna Politkovskaya Award, Behrouz has established himself as a significant global actor in the history of reporting.

On winning the 2019 Victorian Prize for Literature, Behrouz engraved his name into Australia’s collective consciousness. His influence and example continue to reverberate throughout journalistic, literary, artistic, academic, and political circles around the world. The Wheeler Centre, which administers the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, decided to celebrate humanity and creativity rather than observe rigid rules. In deeming No Friend But the Mountains eligible, the Centre recognised the symbolic importance of establishing Behrouz’s name by disrupting standard bureaucracy and procedure. Other Australian awards have since followed suit.

A particular meaning-making and meaning-sharing activity takes place when a name either initiates a tradition or becomes an iconic part of a tradition. With the creation of the ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellowship, Behrouz’s name now represents both. Nonetheless, more needs to be said about the affirmation and empowerment associated with naming and how it can transcend institutions, operational networks of power, and bordering practices. 

Behrouz’s name is an indispensable element of the intellectual and creative challenge against the colonial imaginary conditioning Australia’s border regime and detention industry. Dismantling the material conditions, political representation and policies is a matter of great urgency, but this must be coupled with a transformation of the epistemic and symbolic aesthetic. Behrouz is a political actor in the fight against border violence, but he is also an artist and intellectual. The two are necessary parts of his identity and his embodied experience in what he has named Manus Prison. No Friend But the Mountains produces a new language for knowing and fighting border violence and colonialism, and his method and vision involves radically new acts of naming. Understanding this factor, I tried to embody the same philosophical and political approach in the English translation.

The Anna Politkovskaya Award was Behrouz’s first major international prize. It represented a form of recognition and appreciation he had not experienced in Australia. I was privileged to accept the award on Behrouz’s behalf. It was surreal – and a tragedy – that he could not be there to accept it himself. I also worked closely with the Internazionale a Ferrara Festival – in particular Luisa Ciffolilli, Junko Tereo, and Marina Lalovic – to organise activities and to establish networks. With their profound understanding of the significance of Behrouz’s writing and resistance, they represented a vision that included politics, art, and community. This was clear in the way they integrated Behrouz’s journalism, No Friend But the Mountains, and the film Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time into their programming. (The Italian translation of No Friend But the Mountains will be published later this year by Add Editore; there is already great interest in the book in Italy due to the award and festival.)

Omid Tofighian accepting Behrouz Boochani's Anna Politkovskaya Award at the Internazionale a Ferrara Festival 2018 (photograph supplied)

A significant number of Australian citizens are offended by the idea of removing colonial icons. They occupy digital spaces in an effort to erase or justify historical injustices. Political leaders continue to invest in celebrations of colonial glory in public spaces and further ingrain coloniality into their fabrication of Australian identity and values. In opposition, the act of naming can function as a form of resistance and has potential to disrupt and reclaim digital and public spaces. Behrouz Boochani is one of the many names that needs to reverberate in intellectual, educational, and artistic spaces, in addition to his role as a political and human rights activist.

Understood as part of other traditions of resistance, the ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellowship helps to galvanise a wider collective process. It has unlimited potential to initiate other projects and actions. The Fellowship – based on consultation, collaboration, and sharing – can be leveraged in empowering ways. An addition to the shared philosophical activity I discuss in my translator’s note, it is another call to action.

Part of a larger movement, this act of naming by ABR helps to form broader alliances and to invite the creation of more radical initiatives in future.