Exile

In 2019, I had the privilege of travelling to America as a Fulbright scholar to study a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Fiction at Hunter College in New York City. My great teacher there was the Australian author, Peter Carey AO. Peter has lived in New York for over thirty years. His relationship to Australia, undoubtably, has changed over time. However, if we look at the work he has penned while living in America, there are motifs, themes, symbols, and characters that one could classify as uniquely Australian, particularly in his iconic True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) and the more recent A Long Way from Home (2017). Both novels are strongly influenced by Australian history and his memory and experiences of Bacchus Marsh in Victoria where he was born. Indeed, his final major work of fiction, A Long Way from Home – its title a nice, although unintended, consonance with this essay – is set initially in Bacchus Marsh before moving with the Redex Trial, a round-Australia motorsport rally, and the text becomes a meditation on racism and the impact of colonisation on Indigenous Australia. This last novel, closing an illustrious career in fiction spanning over fifty years, is a testament and link to Peter’s Australian heritage, which, I believe, has not been dulled in self-imposed exile, but rather strengthened by his recollections and imaginings of home from afar.

I too, in my three years under Peter’s tutelage, found myself in exile. I lived in New York during those disjunctive Covid years, when the prospect of returning home was hampered by the risk of contracting the virus in transit before the borders were closed altogether. In exile, I found that I, and more importantly my work, existed in fluctuating states of reflection, repossession, and rearticulation – states that continuously ebbed and flowed as I engaged with the writing of fiction. This constant revaluation of my subjectivity within a unique historical space and time fostered great learning. New York initiated me into a broader, more robust, and global literary culture. I read the books recommended by my teachers (alongside Carey, Téa Obreht, ZZ Packer, and Adam Haslett) and my peers, and during those blissful six months before the hard lockdowns were introduced, I was able to engage in the literary culture by attending events in the city and further afield. In Washington DC, I met with Markus Zusak, Jeanine Leane, and Kim Scott at the National Book Festival where they spoke as the festival’s Australian literary ambassadors. This combination of literary engagement and rigorous study made me feel I was achieving what I had left Australia to do: learn.

Through the process of learning continents away from the sites of my ancestry, fictional settings, and Australian settler-colonial milieu, I felt a great freedom – a paradox considering that for twelve months I was physically confined to a one-bedroom apartment with my wife in Astoria, Queens. A particular burden – that of being constantly reminded of, and socially, politically, and economically engaged, via my Aboriginal Australian heritage – had been lifted from my consciousness. Indigenous Australian issues were not in the American news cycle and framed as a problem; I was not confronted as an ‘Indigenous expert’ on issues outside of my discipline and overburdened with cultural load; I was not consistently reminded by media, the academy, and the community at large of the ill treatment, disenfranchisement, and racism (both blatant and structural), among many other issues, that frame Indigenous Australia in light of its deficits (despite similar racialised deficit discourses in America); I was not beset by the niggling doubt that my success was purely to do with equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives, and not off the back of grit, a grain of talent, and hard-earned skills and knowledge.

I recognise the advantages of cultural grounding, which for many comes by being close to Country, to community, to home. But exile liberated my development at that critical juncture; I was suddenly transformed into an emerging writer in an American MFA program and I can now see more clearly the effects of outside influences on my subjectivity as an Indigenous creative practitioner. As I mature, I understand the heightened expectations placed, predominantly by non-Indigenous settlers, upon Indigenous creatives in this country to be a voice for Indigenous Australia. Since returning home in 2022, I have taken steps to lessen that outside noise and have blunted its influence by stepping away from social media. I have also reached a point of confidence where I am not afraid to decline engagements that may frame my opinions as not purely my own but as representative of Indigenous Australia. I have also attempted to live a relatively quiet life that reflects my new status as a father, and my mostly introverted personality.

Edward Said notes in his seminal essay ‘Reflections on Exile’ that there is a ‘plurality of vision’ that comes from living in a state of exile:

The fluctuating and cyclical creative process I was engaged in within that site of exile could be viewed as contrapuntal, particularly as my developing sense of self was filtered and strengthened through the simultaneous dimensions of home/Country and exile/New York. For many Indigenous Australians, there’s another set of simultaneous dimensions that informs our existence in Australia: that of Indigenous identity, and our relationship to Country and culture, cast against the establishment and continued impact of white settler colonisation. It is at the borders of these layered dimensions, and the cognitive friction between them, that I locate the origins of my creative practice.

To my American peers, who had little knowledge of Australian history and literature, I was just another writer. Like them, I’d been chosen by the fiction faculty from an applicant pool of over six hundred for admission to Hunter’s MFA program that year. My worth and identity were weighed every week by the insights I brought to the craft of writing and my grasp of literary fiction. And to my surprise, they were, in many ways, more articulate in their critique of my work than anything I had received before in Australia from non-Indigenous peers. The other five emerging writers (all local; I was the program’s only foreign student) lived with their own complex history of, and relationship to, American racial discourses and understood aspects outside the Australian political vernacular about racism, justice, and allyship. However, and more importantly, they were not incumbered by the ideological legacies of Australian settler-colonialism and its discursive framing of Indigenous Australia, or by the flashpoint of anxiety that is the non-Indigenous critique of Indigenous literature here. The openness, forthrightness, and questions they brought to the critique of my work set me free to fail – fail hard I did, and it hurt, as well it should when something means so much – and it made me slowly improve at this difficult thing I’d possibly foolishly (most definitely foolishly on those long sleepless nights when I ruminated on a piece of tough feedback) decided to do with my life: write fiction.

While studying in New York, I did not become the clichéd student who begins to write a novel set in Manhattan or one of the burbs. Instead, I began to reflect on Australia, and place, and my Indigenous Australian identity from the perspective of exile. I wondered for whom I was writing and where I was writing towards. How could my work impact the racial and historical discourses of our settler nation? Where was my place, both literarily and metaphorically, as an Indigenous creative practitioner? The process began slowly, with reading and articulating my thoughts while crafting weekly feedback letters for my peers. And what a positive impact writing those letters had on me as an emerging writer. To engage so deeply with drafts of other writers’ work, to wrack my brain, and reading life, to provide comments that might be somewhat useful in making their pieces better – well, there is no better training, and I think it’s a big reason (as well as the sheer number of students and MFA programs) why so many great writers come from the American MFA tradition after participating in the workshop/feedback pedagogy.

I published my first three pieces of fiction in that tough American short story market. After buying a subscription to Duotrope (a digital service providing information on publishers, agents, and literary journals that also organises your submissions), I tentatively at first, and then with great vigour, began submitting my completed pieces from Hunter. Rejection is a rite of passage for any emerging writer, and I have well and truly been initiated, having smashed my work (and ego) against the submission portals of top-tier American literary journals repeatedly. Progress was painfully slow; seasons came and went as I daily checked and witnessed the form rejections drip in. Then suddenly after some months, a slight ray of hope as a couple of personalised rejections, meaningful and motivational, came from A Public Space and then Granta. Winter became spring and some fifty submissions later, I received an acceptance email – a joyful occasion and a great validator. I celebrated that first publication and continue to celebrate all subsequent publications, the final stage of a process comprising first words, editing, feedback, editing, feedback, editing, submissions, rejections (so many rejections), editing, submissions, acceptance, editing and only then witnessing the work’s final form in a book or on screen.

Those three published stories speak out as archival records, explicating in their finality the developmental processes I’m attempting to distil with this essay. The first piece was published in Kweli Journal and is a riff on Peter’s True History of the Kelly Gang. Kweli is a highly ranked online American journal based in New York City that focuses on the promotion and development of writers of colour. After my first publication there, I became a contributing editor and facilitated workshops and mentored emerging writers through their various programs. My story is written from the first-person perspective of one of the police officers tracking the Kelly Gang’s movements. The party utilise the skills of Aboriginal trackers before a racially charged and violent act ends the piece. I was not long into the Hunter program when I drafted this piece. I was trying for that elusive thing teachers universally whisper to creative writing students – ‘find your voice’ – and I felt very lucky to have one of Australia’s greatest writers guiding me towards it.

Keen student that I was, I read Peter’s Booker Prize-winning novels immediately upon entering the program. On completing True History of the Kelly Gang, I was amazed that such writing was possible. The novelty of voice, the way the text enters, articulates, and disrupts a seminal moment and figure of settler Australian history – this shook and then fortified my ambition (a natural reaction for the emerging writer: if you’re not intimidated and excited by certain books you read, then what’s the point, truly?) I was then moved to write a piece in the style of Peter’s text for a weekly exercise in our craft class, where, unlike the feedback rounds of the workshop, we were prescribed texts and exercises, discussing in detail the narrative traits of the works before sharing the snippets of writing we produced. I emulated the voice of Peter’s text to better understand just what was happening in those sentences free from all but the most necessary punctuation, and how it might have felt to walk through history by means of fiction. I tried to mimic the rhythm and tone of the writing while also addressing what I saw as a silence in the text concerning the disenfranchisement and brutal treatment of Indigenous Australians in that historical period.

Through writing this very short piece of intertextual fiction I began to articulate my desires as a writer: to dissect and intervene in aspects of Australian history; to emulate the greats of Australian fiction, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous; to lean into the political nature of my Indigenous subject position, and in some small way help to pluralise Indigenous representation within fiction and resist the long-embedded deficit ideologies about Indigenous Australians that filter into the Australian consciousness. To ‘bear responsibility for the universe’ in my narratives as Jean-Paul Sartre put it in ‘What is Literature?’

The second short story, ‘Staffy’, also published by Kweli Journal, renders the homecoming of ‘Akhurst’ to the rural town of ‘Scarlet’ after being in America to study for an MFA in fiction. ‘Akhurst’ encounters a retired police officer who tells him a brutal story about a death in custody. ‘Staffy’ is a longer and more complex piece – too long for Australian literary journals. I believe the lack of long-form fiction outlets for emerging Australian writers comes at a cost to career and craft development. While I understand the physical constraints faced by Australian journals with respect to space and printing, as well as the pressure to sustain a broader spectrum of works and voices in any given issue, it does brand much of my fiction ineligible.

When I was writing ‘Staffy’, Covid raged across New York City. Our classes were moved online, and while that tainted my experience, I also realised I was one of the lucky few who could continue my studies and Fulbright scholarship mostly unimpeded – if there was ever a degree that could be facilitated online, it would be one that had writing and reading fiction as its core requirement. The small physical space of our apartment, the minimal human contact (I’m very grateful to my wife for being there) – these conditions actually enhanced my capacity to work hard once I stopped incessantly watching the news. This new world provided me with time to reflect, and from my point of exile, I cast my gaze back home with a stronger focus. I began to think about Country, history, and contemporary Indigenous issues in combination with, or layered upon, not only my lived experience as an Indigenous man who grew up in Meanjin, but also – in another dimension to the contrapuntal state brought on by exile – the stories my mother had told me about growing up Indigenous in Cloncurry, Queensland; stories about the mischief she and her four siblings got up to and the joys of being together; stories about the difficulties of being raised in the fifties and sixties during the White Australia Policy and the myriad forms of racism our family encountered in that rural setting. The fictional place/setting of ‘Scarlet’ began to manifest in my mind as I thought about our family history and my mother’s stories of Cloncurry while conceptualising my works in progress. This fictional rural community has become a site, or centre, that I write towards within the fictional universe of my current novel-in-stories, a project provisionally titled This Mother Country, of which ‘Staffy’ is one part/chapter.

Around the time I began writing ‘Staffy’, I heard that the MPhil thesis I’d completed at the University of Queensland had received the Dean’s Award for Outstanding Higher Degree by Research Theses, news which made me revisit some of the theory I engaged with in that dissertation. This included Wiradjuri literary scholar and author Jeanine Leane’s influential essay, ‘No Longer Malleable Stuff’:

Speaking back/pushing towards the centre of whiteness from the margin is a robust resistance tactic that unsettles the Australian consciousness. I create my work within that powerful site of agency that is the margin; however, I also intentionally direct my writing towards a centre that sits firmly within the margin.

From a postcolonial perspective, the centre represents the seat of empire with all its perceived cultural power and knowledge, against which colonised places/peoples are defined. The centre is a site that marginalised writers write towards/resist. In New York, I found myself placed within such a cosmopolitan centre. Instead of writing towards it, I relocated the centre phenomenologically to that of the Indigenous community in Australia so that my intended audience became/is that community and not the centre of whiteness – although by far the largest readership of my work comes from that opaque place categorised as the centre of settler coloniality. Through that mental shift in audience direction and authorial intention, I felt a greater freedom to privilege my lived experiences, and that of my Aboriginal mother and my Aboriginal family.

In writing ‘Staffy’ I had created a centre/site, ‘Scarlet’, that enabled a personal artistic resistance. I began articulating, through fiction, some of the key contemporary nodes of racial and political tensions in Australia, which I was beginning to see more clearly from the vantage of exile. ‘Staffy’ responds to the death in custody of Cameron Doomadgee on Palm Island in 2004, a tragic event and unfortunately not a unique one in this country. Part of the intention was to layer the characterisation of the protagonist ‘Akhurst’ with the trauma of a death in custody within his ‘Scarlet’ community, and to enunciate the depth and force of collective hurt that such events cause. I employ narrative metalepsis, a literary technique where the author makes his presence known within the narrative, bridging differing diegetic levels – between the character ‘Akhurst’ and the writer Akhurst behind the veil – and demonstrating that the story’s personal subject position is intricately connected to the broader imaginary and real Indigenous community. Highly politicised traumatic events like those on Palm Island do not exist in a vacuum; their influence is potent and their ripple effects register on the subject within the story, on the writer, and on the broader community. I also placed the story the character Staffy tells ‘Akhurst’ just after the Mabo High Court decision further layering the piece with the racial tensions – the way that the anxiety of settler pastoralists over land ownership often manifested itself in outright bigotry, particularly in rural settings – that historic verdict caused.

Alongside metalepsis, ‘Staffy’ also utilises the story-within-a-story framing device, which I was inspired to adopt after reading Jorge Luis Borges’ story, ‘The Shape of the Sword’, where the narrator is eventually revealed to be the tale’s protagonist. Borges’ narrative is about cowardice, and while there are elements of that in ‘Staffy’, I add a layer of power – the power of a white retired police officer over an Indigenous writer from that rural community – to ponder who gets to tell what stories and how they may be received in Australia given our challenging history of settler colonisation and racial power dynamics. By linking these differing narrative layers through a fictional ‘Akhurst’, and drawing inspiration from contemporary events and world literature, I feel I am inching closer to a recognisable ‘voice’ and beginning to articulate the foundational learning experience I had in exile.

Developmentally, ‘Staffy’ initially went through the rigorous workshop process at Hunter with Peter as my teacher. Then, directly after I completed the MFA, I was a participant in two summer writing programs: the One-Story Summer Conference and the Skidmore Writers Conference. I put ‘Staffy’ through the One-Story workshop process to garner further feedback. The feedback our teacher, the writer Matthew Salesses, gave on ‘Staffy’ was outstanding and helped further develop the notion of differing narrative layers in my work. He used the analogy of dropping anchor at moments within a narrative so that the deepest layer, or the emotional core of the story, can rise to the surface of the text, adding nuance and meaning. In ‘Staffy’, one of those anchors was the relationship between Akhurst and his Mother, particularly at the beginning of the piece before Akhurst goes to the ‘Royal Hotel’. By establishing this link early, the story sets up the possibility of a deeper resonance when, at its end, Staffy’s embedded story is transferred from Akhurst to his mother. These summer programs served to reinforce my learning; their new environments, far from what had become the comfort of established routines and relationships with writers I had come to know well, were challenging and useful as I began to further hone my craft and understanding of literature.

The last of the three stories to be published, ‘This Country’ was actually written before ‘Staffy’, such is the patience required in the game of publishing. ‘This Country’ is the longest piece at almost seven thousand words. Like ‘Staffy’ and its creative response to the death in custody on Palm Island, ‘This Country’ is a response to another contemporary moment of injustice: the death of fourteen-year-old Elijah Doughty. Elijah was killed by a white man who ran him over while in pursuit of his stolen dirt bike. The man only served nineteen months in prison as a result. Mass protests resulted from the lax sentence causing tensions between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities of Kalgoorlie in Western Australia. I wrote the piece from the first-person perspective of Oliver, the younger brother of Jimmy, the character that tragically dies in the story. Through Oliver’s perspective, I began to imagine the setting of ‘Scarlet’ – its infrastructure, community, and without realising it, I was creating a site/centre in which my novel-in-stories project would be predominantly situated. When ‘This Country’ and ‘Staffy’ are read together, the tendrils of a fictional universe begin to unfold, and it becomes clear that the father of Oliver and Jimmy in ‘This Country’ is Markus Walker who is the man killed in custody by the police officer in ‘Staffy’.

Many writers develop their novels using various levels of planning, from tight plotting to sketching out major issues, themes, or symbols they want to incorporate into the narrative structure. My novel-in-stories project, rather, has grown organically; ‘This Country’, as the first experiment in the ‘Scarlet’ universe, was not intended to be part of a larger work – my only intention for the piece was to get it published. However, in its dusty drought-stricken setting, I began to see a creative force in the invocation of my mother’s stories and the incorporation of my own lived experiences. Themes began to appear: Indigenous masculine relationships (from the brotherly relationship between Oliver and Jimmy in ‘This Country’ to the racialised power dynamic between Giles and Akhurst in ‘Staffy’); and the mother and son relationship, which I knew well from my own relationship with my mother who raised my brother and me mostly by herself.

Like ‘Staffy’, ‘This Country’ also had a moment of literary inspiration. Colum McCann was a member of the fiction faculty at Hunter when I entered the program, but he took leave to launch his book Apeirogon (2020). He did not return to Hunter, but he did stop in during his book tour to give a masterclass on his short story, ‘Everything in this Country Must’, including a showing of the Academy Award-nominated short film based on his story and of the same name. This masterclass was a formative moment for me. McCann’s story, set in Ireland during the Troubles, is highly political and combines grief and the surrounding social tensions expertly. The story is also written in the first-person perspective of a young girl named Katie. In the political tensions that permeated the piece and the innocence of seeing the world through the eyes of a young protagonist I saw very powerful vehicles to articulate the devastation of loss on a family and community.

Developmentally, ‘This Country’ started in the Hunter workshop space with Adam Haslett. It also went through a second workshop at Skidmore College during their summer writers’ program. My workshop leader there was the American writer, Rick Moody. Rick gave me some excellent line feedback, which helped me cut a lot of adverbs and streamline my sentences. It was not long afterwards that ‘This Country’ was accepted by J Journal for their 2022 schedule.

Many of the themes and concerns woven throughout this essay are crystallised in ‘Nundah Cemetery’, a previously unpublished snippet of fiction. I was raised in the northern Brisbane suburb of Nundah, where the Nundah Historic Cemetery holds a special place in my memory as a site of play and mischief. Established in 1846, it is also a site of colonial memory: Nundah was the location of the first free European settlement in Queensland and was populated in the majority by the German diaspora. I recalled the names on the gravestones and pondered, as an adolescent, what a historical German occupation of my then home might mean. Back then I didn’t follow through with that line of enquiry. In my exile, however, I began connecting those memories with the larger historical and cultural implications of colonialism and, via my contrapuntal position, began expressing those thoughts and connections in my weekly craft exercises – through which this small vignette was produced.

In this short vignette there is a craft equivalent of travel through space and time. And to write this essay, my memory has traversed continents and oceans, gleaning new insights over the course of its sojourn. Home was always with me. Yet it was while studying in America that I found some semblance of voice.

The stories I have detailed above were written in exile. I am unsure if these stories have found a readership in Australia – I hope this essay will help expose them to an Australian audience – but my mother has read them. She could see in the hot dry and cattle-trodden landscape a sliver of her former life in Cloncurry. She could see in ‘The Royal Hotel’ a place that she had visited many times on her travels to rural towns. She could see in the rough white figure of Staffy a racism that she knows well. She could see through the fictive mode a rendering of injustice that was familiar. In the relationship between mother and son she could see aspects of herself and her sons. My time away was not for nothing. It gave me the distance I needed to see clearly. In my homecoming I see an opportunity to privilege the contrapuntal space that shadows my Indigenous subject position here on unceded land, and to centre the cognitive frictions that come with this many-layered existence and drive my creative force.