Mykaela Saunders: I’m Deeply suspicious of any writer who wants to write the great Australian novel, 

 

Yumna Kassab:There is this obsession with this image of Australia and how Australia looks. 

 

 

Anna Funder: Hello I’m Anna Funder and welcome to Fully Lit – a podcast about Australian writing. Hear Lynda Ng in conversation with writers and Mykaela Saunders and Yumna Kassab as they grapple with the notion of a national literature. 

 

Mykaela Saunders: I think any discussion about a national literature needs to, in this country, acknowledge the many national literatures and transnational literatures that came before. 

 

Anna Funder:  What is the Australian novel today? Is it even a novel? And what’s Borges doing in a podcast about Australian literature? 

 

Excerpt:- “The Argentine Writer and Tradition” by Jorge Luis Borges 

 

 

 

 

Anna Funder:   It’s time to get Fully Lit, 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[00:01:14] Lynda Ng: Hello, I’m Lynda Ng. I’m joined in the studio today by Yumna Kassab, inaugural Parramatta Laureate in literature, and Mykaela Saunders, who is a Goori writer and postdoctoral fellow at Macquarie University.  

 

We’re here to talk about the Australian novel and the world, or more specifically, about how the Australian novel is currently being shaped and reshaped by the world. And to start off with, I wanted to ask both of you, as contemporary Australian writers, how are you shaping Australia through your work? Yumna would you like to start? 

 

[00:01:44] Yumna Kassab: Yes. I think generally when we talk about literature. When I think about my own writing, I tend to not really apply the label of Australian literature or Australian novelist, or an Australian writer. That generally it’s not till I’ve actually left Australia if I’m travelling abroad, if someone needs to ask me that, I then refer to myself as being from Australia. And even when I was writing my book Australiana, there was a point where I was actually thinking, am I actually allowed to call my book Australiana? So it’s a very interesting subject to actually consider in the context of the Australian novel and shaping the Australian novel. 

 

[00:02:25] Lynda Ng: Mykaela, would you describe yourself as an Australian writer? 

 

Mykaela Saunders: No way. ​​Even before I was a writer, I never felt like an Australian, and I still don’t. I don’t think I ever will. I’m a Goori person, and I’m also Lebanese, and both of my cultural communities have been rejected by the polity of Australia. And also, you know, being kind of asked or demanded to assimilate. And it’s very hard position to occupy as a writer because there are so many ways in which we’re these days we’re being celebrated, maybe even fetishised a little bit and claimed. But for most of our history that wasn’t the case. So it kind of leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. So no, I’m a goori writer. I’m a Lebanese writer, and I say those things not to talk about the kind of person I am, but the kind of things that I write and who I write for. 

 

[00:03:25] Lynda Ng: I find that really interesting that both of you have, in a sense, rejected the label of Australian writer Mykaela. You talked about being claimed or I suppose about more generally, you’re talking about Aboriginal writers being claimed as Australian. Why do you think this is so problematic? 

 

[00:03:44] Mykaela Saunders: I don’t know if problematic is the right word. It’s just I feel like it’s a bit of whiplash because for such a long time, Australia and Australian publishing houses didn’t want to touch our writing, didn’t want to touch our stories, or if they did, it was only a certain kind of Aboriginal story, you know, in the last five, ten, 15, 20 years where more and more of our books are being published in a variety of genres, not just, you know, fiction or memoir, which was, I guess, the big one. There’s a sense that, especially if we’re thinking about literature on a world stage, that, you know, Australia gets to claim Aboriginal writing as our writing. This is our writing. And certainly there are quite a few Indigenous writers who do identify as Australian or Indigenous Australian. And that’s fine. That’s totally up to them. But there are also quite a few writers who don’t. And so to recognise, you know, Indigenous sovereignty in a really serious and very real sense. It has to apply to the way people identify. And most blackfellas I know who are not writers, they identify themselves through their nation and their community and their ancestry, and not through the entity of Australia which hasn’t been here very long, but through their very ancient connections to land and to each other, across space and across time. 

 

[00:05:08] Lynda Ng: I think Aboriginal literature is one of the most exciting categories in Australian literature today, and this is one of the most significant changes in our literary landscape, as you’ve referred to Mykaela. The growth and promotion of Aboriginal authors, the way Aboriginal voices are now given more sort of space at writers festivals. And of course, there have been such, you know, such prominent and very successful Aboriginal writers Which 50 years ago would not have been the case. I mean, in a sense, this has very important implications for how Australian literature is viewed not only within our country but outside of the country. Yeah. 

 

[00:05:49] Yumna Kassab: Often, you know, the most important question for a writer is where you actually start the story. It’s going to give you a particular type of story. So if we actually start, you know, Australian literature, let’s say Henry Lawson, that is one story. If you start at 40,000 years ago or 60,000 years ago, that’s a very different story. And, you know, I was recently reading Purple Threads by Jeanine Leane. This is a very different idea of storytelling, but it’s also the origin of storytelling. And so I think what is very interesting and, you know, I can say this from a Arab storytelling tradition and to an extent you could also say it from an Aboriginal storytelling tradition. We might be actually now publishing books here, but the stories are older, maybe in terms of publishing and a recognition that it’s caught up and it’s all a question of actually where we start this story. 

 

[00:06:46] Lynda Ng: Would you agree, Mykaela, that in a sense this isn’t a deviation from Australian literature, although this is an expansion, a return to older, more traditional stories, in a sense, a truer portrayal of what Australia is. 

 

[00:07:03] Mykaela Saunders: Yeah. I mean, I don’t know if it’s a portrayal of what Australia is, but it’s certainly more accurate to say, like Yumna said, there are stories that have been written on the land and above in the sky for tens of thousands of years, and people might know them as songlines and they still exist. To me, if we’re talking about the novel, which is really a form of a story, a very specific form, you know, it’s a it’s of a certain length. It’s in a book. It’s often just authored by one person. If we think about Songlines, I’ve always thought about them as the first transnational literatures, because some of these stories go across many different nations, and I’m talking about nations in the Aboriginal sense, not in the one nation sense of Australia being one nation, but in the sense that this continent is made up of anywhere from 3 to 500 different nations, depending on who you ask and how you define nation. And some of these songlines go from one edge of the coast to the other, and you’re crossing like dozens of nations and language groups. Yet it’s telling the same story. So recognising that, I think is really important when we’re talking about the first literatures on this continent. And literature to me, isn’t just the written word. I would preface that by saying written literature, because there is oral literature, and the tradition of orality, um, predates the written word by such a long time in every corner of the world. And when we’re talking about it here, um, most of history, you know, our cultures and our stories were passed down through the spoken word, which requires good storytelling, very skilled storytellers to tell these stories in such a way that people will remember them and pass them on to their own younger people. But yeah, I think any discussion about a national literature needs to, in this country, acknowledge the many national literatures and transnational literatures that came before. 

 

[00:09:19] Lynda Ng: The novel is given. I don’t want to say undue prominence in terms of our national literature. I think they’re very important and historic reasons why the novel is most strongly associated with the nation and the nation. Not in the sense that you’re speaking about it, Mykaela. But the nation as in the nation state as a modern sociopolitical form. And, of course, one of the most significant things in the development of Australian literature is Patrick White being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973, which was sort of understood as, you know, not just a moment of national glory, but something that really reinforced that Australia was now a mature country which had something called literature. And of course, in recent years, Alexis Wright has often been mentioned as a potential candidate for the Nobel. In fact, the stature of Alexis Wright overseas is what makes her a clear candidate for being a world literary author, someone who has surpassed the national framework and whose work is regularly taught as an example of Australian literature overseas. I’m bringing this up because in Geordie Williamson’s introduction to Alexis Alexis’s plains of promise. He points out the very different attitudes captured by Patrick White’s opening scene in The Tree of Man and in Alexis Wright’s opening to the Plains of Promise. Of course, The Tree of Man opens with Stan Parker chopping down a tree in order to build his home. 

 

[00:10:44] READING: Tree of Man by Patrick White 

 

 

[00:12:18] Lynda Ng: Whereas Alexis Wright opens by telling us about the biggest tree that grows on Saint Dominic’s mission, that it’s a poinciana tree, and the only one to survive from a seed pod of 21 seeds brought to the land by the missionary. 

 

[00:12:32] READING: Plains of Promise by Alexis Wright 

 

[00:13:19] Lynda Ng: Mykaela, do you agree with Geordie Williamson, that in this sort of scene which harks back to White’s Tree of Man that Alexis Wright, she’s providing a very strong riposte to White’s very masculine and individualistic portrayal of settlement. 

 

[00:13:35] Mykaela Saunders: I mean, yes, I think it can be read as that. I don’t know her mind, so I don’t know how intentional that is. But when we’re reading work, we have to just put our own meanings in there. So it is a really good parallel and a really good relationship to draw between the two. I think the beginning story of Australia as a state does begin with the chopping down of trees in any country you go to, because that’s the first time that the intention was signalled to stay and to not go anywhere, but to start building. If you think about Sydney in 1788, when the First Fleet arrived and those people started chopping down Darug trees to build their settlement, that’s the first kind of intention that they were going to stay. 

 

[00:14:26] Lynda Ng: When I thought about these passages is that the poinciana tree is, I think, more locally referred to as the flame tree. I mean, they’re the bright red ones you see throughout our landscape, which I had always thought of as Australian. It encapsulates, in a sense, Wright’s entire attitude to settlement in terms of acknowledging that Australia is now a multicultural nation, that there are, you know, influencers and people who’ve come from overseas. And this is now, you know, they have become part of the landscape. 

 

[00:14:55] Mykaela Saunders: The way I read that the poinciana tree in Plains of Promise is as another metaphor for colonisation. Actually it is. It comes with the missionaries and it grows in the land, just as that religion took hold in that community. I’m not saying that the tree is a symbol of bad or evil or oppression, but it’s not a native tree. It doesn’t come from the land it’s brought here, and it’s rooted very strongly in the land over time and probably at the at the expense of native trees and native ecosystems. And, you know, even though it’s a different metaphor of a tree to Patrick White’s, it’s still, to me a metaphor of colonisation. 

 

[00:15:46] Lynda Ng: As a multicultural country, Australia is defined by its vast and dense network of connections to countries and cultures across the world. And I thought this interconnection that is such a common part of Australian life was well illustrated by the fact that the three of us in the room today have a connection to Lebanon via descent Yumna and Mykaela. You both have Lebanese descent, and I married into a family that is of Lebanese descent. My children have Lebanese descent. Now I want to ask both of you, how do you think this heritage plays out in an Australian context? Maybe Yumna you would like to start. 

 

[00:16:21] Yumna Kassab: Yeah. You know, last night I went on to census data and 1911 census data. 17% of Australians are born overseas. That if we go to 2021 or even 2020, you know, 2014​​. Well, 28% are actually born overseas. Half of Australians actually have a parent who is born overseas. I think it’s about 23% speak a language other than English at home. The five biggest sort of migrant languages are Mandarin, Arabic, Vietnamese, Cantonese and Punjabi. That, in the 2021 census, 3.8% of the population identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people. That’s 980,000 people. And then also, when I look at the Miles Franklin in the last sort of ten years, Michelle de Kretser, who was born in Sri Lanka, has won twice. Shankari Chandran, who was born in London and has a Tamil background, won in 2023. Melissa Lukashenko won in 2019. Tara June Winch won in 2020. And AS.. Patric’, he won in 2016. And he was born in Serbia. So I am very interested in this as a number and that when we actually look at Australia that there is this, you know, a particular view of Australia that, you know, sort of persists and maybe also in terms of the novels that are being written. 

 

 Yumna Kassab: And ​​I’m going to sort of joke and stereotype here a little bit that we have this image of, you know, Bondi Beach and a share house and a kangaroo. Kylie Minogue, it’s sort of the tourism ad, but the reality is, if you actually look at the country, it’s actually not that at all. I am mentioning a lot of the sort of statistics in terms of people’s migrant backgrounds and the sort of different languages that are also spoken. But the thing is, I think this is also part of the history of the country. It’s not anything new. And that, you know, even what we call a sort of multicultural novel that is probably actually the origin, you know, it’s there in the sort of inception of written Australian literature. And I do make a point about Henry Lawson, that his background is Norwegian and his family name is an anglicisation of Lawson. And, you know, he’s a very important figure in terms of Australian literature. 

 

[00:18:44] Lynda Ng: Mykaela, how does this heritage affect your worldview, and does it affect the stories that you choose to tell? 

 

[00:18:50] Mykaela Saunders: Well, yes, it does affect, um, it affects the way I write, because ​​culturally I come from a Goori and a Lebanese oral tradition. And so it affects the way I see the world. It affects the way I communicate, it affects the way I tell jokes. You know, all of these things are connected to my writing. However, when I’m commissioned to write something, it’s often because I’m Aboriginal and rarely actually only once because I’m Lebanese. I was asked to write something that was set in Sydney and that referenced both sides of my cultural heritage, and that was the first time, really. I think part of it is that it’s very hard for people to hold that in their minds, that I am Aboriginal and Lebanese, you know, I’m not Aboriginal with Lebanese background. I’m not half Lebanese, half Aboriginal. I’m fully both. I always have been and I always will be. And I think because I guess the majority of Indigenous people that publishers or, you know, just anyone comes up against, they might also have a white parent or they’re not. There’s not a lot of us Aboriginal and Lebanese people out there put it that way. So it’s often quite novel when people ask me about it, or when I tell them that, you know, there’s often a note of surprise or whatever. 

 

Mykaela Saunders: But to me it’s totally normal. But I want to just talk about Yumna was talking about these statistics about, you know, how the kind of the changing population and migrant backgrounds and all that stuff and how the reality today is that so many Australians were either born overseas or have a parent who were born overseas, too, and that might be the case. But who holds the power in publishing? In broadcasting? I don’t know if I’m allowed to talk about this, but if we look at the ABC, everything that’s going on there, the silencing of Palestinian voices and stories and support. It’s not any surprise to me that that’s happening. So when we think about who holds the power, and that’s just one example. But when we talk about who holds the power, even though, like there’s a lot of us who are from these different cultures and have these different experiences. The reason that the stereotypical Australian kind of cultural images are of kangaroos and neighbours and Kylie Minogue and all that stuff is because of, you know, who gets to control that. And still to this day. 

 

[00:21:28] Yumna Kassab: Yeah, there’s actually one thing that I do want to add about that. And it’s, you know, the House of Yusuf versus Australiana. I actually do read reviews and I find them very interesting. The House of Yusuf was actually seen as indicative of migrants in western Sydney, but Australiana, no one actually saw all the depression, all the violence as indicative of anything about Australia. And maybe we have this vision of Australia that it’s not really registering, that there is a lot of violence and that there is this sort of fracturing, that this is not something connected to an Australian experience. While, you know, House of Yusuf, you know, all these poor migrants are depressed or it’s indicative of something about actually the migrants. But both of the groups in those books are actually deeply depressed. But it’s a sort of different reading here. 

 

[00:22:20] Lynda Ng: It seems to me that these issues both of you are talking about relate to a sort of minoritization. You know, that this is an issue in the way Australia looks at itself in terms of certain issues pushed aside or placed onto minority communities. Again, I think it is also why the expansion of what the Australian novel is, is, you know, that becomes important in terms of formalising these ideas of Australia. Yumna would you say that your voice out there as an Australian author makes a difference? 

 

[00:22:52] Yumna Kassab: Well, I don’t have anything so grand actually associated with what I actually write that I try and keep it very humble and very basic. But I do think that when I look at what I’m actually writing, that if I compare it to, I suppose, what’s being written in Australia? The Australian novel, maybe it’s, you know, 50% different, but if it’s actually placed within a sort of world tradition or world literature, maybe it’s 10% different. Maybe it doesn’t actually stand out so much. But I do think that there is a sort of obsession, and it really is an obsession, um, with this sort of image of Australia and how Australia looks. And, you know, also even this conversation about an Australian novel, I keep thinking about the great American novel, and I really would like to know that. Are people actually writing a Canadian novel? Are they writing a Lebanese novel? Are they Uruguayans writing Uruguayan novels, and are they or aren’t they? And what does this actually say about this concept of an Australian novel? That it’s almost like trying to establish what are we as a country and what kind of stories we’re telling, and we’re still kind of building a particular image. And maybe these countries who are saying that their history is maybe, you know, a few hundred years old, are trying to establish a particular idea. I have to like, chat to, you know, some of the, you know, Arab writers who are writing in Arabic. If I really want to know, you know, are they writing Arab novels or are they writing? You know, I don’t know, Palestinian novels. Like, what kind of novels are they writing? Are they even thinking about this? You know. 

 

[00:24:33] Lynda Ng: Mykaela has something to say. 

 

[00:24:35] Mykaela Saunders: I don’t know if there’s any. Am I making up a writer in my head to argue with? Is this a straw man? But I’m deeply suspicious of any writer who wants to write the great Australian novel. I think I’m suspicious of any maybe literary culture that wants to celebrate it, because nationalism sucks. Um, I think unless we’re criticising nationalism, you know, and I think that goes to the heart of everything we’ve been talking about. Unless we’re critiquing these structures that seek to create one homogenous version of Australia, not just create in the literary sense, but are violently policing it through laws, through policies, through actually policing it with police forces. And I’m very suspicious that anything can be the great Australian novel, because there is such a multiplicity of experiences. I think unless there is a critique of how the polity of Australia came to be and how it continues to be, to me it’s not an interesting story. It’s propaganda. And we’ve had a lot of that in Australian literature in the last few centuries. 

 

[00:25:46] Lynda Ng: I agree, Mykaela. I think there’s a disjuncture between the individual experience or the individual writer and the way the books themselves get promoted and sort of, in a sense taken out of context or taken away from the domain of the writer, but at the same time I think it is important. Certain novels do enter a world literary sphere, and they do become representative of the country inside. I think a very clear example is Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria being placed on the French education syllabus. So for those who don’t know, the agrégation is the compulsory exam that English teachers in France have to set. It was hugely significant when Carpentaria was placed on the agrégation a few years ago, because it was the first time an Australian novel had made this list since Patrick White’s Voss, and I think it’s also hugely significant and says something about about how Australia is interpreted, that now we have a couple of generations of French teachers who will be teaching English to French children, and their idea of Australia comes from Alexis Wright. 

 

[00:26:55] Mykaela Saunders: The example of commentary is really interesting and how well it’s been received. And you know how many languages it’s been translated into. Which I find really interesting because I think, like the average Australian reader finds it hard to read in English. Right? That’s a lot of feedback I’ve ever had from people who say they’ve tried to read it, or they can’t get into it, because the language is so meaty, the sentences are so chewy, so I would find it really interesting to see how it translates into other languages. I think in Carpinteria it’s interesting because the people committing the crimes are the police and are the mining corporations. So it is an indictment of ongoing colonisation in small, remote or rural Indigenous communities. I think it’s a really exciting time to be an Alexis Wright fan because she’s getting world. Well, we say worldwide recognition, Anglophone recognition. 

 

[00:28:00 ] Lynda Ng: I would like to add to that that she’s also recognised in quite widely in the Francophone world and also in China. She was published in Chinese quite early and has quite a following there. Of course, Alexis herself is of Chinese descent as well, and in that sense, I wanted to loop back to the way we opened with Mykaela and Yumna, both of you saying, you know, you feel uneasy about being labelled as an Australian writer. Do you think that you would be accepted as a Lebanese writer by people in Lebanon? 

 

[00:28:34] Yumna Kassab: Well, actually, I’m appearing on some Arab lists and I’m very excited about this because I’ve been trying to actively get all publishers to please translate my books to Arabic and Spanish, and there are a few other languages I really care about. You know, I’ve got like some cool languages, but I am not entirely sure. But I really love the writer Jorge Luis Borges, and he has this essay called The Argentine Writer and Tradition, and he makes this argument in that, that the people who are most dominant in a language, and he uses the example of Irish writers within English because they’re referencing two worldviews or two cultures, two languages, two systems. That gives rise to a very interesting hybridisation. 

 

[00:29:23] READING: “The Argentine Writer and Tradition” by Jorge Loui Borges 

 

 

[00:32:17]  Lynda Ng: Mykaela, what about you? Do you think that you would be accepted as a Lebanese writer? 

 

[00:32:44] Mykaela Saunders: Yeah, I would. I don’t write about, you know, the Lebanese experience. But I am Lebanese. I write about and for my Aboriginal community mostly. I grew up in an Aboriginal community. I didn’t grow up in a Lebanese community. My parents split when I was very young. So, um, my connection to my Lebanese family and culture, um, isn’t an immersive day to day thing. Um, but it’s still a very important part of my life, you know? Still is. Um, but I grew up in an Aboriginal family, in an Aboriginal community. I write stories for and about Aboriginal people. I’m explicit about who I write for, because there are so many stories out there that aren’t written for us. It’s a real bee in my bonnet. I think there is an expectation that a certain reader be centred when you’re writing, and I reject that. I want to write stories for our people. I know that what one of the many things that prompted me to become a writer was reading work like Carpentaria that centred our people as a community, not just as lone wolves or the token black character, but a community of characters doing what we do in life, which is fighting, loving, you know, all the great things about living. 

 

Mykaela Saunders: I edited an anthology a few years ago called This All Come Back Now, and it’s an anthology of First Nations speculative fiction. And I was very explicit that I wanted work in there that was for blackfellas about Blackfellas and by blackfellas. And I’ve since had some feedback and review that some of the stories were quite opaque or hard to understand. And for me, that’s a good thing, because if we’re writing stories that centre a particular white reader, then that white reader actually isn’t learning anything, or they’re learning is how to have their feelings centred. I know when I’m reading across cultures and let’s face it, I’m always reading across cultures. I like not knowing. I like being immersed in cultural and political and historical information that I don’t know about it you figure it out. If you’re an intelligent and curious reader, you find this stuff out, um, by context, or you can look things up. And I think that’s the way to learn through reading, not by having your own feelings and worldview and sensibility centred. 

 

[00:35:17] Lynda Ng: On both you and Mykaela have spoken about, in a sense, the limitations of the novel form. You know, you’ve said you’re in an ongoing debate with your publisher about whether you’re actually writing novels or not. Um, does this present another barrier of entry for minority writers or for non Anglo writers? 

 

[00:35:17] Yumna Kassab: I think this can actually go both ways. When I was approaching publishers with Australiana, I made it very clear that I wasn’t going to be writing a traditional novel. So I sometimes feel like maybe there are also mild eccentricities that are sort of tolerated a little bit more if you do have a different background. But when I think about, you know, my reading and literature in general because of, you know, my, my background, but also, you know, travel and various interests, that often I am also referencing more than one place or more than, you know, one worldview. There is something interesting that actually Mykaela mentioned there, where it’s about having references in your books that will potentially only be understood by certain readers. I know with the Lovers and you know, with politica that some people don’t actually get the references or really want the references to kind of be spelt out. And I think, you know, one of the things that I’m sort of I always have at the back of my mind is, look, I’m actually not here to write the Lonely Planet guide to, you know, the Arab world or Arab literature or, you know, you can go to those countries, you can go read the Lonely Planet guide. But that’s I’m not here to, you know, actually have a sort of education campaign, if you understand, you know, what the handshake is about or if I, you know, reference human shields, if you get it, you get it. 

 

Yumna Kassab: And if not, maybe that’s actually on you. Not necessarily. It’s you know, it doesn’t have to be like a drop down little note down the bottom for people to actually understand that.  

 

So I am going to be reading a story called Windows that I think could have gone into either The House of Yusuf or Australiana.  

 

[00:37:36] Reading : “Windows” by Yumna Kassab. 

 

 

 

[00:39:01] Lynda Ng: Mykaela, do you feel pressure to write a certain way, or do you feel much more of a counterforce in order to go against expectations in your writing? 

 

[00:39:12] Mykaela Saunders: I have felt pressure, but I ignore it. I think because I came to writing a bit later than some people. I mean, I had my first short story published four and a bit years ago, well into my 30s. And so I think if I was a lot younger, I would feel those pressures and maybe convince myself to bow to them. I also know the value in my writing is because of my voice and my unique perspective. And if I started writing towards an expectation, that would mean my writing would lose its unique voice and its unique, you know, whatever it is, whatever it is people like about it. That said, sometimes when I’m writing something, I do think about who the publisher is going to be or who the editor is going to be, and it can kind of infect me a little bit, but I just try and become conscious of it and push against it. I try just to write things that I like for my own sensibilities, and to impress myself and to impress the people around me who, you know, have a sense of humour and who talk a certain way and who understand the world in a certain way. I don’t know about your experience, but I’ve had editors over the years really try and butcher my voice and to try and whip it into line with a particular white and middle class sensibility, or a way of talking, or a way of even punctuating a sentence. And I do reject that. Not to say I hate being edited, I love it, but there are certain kinds of editors. And, you know, it’s often very apparent what they’re trying to do when it comes to your voice. 

 

[00:40:43] Lynda Ng: Part of this issue of the novel or form that has come up is that categorisation between is it a novel or is it a collection of short stories? And, you know, you’ve had work which was marketed as both. I think both of you have also spoken in the past about different ways of storytelling, the limitations of the novel, its focus on an individual and an individual story, and needing to break apart that standard form in order to start telling more collective stories or more comprehensive stories. And Mykaela, you have a book of short stories coming out soon, so you’ve also chosen to work in this form. Has it allowed you to, in a sense, be truer to your culture or, you know, to capture more of the worldview that your culture has? 

 

[00:41:25] Mykaela Saunders: I think with every particular piece of writing, whether it be an essay or a poem or a short story or a novel, the story will start to suggest what kind of form and length it needs to take. Um, I don’t know any serious writer who kind of starts with this idea of I’m going to write a story of such and such number of words. I think we just start writing the story and it tells itself in that way. When I started this project, um, through my doctorate degree at Sydney Uni, I wanted to think about what my Indigenous community, where I grew up in the Tweed, what we would look like in the future, in any given future. And I’m talking about climate change. I’m talking about political structures. But I didn’t want to just think about the doom and gloom of it, which we know, you know, is quite profound. I wanted to write stories that in some sense or another, explored my community’s sovereignty and their assertion of their sovereignty in the face of, you know, climate catastrophe, um, rising waters, global warming, uh, fascist governments, all of that stuff.  

 

[00:42:42] Reading” “Taking our time” by Mykaela Saunders 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[00:46:23] Mykaela Saunders: When I was thinking about this project, I wanted to explore all these different futures, and the only way I could think to do that was to write a series of short stories set in these different futures. I couldn’t see the way I wanted to write a novel. Don’t get me wrong, but I couldn’t see the way that would work. And so that’s why my book, always Will be, is in the form it’s in. That’s what those stories demanded. Yeah. 

 

[00:46:50] Lynda Ng: No, you’re nodding vigorously. So is this similar to your experience? Yeah. 

 

Yumna Kassab: Of course. You know, I think the actual story is going to dictate how it sort of expresses itself, whether it is going to be a poem, it’s going to be a short story. Maybe it’s going to be fragments, maybe it is a novel, maybe it isn’t a novel. The actual structure itself is the framing, and it’s either going to expand the possibilities of the story, or it’s going to greatly restrict it. 

 

[00:47:15] Lynda Ng: I guess just as a final question, I wanted to say or ask, who do you think are the most exciting Australian novelists working today? 

 

[00:47:24] Yumna Kassab: Yumna I am willing to take the broadest view possible. And Mykaela mentioned earlier claiming people. So I’m going to put these forward as people writing great Australian novels. The first one I would actually mention is Scary Monsters by Michelle de Kretser, because it is actually two stories and they’re kind of complementary. And she also did this, you know, flipping of the book and it’s, I think got a section that is 1980s and then future which engages with misogyny, racism, um, climate capitalism. It’s, you know, a great book, but I, I’m just jealous that she actually did the flipping of the book kind of thing. I really want to do that. Michelle, if you’re listening, I still may do it. The other writer that I want to mention is Intan Paramaditha, who wrote The Wandering, which is, well, it’s for adults. It’s a choose your own adventure book, but it’s about and explores ideas of privilege, um, around travel, where this woman has this magical pair of red shoes that can transport her anywhere around the world. But the internet is a very interesting person to put on this list, because she’s got an Indonesian background and she writes in Indonesian, and I went and actually checked it just to, to see whether I could actually put her on my list. 

 

[00:48:29]Yumna Kassab: But she was listed for the Stella Prize, which does have a condition that you have to be a permanent resident or a citizen. So Intan is actually definitely on my list. The next person I would include, and I just read this just before Christmas, Purple Threads by Janine Leane. Reading this book, I kept asking myself it says on the back, short story collection. It also says yarns. And I was thinking, you know what? You could actually make a very strong argument that this is actually a novel because it does have a trajectory. It’s got,  this young. It’s from the, you know, perspective of a very young character. And, um, no, you could definitely actually argue that this one is a novel, and I’m going to cheat completely here. We’re not too hung up on what we actually consider to be novels. Maybe they can also be short stories. But, Mykaela, I am going to include This All Come Back Now, which was edited by Mykaela. And it’s, you know, First Nations speculative fiction. This is such an exciting book. 

 

[00:49:36] Lynda Ng: Mykaela, what about you? 

 

Mykaela Saunders: Um, I can’t answer truthfully at the moment because I’m reading for the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Prize in the Indigenous categories. I can’t actually talk about my reading, but for my project at Macquarie Uni, I’ve got a post-doctoral fellowship and I’m in the process at the beginning of writing a monograph on First Nations speculative fiction. So my task over the next year is to read, or, as it were, reread every single published example of First Nations speculative fiction, whether that be a short story or a novel, you know, whatever. So at the moment I’m revisiting work that I’ve studied in the past, but I’m reading it in a different lens, and I’m finding it really comforting to to revisit these stories and to think about them in terms of genre and to think about them in terms of not just as Australian work, but as global speculative fiction examples, you know, that are related to other Indigenous futurisms or climate fiction or, and things like that. So I’m finding these stories really interesting to revisit in that sense. My favourite probably being The Swan Book by Alexis Wright, because it’s a really wonderful example of, um, Indigenous futurism that’s also a dystopia. It’s also really funny and also really beautiful and also really grim. It’s kind of got everything I like in a story in it. And there’s not many examples of First Nations speculative fiction that are doing as much as The Swan book is. 

 

[00:51:16] Anna Funder: That was Mykaela Saunders, Yumna Kassab, and our host, Lynda Ng, with a look at some of the key issues in contemporary Australian fiction.  

 

Before our next episode, we’d like to share with you a short extract of Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book.  

 

 

[00:51:39] READING The Swan Book by Alexis Wright 

 

 

[00:53:15] Anna Funder: Thanks for listening to Fully Lit. This series is brought to you by Impact Studios at UTS, the Sydney Review of Books with the UTS Writing and Publishing Program, and is produced by Regina Botros.  

I’m Anna Funder, and if you’d like to hear any of our other episodes, look for Fully Lit wherever you get your podcasts.