Melanie Saward: 

We should be allowed to share our joy and our love. And also, I want to read a silly story that I relate to. You know, I want to have fun and lose myself. I don’t always want to be reading about our ancestors’ trauma. 

 

Anna Funder: 

Welcome to Fully Lit. A podcast about Australian writing.  

 

Graham Akhurst: 

White settler colonial critics are not equipped with the tools to critique  

Indigenous Literatures in a particular way, because they come to the text with that kind of cognitive imperial baggage. 

 

Anna Funder: 

What is cognitive imperialism? And what do readers and critics expect from First Nations literature? 

 

Ben Etherington: Read the criticism. If it doesn’t have any substance to it. It’s bullshit. And it’s kind of racist bullshit. It’s a call to good close reading. 

 

Anna Funder: 

I’m Anna Funder, and coming up you’ll hear novelist Melanie Seward and critic Ben Etherington with host Graham Ackhurst.  

 

But first Alexis Wright. 

 

THEN 

 

Alexis Wright: I really think we need readers to read more deeply, too, and I think we need to teach our children to be literature literate. 

 

Anna Funder: 

It’s time to get Fully Lit 

 

 

 

 

[00:01:24] Graham Akhurst: I have with me this afternoon two wonderful guests, Melanie Seward Bigambul and Wakka Wakka writer and academic. She’s the author of Burn, which is currently available with Affirm press, and her debut romance novel is called Love Unleashed. She’s an academic from the University of Queensland and is currently working with Auslit on Blackwords.  

 

Melanie Saward:Thank you 

 

Graham Akhurst: 

We also have Ben Etherington, or should I say Associate Professor Ben Etherington, who’s working on a history of poetry in Caribbean creole languages after slavery. He’s also an academic at the Western Sydney University. He’s head of the English department and works in English language literatures. 

Ben Etherington:– Thanks Graham, it’s great to meet you Mel 

Graham Akhurst: 

 A pressing question that I wanted to ask you, Mel. The idea of genres in this settler colonial context, and where an Indigenous voice can sit within that conversation. 

 

[00:02:27] Melanie Saward: Yeah, it’s a really kind of tricky question in some ways, because in some genres there might be perceived to be a lot of Indigenous Voices or more Indigenous Voices. You know, there’s a little bit of speculative fiction, which is kind of a contentious term to use for Indigenous Writing. But I’ll say it for now, for want of a better term, we might see a little bit more again, contentious horror, thriller, that sort of thing. But then when it comes to romance genre, that’s my thing. That’s the genre that I love. There is literally Anita Heiss, and then in a couple of months time when my book comes out, me and so do we fit in genre, I think is probably the question. I think the publishing industry has a lot to answer for. The lack of books doesn’t mean that there aren’t people who enjoy genre, particularly romance and romantic comedy genres. I think that it is a reflection of what the publishing industry is asking us for, and what they think readers are interested in and what they’re willing to market. So we are owed joy, you know? We do have joy. We should be allowed to share our joy and our love. And also, I want to read a silly story that I relate to. You know, I want to have fun and lose myself. I don’t always want to be reading about our ancestors trauma and all the things that flow down to us. I sometimes just want to lose myself in a book, and I want to see someone who looks like me and my friends and my family, and has a life like me and my friends and my family. So I’d like to see us fitting into that space more. Yeah. 

 

[00:04:08] Graham Akhurst: You touched on something that I spoke with Jeanine about, and that’s this idea of the fetishisation of Indigenous Identity when it comes to market driven publishing entities. Yeah, and their ideas around what Indigenous Subjectivities are, but also what will sell in a capitalist sense. Yeah. So what I think you’re getting at and what I’ve loved to see, is that we can tell our stories our way in any form or genre, which may or may not fit into the construction of their ideas of what an Aboriginal story is. 

 

[00:04:48] Melanie Saward: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that also goes for you said structure. So for romance writing has a really strict kind of structure that readers will get upset if you miss. So it’s got sort of two essential elements, which are that the romance is central to the narrative, and it has a happily ever after, and then it has little tropes that you can deal with within that. So you have like a missed connection or friends to lovers or enemies to lovers and things like that, that, that run through that are the really the, the meat that the readers really want. When you’re talking about approaching it from an Indigenous perspective, I felt like there was kind of a rich playground there to to go with, you know, in a lot of my other sort of writing, like with burn and even with my academic work, like when I was writing my PhD, I have an inclination to mess with structure and mess with Western structures of writing because I don’t like to follow rules. But when it comes to romance, I’m pretty strict on the rules. And and I think it’s because there’s a lot of place to play inside those tropes and fit within them. And it’s a nice puzzle. But at the same time, there’s been a lot of work done. You know, when you play with one area of the romance genre. So for example, if you just swap out a white protagonist for an Indigenousprotagonist, that it pulls on other levers and so then something else has to give. So it could be or it has been historically that maybe if you pull on the the white to black or swap things around that, then it becomes, you know, maybe if you think about a North American perspective, a privileged young black woman, and then you forget about some of the other difficulties or struggles of, of race. 

 

Melanie Saward: So you’ve really got to think about embedding those things in and not making them too heavy for your audience, which can be really difficult, right? Because you want to talk about real things, but are things too heavy for them? One of the things that I find really refreshing about this sort of upswell in publishers, maybe being a bit more interested in Indigenous Stories and and what we have to say is that there may be putting slightly less constraints that might be speaking out of turn, but it appears as though some publishers are putting less constraint on our authors on mob who are writing. And so you see people like Ellen van Neerven, for example, coming through, and all of their writing is structured in what I would say, a much more connected black way without kind of regard for, you know, this beginning, middle, end narrative structure that we sometimes feel like we have to have to fit into Western publishing. They can’t categorise it as well. You know, you see people that struggle to really categorise heat and light, for example, because of the way that they structured that narrative, that it has a through line, it sort of sections. There’s little bits of story in there. They struggle to categorise where that fits in the genre. 

 

[00:08:15] Graham Akhurst: Yeah, I completely agree. Melanie and Ben, I wanted to ask you around the traditions that you’ve seen as an English literature academic, the types of storytelling modes of Indigenous peoples, not just in a settler colonial Australian context, but also First Nations, Canadian, First Nations, Native American. And how I’ve noticed and correct me if I’m wrong, that we play with structure very differently in books like ceremony, etc.. 

 

[00:08:45] Ben Etherington: It’s such a good question, Graham, and I’m just bringing my mind to bear on it. I mean, as Mel was talking there, something I was thinking about is that it’s a conversation about categories, but the conversation about categories often comes after the creativity in question. Yeah. You want to write in the form and write the stories that you want to write as an author, kind of regardless of your background, but background definitely conditions and influences how you would approach that act from a pedagogical perspective. Categories are really important because they can send students minds in particular directions. I think speculative fiction is such a good example, because a term like magical realism, when it comes to so much recent Indigenous Writing, kind of enters the fray and everybody immediately starts connecting up the works of Alexis Wright and others to Latin American novels, to Peter Carey say in the 1980s, to Salman Rushdie. And it starts to create, I guess, a sort of transnational, almost reading of Alexis Wright. Now she read Latin American so-called magical realism. So it’s not as though it’s entirely misdirected. But in Jeanine Leane’s piece, she talks about how an appropriate categorisation of that is Aboriginal realism, and that for students is immediately going to steer their mind towards. Well, what does that mean? I mean, we may have done a subject on the history of the realist novel, starting with Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe or something like that. 

 

Ben Etherington: That would be a sort of traditional canonical structure, and suddenly it’s playing with their concept of realism, so that which seems to their eyes, if they’re not Indigenous or if they’re not from a culture that sits outside of, I guess, the conditioning by Western rationalism and science, they might think, okay, well, I now need to undo the categories that I usually sit within and be open to what this novel is doing in relation to country, relation to forms of one year cosmology. If we’re talking about the work of Alexis Wright. So categories are really important for how they direct readers. But you know, you guys are the writers. So you know that the category can also change the way markets dictate how you write. They can change the way in which publishers think X or Y is important. So I think Jeanine Leane is doing something so important, and I love that you’re amplifying that work, Graham, through your conversation with her by really bringing into question the critical categories. And there hasn’t been enough of that in my reading, Australian literature and criticism. 

 

[00:11:26] Graham Akhurst: Something that comes to mind, and this is a question or a comment for both of you, is Jeanine’s idea around cognitive imperialism and how Western readers are conditioned to understand texts in a certain way, through a particular type of education system and a particular type of canon, but also their ideas around aboriginality through what has come before and white people, you know, writing about Aboriginal people. And one of her criticisms is that white settler colonial critics are not equipped with the tools to critique Indigenous Literatures in a particular way, because they come to the text with that kind of cognitive imperial baggage. They can’t cast away and they can’t localise the text in a particular way. You know, as an Indigenous author, we write specifically locally because our mobs are specific. They’re places we have our own turf as writers that we engage with, and it’s cosmologies and it’s particular social constructs. So I just wanted to throw that out to you. Mel, if you had anything to say  about this idea of cognitive imperialism and how it impacts our relations between white settler context and our writings. 

 

[00:12:47] Melanie Saward: Yeah, I think about it that the critical is interesting because we’re having a lot of conversations about literary criticism in this country anyway, whether that’s Indigenous writing or not. But yeah, there are so many people approaching our writing with that westernised idea of what writing should be. I mean, I’ve faced it in the editorial process as well. I think, you know, even in the creation of our stories, you get a lot of questions. Why is this done this way? And having to explain that sort of thing, it’s hard to know what the answer to that is. I often say in publishing, I want to see more mob working in publishing so that they can handle that, so that then this part is going out. You don’t have to have those weird, uncomfortable questions about your perception and your, you know what, your sense of cultural safety. Yeah, all of that. And I think that is the same in like all facets of the industry, right down to the critical component of it, because I, I would love to see more mob have literary criticism of our work. I think that’s how we improve. That’s a really, really important aspect of literature and creation of literature. But it doesn’t work right now. 

 

[00:14:11] Graham Akhurst: And Ben, to throw it to you, you know, being a critic with a particular background that is non-Indigenous, how do you see the idea of cognitive imperialism playing out, and how do you approach all your some of your peers approach the study and critique of Indigenous Literature? 

 

[00:14:29] Ben Etherington: It’s a really central problem. I mean, I’m a white academic. My mom’s family assimilated secular European Jews, my dad’s family, white Americans whose family fought on either side of the Civil War. And positionality itself can be a struggle for white people, in particular in this country. I’d say non-Indigenouspeople are more broadly in certain contexts. So even getting to that starting line can be a thing to get over. But speaking as a teacher, as someone who was really brought up within the realm of the cognitive imperialism that Jeanine Leane is talking about, and finding my way to being someone who has that authority at the front of the room. I’ve thought pretty hard about how to disassemble that authority, and to create a space in a way that when it comes to Indigenous Criticism of Indigenous Literature and this essay has been really important, I’ve said it in a subject called The Value of Literature, which is really about the public life of literature. We read Jeanine’s essay alongside introductory essays on criticism, and we then have an interview with Alexis Wright about writing the novel praiseworthy, because, as Jeanine says, you know, authorship is really important. Knowing the country, knowing where the perspective of the author is, is actually a key part. 

 

[00:16:30] Ben Etherington: And in the death of the author kind of world that can sometimes be overlooked. And then we look at reviews of Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy in this particular part of that subject. You can draw a direct line between what Jeanine is saying in the essay and how the criticism unfolds. And there’s almost a kind of convenient marriage, if you will, of conventional forms of literary criticism and whiteness. You know, whiteness is something that universalises itself, but also effaces itself, that it pretends its norms, that everybody’s norms and disavows its cultural specificity. And codes of objective criticism often follow exactly the same thing the erasure of subjective perspective, the use of what Immanuel Kant, the philosopher, called subjectively universal judgements of taste, which is something I was very much brought up to believe is the right way to go about it. And there’s still parts of me that are attached to that form of criticism. But seeing student break down the different reviews, the different authors, the different critics, how they’ve gone about it, out of the categories that Jeanine introduces them to, is, I think, a really good way to disassemble the misdirection of white criticism. 

 

[00:17:00] Melanie Saward: It’s interesting that you’ve done looking at reviews. I’ve done that with my students, with Melissa Lucashenko Too Much Lip as well, but we do because my students are like undergrad creative writing students. We often look at Goodreads reviews, right? Which is it’s not criticism, it’s the cesspit of where you get reviews from. But like there are people on there giving really thoughtful and non-Indigenous people, giving really thoughtful reviews of those books, and watching my students thinking about who the audience is meant to be looking at, say, one star reviews that talk about perpetuating negative stereotypes about Indigenous people. Right.  Too Much Lip has some violence, some crime, some things like that. And you’ll have people going, oh, I couldn’t read this book because there was lots of violence and it’s doing harm. More harm than good. All these people are horrible. Couldn’t read it as opposed to someone who is a thoughtful reader who is talking about. I was concerned that this might perpetuate a negative stereotype, but actually what I’ve realised is Melissa is writing from a real place, and you can’t tell this story without making this point, and it’s not in there to perpetuate a stereotype. And I think you can see that sometimes the students are like, okay, you’re actually right. I have to start unpicking who is the right reader, what context they’ve come from, and then they start to unpick the context that they’re approaching things as well. So it’s like the simplified version of what you’re doing, but still, I think a really good start to it. 

 

[00:18:39] Graham Akhurst: What I’m gathering from this is that it’s really important to bring in Indigenous Voices into the classroom in a particular way. 

 

Melanie Saward: It’s so important. 

 

Graham Akhurst: And we see the reaction to a white settler colonial discourse to those voices, which then gives the student an opportunity of perhaps unlearning. 

 

[00:19:04]  Melanie Saward: Have to challenge them. It doesn’t work if you go in and tell them this is bad because of x, y, z. Challenging the student is how we start to undo some of these systems that are in place. But what maybe is an interesting thing for you, Ben, is that I wonder about how that’s being done in the classroom from non-Indigenous academics, because it’s kind of second nature for me to put that into the things that I’m teaching, because I want that perspective in there. I think you would want that perspective in there. But yeah, how you’re bringing that into a classroom, it is central. 

 

[00:19:42] Ben Etherington: And we are at a particular historical moment when I think we’re waiting for a structural transformation to catch up with the discourse. You know, Aboriginal critics and writers are leading these conversations in the creative space, in the critical space, in the theoretical space. But we still have overwhelmingly white academic departments. I guess there are multiple ways in which this is being addressed, one of which is the Indigenising curricula move, which has some really good things happening in it, but can also become a bit of a corporate slogan, and we got to be wary of that. And it can be done in quite superficial way 

  

[00:20:21] Melanie Saward: It’s like s, like decolonising curriculums. Also a bit of a slogan. Yeah, that’s. 

 

[00:20:25] Ben Etherington: Right. And it can. It can easily become very superficial and get wrapped up into a kind of diversity discourse of, well, we just kind of attach things. But to speak to my own experiences, putting together this module on criticism and Alexis Wright within a larger subject, it’s all about creating a polyphony, multiple perspectives, multiple voices, and ensuring that it’s not a diversity style polyphony. It’s like, well, everybody’s got their perspective and we can’t really make up our minds about it. But just listen to everybody. It’s more about prioritising, I guess, prior Indigenouspresence and storytelling and starting from that basis and then looking at, I guess, the different layers that come into Australian literary culture, including the criticism, I’d say that something that really struck home with students is I did an interview with Alexis about Praiseworthy and about criticism. What does Alexis make of the practice of criticism? And she said something quite powerful, which is that she put thousands of hours into this book and a lifetime of thinking, and she expects the same level of concentration from her readers. And if you look at the criticism, you know it’s all praise, full of praiseworthy. No one said it’s a bad book, but the level of concentration, the level of effort to think about what the book is doing is not necessarily there. And the students can see that they don’t read the whole book, because it’s not a long enough subject to be able to get all the way through Praiseworthy for them. But they can see when somebody just kind of dashed off a review and that kind of cognitive effort. I guess that’s what you need to puncture cognitive imperialism. 

 

[00:22:12] Recording Alexis Wright: Well, I’d probably agree with Jeanine that, you know, I expect that rigour to be there in ways that works are discussed and critiqued. I expect that to be a solid basis on, on what people write about. And that’s really important. That’s what it’s about, you know, it’s about the work. It’s not about this or that or whatever. And I’m probably the biggest critic of my work. So whatever anyone else has to say is not going to reach what I want, how I critique my own work. And I’m really hard on myself, so no one else is going to be as hard as me on what I do. And I can tell you that right now. So everything else pales into insignificance, really. 

 

[00:22:56] Ben Etherington: And I think the same is true even of the genres you were talking about before, Mel. Like there’s a rethinking of subjectivity involved in so-called romance genres that requires a leap of empathy for those who are used to forms of romance that really reflect their white normative perspectives. Right? 

 

[00:23:15] Melanie Saward: Yeah, absolutely. 

 

[00:23:20] Graham Akhurst: Yeah. And particularly white critics often call Indigenous Literature in their criticisms important work. And it doesn’t really engage with the text past that empty sort of flattery. So I put it to you both. How do you think critical literature around Indigenous Storytelling can work towards improving their depth of critique rather than this sort of empty flattery that we we see again and again and again. 

 

[00:23:54] Ben Etherington: I think it’s really significant for the field of Australian criticism to hear Jeanine Leane call out empty praise, because I think when you have harsh criticisms from white critics of Aboriginal writing as too political, say, as you know, she quotes Geoff Page in that piece, it’s easy or easier, I should say, to call that out. It always is an act of bravery, I should say, to call out any form of racism publicly. But there’s a lot of empty praise. You know, Tuck and Yang, in their famous essay Decolonisation is Not a Metaphor. Talk about white moved to innocence, and that is effectively white people disavowing their own complicity in the colonial situation through kind of empty acts of metaphor ization. So you could kind of say that’s akin to what’s going on here. Like, you know, this is such an important work. You’re doing such important thing. What I think Jeanine Leane says it’s so important is read the criticism. If it doesn’t have any substance to it, it’s bullshit. And it’s kind of racist bullshit as well. It’s a call in an almost old fashion way to good close reading, but culturally rigorous, substantial close reading. And I think the thing that Alexa said that I was talking about earlier, that she brought all this effort to writing praiseworthy. So if a critic is not bringing that same level of effort and they’re just dashing off little canonical references and whatnot, you should see through the kind of high minded cultural moves and just say, there’s nothing in this. There’s just nothing here. And this is actually perpetuating a kind of condescension of the entire sphere of Aboriginal writing and this particular work as well. 

 

[00:25:59] Melanie Saward: Yeah, it does the work a disservice. It does the creator a disservice. 

 

[00:25:45] Graham Akhurst: Yeah, and it certainly does nothing to help establish Indigenous Literature in a way that has a critical rigour around it, where we begin to have an understanding of the importance of the literature within the history and settler colonial nature of our country. Yeah, it takes away from the localisation of the texts. It takes away from the disenfranchisement that is portrayed in our texts. In the case of Bern, it takes away from the young protagonist’s journey. Yeah. Empty flattery does nothing but perpetuate certain ideas around aboriginality. And we’ve been seeing it again and again. And it would, I think, the work that you’re doing, Ben, in the classroom and yourself, Mel, from an Indigenous perspective in the classroom is so important because it’s only through this unlearning with the next generation where they’re beginning to see through this kind of discourse of empty flattery. It’s not like Indigenousartists I feel, are afraid of criticism. We want our critics to be able to look at the text with some depth, as Alexis has told you, Ben, to bring in a lifetime of understanding of literature, to engage with our texts in that way, and then if we fall short, let us know. And that builds a critical rigour around the kinds of discourses that we’re doing. So something else I wanted to talk to you both about post-referendum, where this country is now and the ideas around truth telling. And I was hoping that you could, Ben, if we could start with you around the sorts of discourses around the Post-referendum Referendum moment in literature and literary studies, and where you see the future of of Australian literature and Australian Indigenous Literature going. 

 

[00:27:55] Ben Etherington: Thanks, Graham. I have no authority to make pronouncements or opine on this. So I’m just going to contribute thoughts. And I’m taking my bearing from that poem by Ujiri that you read with Jeanine Leane. And there’s a moment when she talks about the accidental present of contemporary settler colonial Australia, that there’s a kind of accident or contingent nature of where we find ourselves in this country as against 65,000 plus years of cultural knowledge, living on country, developing a mythology and life praxis that’s actually properly adopted to place spirit, etc.. Yeah, and I was working on this module on praiseworthy, trying to work with and through my students on questions of voice during the year, taking cultural lead from Alexis Wright, from Sandra Phillips, who was leading an internal conversation at Western Sydney University around Indigenising curricula. And I think that contingency is what we saw in 2023. Around the voice is an attempt to try and create, within a settler, colonial sovereignty, a very limited form of sovereignty and the failure of even that limited form of sovereignty, I think, shows the depth of, I guess, the colonial project in this country, but also the degree of difficulty of what words like indigenisation and decolonisation actually entail. So really, I think there’s cultural work to be done in a big way, but there’s also massive big political work to to be able to live up to these kind of ideas. 

 

[00:29:41] Recording Alexis Wright: So you asked about how do I come to write it? You can go about writing a book like Praiseworthy. I think that’s been a development, you know, for a very long time, you know, over, over all those years from playing to promise that, you know, to Carpentaria, Swan book, you know, and um, in Tracker as well and to, to shaping a book like Praiseworthy. Praiseworthy is a book that, um, I’ve taken a lot of put a lot of thought into. And so if I’m working on a book, once I start working on a book, you know, I don’t stop thinking about it, even if I’m not sitting at the computer writing, um, it’s taking all my thought and, you know, and thinking about, you know, issues about the book. And we’re always writing notes and, um, um, and just thinking about ideas and, and and problems all the time and questions. So, you know, I’m asking big questions when I’m writing a book. Like Praiseworthy, you know, Praiseworthy is about the concern I had about assimilation, how much we give towards assimilation all the time. And does that take away who we are and how do we, you know, balance all that? And can we balance it? And you know well that we’ll be able to keep that something of ourselves, our own sovereignty of who we are, you know, in the future. 

 

] Alexis Wright: And so that, you know, that becomes the question about, you know, losing Aboriginal sovereignty and, and what that means, you know, and the realisation of losing who you are and, you know, and trying to get it back somehow or whatever. Those are some of the questions about about working with a book like Praiseworthy and also ideas about, you know, global warming, climate change and what are Aboriginal people got to do in the future, given that virtually we’re the last ones to sort of be recognised or given any support about where we might want to go in the future, you know, we’re down on our knees. You know, we are humiliated all the time. So Praiseworthy. Well, I put a lot of work into the books I write and a lot of thinking and really deep thought. I struggle with my own thoughts sometimes. 

 

[00:32:12] Graham Akhurst: I always think about my own practice as a creative writer, and the kinds of truths that are inherent in my writing about Indigenous Australia. Coming from my own lived experience, it cannot help but bleed onto the page. In my debut novel, Borderlands, the young protagonist Jonathan. So much of my own personal experience of growing up Indigenous Meanjin Brisbane is placed within that context. So even through fiction, where almost even closer to the truth than the truth itself in many regards, and we see this through our great writers like Kim Scott and his his book Benang:  From the Heart and A. O. Neville, and the kinds of discourses around aboriginality and whiteness that were happening in Western Australia in that particular period of time. We see it in Burn, Melanie, with this young man who’s trying to find his way in the world. Um, so I feel like we need Australians to be reading more of our literature so that they begin to understand our perspectives and our truths in a certain way. 

 

[00:33:28] Melanie Saward: We do talk about fiction being that vital vehicle for empathy. Yeah, I always think that that’s why I mean, obviously being Indigenousmakes it easier to empathise with other minority experiences, right? But also, I think that growing up a reader and inhaling books as a child and a young person and even now becomes a vital vehicle for empathy. And I think, you know, that’s why a lot of the times in my circles, non-Indigenousf olks, because they’re reading, they have a better idea of what our experiences are because they’re engaging in literature, even in the fiction, putting criticism aside because that becomes a higher level engagement, right? But even as a reader, engaging in, in that space is is is changing. I don’t know, it sounds a bit wanky, right? But it does change hearts and minds by really making people think, you know the thing. Without spoiling my book, because I’d love people to read it, but it has a hopeful ending and I was talking to someone about it. A little while ago, they were saying it was great, you know, we should put this on the curriculum and then talked about the ending. And I said, well, you know that the ending of my book is the most fictional part of my book. 

 

Melanie Saward: The real story here doesn’t have the hope watching people’s faces go, ah, yeah, right. I said, you know, like, I couldn’t have written this book as a non-fiction if I had followed a young man who lit fires the way Andrew, the protagonist, does in my book, the outcome would be very different to how it is. That is really an interesting way of looking at it and hoping for change through people engaging with our stories. Yeah, there are complications and problems with this renewed interest and fervour for our stories, but you also do have to hope that that does create change as well. You know, it’s very easy after the voice to want to run and hide and stop trying and stop having those conversations. But I don’t want us to go backwards. I know things are really terrible. Don’t get me wrong. Don’t think that the romance writers coming in here with all this endless hope and optimism, but I feel like, how do you keep going if you don’t try and imbue what you’re doing with that sort of feeling? 

 

[00:36:01] Ben Etherington: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think it’s worth remembering that white Australia is a massive fiction. 

 

[00:36:08] Graham Akhurst: All three of us work within the academy institutions that have perpetuated many of the ideas around Aboriginality and have been, in many ways, sites of some of the most damaging knowledge towards Indigenous peoples ever. And we’re such a researched people. I wanted to ask you both where you see university institutions in context of a broader narrative around Indigenous Australia at the moment, and your place within that, and the kinds of things that you might do, or the sorts of initiatives that are happening where Indigenous Knowledges are being looked at in a more positive light than perhaps they have been in the past. From my own experience, I’m now the director of the centre for the Advancement of IndigenousKnowledges here at UTS. I’m in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, and there’s a real push to not only Indigenise curriculum, but also to value Indigenous Storytelling in a particular way that might not have been valued in the same way in the past, and that across the board, in all sort of disciplines, we’re looking at embedding Indigenous Knowledges so that our graduates at least have some idea around what Indigenous Australia is in the context of their own profession, but also going some way to sort of impart knowledge and be part of that process of unlearning. And I was wondering how you see that within your context and your different institutions. 

 

[00:37:46] Melanie Saward: A big part of what I’ve been working with a research team from multiple universities on for the last couple of years is Indigenous HDR students. So master’s by research and PhD students across all disciplines. And looking at this, we talk a lot about Indigenising curriculum, and there’s a lot of eye on decolonising curriculum and all of that. And I think this is really, really important. But one of the things for me, I guess maybe is someone who’s just coming out of that PhD journey. I can’t believe I’ve just used the word journey, by the way. But just coming out of that, what seems critical for me is to not be the only one in my team. For the last four years, I’ve been working in a large school at a different university where there were only two Indigenous academics, and that was me included in that. And I’m, you know, basically training at that point to have the job that I’ve got. It’s just become so critical to me to think about if we’re inviting Indigenous people in to do HDR studies, that we think about what comes afterwards. So there’s a lot of talk about we get Indigenous students in by offering them scholarships and, and money and employment for this study, but not really thinking about why they’re coming into the Academy and supporting them through into maybe doing their PhD and then becoming academics and therefore arming that workforce and also changing the shape of what the Academy looks like, because I think there’s a lot of work for non-Indigenous people to do in terms of teaching and decolonising, but I also don’t want to be the only one. I don’t want to spend all my time on your reconciliation committee. I don’t want to be the voice that has to tell people in other disciplines how to decolonise. 

 

Melanie Saward: You know, I’ve had some ridiculous things where I’ve had to speak to schools of optometry about how to approach that. And I’m sorry, I’ve got three creative writing degrees and an editing degree. I do not know anything about eyes except that I have some really cool glasses. So looking at factors for Indigenous HDR success. So what do we need? And actually realising throwing money at the problem is not always the way to fix it. We need more than the cash money. The money is very helpful, but understanding that in order to do a PhD there can be complications around researching in our communities about sovereignty of data and knowledge and so on. Once you’re in doing a PhD, that money might not be enough to sustain because we come with cultural and family obligations that are very different. You know, I don’t know how many times I’ve had to explain to an HDR department that, yes, just because I’m also on an income while I’m doing my PhD doesn’t mean that I can spend a lot of time doing extra work, and that I have to go home and do particular things, or support my family in particular ways, and that I need different sorts of support to a non-Indigenous Student. So yeah, we’ve been looking at that and trying to do a lot of research. We’ve worked with focus groups, and we’re talking to HDR students about their experiences, about what we need in supervisors. What would encourage you to do an HDR degree? What will keep you there? What do you need to then? Go on to work in the academy and. Yeah. So that’s where I’m putting a lot of my effort into these days. 

 

[00:41:34] Graham Akhurst: Amazing, Ben. 

 

[00:41:36] Ben Etherington: I kind of want to hear what you have to say, Graham, but I will just chime in with a couple of thoughts. That was really illuminating. One is that I think it’s clear that we need a structural transformation, and we need a massive revolution in personnel. And it coming at a point when the humanities are being assailed. So I’m thinking specifically in parts of the university that I know all the layers of management and collegiality actually have to deal with within the realms of possibility. You can talk about the neoliberal university all you like. Yeah. Yeah. But you’ve actually got to change the ways in which almost internal institutional empathy works. Yeah. Because there are often a lot of people coming through a system that’s set up in a particular way to, I guess, certain kinds of students from particular backgrounds on a pathway, and with scarce resources and scarce jobs, it can often be a matter of, well, we’d like to indigenise, but we kind of have to deal with the crisis right in front of us. You know, it’s a sensitive issue as well. You know how to indigenise and decolonise in a world of scarcity in the humanities is in the 1960s, when they were hiring 20 or 30 people into departments at a time. 

 

Ben Etherington: And the other thing is the need to also decolonise what a higher degree research qualification looks like. We had a grant forms of world Literature, on which Alexis Wright was one of the investigators. This is an Australian Research Council grant, and she was looking to bring in senior storytellers into the project. And we had PhDs sort of budgeted into what we were doing. And there was this massive mismatch between what is considered a PhD in literature or creative writing, and the forms of knowledge these senior storytellers were involved in. So the pot of money didn’t necessarily kind of match the forms of expertise. Not saying that these men and women would have wanted to have done a PhD anyway. I’m not assuming that. But, you know, oral storytelling is a 65,000 plus year old practice. It has forms of qualification. It has forms of expertise. But money is not flowing into that. I mean, you talked about money. It’s about the directionality of money, right? Yeah. And that strikes me as a problem. I mean, you’re in the centre for Advancement of IndigenousKnowledges, so you’d be at the pointy end of some of these questions. So I’d love to hear what you have to say. Graham. 

 

[00:43:58] Graham Akhurst: Yeah, absolutely. I think there needs to be certain considerations for our Indigenous HDR students, because often our HDR students come at a different point in their lives. A lot are older than some of the non-Indigenous students. They have different community engagements that they need to take care of, be that family or the larger community. There is also a certain level of cultural load that is placed upon Indigenous people within the Academy, which I think we’re at a point of discussions around addressing, and there are certain policies in place that begin to look this, this thing that’s very real. But on the ground, it might look very different because where is the Indigenous subject? What kind of power relations are at play within that context? Is it fair for a young Indigenous academic to talk to their supervisor and say, no, there’s a policy here. What does that do to their relationship with their higher? Many times it’s not a great outcome. And what we don’t want to see is our academics being ostracised within faculty because of the commitments that they have outside and the relationships that they need to not only do their research, but to be a valued member of the Indigenouscommunity that the institution happens to pry so highly. 

 

[00:45:44] Melanie Saward: Yeah. Yeah. And the institutions, like I was in a focus group once with a bunch of academics discussing like a staff survey. And one of the questions was, do you think that we really prioritise Indigenousperspectives? And everyone in that focus group was non-Indigenous Except for me. Oh, well. 

 

Melanie Saward: First problem and the answer everybody was like outstanding. Yeah, we do it all the time. And I sort of went Mhm. Cool. Uh, there’s two people here in this, this faculty and they are and, and I think there’s a real impression amongst maybe non-Indigenous staff members that because we’re talking about decolonising curriculum Indigenising curriculum, because there’s institutional money being poured into making new centres and so on. Not saying that those centres are not doing good things or having good aims, but there’s money being poured into those areas that then other staff get this impression that the university is making big strides in this area. And when you talk about cultural load, that’s what I keep thinking about because I’m like, why do I have to sit in this focus group and be the one that says, no, no, no, no, this is the thing that’s like, you’re you have this impression. But from my perspective, absolutely not. And that we’re not thinking about those sorts of things at all. Thinking about that cultural load that’s been put on you, then that becomes the sort of cultural load in itself. 

 

[00:47:30] Graham Akhurst : Yeah, I Agree, I think there needs to be a certain mind shift within the universities themselves. We’re talking about change. That takes a long time. Yeah, but what we really need is more and more Indigenous people employed within the university sector so that our voice is louder and that we feel we can have these conversations and talk to our higher ups and strength in numbers. 

 

[00:47:57]Melanie Saward:  Isn’t it funny, though. That that becomes the answer to a lot of the problems in the  Indigenising curriculum and the university and institutional things, but we also talked about this in the publishing context.  

Absolutely.  

 

And I think it’s about building our mob up, seeing our mob in all levels. You know, I don’t know about your university experiences, But for me, what a difference it would have made to my undergraduate experience to have an Aboriginal tutor or an Aboriginal teacher. I sat there quietly the whole time. I guess I operationalise some of that white passing privilege that I have there and tried to stay out of things, but when I stepped into a classroom as a sessional academic is where I started, and I remember having a conversation with the student about history being fiction, white Australian history being a fiction, and and then getting an email from an Indigenousstudent afterwards saying, this is my first year at university, the first Aboriginal person that I’ve had in any of my classes, and I was going to drop out and I think I’m going to stay now. And to me, that made me think I was doing my master’s at the time and I was having a really difficult time. It was one of those things that made me go, okay, I got to keep doing this because I’m doing this for our mob, for our people. You know what a difference it makes to students. And so having people at all levels, you know. It was also my experience in the publishing industry where where are the Indigenous people at higher levels to make me feel like I could rise from being an editorial assistant to a publisher or a managing editor? Where are those people? And yeah, it is the answer to so many things, right? Getting more of us in. 

 

[00:49:44] Graham Akhurst: Yeah, absolutely. And, Ben, I count you as an ally. We’ve had some wonderful conversations about Indigenous Literature, and you’ve been a mentor to me in some of my decision making in my career so far. And I was wondering what role you see you can have within the academy to sort of build capacity. 

 

[00:50:02] Ben Etherington: Thank Graham. That’s a great question. And it’s a really practical question. And that’s the kind of questions that we’re dealing with. The need to be interventions in particular meetings. They need to be Organising within the university to make sure that things aren’t said and then float down the river of institutional process. And I think this isn’t a great answer, but puncturing smug self-satisfaction. Yeah, around anything to do with corporate indigenisation is very important in a very practical way. You know, I’ve been an elected representative on the board of my university. I’ve seen the way discourses get kicked around at the top levels of my institution, and I’ve also interacted with others in similar positions at other institutions. And there’s always a sense of, well, we’ve done enough now. 

 

[00:50:58] Melanie Saward:: Yeah, all we’re doing the thing and patting yourself on the back. When you say smugness, I’m like, oh, I’ve seen so much of that. 

 

[00:51:06] Ben Etherington: Exactly. And it just it’s calling out to an extent, but it’s also making the real scale of the challenge, which you did wonderfully to present, and Mel bringing minds into that set of thoughts about where we are now and where we go to in the future. I could go into more specific detail in my institution, but I don’t feel entirely comfortable going into some of the more confidential discussions that have gone on. But I can think of very specific room with particular people. Yeah, I was thinking about this essay by Olufemi O. Taiwo on elite capture and how much he stresses the importance of who’s in the room. And you talked about cultural load, and there’s this sort of discourse that understands that we need to have culturally led institutional transformation. But there are also rooms where there are a striking absence of the relevant voices of people who are perceived to be difficult, people who’ve been asked what they think, say what they think, and then thank you very much, see you later kind of thing. And then the real decision making happens in another room. So I think, you know, it’s a big challenge for 2030, 40, 50. It’s a short mid long term problem. And we’ve got to deal with the cognitive imperialism that says, okay, well, we’ll just get to that thing, and then we’ll kind of stop and we’re kind of done. 

 

[00:52:20] Melanie Saward: And it’s winter with allies. You often think it’s when when we need you to step forward and when we need you to step back as well. You know the difference it would make in some of those meetings to have someone realise that that cultural load is falling again on that Indigenous person and step forward, but in another time when to stop taking all the air out of the room, I suppose. Not that you would do that, I can tell. 

 

[00:52:47] Graham Akhurst: Yeah. Yeah. Well, we have certainly come full circle and a long way from the conversation that I had with Jeanine, but I think still incredibly relevant to the sorts of discussions and discourses that Jeanine and I were talking about. And if we look at it on a, on a structural level and more broadly, I would love to thank you both for being with me here today and I hope you have a wonderful afternoon. 

 

[00:53:12] Melanie Saward:Thank you. 

 

Ben Etherington: Thanks, Graham. Great to meet you, Mel. 

 

Melanie Saward: Yeah. You too. 

 

[00:53:18] 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.