What inspired you to write A Piece of Red Cloth?

Clare Bush, Yolŋu woman and my adopting mother, was a skilful and prolific storyteller. She asked me to write A Piece of Red Cloth . Her lifelong ambition was to reduce racism. She believed that if people could get to know each other through personal experience, and/or its close affiliate, narrative, they would come to understand and to respect each other and that would reduce racism. To that end, she worked with me to create a collection of children’s books set in remote North Australia featuring Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children. As Clare grew older and less mobile, she watched many Australian TV series and films which included Aboriginal characters and regularly identified the persistent, negative and patronising attitudes toward traditional Aboriginal people in those narratives. Then she saw Ten Canoes and decided we should write a historical novel – about ‘the true history of Australia, the proper one, not that ‘Captain Cook one.’ She wanted a book that presented pre-colonial Yolngu people as they saw themselves, from a point of view that enacted their motives, ambition and philosophy — so that mainstream Australia might get to know them, not as victims or in relation others, but as a people in and of themselves.

What were the most challenging and enlightening aspects of writing your book?

The most challenging part of writing the book was working out how to bring together Yolngu and Western copyright law – two ontologically different laws – in a way that took both seriously. For example, in writing this book we had to accept that Yolŋu knowledge is spread over the land, held in stories, songs, artworks and ordered through kinship; kinship between people and kinship between people, land, ancestors and non-humans. That the characters and plots were not physical objects, that could be bought and sold, known and transmitted — a story, a book, a film – but alive entities that had to be relived to be retold. We had to accept that that the concept of ‘author’ is not a singular creator of narrative. Rather, we had to accept that land, story, language, speech, and humans can be one category, the author. 

Australian copyright law only provides for individuals – it cannot provide for stories that are owned by clans and Country. It can’t provide for story’s kinship, not only of the owners and Country but that of the opposite moiety and the kinship relations of the people who are presenting the story. One obvious result of bringing Yolngu and Western copyright law together, was that while one person wrote and imagined the English words in the book and the plot, the creation of this novel was the collective action of four authors. 

The most enlightening aspect of writing the book, was being on Country reading the drafts to the ancestors. Speaking aloud English words that attempted to describe an ancient story. 

I knew that stories emerged at the same time as People and Country so from the very beginning, I understood that Country or People-Place was going to be an active participant in writing the novel. It is common for Western educated authors to spend time in a place to absorb the atmosphere, accumulate images and sounds and extract a ‘feel’ for the place anyway. However, the action of going to and being in these places was completely different.

I was introduced to the Country. The Land-owners called out, explaining who I was, why I had come and lent me their body sweat so the Country could recognise me as kin. They told the story in dance and song. They sang to the Country, sang the kinship connection between my adopting self and the Country, my adopting self and the ancestors. Legitimating my role as co-author via my adopting kin, with Country and Ancestors.

They educated me on various hunting techniques. They brought birdsong to my attention, pointed out the black line that showed a crocodile out on the ocean, and turned their faces to acknowledge a change of wind. They also insisted on taking me out to sit, our bare skin touching sand or earth, to be with Country. They showed me the cultural norms they wanted represented in the novel, but they also took me to specific places to sit and be, without any overt teaching. We ate and gathered from Country not only so that I would know how to describe what the protagonists did in the novel, but to take the Country into my body, to make anew the connection between the body of my adopted self and the Country which held the Macassan-time story. On Elcho Island, Old Man’s daughter insisted I watch her family cook and share a sea turtle, insisted I taste the soup, the fat, the meat.

She also woke me up before dawn so I could sit and watch the sun rise over the ocean in silence and walk with her on the beach near her father’s house in the moonlight, again in silence. I camped at Macassan Beach just a half hour from Yirrkala community. It was May but unseasonably overcast with intermittent sprinkles of rain, gusts of cooling wind, sky wide rainbows, sea eagles calling out in the trees, water rats feasting beside me as I sat on the rocks in the sea splash at night. Kin and landowners came out to harvest and eat with me, walk with me to the Macassan story stone sculptures and sit in the sand, with as much of our skin connected to land as possible. ‘Make yourself quiet and read the story to the Country it is those old people’s story too.’ As I read the novel out loud to the Country, it seemed as if the abiding ancestral spirits were gathering up the words, as soon as they were uttered, so they entered the sound recorder entangled with the wind, waves and bird calls.

How do you think literature helps to shape our understanding of ourselves and others?

Stories are what it is to be human. We understand ourselves and the world we live in through story. It is only through personal experience – the stories we live, the oral histories of our country and our ancestors and the stories we read, see and hear throughout our lives that we learn to understand the world, ourselves and others. 

What was the most recent book you’ve read about women or girls that moved you?

The Winter Book by Tove Jansson.