Shortly after Europeans bumped into the southern continent that they’d been mythicising with fantastical drawings in the large blank section on their maps, fantastical white tales were penned. Centuries later, authors are still writing fiction that mythologises and dehumanises Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and too many of these works are being published in Australia and beyond. Instead of being critically scrutinised by the literary sector, they often receive favourable reviews, are awarded prizes, and feature at literary events.

Sometimes it feels like little has changed since Eliza Fraser, the wife of two English captains,captured the Anglosphere’s attention with falsified accounts of her time with Butchulla people, who’d rescued her after a shipwreck in 1836. In her retellings for an English readership, Fraser spoke of fabricated perilous encounters with the locals. Exploiting her white womanhood awarded her more notoriety than if she had instead spoken of the care her rescuers had graciously provided. The unchallenged stereotypes of Fraser’s story highlights the bias and power within colonial storytelling.

Nearly two hundred years later, English author Evie Wyld has also applied a white-gazed approach to her depictions of First Nations peoples and history in her latest novel, The Echoes. Using dehumanising racial stereotypes and tropes, Wyld, like Fraser, has turned Blak people into mere extras in a white woman’s drama.

Wyld (with whom I’m not related) is an English author who has spent time in Australia with her Australian-born mother’s family on the east coast. However, the geographical, social, historical, and environmental inaccuracies in The Echoes suggest an unfamiliarity with the Western Australian places and events she uses in her novel. The unrealistic worldbuilding, along with awkward caricatures of white Australians and nameless-voiceless-lifeless Aboriginal people, presents a languid rural gothic/slapstick version of remote Australia.

In the Australian chapters, characterisation, settings and dialogue are reminiscent of the cartoonish faux Australia featured in movies for overseas audiences. In a nod to colonial-era literature, dangerous native animals lurk in an ominous landscape, and voiceless First People are awkwardly inserted into gawky settler stories. Glaringly absent is an authentic, strength-based representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

In white-gazed novels such as The Echoes, past and present injustices of settlement are narrated as trauma porn for a white readership, and one-dimensional Blak characters exist as props for white characters, whose white tears and flawed redemption arcs are of more importance than justice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

A growing cohort of writers, critics and literary scholars have been critiquing how white writers, from invasion era to the present, approach writing Blak characters and narratives. Challenging white gazed narratives is also effectively done through Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers’ works of fiction and non-fiction. In her essay “Other peoples’ stories”, Dr Jeanine Leane states:

Black writing has interrupted the unquestioned privilege of whites to represent non-whites in Australia. This has unsettled the settler by rupturing the previous trajectory of writing and representation. In doing so, it has challenged the conceptualisation of the past, present and future with which white Australians were familiar — a construction of time and space in which Aboriginality was contained safely within the margins of settler texts.

In mixing fictional locations with actual places, Wyld has created an unfamiliar version of remote Western Australia, in particular the Goldfields. Action centres around a family’s goat farm in the fictional town of Wilma. In the book, this area is referred to as Wongi people’s country, but Wyld could have been referring to Wangkatja people (a language group of the goldfields , whose land is situated between the towns of Laverton and Menzies). Kalgoorlie is mentioned in the book as being a couple of hours drive from Wyld’s fictional Wilma. And an ocean is at least two days’ away by bus and train. Which makes it likely that Wilma is in the Laverton/Menzies region. Another possible location is Wiluna, in the northern part of the goldfields.

Although this novel is set in a semi-desert region, there are numerous mentions of swimming in local creeks and billabongs, and a reference to an overnight school excursion to lakes near Kalgoorlie. Oddly, there are camphor laurel trees —an introduced species that’s invasive in Queensland and unlikely to thrive in a dry region of Western Australia. Also unlikely, given the location, is that the sisters would catch buses into the nearby town of Wilma, a town with an unrealistic selection of shops and businesses. Another inauthentic aspect is the family’s goat farm, situated on a property where members of the Stolen Generations were kept against their will. The family decides not to slaughter their goats, and transition to cheesemaking. However, there is no mention of milking the animals, and they are seemingly only fed endless buckets of cockroaches and rotting household scraps. Thankfully, some of the adults have day jobs, because they would not survive as farmers or artisan cheesemakers.

The switching between Then, Before and After chapters, with the occasional one named after a character, makes untangling timelines and events difficult. The Before chapters focus on Hannah, a self-absorbed Australian-born woman. Estranged from family, she leaves Australia at the age of twenty, and ten years later is working in an English pub. She’s clearly unhappy with her six-year relationship with Max, a literature lecturer she had met while studying creative writing. Max is killed by a truck while crossing a busy road, and returns in the After chapters as a ghost trapped in the couple’s flat, where he discovers aspects of Hannah’s life that she had hidden from him.

The Then chapters are set in Australia and focus on teenaged Hannah and her slightly older sister Rachel, with flashbacks to provide backstories for the older characters. Hannah’s property-owning, dysfunctional middle-class family are written as trope-riddled working class “Aussies”, with more than a dash of inauthentic characterisation and dialogue. In the Australian-based chapters, Wyld occasionally uses English terms instead of Australian, which is jarring.

The sister’s father Piers, an accountant, meets their mother Kerry while she works in a Kalgoorlie “sandwich shop” (possibly an English term for deli or cafe). They move into Pier’s family home in Wilma, before purchasing property nearby. Later, Kerry’s younger brother Anthony moves into Pier’s abandoned campervan. Anthony met his partner Melissa at the Wilma travel agency — another unrealistic businesses for a small, remote town. Anthony grooms his fifteen-year–old niece and, when Rachel becomes pregnant, they run away together. A few years later, Rachel is living in a caravan park in Broome, working while her son is in “nursery” (maybe an English term for either childcare or preschool).

Time is not easy to pin down in this novel, and there are many inconsistences. In scenes where the sisters are teenagers, there are numerous references to other characters watching movies and television series that first screened during the mid to late 1990s, but there’s also a flashback to 2005 “when the girls were small” and Kerry secretly visits her estranged mother. The London-based scenes, which are set in a later time, don’t mention local or global impacts of Covid. This is possibly a fictional near-future, where that significant moment in history has either not occurred or been forgotten.

The pandemic is not the only forgotten aspect of history, however. Hannah and her sister are clearly ignorant and disinterested in First Nations peoples or their history, and their parents quickly shut down Anthony’s occasional jabs at living on stolen land. At the end of the novel, when an elderly Hannah visits the flat she’d once lived in with Max, escorted by her nephew and grand-daughter, it is obvious that her family financially benefited from owning the property known as The Echoes. However, there’s no acknowledgement of their inherited wealth, built on stolen land and Blak trauma, let alone the slightest thought of justice for forcibly removed children and displaced First Peoples. Throw-away references to uncomfortable feelings, such as white guilt or avoidance, do not amount to redemptive action.

Briefly appearing in the story, Rina and Dionna are the only Aboriginal characters who are not nameless, although they serve no narrative function and barely have any dialogue. They attend the same school as Hannah and Rachel, and clearly want nothing to do with them or their paternalistic mother. Years later, Rachel thinks of Rina and Dionna when observing “Aboriginals” [sic] sitting under a ghost gum tree, in Broome. Wyld envisions a group of non-people under that tree, not women, men, children or people — just “Aboriginals”. For an added touch of racist stereotyping, they are drinking alcohol under that ghost gum tree. Rachel has a sudden urge to tell these strangers that she knows Rina and Dionna, who are presumably still in Wilma, nearly two thousand kilometres away. This performative “but I’m a cool/good settler” white-guilt scene is almost as awkward as when Anthony rambles on about stolen land and murdered children, and momentarily considers doing an acknowledgement of Country to show “respect”, but changes his mind and instead offers his underage nieces another beer.

Anthony eventually purchases the building that he refers to as a “training centre” and others call the “school house”. This property is an inaccurate reimagining of the many institutions that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were placed in, after being forcibly removed from their families. Francis (Woody) Manningtree’s parents build the “school house” on their property, most probably in the 1930s. Wyld provides no explanation to how or why a couple of settlers — rather than the government or church — built and managed an institution for stolen Blak children, and the circumstances in which Manningtree closes this institution, possibly in the 1970s, is highly unlikely. In the novel, the removed Aboriginal girls are given no names, no background stories, no nation or language groups, and no dialogue. Readers are not told where the girls come from, who removed them from their families, or how they ended up in Wilma.

Wyld’s shallow miss-telling of the Stolen Generations’ lived experiences is narrated through ManningtreeHe has no redemption arc, and no insight into why the race-based child abuse he’d participated in was wrong. He often thinks of the Aboriginal girls buried in the paddock, with references to suicide and abuse, and fears the consequences if anyone dug up the ground. During his night wanderings he imagines ghosts, and believes he can talk to the deceased. Wyld disrespectfully refers to deceased Aboriginal girls as mere “bones”.

References to Blak people in The Echoes are mostly racially-biased, negative, trauma-laden accounts given by white people who are wilfully ignorant of both past and present, and have no intent on doing anything of substance. Anthony’s occasional shallow tirades on past oppression of First Peoples are merely a limp device to upset other family members, before they all quickly change the subject. The Echoes has no stories of Blak joy or love, no land rights’ movements, no Blak achievements or innovation, no assertions of sovereignty and self-determination. Just Wyld’s version of Blak trauma for the consumption of the white gaze.

Wyld’s careless depictions of members of the Stolen Generations, and grotesque interpretation of Blak trauma, in this sad white girl novel should be receiving criticism not accolades. Wyld dehumanises First Nations people by denying them dialogue, motivations, personhood, origins, or futures. Upon their death, due to settler violence that’s glossed over, she transforms the nameless-voiceless Blak girls into nameless-voiceless-lifeless ghosts, and relegates them as props for white characters. The references to settler abuse of Aboriginal girls, choice of archaic racist language, use of biased stereotypes and racist tropes, and dehumanisation of Aboriginal people add nothing to the narrative and serves no higher purpose. Yes, other books feature similar content. Some even have clear literary merit , but this type of storytelling becomes gratuitous trauma porn if left unchallenged by the narrator or characters. The Echoes contains no evidence of truth telling or a call for justice and, instead, the author’s uninformed version of Stolen Generations’ trauma comes across as voyeuristic and disrespectful.

The scene where teenaged Hannah compares the self-inflicted scars on her thighs with marks that detained Blak girls etched into desks is somewhat grotesque. Hannah’s feelings of “a certain kind of badness” are absolutely not the same as the abuse and trauma that was inflicted on members of the Stolen Generations. If Wyld had undertaken adequate research, she would have understood why that scene is disrespectful and unnecessary.

As an adult, Hannah bemoans that her ancestors should have stayed in England, perhaps believing her life would have been different. If the intent behind Wyld’s appropriation of the lived experiences of members of the Stolen Generations was to contrast those experiences with the family violence experienced by older members of Hannah’s family, she could have instead referenced the abuse suffered by post-WWII British migrant children institutionalised in rural Western Australia.

In a recent Guardian Australia article entitled “Furore sparked by Jamie Oliver children’s book cultural appropriation opens wider debate”, two other novels by English authors are criticised for their portrayal of Indigenous peoples and cultures: Jamie Oliver’s Billy and the Epic Escape and Elly Griffiths’s A Room Full of Bones. The article notes that neither of these authors engaged with Indigenous people when writing or editing their books. After reading The Echoes, and some of Wyld’s interviews, I suspect she also did not engage with Indigenous people. It’s interesting to note that these works of cultural appropriation are being published by both Australian and United Kingdom offices of multinational publishers (Penguin Random House, and Hachette). The Anglosphere’s literature sector has not shaken off its colonial past.

This continuous stream of poorly written white-authored books featuring Blak people brings to mind the “Put A Bird On It” episode of the television show Portlandia. In the skit, two white hipsters barge into a décor shop and, as the owner looks on, run around shoving bird stickers on lamps, teapots, tote bags and other items. However, it is not quite as humorous when non-indigenous authors barge in and thrust Indigenous characters into their narratives, with no thought, no meaningful narrative purpose, and no evidence of research or engagement. In the Portlandia episode, a real bird flies into the shop and the two hipsters panic, destroying some of the items for sale and finally killing the pigeon with a vase. Instead of slapping on performatively aesthetic stickers, perhaps writers need to ask themselves: why are they adding a bird? does their narrative really need a bird on it? do they have the skills to add authentic birds? and what is their relationship with living birds?

In a promotional interview with the Daily Telegraph, Wyld has stated:

My mother remembers the stolen being talked about in her home: her family would say, ‘Yes, it’s sad, but they are not real people’…

Once again, Wyld does not view Blak people as worthy of personhood; they are merely ‘the stolen’. Considering the dire and unnecessary appropriated Blak trauma in The Echoes, and the way Wyld has written her Aboriginal characters as not “real people”, the novel probably contains uncontested traces of her family’s racist worldview. This is why it’s important for non-Indigenous authors to first self-reflect and do the hard work to unlearn, because writing culturally disrespectful fiction is not an act of absolution.

In that same interview, Wyld mentions that she chose to ignore editing advice from an editor who’d suggested she removed certain references to Indigenous people: “They felt it would be safer,” she says.

But I thought that was dangerous. To me, a large part of the inadequacy of white Australians to tell this particular story. And I get it, because I’m inarticulate, too, and there is so much feeling that nothing can possibly be enough, and I don’t want to put a toe wrong.

It’s unclear why Wyld believes this recommended edit would have been “dangerous”, and to whom. She might have considered reflecting more deeply on the gaps in her craft and her lack of knowledge of the subject matter, before writing her uninformed interpretation of the Stolen Generations — especially when these are not her stories tell.

I’m not proposing that non-Indigenous writers should never develop First Nations characters, or include references to First Nations peoples and histories in their works. I would rather direct energy and time to my own writing, and building my own capacity to narrate authentically and respectfully. However, all writers need to question themselves, to understand their personal and professional standpoints, and whether they have the required skills, connections and knowledge to authentically portray the characters and story they envision. Writing outside of one’s lived or familial experiences — especially when writing of historically and socially marginalised peoples — is ethically and professionally a challenge. First, the process should start with self-reflection, challenging one’s own values and worldviews, and understanding one’s writing limitations. Followed by months, if not years, of meaningful engagement, in-depth research, and listening to experts’ editing advice.

Unfortunately, Wyld does not appear to have done this groundwork before creating her voiceless-nameless-lifeless Blak people, and seizing trauma experiences of members of the Stolen Generations. I’m hesitant to harshly critique what and how others write but, after reluctantly reading this novel, I couldn’t remain silent. But this is not just about Wyld’s novel. All sectors of Australian literature — writers, editors, publishers, reviewers, booksellers, award judges, literary festivals programmers — should be actively working towards making culturally appropriative, white-gazed novels a fading echo, alongside the racially biased literature of colonial eras.

It’s unlikely that Wyld is unaware of the harm caused when white writers dehumanise Bla(c)k peoples, use racist tropes and stereotypes, or misrepresent violence set both in colonial times and in the present. There’s an English-based scene in the novel where Max’s father mentions a white author who attends the same golf club as himself, and who has written a book with a Black main character. He asks Hannah and Max: “Shouldn’t an artist be able to freely imagine themselves into any point of view?” Hannah repeats something her uncle once said: “I think sometimes silence is better than the wrong person speaking.” While Max replies: “I suppose the question is, is Ian from the golf club the right person to tell that story?” In writing those lines, Wyld indicates she has thought about this contentious issue — but failed to follow her own advice.

Wyld’s creation of voiceless-nameless-lifeless Blak people in The Echoes serves no narrative purpose. This novel is not truth-telling of invasion and occupation, and it does not envision justice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Instead of rejecting or confronting lazy literary tropes and colonial-style narratives, the author has erased Blak voices, bodies, histories and futures. She has added her own voice to a never-ending echo of white gazed literature, when silence would have been better. The Echoes might have been a less problematic novel if Wyld hadn’t insisted on putting a bird on it.

This is the second in a series of critical essays supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.