At the end of October 2023, Kim Scott travelled to Adelaide to speak at the Stories from the South Book Club, a public event held at Dymocks, Rundle Mall that focused on his most recent novel, Taboo (2017). I chaired the evening’s conversations, which featured Scott in dialogue with Professor Stephen Muecke, before opening the floor to a discussion with the audience. As a long-time admirer of Scott’s work and a passionate scholar of Australian literature, I sat down with Kim in the Adelaide Botanic Gardens the day before, where we conducted an interview. The South — both the context of the Global South and the embeddedness of Scott’s writing along the south coast of Western Australia — offered an entry point into our dialogue. His driving role in the Wirlomin Noongar Langauge and Stories Project.)

further deepened the scope of our conversation and its relation to place. However, the interview also presented an important opportunity to reflect on Kim’s impressive body of work, with the 30th anniversary of his debut novel, True Country (1993), and the approaching 25th anniversary of his seminal work Benang (1999), which we discuss in some detail. Finally, the failure of the referendum — which Kim characterises as “a little chink of an opportunity” — still so fresh in the mind, inevitably entered our conversation, as Kim — always reasoned and considered — offers a voice which I think we should all sit up and listen to.

KS I’m flattered Sam, I’m flattered.

SC Well, that’s a good start.

KS It’s better than being ignored.

SC Kim, after True Country, which was set in the Kimberley, all three of your subsequent novels have returned to the deeply personal terrain of the south coast of Western Australia, the Country of your Wirlomin Noongar heritage. Could you speak to your decision to return, and to borrow your own words from Benang, “remain”, in a sense. Do you ever see yourself writing about anywhere else again?

KS I can see myself writing about somewhere else. I would like to. You would like to grow and evolve, but … my writing has been about reconnecting to heritage, to a lesser extent with community and Country. There’s much to be done. You might need to be reminded that when I first went to university there was not really a genre or a niche of Aboriginal writing or Aboriginal history. There was, I remember, a course on African literature, which helped get me thinking: what about me, what about us? Writing True Country I was still trying to work out connection. Only later did I come to realise my father was the only surviving child to a woman born in Ravensthorpe, a region — I came to learn — infamous for “massacre”. I knew family had lived there, though some of the “Native Affairs” files seem horribly smug about my father’s generation being “dispersed” across WA and southern Australia, “most living among white people”. It’s a lot to work through and keeps expanding. The end of Benang, in retrospect, is perhaps something of a manifesto, however feeble: the protagonist hovering over the campfire, making the sounds of country and a community gathering around that. An aspiration, perhaps. Much of my writing I think is about reconnecting … what some call “decolonising”, wondering how to rebuild community and bring our heritage into the now in some way, the spirit of it, the deep humanity of it. For ourselves firstly.

We have gone from the denigration and attempted destruction of a people and their heritage and culture … to the current period: a settler-colony, having failed at destroying it, now very greedy for that material. Got better access to it than the home community even. And still deep injustice hasn’t been addressed. The same old power relationship.

So, I keep playing with those sorts of ideas of audience and who the fuck am I writing for? If my gifts seem to be in the literary realm and most of the Noongar community that I know don’t actually read books — not literary fiction, I mean — which thus exists in the way of frozen cultural artifacts … How to do “Literary” work in that space? Were your eyes glazing over there Sam? [laughs]

SC They weren’t [laughs].

I’ve told you I’ve been along that stretch of coastline you write from, I know, roughly speaking, Wirlomin Noongar Country lies between Esperance and Albany …

KS It stretches east of Esperance. My “Apical Ancestors”, as Native Title puts it … one is Bremer Bay born and one’s born way a little so east of Esperance. Noongar country is a very thin little strip along there. That is Ancestral Country for me, that’s what I care about. That Country, that history. The words for it, and me. The aptly named “Hopetoun” is at the heart of it, I reckon.

SC I was struck by how beautiful that stretch of coastline is, so diverse and there are all these national parks, and it is a powerful place, with the strong coastal winds: the coastline and ocean is a force you feel there. There has been a lot of change to that landscape and destruction, as evidenced in your novels, but could you speak to the continuing power of the country — land and sea — to your writing?

KS Yes. And I am trying to make it even more powerful. And those of us descended from that place, its human culture, our many ancestors, the spirit of there. Of course, I am “touched” by it. A great deal of my current work is not writing novels but is centred on the Wirlomin and Noongar Language and Stories Project — a not-for-profit cultural organisation (wirlomin.com.au). I mentioned “transition” before. I did a book, Kayang and Me (2005), with Hazel Brown. Aunty, Kayang, claimed me, knew the genealogies, we share siblings generations back. Now that cultural heritage, it seems to me, is increasingly being recognised — even if not explicitly articulated as such — as a major denomination in the currency of identity and belonging. Although not consciously wanting to do it, one is almost encouraged — because of the imperatives and rivalries created by capitalism and cultural brokerage — to not share with others within your fragmented, factional, historically oppressed community whatever heritage and language you might carry.

In my experience it has been difficult for elders, for knowledge carriers, to actually cross-reference their knowledge. This is so necessary, it seems to me, for a still largely broken, disrupted, traumatised — what word sums it up? — community. I am lucky enough to have learned, been given songs and — because of trust, acknowledgement and I think respect, not because I’m any sort of leader — and then I get muddled about what should one do with them. You could make a little hero of yourself, perhaps singing some of those and performing them to a desperate, anxious settler colony. But what about the people, those central to what we regard as our heart community? Individual people might carry oh you know … songs, site knowledge, love — that their own kids don’t know. That’s part of the trauma, the lived experience of oppression. One of those elders, one of Kayang Hazel’s siblings — like many of us — spent a lot of time in prison, and now one of his daughters, a cousin of mine in that generational, extended family way, has learned half a dozen or so of those songs. It means a lot to her to be doing that. Means a lot to me. Ocean songs from along that coastal strip … quite apart from their antiquity and place-based resonance, they are aesthetically beautiful, in particular in their assonance and rhythms. And she’s part of sharing them. Circles, ever widening … This is the power of heritage and we “Wirlomin” been doing this for two, getting toward three decades now — connecting to place. We did an event late 2022 in Hopetoun — just south of Ravensthorpe — as part of the Wildflower Show. About 30 of us went over there, stayed in the caravan park — this connects with Taboo, although it was actually after Taboo was written.

SC Yeah, okay, so art almost informing life.

KS You might have seen the Kukanerup Memorial there. Did you go in there?

SC Yes, I think I found it without knowing about it — just stopped in on the road.

KS There was this story in the archives told by a fellow, George Nelly — in the 1930s he had told this story to a linguist of dogs turning into seals — and we did this at the presentation, taking the story home. The first step was to get the story moving again in a community that trusts one another. His son and his daughter — Russell Nelly (RIP) and Helen Hall (ne. Nelly). First cousins to Kayang. They never knew their dad, were involved in the publication of the story — a lot of psychological stuff going on there. Healing. It took a couple of years just for them to get comfortable with hearing it, because they didn’t know he … It was in a version of the International Phonetic Alphabet, and I taught myself that. We decided not to give away the locality in the publication but gave a bit of a red herring for one of the places. We did the book together, from conversations and workshops and some other things we pulled together, and with some funding received in collaboration with South Coast Natural Resource Management — a regional non-government environmental agency. We managed to reconnect the story, this Creation Story, to landscape and a couple of old songs.

That business of pulling things together like that feels immensely powerful. The story — Dwoort Baal Kaat (UWAP 2013) is about transformation and to take the story back, and to sing those songs on country with other, connected, Noongars who are not necessarily into poetry and story and songs like I am, but who are into fishing, hunting and know Country well in that way — that’s what it’s all about, bringing it all together like that. These dogs are transformed into seals, and they swim back to another Noongar, and in some of the scattered notes, and from people talking about place names in our workshops, we got the idea that there was some sort of stone formation representing that moment, the seals-that-once-were-dogs returning to this bloke. We were singing the song as we were driving east to where we thought it might be … Then we looked up and there was this huge granite head looking out over the ocean and at the base the rocks are eroded to look like seals looking up at this fella. So things like that, without getting all mumbo-jumbo new-agey, that feels immensely powerful and really exciting in terms of there is energy, spirit, maybe you’re being directed, maybe doing this work is a catalyst for igniting that sort of heritage and strengthening our relationship with it. And it’s only a beginning. All this in a region infamous for massacre. Years before this a whole mob of us visited the homestead at the centre of all that. Confronting it, you know. Met with the owners.

It was a quite few years work bring all that together, and that presentation. It was a wildflower festival, and we talked a parallel between the poor soul of that area and its amazing biological diversity; made a metaphor with the hostile history there and yet the possibility — the reality—of the sort of cultural blossoming we were describing and enacting. The Fitzgerald River National Park is internationally recognised for biodiversity. We did a multimedia presentation as a group, collected ochre from an old local quarry and gave a multimedia presentation of how we developed the story, explained our long connection to the region, our return, and shared the story and songs. After the presentation we took a bus load of people up to look at this site. We had elders greeting people with an ochre handshake as they’re getting off the bus. All that felt … it was a real buzz. It feels like some, a lot, of my writing is about trying to stimulate that sort of energy, the reconnection and the healing that is possible, that is needed. Then there are the power transformations that come out of that: the paradox of empowerment through giving. People — a settler-colony — want this, and they will even put up with any sort of mumbo jumbo you give them, it seems; that is one of the dangers. However, to demonstrate what we did on this occasion: reveal land as text, show a community surviving, enduring, despite that massacre history, and then to pull this together, and it worked! A community thriving. There was 150 people in the audience, so not really big time, but in my head, it felt like … this is amazing. It was amazing what we have done, the story, the two songs, a bunch of us learning. Then what do you do, what next? You have to, it seems to me, keep it small, you keep it to that sort of level, because that is where it belongs. Building community from connection to heritage and Country. And sharing it carefully, sustainably, empowering us as a collective in doing it. So again, Taboo is playing ideas like this …

Increasingly, I have been trying to take this sort of split focus: with the Noongar language and related work, there is a home audience, you consolidate material there, the language material and site knowledge particularly, try to enhance it through bringing ourselves together on Country, and create opportunities for people to get involved. There are questions of how much you give and maybe we should not give outsiders this sort of thing. But experiences like that — and there’s others that happen through these processes — you transform power relationship even if only temporarily through generosity and that’s the whole complex nature of these things. I get quite a buzz out of doing that sort of work.

So there is a shared history, trying to unpack that sort of thing, you know, going on to find, with the elders who now, they’re gone, going. And then processing the contrary nature of, like with elders on the properties where they would work like slaves basically, but they have these strong relationships and they’re proud of having helped. In a complicated way, they’re proud of helping create these farms, even though it’s meant their own loss.

SC In Taboo you write of stories of ancestors that used to sing the dolphins in, “bringing the salmon in”, and in Dead Man Dance there is a similar but different connection to the whales. I know that in Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu he writes about some of those relationships along the coastlines of Australia. Looking at these stories … they reach beyond the human and entwine us in relationships that have been lost or at risk of being lost.

KS The dolphins, whales, the seals we just talked about. We have stories and songs like this. They are in the repertoire, the Noongar South Coast repertoire. It is about transformation as well, not only the dogs into seals, but people into fish and other creatures, you know, and that affinity and those networks of relationships, they mean a lot. And the ocean itself, and its rhythms, how they’re captured in a story and song. Although I am feeble and I don’t fully understand — I don’t think any of us do, fully — there’s real power, healing and strength and dare I say love, that you want to build up.

SC And it’s not just the ocean that features prominently; rivers and waterholes also appear as places of importance and meaning in your stories. Could you just touch on briefly the importance of water, not just the ocean but fresh water, in your writing — there are so many sites that figure memorably and significantly.

KS Yeah, with the ocean and ice ages and the water line changing, that is probably part of the affinity with sea-going critters, I think. There is a lot of rivers along that south coast that don’t reach the sea. One of them, Jerdacuttup River, on occasion may even flow backwards. It has a spring at the so-called river mouth. It would have been a major pathway — there is a quarry up at old sites and so on and fresh water holds all along it. In so many of the stories, riverbeds … rivers, and pools. Water holes, when you are in so-called massacre country that is over-cleared, and then there’s water holes with the slabs still over them, and granite sheets … they feel … you still have evidence of the hand — the gentle, caring Noongar hand — on the environment. Other stone formations in the vicinity. Then the sound of water also, increasingly I notice that. And the sea. Rhythms. Sound, I think maybe for a lot of Aboriginal groups sound is how you really know things. So yeah, I think a lot about the sound of water and the other, the audioscape, how much it matters.

[a young Magpie who has approached us starts singing] … Last night, I think we were talking about that woman singing like the magpie … Welcome. The baby one over there.

Recapturing the sounds and rhythms of place through language artefacts. Maybe that’s something that drives me. That is a great interest. Of course, it is a survival thing as well, knowing where fresh water is, but increasingly I’ve come to realise — and of course this is thanks to people like Bruce Pascoe and Bill Gammage also I think — how much the idea of Noongar people existing in a hostile environment is a myth. More and more you realise there is only a little bit of time put into food and water, because you know where the water is, where the game will be, where you’ll be resting. You realise this when you see the ngamma holes with the slabs of stone covering them over, and springs of fresh water in the riverbeds of a river that — when it flows — is salty. And just knowing where they are and starting to work out the pattern of how they connect — small, but deep-water holes in riverbeds again where fish get trapped. I try to write about all this in Taboo. The discovery, the healing and nourishment of it. I think that you have to know about those places to go there and find all that rich life, or else it remains neglected. Latent. Singing country alive is perhaps a cliché but these sorts of possibilities mean a lot to me.

SC The South is a possible frame to place Australian and, in particular, Indigenous Australian writers within. I know you quote Eduardo Galeano in your (non-fiction) writing. I also know you’ve said you’ve read Marquez. I wonder what other Southern writers you can think of that have influenced you and if you see any possibility for the South to be a productive framework.

KS I certainly see the possibility for it, but I am not a rigorous and diligent enough scholar in this area to be able to know for sure. But yes, I read Marquez, Fuentes and South American writers, India … Naipaul. Ha. Rushdie. Because in my youth, yes, I looked to “writers of colour”, I suppose. Embarrassingly naive, with only half-formed notions of even of being in a colony. I know when I was a kid I would look and ask, what is going on there? Are they and their histories like us? This was me sailing into university with the tailwind of Whitlam reforms really. Of course, I looked to English literature as well. There was a time when Galeano’s work meant a lot because it was different, it surprised, and you could see similarities. I’ve often quoted his “In Defence of the Word” essay, which I think is tremendous. There is the possibility to use literary work — literature and words — to somehow work your way out of oppression and open the world up.

SC When I was in Albany, I came across an article of yours, “King George Sounds”, in a collection on Albany.

KS Oh, in the history … Albany: An Antipodean Arcadia. It was a little … a history collection as I recall.

SC In that piece you draw on Rachel Perkins and Noel Pearson to write about how a cultural renaissance in Australia might arise, and that the “shards” for a cultural renaissance in Australia must derive — unlike in the north, where it was pottery and statues — from the songs, story and language of this land. Could you speak to that potential in your capacity as both a writer and as a leader in a language project?

KS Some of my ideas have changed a bit. In writing like that … you are trying to make a case for how important that sort of cultural heritage is for Australia as a “nation state”. I feel less inclined to do it now because I think the case has been made to my satisfaction. It’s obvious. The problem is that the whole situation is a little more fraught than that. It’s all about identity. I was saying that Oz doesn’t have to be the shallow, psychotic, settler-nation that we are. These are the answers and solutions, the things to address. But increasingly, of course, without some sort of formal arrangement, it’ll confirm the same old, same old power relationship. Our many Aboriginal heritages are major denominations in the currency of identity and belonging — no wonder the settler-colony, the affluent, want to steal it and bastardise it. Am I being unfair? It is not sustainable. What is the “yield”. I also come to think that I’m complicit and implicated in these processes. But it’s necessary to share, to entice interest, and at the same time build and consolidate heritage in its home community because it heals us, but also because a careful sharing empowers the home community. The paradox of empowerment through giving, you know. One of my phrases. Story. So it becomes a very awkward thing. And thus, I dunno, the sort of split focus or whatever I call it.

In the ’90s when Native Title was emerging, I remember writing something for the BBC, and highlighting a phrase that conservative commentators were using: “insecurity, uncertainty, doubt” — time and time again these words were used, supposedly about economic contracts and so forth, but really I think it was about things like national identity, about stolen country, about an insecure Australian identity and so on. I was just now trying to make a case for putting more attention into language regeneration on behalf of us all, and I still hold by that. It is just in the last few years I have come to realise it is not going quite right. A relatively privileged Australia is grabbing for stuff and sometimes we are all turned into rivals, Noongars — in my case — shepherded into being rivals, not sharing what we know in terms of rebuilding it but keeping it just for commercial transactions and ego. Thus fragmentation, atomisation … To tell you the truth, I feel sort of stuck … especially after the referendum, no treaty, no formal infrastructure to deal with these things. And our emerging Noongar infrastructure, coming out of Native Title settlement, the pressure of it. The danger, the ever-present same old, same old, in terms of power and greed and transaction and … Capitalism and colony.

SC You mentioned before that there was not much to look for in Aboriginal literature when you were younger. In the 70s …

KS There was a bit around, but not a body of work as such. Not a category, not serious attention … But I’m a poor scholar, often miss things …

SC I’m wondering … I taught Jack Davis’s No Sugar, and I was struck by some interconnections with your work — obviously former protector of Aborigines A. O. Neville features in both No Sugar and Benang — and you are both in some sense trailblazers in what has become a movement of Indigenous writers returning and writing back to the archive. I wondered if Davis was in anyway an influence for you?

KS Oh absolutely. I went to him at times, for guidance probably. Not a lot of times. He was writing! He was on the Lit. Board, or whatever it was called back then. I remember going to No Sugar dress rehearsals in Perth, at the Malthouse in Perth, I think it was. It was really quite a wonderful experience because there was many Noongars there — he had a big extended family — I can remember young Noongar kids jumping up on the stage to join in the classroom scenes … it was so rich. In those days, we didn’t have much of a role in theatre except for what Uncle Jack created with others. I also liked non-stereotypical Noongar things about him. He liked to listen to classical music when he was writing. I thought that was interesting and the fact that he valued literacy and poetry, and writing! That was pretty inspirational, really, and he was a strong man, much stronger than I am, and with a lot of family around him all the time, and very generous and welcoming. So he was a pretty strong influence in those sort of ways, he was a bit of an inspiration. For his strength and his valuing and how he was changing things, kind of gently too. I knew a Noongar world with a lot of shame in it and feelings of not being wanted and fucked over big time you know dregs and full-on marginalised stuff and here was someone more than holding his own via literature.

SC That is interesting. I did not know you had met him and knew him. There is a connection here with his work — you spoke about elders that worked on farms and the old people who had a conflicted relationship. It is hard to know exactly what he wanted from that play, but in that play, because Davis knew him, the depiction of AO Neville is bit conflicted [far more so than in Benang].

KS Well, it would be, I imagine, that people would write to Neville, you know, to get their money, or ask for help. Because they actually knew him … Was it the seduction of power? The false idea that some of the missions were properly preparing people to participate in wider society. A sense that missions and such were also a refuge, relatively. Agency? There is something different going on there.

SC I suppose going back to these conflicted histories, and Davis’s play, there is the place of the mission in stories and memory. And I know missions varied in quite radical ways, the government ones are, lots of the time often seem, you know, hellish.

KS I think missions and reserves … people have contradictory memories and experiences of them because you have nostalgia. You spend a lot of time in them, you knew people there, but at the same time, you should not have been in those circumstances you know and the obvious injustices and betrayals and evils of them. Trauma too. Abuse. Working on farms, too. You know in Kayang and Me, Aunty Hazel talked about her brother helping drive the bulldozers clearing stuff and crying because they had gone over — he had dragged chains over Mallee hen nests and everything else. They used to dig up the eggs by hand, don’t take them all, replace the soil. You know, there is pretty limited options for how you can be living.

SC There might be no other options.

KS Yes. And relationships are important I think in a classical Noongar worldview. So in those instances, you know, Davis knew Neville perhaps. I cannot remember No Sugar that well at this moment, but it is a similar situation with the farms. People living on Country.

SC I’ve read that as a kid there was some sort of personal contact there.

KS I think his parents put him onto one of the missions, believing he would get farm skills and so on. Which a number of people, you know, it is such an apartheid state and you want to equip your family members. So maybe Jack’s family put him there thinking that it helped him get ahead and of course that wasn’t the way it worked at all. But I may be wrong.

SC When I was at the National Library not so long ago, I was going through some of Randolph Stow’s papers, and he wrote a review of True Country? Do you remember that?

KS Yeah, I do.

SC That little connection made me realise other connections … there are radical differences between the To the Islands and True Country, but there is that little personal connection and a geographical one as they are both set in the Kimberley. And I thought the differences in time and place and perspective might be as instructive as the similarities. I have thought it could be interesting to look at those two novels and those two communities …

KS Yeah, yeah, it might be. I have only read To the Islands once …?

SC Yeah, I have already found that finding a true history of those communities might be a difficult thing to get.

KS Yes, I have read To the Islands and after True Country I became aware … I think I read it as Randolph Stow … what a sensitive personality to be picking up some of the things he’s dealing with there, especially at that time. The difficulty of articulating this sensation of being in, of coming to understand, I am on someone else’s country. The spirit of it. How do you negotiate all that stuff? Maybe Randolph Stow was really switched on to such things. He stopped writing, I think, and moved away from Australia?

SC Yes, he did. Sensitive is a word I would use.

KS And intuitive, you know, like clever and open to it and … what do you do?

SC We are now thirty years on since the publication of True Country. What are your reflections on that novel and your time in the Kimberley? Looking back now, how do you sort of see it within your writing life?

KS Another Aboriginal writer, Marie Munkara, read it in the last year or so. She reckoned it was fantastic. I’m really pleased with that feedback. So of course, I think she’s wonderful.

I like it. I think technically it is the blend of form and content I am most proud of in that novel. The move from an individual voice to a collective narration, I really liked finding that. And the ambivalence about whether he died or not. I’m pleased with that. However, it is also kind of naive, although I still think it was courageous in trying to articulate difficulties in myself mostly about identity, history, the void inside … Or something. I think its concerns are pan-Aboriginal: identity, history, voice, reconnection and reclamation …

I am ashamed and embarrassed to at that stage have known so little about where I was really from, but that whole massacre business helps explain that. That is, in my family history, not True Country. I had family living on the WA south coast, named as the town is proclaimed, ancestors who were guides for explorers, midwives for the colonisers even as their women arrived … and then the massacre and they’re sort of trapped there. So, yeah, the family would have had difficulty talking all that. Taking all that. And when I was a kid, you know, there was pride in one’s Aboriginality — “of descent” I would explain — but no words for it, because it was also making sure you weren’t brought under that legislation. The puzzle and trauma. Meantime strutting around best you could. So yes, I’m, you know, it’s a bit shameful that there wasn’t, that we weren’t stronger. And older Noongars would have known where my dad fitted in when he brought us back near home, and there was a sense of belonging with some factions in that community. But I think there was internalised shame, and disfunction everywhere. Noongars among the white community, the low working-class community. Like Neville and his cohort planned, came to realise. Yeah, but that’s the change, the whole change in things. I try to put words to all that energy and mess.

SC I was reading a piece by Evelyn Araluen recently on the Sydney Book Review. It draws on her thesis and explains how at the start she envisioned not using any settler-colonial references or citations, but over the course of the research she came to the realisation that, and I’ll quote her here: “I came gradually to the reluctant concession that settler literature and its tropes remain for the time being an unavoidable context and condition of Aboriginal literature.” Some of her creative work makes fun of these tropes and plays with them, but I don’t know, it made me think isn’t the reverse also true? You know, is there “Australian literature” without Indigenous people and presence? I’m not sure I can see it. Often, going back, that presence is a projection, or an appropriation… I don’t know if you have any thoughts on that, but I was struck by the sense it is all inevitably intertwined in some way.

KS Yeah, yeah, they are intertwined. English literature too. But which roots are deepest? And then some of this, what we’re talking about. It’s a delight for me to see, in history at home, examples of what Penny van Toorn talks about in Writing Never Arrives Naked. The Indigenous propensity for literacy (it’s not so foreign, not so hard), and then the entanglement of it all.

SC Evelyn Araluen also talks about reaching a point where Indigenous writers might be able to fully escape these frames of reference …

KS Yes. Or twist them, use them differently. This is an obscure thing, do you know TS Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”? Forgive me, perhaps I remember it wrongly. But — there may be a parallel, possibly. Eliot writes about how an important work operates within the tradition. And I would say those of us writing in English, even Aboriginal writers, that English is much of what we’re working with. I was informed by that tradition, but the really big works — and I’m thinking maybe this is a role, an emerging function of Aboriginal literature — changes and shifts the relationship between everything within that tradition: it shifts and transforms the tradition. Or it can do. That might give us a way of thinking about Aboriginal literature in this context. I’m puzzled with it because they are different and you can do it as Benang and many others do, I think. Certainly, with Benang, I’m taking on the voice of the State Archives as I see it. You know, Neville’s linear eloquence, and try to twist that around. Make something else from within it, a different centre.

That’s kind of the dual focus. Literary work to make space, and a different sort of literary work I guess to heal and rebuild and inform, and again to transform imported tradition. Help it belong, make it fit better?

I did write a novella or a short story maybe, Lost (2006), where I played with one of those tropes of white Australian storytelling: the lost boy or lost girl. It intrigued me at the time, that idea of using what is a trope of colonial literature and bringing this in to shift things a little bit, the power relationships with the text. There’s a number of ways of playing with those ideas, I think. We just do not need to get too prescriptive about what is the best way. Play.

SC Speaking of Benang, that is undoubtedly my favourite novel of yours Kim — if there is one novel I tell people to read, it is that one. I see it as something of an intergenerational epic that spirals or billows out into the past from today, or perhaps from the past into today, exposing both the tragedy and trauma of that past and how it reverberates into the present, even as you’re writing back to it, and even as the story itself is an important act of recovery or reconnection. The year 2024 will be the 25th anniversary of the novel. Could I ask you to reflect on Benang as you look at it standing here today?

KS I’m proud of the novel, even though I get a lot of feedback saying it is too difficult. I know it was hard to write and it was like channelled aggression — that is how I think of it. It was very much a response, and I still stand by this, to the state archives that contain the language of our shared history and particularly a couple of phrases. I was responding to the prevalence and continued recurrence of the phrases “first white man born” and “last full-blood Aborigine” in local histories and coming across Neville’s book, Australia’s Coloured Minority: Its Place in the Community — a title which I wrote down as “their place in our community”, a Freudian slip that probably tells you how I was reading it.

Neville is saying that there is no place for Australia’s coloured minority, advocating for the need to breed out Aboriginality and re-educate people. He’s saying that because Australia is … it was absolutely brutal. In that book there is a photograph, which I think I sort of referenced in the novel, showing the three generations reading from right to left and the fella at the end appears to be the so-called success of Neville’s scheme — the ace in the pack — and there seemed a parallel to those recurring phrases in those local histories. But weirdly, unfortunately, the fellow on the end … I could identify with him in a certain way, so along with what has been some internal screaming and shouting, these became things to explore in writing. You also have to remember what was going on in that time period. Some writer calling himself Koolmatri, as I recall, in South Australia, had won some sort of literary award for Aboriginal female writers. One of the Duracks was entering visual art competitions, signing her artwork “Eddie Burrup”, and suggesting the artist was in fact an Aboriginal elder. And at home, directly across the street from where I was working at the time — running an Aboriginal bridging course at the Centre for Aboriginal Studies at Curtin University — across the road at a place called Dumbartung, run then and still by Robert Eggington, there was an inquisition of sorts going on about Colin Johnson, also known as Mudrooroo Nyoongah. In that context, when I wrote down that phrase, I may well be the first “the first white man born” in the family line, it just seemed so sparky and difficult and to have such a lot of energy and juice. It also seemed ethical to take on this very difficult position and see if I could write my way out of it, or deconstruct, you might say, and use that very same language to foreground and point to the blindness, the rationalisation, the psychosis, the many restrictions there on the possibilities of ways of being. I thought that phrase in Neville’s book revealed the full-on psychosis within Australian identity and what was happening around me. And once you know history, the long inhabitation and the self-serving brutalities of colonisation, that it is impossible to be a First White Man Born.

There was a paper from that time by Mick Dodson that I thought was great, “The End in the Beginning: Re(de)finding Aboriginality” and he was talking about, this is how we’re represented, it’s up to us to redo it, to deconstruct and rebuild. I am awkward using those terms, but that’s how I approached it. With Benang — speaking from the heart — you have this language that I’d found in the archives — the language of our shared history — that you have to try to speak with. I was still finding my way and encountering Noongar people for whom I had deep respect, and I was a little bit muddled where I fit it in because of this family history. The welfare files talk about my father’s generation dispersed across the southwest, mostly living with white people, and you have to, as I have in fiction, speak it from the heart. You cannot help what you feel and that mattering, but when you came to the language, pretty tricky, hard to do. So all of that informs the novel, and I am still proud of it.

I’ve recently written a foreword for the new 25th anniversary edition of Benang. I completed and sent it off the day after the Voice Referendum. It made me think that not only how that phrase took off, that “speaking from the heart”, but how we still confront the same problem, that psychotic insistence on a power relationship. It seems that all the insecurity behind position was revealed again. Just a little chink of an opportunity was being asked for with the referendum and that was, that was too much of a threat. When I was writing the introduction, I was also thinking about some of the case studies in the Royal Commission of Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, particularly the representations of Aboriginality given to us, and the dead ends and destructiveness of that.

As the Dodson paper and many others talk about, we need to decolonise ourselves and rebuild in our communities. History and language and site knowledge are important to this, all these things that open up the possibility of a whole different register in terms of identity. There is still a lot of need to do that before, or perhaps at the same time as, sharing it with wider circles, before answering the identity needs and insecurities of the settler-colony. Aboriginal heritages are crucial denominations in the currency of identity and belonging. It seems to me though that there is still very much the same old power relationship: a “give it to us” mentality that can turn Aboriginal people at that cultural interface into rivals. Because of the whole commercial transaction nature of cultural brokerage we are discouraged from sharing and cross-referencing and rebuilding. Such pressures can atomise and isolate. It doesn’t help rebuild or transform. And it creates a push to do it quickly — heal and access Aboriginal heritages with the welfare of the settler-colony prioritised — as if there has not been all this trauma, and it isn’t, you know, stolen country and with only a tiny percentage surviving the first decades and then essentially an apartheid state — as if all that hadn’t happened. The attitude seems to be, “We want your stuff. Hand it over.” As Auntie Hazel said in Kayang and Me, it leaves us “jostling in the queue to put your hand in the white man’s pocket” or something like that.

SC The phrase “from the heart” is not the only part of Benang that has had enduring influence … the groundbreaking way it wrote back to the archive, it seems to have influenced subsequent Indigenous writers. Not to say that Benang is necessarily the first. We spoke about Jack Davis doing that in some way. But it does seem to be a trend in Indigenous literature … For example, I’ve been looking at Archival Poetics by Natalie Harkin recently …

KS I’d like to think so. And I think it is still necessary. I used that title, Benang, partly because of what the last line of the novel enabled. Partly because it was one spelling put to an ancestral name. We are still here, Benang. We’re still here tomorrow. We are still here, ancestor. That mattered to me. The idea of using an Indigenous language from the provinces to speak to the nation is perhaps kind of awkward. But of course, now with all that transactional stuff going on, the market doesn’t mind it because it signals Aboriginality or even authenticity. It is almost like you don’t even have to understand. Identity politics, if that’s the phrase, has changed a lot in these 25 years — I recognise that I’m being very non-assertive on the surface in Benang. In a way it was of course difficult then to start with the first white man born stuff. It would be even more difficult now, but I believe that it’s an important job to do.

Part of the strange appeal was to give ground in order to lure people from their defences —and I’ve mentioned the energy of playing with the phrase — and it was I think also to try and communicate a bit about the inadequacies of language, how to get, especially, those ancestral women, who are really silent in the archives, how to get them speaking from between the lines. I have a scene in there somewhere, I think, of a couple of women or maybe kids with them looking down an alleyway of words. There are funny phrases that you see in the old advertisements, and they see the travelling inspector for Aborigines, he is after them, you know, that is a key little bit in the novel. These may be obsessions of mine that I am not aware of a lot of the time. I think the inadequacies of language, and again that relates to the difficulties of speaking “from the heart” and with sincerity. Of course, you are ambushed if you are not careful and if you do give a bit of ground, you know, don’t trust it, keep your focus. And being vulnerable, being brave, you know, it’s risky. I think the novel still rings true to that, those sort of things that I think are important.

SC There is a level of uncertainty in your work that is a source of productive tension — where you write your way through the limits of the written form. I think, perhaps, it comes partly from grappling with oral traditions and written form.

KS I think now we are expected to have a lot of conviction and so on. But I, my creativity, seems to be fed by doubt of a kind, and the readily available words, stories, don’t fit the reality, the feel of things, and so I feel obliged to go with doubt as part of being courageous, and this does sound immodest as well, being brave and courageous enough to go where … it’s uncomfortable. “I may well be the first successfully born white man in the family line.” In an age of hoax and appropriation of identity, and a certain shrillness even, I think that you have to scratch a little, open things up … In fact, I feel obliged to go into those, as a relatively privileged Noongar, you know, I am obliged to go into these areas — these discourse traps — and see if I can get out again. That is what you should do, not necessarily try and perform certainties and exactitudes. Course, there are foundational truths: stolen country, tiny percentage of us surviving the first decades and then decades of apartheid, near enough. What else are you meant to be doing, how to grow from here?

SC With the referendum just occurring and the result, we have been taken back to a place where it seems acceptable to think nothing happened and we can move on. And these are sorts of narratives that are out there again more prominently. I suppose reading Taboo, and indeed your entire body of work — but I’m particularly thinking of Taboo — makes it embarrassingly obvious that for any possibility of reconciliation, you know, something has to be offered or given or ceded.

KS There is a price, you know … A lot of it, a lot of the fuck up … it’s such a structural thing, and we need some sort of better infrastructure for our emotions, and to express — to articulate — our identity, and more. What does it mean to be living in this part of the world in these times? The Voice was a way to just make a little opening somehow in this tight, psychotic, emotional “infrastructure” that is so much a part of Australian identity, and the role given to Aboriginal people and Aboriginality within that. An opponent of the Yes vote said, leading into the referendum, “maintain the rage”. I think he was plagiarising Whitlam there, wasn’t he? But quite different circumstances. Ridiculous. What a stale thing to be saying. Keep angry, be angry. And Noel Pearson replied, “maintain the love”, as I recall. People like Pearson, sense that we’ve just got to loosen the whole thing up a bit. The Voice, to me, was a way to get that happening, to begin that. We need a bit less fear, and less anger, whitefellas and blackfellas too. Saying No, not just to the Voice but to any initiatives, it is part of a structural thing. It is a polemic. We are set up to be polemical, angry, confused, not admitting to vulnerabilities and doubt and so on, to get back to the previous question. That is why it all matters, but, you know, same old, same old; the referendum business, same old, same old, no big deal really. It’s a fuck up. We could have got quicker to a better place, it’s going to take a lot longer, if ever. Especially if frightened people keep trying to be the tough guys.

SC I’d just like to ask about your current and future projects and plans if there is anything you’d like to share?

KS Well, I’m very non-prolific. I’ve got a manuscript of a novel I’ve been playing with for a few years. But it’s only about thirty thousand words so far. The whole Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories takes up a lot of my time, a lot of “people stuff” and lot of bureaucratic work. Logistics. Community work. Some of the stuff I’ve hinted at, the rivalry over such things as Native Title and cultural brokerage seems to fracture our community in very non-productive ways. Perhaps I’m wrong to put so much time into it — into culture and community development, or heritage and community development. Perhaps I’m not getting anywhere. I’m out of time, out of place. Perhaps I’d do better to write another novel; I’d like to. I’ve got something sitting there. But I don’t know that I can do it just yet, while I’m working as an academic, much of which channels into the Wirlomin stuff. I think the role of culture and heritage in community development is really important. Perhaps all that community focus, that Wirlomin stuff, is really naive. I started getting serious about this when I was, my kids were young. I’d written a novel. I’d reached the age of when my father died, 39, and I thought, well what do I want to do? And it was, you know, it was the, I didn’t use those words, but it was, there’s stuff around that I need to know and we need to know, I want to get that, and that was language, knowledge of Country, and building on trust within the little community I was part of. I was given a lot of trust from people who are no longer with us, and I thought that was just so precious. So I’ve put a lot of time into it, trying to build on what they left, build a heritage, build community engagement with it. A sub-set of community, really, those elders carrying a wide sense of family and a name for us from oral history only, an identity connected to specific Country and language artefacts and ceremony even — wanting it known, wanting to heal and strengthen their own family and make up for the trauma they themselves carried … But it may not be, I don’t know how successful or well it’s going. But it does mean it’s very difficult for me to just sit for hours at a desk, writing; it feels indulgent. Writing for whom? For what purpose?

SC Good things take time.