Elfie: My name is Elfie Shiosaki and I’m a Noongar and Yawuru writer and academic, and I have been given the great privilege of yarning with Noongar novelist and academic Kim Scott for the finale event of Side Walks 2021. For those of you who don’t know, Side Walks is an annual storytelling, literature and ideas festival run by the Centre for Stories, and the theme of Sidewalks 2021 – ‘Still’ is about taking a moment to reflect where we are, to embrace community, and to become still. This festival is held on Whadjuk Noongar Boodjar on Whadjuk Noongar country, and I would like to acknowledge the Whadjuk people of the Noongar nation, their ancestors and elders. I would also like to acknowledge the Whadjuk people as the keepers of the story cycles that are held here in the land, the water and the sky. Today, six events have run across the afternoon including a bilingual poetry reading, an interview between a father and son, an empowering conversation about women, and the triumph of aging.

I had the privilege of attending the Northbridge block, and it was such a fun afternoon to wander around Northbridge into new spaces that were full of stories and the storytelling was full of heart and so moving, so it’s been such a lovely afternoon. On behalf of the Centre for Stories, I would like to thank the sponsors who have made Side Walks possible this year, and those sponsors are the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries, the Centre for Stories Founders Circle, Aspen Corporate Financial Planning, and Rayner Real Estate. When the Centre for Stories first invited me to yarn with Kim, I was really excited to be given the opportunity to learn from a distinguished novelist and academic, and someone I greatly admire. It wasn’t hard to write some questions for this evening because I think I already had a million for you. Kim Scott is a novelist and academic, he has written many novels, and I have a short bio here about your writing to read. His second novel ‘Benang from the Heart,’ won the 1999 West Australian Premiers Book Award, the 2000 Miles Franklin Literary Award, and the 2001 Kate Challis RAKA Award. His third novel ‘That Deadman Dance,’ also won the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2011, the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the West Australian Premiers Book Award.

His most recent novel ‘Taboo,’ was a finalist for the 2018 Miles Franklin Literary Award and won the 2018 New South Whales Premieres Book Award, and the 2019 Victorian Premiers Literary Award for Indigenous Writing, among many other awards. He is currently a Professor of Writing at the School of Media Culture and Creative Arts at Curtin University. So this evening, Kim and I will be yarning about his writing craft and practice, and the potential for Aboriginal writing to contribute to cultural renewal, and perhaps the imagining of a future that recognises sovereign people and sovereign stories. So, this is how we’re engaging with this theme of ‘Still.’ Kaya, Kim!

Kim: Kaya. [inaudible words]. I wanted to say, keep talking Elfie, it’s smooth-talking, it’s best like this- if I don’t say much at all, if Elfie keeps going.

Elfie: We’re all here to listen to you, would you like to introduce yourself and your work to us?

Kim: I think you have already, Elfie, introduced me. For some reason, if it’s not too sort of personal, I’d also like to say, other than the Noongar novelist-academic thing, my father was the only surviving child, (and he died in his thirties) to a woman born in the early 20th century in Ravensthorpe, a place infamous for environmental destruction and a massacre that occurred there late 19th century. Back in the silence of my father, and perhaps my family, I think informs in some way a lot of my writing. I hadn’t really planned to introduce myself like that, but there you are.

Elfie: Thank you, Kim. So, I really enjoyed looking back of your work this week as I’ve prepared tonight-

Kim: Very sweet of you to say this, It’s a lot of novels.

Elfie: Your first novel ‘True Country,’ was published in 1999 and it tells the story of a young schoolteacher who travels to a remote community in the North-Western region of Australia and you’ve since published many other novels, could you tell us what first encouraged your writing, and perhaps what has sustained it as long as it has? To borrow maybe a question from one of the other sessions I was at this afternoon is, could you tell us in reflecting on what encourages your writing, perhaps, who you write for?

Kim: That’s three questions, Elfie. And I’m old and I’m nervous, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to remember them all. What started me writing?

Elfie: What first encouraged your writing?

Kim: I think my writing comes from the ceremony of innocence, the solitary pleasure of playing with paper and pens. As a kid I used to draw, almost non-stop. That moved to my late teens, early twenties. I think that moved into writing. And then, I’ve always been a reader, so those two things go together in my experience. Strangely enough, in one stage when I was a teacher of English to high-school kids (teenagers) I have said this a few times, but I realised that the Manual Arts teacher could build a house and fix his car, and the Home Economics teachers could put on a good feed for people, and I was an English teacher, meant to be teaching and stories, writing, and I had not much idea about it at all. So, in fact, that is what pushed me to try and work out how to get published, how to take writing seriously. I don’t think I quite achieved it while I was teaching, but a few poems, I started with poems and short stories. Then, I started to feel like I had some sort of experiential knowledge to offer about writing other than just… getting it out of books, which you’d think makes sense, but it didn’t give the experience of what it meant to be a writer. Second question, sorry, what was that second question again?

Elfie: What has sustained your writing?

Kim: This is why I said Elfie, it’s beautiful of you to say I’ve written lots of novels, because my writing actually ebbs and flows. I think I have long, unfortunately quite dry, periods, and I do find it difficult to do sustained writing if I’ve got other jobs on the go. Particularly if they involve strategic or tactical planning, that sort of thinking. I think it’s largely the pleasure in the artifice of language, the structuring, the shaping of language, and the beauty of the rhythms of that, and the chance to communicate in a way that you really can’t in any other way, with the intimacy of writing. I’m very respectful, not only respectful and grateful for you all turning up tonight, but those of you that have read so many of my novels, I’m grateful for that because that’s quite a few hours (in a way) that we’ve spent together collaborating on building a story, an alternative world. That very privileged sort of communication that takes effort, reader and writer, and the vulnerability that’s in there, and the artifice and the play. That can lead, I think, to really important and sometimes almost sacred communication. I think the delight and the importance of that is what keeps me at it. And the third question?

Elfie: Even I can’t remember the third question! No, I can, I can.

Kim: Check your notes.

Elfie: It’s borrowing a question from earlier today which I really enjoyed listening to the responses to, which is, who do you write for?

Kim: Yeah… In a large way, I write for someone quite like myself, some sort of ideal reader. But then, you know, people talk about “Be a good ancestor! Be a good descender!” I’d like to think, and this relates to being a Noongar novelist, you know, there’s 10% survive the first 50 years, something like that. And then, they have great propensity to move into literature strangely enough, in traditional Noongar culture as I understand it, so there’s all those voices that will never be heard. There’s all wisdom and ways of looking at the world that will never be shared, perhaps? In a way, I sort of write for those people. There’s a lovely old Noongar song that I won’t perform just now, but in effect, it starts with language play so a little bit of [inaudible words], it’s just playing with sounds. Then, it talks about sounds dripping off the end of one’s tongue, sound and language always moving away from the inner self, and it ends with a refrained saying something like, you can come up with all sorts of cultural products, but your own people will always understand you. So, in a way, I think something like spirit I suppose, a spiritual family. Oh, that sounds really tedious, hey? I don’t know how to retract it now I’ve said it… I’m more rigorous than that sounded, honestly.

Elfie: I think we’re allowed to retract anything we say tonight. You talked about that kind of delight that you feel when you’re playing with language and developing work, is that a part of your writing craft? How would you describe that process that you follow to write your novels?

Kim: I love it when I get lost. Same with reading, and with writing it’s even better. It’s as if you’re surfacing and you’re like “Where am I, where have I been?” I love that, enormously. That’s sort of the first early draft stuff, when you get sort of a flow happening. I also like the shaping of things. I read a lot of what I write, certain fiction, aloud, so sound matters to me, and rhythm matters to me. I don’t know if I’m quite clever enough to work structurally as well as I’d like to, but I do like when everything clicks into place, that structural bit particularly of a novel, just when it all comes together. Whatever you think?

Elfie: So tonight, Kim is going to be reading to us from some of his novels. Kim, would you like to do your first one?

Kim: You’re suggesting we start in reverse order, I think, hey? Yeah, you did, and I thought that was really clever. Without knowing why, perhaps we’ll try it like that.

Elfie: [inaudible]

Kim: Oh yes, yes. Maybe. So, I’ll read an extract from early in ‘Taboo,’ and this is part of the earliest bits of the novel that came into formation. So, for the first few pages, there’s a truck that’s just gone screaming down a hill, through the main street of a town that’s kind of like Ravensthorpe if anyone’s ever been there, but not quite the same. It crashes at the bottom of the main street in a river valley without much of a river there in the sand. I’ll start at…

“Birds flap into the sky, screeching in dignation. The motor hiccups, stops. Wheels spin on as good wheels do. From a distance, the elute view of those birds, a pattern is dissolving and reforming again. Bunches of people at the museum, pub, café, roadhouse, the little park, all moving together and flowing down the street.

A car stutters ahead, pulls up at the road edge of the river crossing. A bystander, perhaps even you, dear reader, might anticipate an explosion, a great ball of flame. But there is no explosion. Already, the so recently startled birds are beginning to resettle among the slow and incrementally turning leaves of the patient trees. A human figure emerges from the window of the truck’s cab door. A girl, a young woman perhaps? Standing easily on the side of the cab, she bends to help someone exit. A strong young thing then, athletic.

The other person seems much older or injured. Having been helped, pulled from the cab, he immediately sits down on the steel closed door. Hurt? Tired? He looks around, back into the cab, and then tentatively makes his way down after the young woman, though less nimbly. The two of them stamp their feet on solid ground, as if reassuring themselves. They listen to the wheels spinning, and a luxurious whispering sound. Wheat, slowly spilling from the vehicle.

Come close, closer. A small pile of wheat is growing beside the trailer, fed by a thin, grainy spout from the upper corner of the tarpaulin. Golden, it has both the look and sound of great wealth. The tarp slips a little so that the thin stream becomes a golden shoot, and then the tarpaulin pulls away like an upside-down stagecoach and a wide, low wave of wheat makes the girl step back once, twice, three times. She stops, transfixed by something in the trailer

as the wheat continues to flow around and behind her. Imagine a figure sitting in a deep and rapidly draining bath. Head and shoulders appear, then the upper torso, the knees…

In the trailer, beginning with the dome of a dark skull, a figure is being revealed. The figure slides a little, shifts.

The tarpaulin slips again. The golden grain continues to flow across the ground. The figure begins to rise. It must be the moving grain, but it seems as if the legs lever it upright and it steps from the upturned trailer and stands, swaying with the high weight of its skull. The girl, the figure, they stand facing one another, feet invisible beneath the grain. The wheat dust, the light of the sandstorm, the aftereffects of the accident… What is it the girl sees? Something like a skeleton, but not of bone. At least, not only bone. The limbs are timber. The skull is timber, too. Dark and varnished, and ivory dentures stained as if by chomping, inhaling, gustatory human life grinned exaltation. A gauze of gold dust and light motes swirls from its broad shoulders and around the rippling cage of its ribs. Long shanks lever the pelvis. Itself, a solid thing of smooth river stone and timber glowing at its centre of gravity. Kneecaps, too, a smooth stone.

But the rest is bone and polished timber, and woven grass. Seeds and brightly coloured feathers, and even fencing wire. Cords of sinew of neatly knotted fishing line, and… Is it human hair? They meet moistly at each mobile joint. The figure sways toward the girl, led by the heavy skull. And then glides to her, arms low and open, each beautifully defined and delicate hand, held palm up. Its whole being is a smile. Hands clasped, firm, warm, uncalloused. And now, the wind gathers strength. A melody plays across the visual rhythm of those ribs. Hollowed, meticulously carved spaces begin to whistle, and timber limbs begin in accompaniment. Thunder cracks and booms, it rumbles in the riverbed. The figure teeters, it begins to move and to slowly fall apart, maybe tumble.

Elfie: Thank you, Kim. A beautiful reading, and such a haunted introduction to ‘Taboo.’ I think that it is a vivid part of the story that I still haven’t forgotten. So, your novel ‘Taboo,’ tells the story of a group of Noongar people returning to their ancestral country on the South Coast of Western Australia, and I love the way that it explores many things. The ways in which language loss, language preservation, and the potential for language revitalisation intermingle with each other. Could you tell us a bit more about the story within ‘Taboo?’

Kim: The story within ‘Taboo?’ I suppose we might have a different idea of the story within ‘Taboo’ there. That figure that I just read about, that’s part of it in the sense that it’s in part, animated by people, a community reforming itself, and coming together in some way to commemorate and reconcile themselves to talk about a historical massacre. The figure is also animated by atmospheric sounds, the rumble in the river, the thunder booming, it’s the instrument for a voice of that sort of country. It’s also made up of things deeply indigenous to the place, the river stones, the timber, and things of now, like fishing line and… whatever. That’s part of the story within ‘Taboo,’ for me. Community, moving back to ancestral country, addressing history, trying themselves out as instruments for the language indigenous to that place, and seeing what sort of transformations will occur in themselves and their community in a way of being the possibilities that might blossom from that occasion.

There’s quite a lot of autobiographical material in ‘Taboo,’ with different characters inhabiting little narratives that have been an important part of myself as an individual, but also as a collective, a community moving back on country and working with language, as I’ve just been talking about. It’s not the same as what happens in ‘Taboo,’ but that sort of experience informs. I think a lot about decolonisation, arguably a big word, but there’s a great truth in it, I think. There’s also possibly, transformation, in there.

Elfie: Do you think of ‘Taboo’, as a form of truth-telling about how Noongar people on the South Coast experienced histories of violence and colonisation?

Kim: Certainly. One of the reasons I attempt to write novels and am attracted to novels is truth-telling. I’ll tell you my truth, and I don’t want to listen to your so-called truth. [It’s] a truth that allows for conviction, but also doubt, and vulnerability. That sort of truth. The truth that you unpack or mine or render through care with language. That sort of truth telling. It also allows for hesitation and allows doubt into the mix. That unsure-ive-ness.

Elfie: Is there a pathway that’s carved out in ‘Taboo,’ for how we might return to country that is considered taboo for us?

Kim: That’s how it’s sort of biographical. There’s a scene in Taboo of a couple of people sleeping at the Massacre Homestead. They are things that I’ve done to confront the idea that this place is taboo. Just thinking about it, I was thinking “That can’t be right, that can’t be right!” In the reality, and I can’t remember if I used it in the novel or not, before we were about to sleep in the historical murderer’s beds, my cousin said to me, “What are the Noongars going to say about us doing this?” And I said, “Well if we’re in any way connected to Noongars that were living here, if it is indeed our family, they’re going to be happy to see us back, surely?” As in ‘Taboo,’ well, I’m giving it all away here but, of course it was spooky to stay there, there was no electricity, and it had that old glass, so images were tremulous in candlelight and all that sort of atmospheric stuff.

But when we left the next day, and this has absorbed a lot of my thinking, we went through a little stream and a couple of mallei-heads came out and stood out in front of the car and we had to stop the car. I’ll abbreviate this little yarn. A bit later we got going again, and a big… Do you say a mob of emus or a flock of emus? Well, a big group of emus forced us to stop the car again by racing across, shaking their tail feathers at us, digging up great lumps of dirt as they accelerated away. And then when we got out to the gate leaving this property, there was an eagle on each gatepost. So, you had to make eye contact with these eagles before they lifted themselves away. Noongars that I know would talk about that, as those are the spirits of the old people, saying they’re glad you’re back. So ‘Taboo,’ is trying to start with some element of skepticism and attempts to articulate what must be the truth in those sorts of experiences. There’s more of that, and it very much comes from a language project I work with trying to rebuild community around language and story, and revisiting country to get over that notion of taboo. It seemed to me, it comes not only from the killing but also from the apartheid-like legislation that made it very difficult for people to get back and come to terms with what had happened in, you know, home country. Which is, you can’t stay away from. I would think.

1901, and its based around Ravensthorpe, 1901, there was 11 Noongars the police books recorded as being in Ravensthorpe, my ancestor being one of them. So, they were there within twenty years of many people being killed. You have to get back on home country. But the longer that is prevented the more and more it becomes taboo. This is how I think of it, but not everyone agrees with those ideas. So yes, that’s part of what’s in ‘Taboo.’

Elfie: I find so much hope in, that even though land has been scarred in the way that it has, that there are pathways that we can follow to return to it.

Kim: Yeah, and it may be that as we recover language authentically and sincerely as against just performing it. As we recover language and re-gather as community, it may well be that language, if not ourselves, is a catalyst for that sort of change and transformation. I rely on the truth of that.

Elfie: By chance, I heard you on the radio this week and I heard you-

Kim: By chance, that’s really part of your study, and preparation.

Elfie: I was sneaking off for a lunch, and was in the car at lunchtime, and heard your yarn for Off-track on ABC Radio National and they did a story about [inaudible words], Port Ravensthorpe, and you discussed this concept of possibilities of blossoming, and you’ve talked about that just before this idea that we’re able to renew Noongar senses of place, or shared senses of place. Would you share more to us about that philosophy, in that way of blossoming?

Kim: Oh, I’d love to Elfie. Doing a great job, Elfie.

Elfie: Thank you.

Kim: Making me feel important up in here! I’d like to, but it’s kind of difficult without getting all portentous and abstract. But it’s sort of about the idea that country, where each of us is a unique manifestation of the possibility of the spirit of country. That makes it interesting to think about biological diversity and also not a static so-called traditional Aboriginal worldview, as if the dream is a blueprint that is being repeated. Don’t go with that, I think you improvise from strong traditions. It’s also, I read an account- and this is where I try not to get too abstract- [inaudible words] I believe, a book by a fellow, Tony Swain called ‘A Place for Strangers,’ there’s a wonderful chapter talking about the notion that time is not a major organising principle in a classical Aboriginal world view. It dismisses that as time is just a negative thing. It then goes on to talk about the rhythms of abiding stories and landscape creation stories, in that they carry the rhythms of place, not only the rhythms of flora and fauna, moon and tides, and all that. But that somehow, they carry all those. From that rhythmic sense of place, even time can be dealt with in terms of it’s the intersection of different rhythms, that’s the now, is the intersection of these different rhythms.

You can, therefore, talk about future in the same way just from those rhythms. In that discussion where he talks about this billowing or blossoming, I think he uses the word billowing, of possibilities. And as a South Coast Noongar, it’s very interesting to think about

some of those notions and I have, in a number of novels, of the ocean, meeting the land on the South Coast. Those relentless swirls and the billowing of foam, and hanging there for a moment and resettling… I think it’s something that comes up in lots of the old songs, the little that I know of them, that sort of process, that continual blossoming, falling back again and then some other shape or possibility will emerge. I find that very productive. History is not over yet; we can talk about it. There are all these other manifestations that come from increasingly rich experiences and traditions that we continue to build and gather. I told you it was hard to be… picky, with that one.

Elfie: You did very well.

Kim: Hard to be picky.

Elfie: Would you like to do another reading for us?

Kim: Certainly!

Elfie: We have time for one more, I think.

Kim: Trying to slow it down so we haven’t got time, fumbling for my glasses. Okay, so I’ll read from ‘That Deadman Dance.’ What pages did I say I’d do? I’ll read this section because in the acknowledgements of ‘That Deadman Dance,’ I talk about working with language and classical Noongar narratives as much as I was able to. Seeing the enormous agency of protagonists in these stories, and how that at first clashed with the archival expressions of that time, but then those classical Noongar texts helped me read against the grain and see other things in the archives I might’ve not picked up so quickly, otherwise. A little about this, too, before I start. It also helped me read Noongar texts in the archives, stuff like Daisy Bates had collected, with great interest, and some of them started with English language, which is what I riff on a little bit in this extract.

There was also one if I could remember, by a woman written about her man being chained up and taken to Albany to be taken to Rottnest island. “[inaudible words] King Georgetown.” So, it had King Georgetown, this colonial place name, carried within the frame of Noongar language and storytelling and I thought “Wow, that’s a different way of approaching this.” So, this little extract starts with a little riff on the English in one of those songs.

Oh, imagine sailing on one of those very fine days on the ocean. Clear sky, sun and bright air, foam and bubbles at bow and wake, and taught swelling sails. Bobby felt like a bird, rising on a sweep of air. He felt like a dolphin slipping easily in and out of the wave face. The deck tilted mostly one way, and its regular beat at that angle put a rhythm into Bobby’s step. A walking uphill-downhill thing that even with no music, and no one singing out loud, made him want to dance. A flourish of limbs embellished the rhythm and energy of the boat as it fell from wave crest to valley. Different steps were needed when it wallowed or balanced on the peak of a rushing ocean ridge.

Doctor Cross had his violin, and while his breath came hard, he could sometimes not speak for coffee. The violin’s voice soared and swooped, spiralling on and on with no pause. The

new man, Mr. Chain danced. A jig, they said. His feet springing up from the deck again and again as if he did not want to be there at all. His children laughed and clapped their hands and jumped up and down, too. Beneath all this, the steady accompaniment of the wind, the sea, and the boat’s passage. Bobby grinned and laughed out loud with the joy of it all. The bubbling foam in his blood and salty air in his lungs, the differing rhythms, and now this jig. The shifting deck made it impossible not to be moving. The rhythm of it set his muscles trembling, gathering energy to show these people the strangely dancing man and his children.

The violin stopped. Cross was hacking into his handkerchief, the violin and bow held out in one hand. Chain was puffing and red-faced. Bobby let his feet take him, he let the boat and the ocean beneath him set him in motion. His arms were the sails of a ship, the wings of a bird. His legs lifted him into flight, swooping, rising, swooping. He put his own voice to it. A lone seabird, white, trailed the boat, following its milky white path from above. A group of whales came close by, each great glistening back a flowing arch beneath the spout of vapour. Bobby felt his own shoulders begin to rise and curve, his own form merging with that of the whales, even as his little audience’s attention moved away from him, to them. Over the shoulders of what had been his audience, Bobby saw giants each side of the ship, breathing. Doctor Cross turned, and Bobby catching his eye danced a little of that Chain jig, but there was nothing in it now. No energy. The whales, though, there was energy.

This was a path they followed year after year. A [inaudible words] path that was hard to follow yet was that of their ancestors and his own too, since he came from ocean and whales. That was why Nana gave him the story and the song that took the whale from east of King Georgetown along the coast to its very shore. The whales were close now, he heard them breathing. That rhythm. The blonde girl, Chain’s daughter, asked Bobby the blackfella word for ‘dancing.’ He gave her the word all the sailors knew from Sydney.

“Corroboree.” He said, laughing. Oh, her very earnest face. The twins, Christopher and Christine, you know, the name for Christ, who died for us and came back from among the dead. Then the weather turned, and the wind blew them to the shelter of King George where Bobby felt his toes sink in the sand.

Elfie: Thank you, Kim. ‘That Deadman Dance,’ reflects on those very early relationships between Noongar and European people on the South Coast and it does that through, as you say, through the portrayal of the protagonists who embody this moment of history in a way. It’s really one of my favourite novels because I really enjoyed imagining-

Kim: Only one. Only one.

Elfie: Only one- because I really enjoyed imagining Noongar country and kin before colonisation, before the violence that started, and the potential in those early relationships for friendship and curiosity between two cultures. That book really made me think about what had been lost in terms of the potential for friendship. How did that story of such scale come to life on the page for you?

Kim: I’m glad it came to life if you think that’s the case, it was partly fretting over the way- so it’s Albany, based on Albany’s early of history, and there’s… some historians talk about the friendly frontier, so three years or so before colony here. There’s a military garrison perched on the ends of the continent down there, and in their journals, they talk about the landlords- they talk about the Noongars as landlords- this only goes on for a few years, and they think they’re just holding the fort for a little bit to keep the French away, I think, and then they’ll be going home. So, they talk about the landlords and in the journals and they say things like “We’re heavily outnumbered here, so we’ll have to win them over in ways.” There’s a lot in there of Noongar agency, accepting their role as landlords, being rowed around King Georgetown to get from one area of country to other, a couple of them even being given guns to take out hunting, coming back with no ammunition and no game, and they shudder to think what may have been going on there.

I’ve said this a number of times, there was one Makari Noongar there in a soldier’s hut, and a Noongar brother enters the hut and Makari calls out to him, “Oh where have you been out all-day Billy-boy Billy-boy?” And when I encountered, that I thought, “What’s going on, this is a functional statement ‘Where have you been all day?’” He’s doing it in song, which as I understand, classical Noongar traditions, is part of the way they function, in and out of song all the time. He’s also perhaps making a statement to those soldiers there that “I’ve learned your songs, how you’re getting on, and you haven’t bothered to learn anything,” So, that agency and that wit, that generosity even, is difficult when you’re thinking, “Look what’s happened to us, look how that was betrayed, were they stupid like that?” And I came to think “No! No!” Because what we’ve been offered is almost just polemic or perhaps a shallow and shabby alternative that’s been achieved through brutality.

The more I look at- and I’m an ignorant man- and the more I look at classical Noongar world view, and its generosity and accommodation, difficult things to do in the history wars and the polemics, the talent, the generosity, the inclusion, the improvisation, the willingness to take risks, the innovation, and it includes as said before the ability to move rapidly into literacy. The New Nautica blokes- Salvado, was it? Has an account of Noongar kids- around ten years old-within ten minutes, writing the Spanish alphabet in the sand in standard form, and then in reverse order, and being able to- when it’s in standard form- reproduce the sounds within ten minutes. Even learning to use a sextant he says, within half an hour when adult sailors- it was taking them months. So that tradition is what I was trying to- that entering the storytelling tradition, that’s what I was working with a lot within that novel.

Then also, something about literature, thinking “Is it enough?” to just be political staunch and do the polemical thing- or does that just chase people away and doesn’t do much at all, when literature is just this intimate form where you can get in really close, I was saying before. What I tried to do with that novel was- you get a story going which was informed by what I believed about Noongar traditions, you get that story going and all the time most of us reading it will know perhaps the orthodox version of our colonial history. Something like the near conquest of the Noongar people, and that itself- I can’t find the word- that difference in those two narratives will be held in your head the whole time and then how you finish the novel, and how I tried to resolve the novel, its resolution, the resolution could become really political in that it could resonate discordantly in the context of our history as we know it, this possibility. There was some political effects to that, I would like to think.

So, I don’t know if that’s how it came to life, but they’re the sort of things that I was playing with, really, working with.

Elfie: It seems ‘That Deadman Dance,’ involved a substantial amount of archival research and a real gathering of colonial records. How did you kind of navigate that space and recontextualise records that have been written about our ancestors?

Kim: Yeah, well in an earlier book, I think I had already done a lot of hard work in the archives already so that’s largely inspired by A.O Neville’s Book ‘Australia’s Coloured Minority: Its Place in the Community,’ in the acknowledgements, I wrote it down as ‘Australia’s Coloured Minority: Their Place in Our Community,’ which tells you how I felt reading it to make that mistake, and had in fact- not only that book, which is about breeding out Aboriginality and separating people from family and filling them with shame, that’s their place in our community as it were, the language of our shared history here. But I’d also read the recurring refrain in lots and lots of local histories, largely unpublished, about the last full-blood Aborigine and the first white man born, and somehow out of my fair bit of anger and rage- but I internalised all these things- I found myself writing at one stage the phrase “I may well be the first successfully white man born in the family line,” and it was just so much perverse energy, I thought, and it was at a time of- I don’t know if you remember Colin Johnson and Mudrooroo Nyoongah, there was a sort of inquisition going on in the Noongar community about fraud, hoax and appropriation. I thought “This is the essence and the heart of the archives, this brutal, vicious stuff, and I’m going to take it on and use it, and if I can get out of this little box and the danger I’m putting myself in, that will be useful,” as against posturing something to get ahead in the literary or art world, you know? Exploiting one’s heritage, and one’s identity, it’s to reverse that.

So, when I got to reading the journals down the Albany way- similar quest though- to reconnect in a way. Deconstruct, you know- and reconnect, and finding these gems, Henry Lawson met a Noongar in a kangaroo skin cloak in Albany who spoke fluent French who had spent twelve months on a French- Oh, wow! I know I’m going on a bit, there’s another story of a Noongar- a shepherd, a shepherd writes this into the paper, and he said, “I was out there, you know, a hundred sheep or something, and this bunch of about twenty Noongars came over the hill with their spears and I got my gun out and said, “Don’t come any closer!”” And one of them stepped forward, and said, “You only got one shot,” and took the rifle from him, and whatever he did to the thing defused it, you know took the powder out, then gave it back to him and said, “Now you’ve just got a lump of wood, too.” So this is the agency- this is what we could yet be, the story’s not over yet, to try and deconstruct some of the narratives we’ve been offered- and some of the brutal truths, you know, deal with them. What else, what else can we get going? I saw lots of examples, and to find those Noongar texts using English and using colonial place names, that was thrilling.

Elfie: I like that, that the story is not yet over. We only have maybe five minutes left, so that’s pretty hard for me to choose what questions to ask you, but, reflecting on that, ‘The story isn’t over yet,’ your works will have a life, like a cycle, and they will be read differently by the generations that follow us. Is there a hope embedded in your novels in a way, for what kind of impact they will have?

Kim: I think there’s hope in them- that was very flattering what you said- I hope people will still read them. You know, narratives and discourse changes rapidly and that way of communicating, being absorbed in the mind of one another and creating a world out of internal space- I’m not sure if that mode of communication will remain strong. I certainly hope so, and of course I worry about how I may well be the first successful white man born in the family line, I worry how that could be read if people don’t read in terms of layers and resonance in so long, so I don’t know.

Elfie: So, perhaps just to end by returning to the theme tonight which is ‘Still and Yet,’ Kim, could you tell us what is yet to come for you?

Kim: It’s a long time since the last novel, my last novel was 2017, I haven’t got the next one done yet, but in terms of some of the stuff we’ve been talking about- so literature I partly work in that area because I’m shy and I’m introverted, but increasingly some of the work with the subset of the Noongar community, a little clan or group where there’s trust- which is a difficult thing to sustain- I try to build community out of recovering language and turning ourselves into instruments for what that language represents, and reconnecting creation stories with landscape in that same sort of way, I find that enormously invigorating. It’s difficult for me, the sort of person I am, but I would like to keep that happening, and small enough so that increasing community can get the benefits of it being consolidated there, and the benefits of some of the things I’ve touched on- this other narrative, this other storytelling tradition, what we can get that up and going again, that drives me a lot. I would like- the only way I get any sort of fame and glory and the only way people can let me finish my sentences, is because I write novels, so I’ve got to try do that again, once or twice.

Elfie: Thank you, Kim. That is a lovely note to end on, and I would like to thank you for being very generous with us and sharing about your work and yourself with us, so can you join me in thanking Kim again?

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