Ellen van Neerven’s Heat and Light, page 76

Ellen van Neerven, Heat and Light (UQP 2015)

This book of short stories gives no external indication that it’s a work of Blak queer fiction. The back cover and introductory pages describe the contents accurately enough – traditional story telling with ‘a unique contemporary twist’, characters ‘caught between a desire for freedom and a sense of belonging’ – but make no reference to First Nations, unless you count mention of the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards – Indigenous Writing, and the David Unaipon Award, and a discreet badge that reads ‘Black Australian Writing’. Queerness gets even less acknowledgement: apart from a quote from the ABR that the stories ‘evoke mystery and sensuality in equal measure’, there’s no mention of sexuality at all.

So let me tell you: this is a book in which there’s a lot of sex. In most of the stories, queerness and Blakness are taken for granted.

Having got that off my chest, I can tell you that this collection of stories by Mununjali Yugambeh writer Ellen van Neerven is terrific. It’s in three parts: ‘Heat’, five stories that amount to a compellingly compressed family saga; ‘Water’, a single longer story that is the big surprise of the collection; and ‘Light’, ten tales of complex intimate relationships. Most, perhaps all, the main characters are First Nations and most of the action takes place in either Queensland or Western Australia. (One character refers to my home as ‘slimehole Sydney’.)

Page 76 (still my age) comes part way through ‘Water’. The story is set in a future Australia, where ‘Aboriginal spirituality’ is a dominant religion, and President Tanya Sparkle is implementing some dire policies regarding First Nations people while presenting a veneer of respect – creating chaos in the public transport system by changing all route destinations to not-always-accurate Indigenous names and, at the heart of this story, re-forming offshore islands to create a ‘super island’ where Aboriginal people can apply to live, a kind of apartheid dressed up as innovative native title.

The reader has barely settled in to this brave new Australia, when further weirdness is revealed. The narrator has been employed as ‘Cultural Liaison Officer’ for the first re-formation project, in the islands of Moreton Bay. Her job places the story well into the realm of the fantastic: she is to liaise with non-human beings who have recently appeared on the islands, the ‘plantpeople’. Page 76 introduces them:

These creatures, beings, I’m not yet comfortable on how to place them, were formed when they started experimenting here, mining the sea in preparation for the islandising. It was a young botanist … who first discovered them: he distinguished their green human-like heads lined up on the banks of Russell Island …

Right from the start, the government has been very protective of them, so they don’t become a public spectacle. You need permission from a government official to go near the population.

Basically, they present a problem for the Project at this stage, as all the southern Moreton Bay islands are being evacuated. This means everyone has to leave their homes and businesses for an indeterminate amount of time while the engineers work on the re-forming. These plantpeople, who divide their time between the water, Russell Island and the edges of some of the smaller unoccupied islands, must cooperate during the process, for the safety of all.

Some of them ‘root’ – that is, they firm their roots to an area, into the ground, and are hard to persuade to move; you can’t get them away. Milligan tells me there are a few that actively voice their opinions within the community, speaking out against the government and their plans.

They are a very intelligent species. I read a transcript of an interview with one of them. She spoke well, from the notes, a steady, formalistic English. Hers was the only first-person account and insight I have into what these people are about. A plant’s mind.

So in the middle of a collection of more or less social-realist stories about queer Blak life in Australia, there’s a weird – and very funny – piece of fantasy science fiction.

It’s a complex set-up. The Cultural Liaison Officer’s job is to persuade the plantpeople to cooperate, to allow themselves to be displaced. At first she is successful – she gets on well with these non-human creatures and comes to believe, as her white employers don’t, that they are fully sentient. As her sympathy for their plight deepens, she comes to suspect a darker purpose behind her ‘liaison’ work. She forms a forbidden bond with Larapinta, a female of the species, and that bond … well, I already said there’s a lot of sex in this book. But then there are further twists as the origins of the plantpeople are revealed and the parallels with the original dispossession of First Nations peoples on this continent come into sharp focus.

Ellen van Neerven is better known as a poet than as a fiction-writer. Their two books Comfort Food and Throat (links are to my blog posts) are wonderful. I found Heat and Light in a street library. I’m not parting with it.