The Sydney Writers’ Festival is always one of my annual highlights. I’m off to a very quiet start this year, just one session today in the smallish Gallery Room at the State Library. And then nothing until Friday.
12.30: And the Award Goes To …
The Festival website invites us to:
be among the first to hear from some of the winners of the 2024 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, in a discussion covering the impact that awards can have on a writer’s career.
We did get to hear from three of the winners: Ali Cobby Eckermann (She Is the Earth), Helena Fox (The Quiet and the Loud) and Christine Keneally (Ghosts of the Orphanage). But the conversation wasn’t about the awards’ impacts. From my point of view, it was a lot more interesting than that. What follows is the best I can glean from my mostly illegible notes aided by my unreliable memory.
Bernadette Brennan, senior judge of the awards, kicked off the conversation by saying that though the three award-winning books were in different genres – a verse novel, a thoroughly researched piece of non-fiction, and a novel – they all dealt with intergenerational trauma with an emphasis on the vulnerability of children, and they all found ways of pointing to healing. That set the agenda for what followed.
Ali Cobby Eckermann spoke first, and did her best to follow the brief of the program notes. Her first verse novel, Ruby Moonlight, was written in the context of the Howard government’s Intervention in he Northern Territory. The awards it received enabled her to leave her home with her Yankunytjatjara family, go south and buy a house which she set up as a writers’ retreat. When she unexpectedly received a Windham-Campbell Literature Prize (link is to the Wikipedia entry on that prize) her life was turned upside down again. When she came to write She Is the Earth, she was very alone. But she drew on her Yankunytjatjara grannies – though they had passed, she imagined them as creating a safe place for her to create.
Helena Fox spoke in fairly abstract terms of having endured trauma as a child and an adult, and said she saw herself as opening a space where her young readers could see that it is possible to speak of hard things. Among the loud things like abuse, you have a right to be alone, quiet, to ground yourself.
Christine Keneally’s book is about terrible things done to children, focusing on the testimony of survivors from an orphanage in Vermont. Its seed was planted when she ‘wandered into a room’ at a conference in Brisbane where people were talking about the extreme difficulty of finding any record of their early childhood. She discovered the unfolding story of abuse in orphanages in Australia. She reasoned that similar things must have happened in the USA. She discovered that indeed they had, but there the only redress survivors had was through litigation, which was often a damaging process in itself. As she found and interviewed survivors, she saw what a powerful antidote talking is. She realised the importance of bearing witness – and that is what the book seeks to do.
Some snippets from the conversation that followed:
Ali Cobby Eckermann:
‘It shits me that you have to forgive everyone to heal yourself.‘
‘Poetry can change the dialogue about trauma away from trauma itself to something like regeneration or repair. It can turn something painful into beauty.’
Helene Fox:
How can you heal if you can’t share?
Christine Keneally:
I spoke to people who had been married for 30 years but hadn’t told their spouses about their lives. Sometimes I was the first person they told their story to.
There was a time for questions, but no one raised their hand. I’d love to know what contact Christine Keneally has had with the Lost Generations people in Australia. If I wasn’t so shy and needing to get home, I would have stopped to ask if she knew about Bryan Hartas’s autobiography Hard As (link to my blog post) and the work people like my niece Edwina Shaw have been doing helping members of the Lost Generations to tell their stories.
On my way out I heard one of the few men in the audience mutter to another, ‘What a miserable lot!’ That’s not at all how I saw it, but I guess there weren’t a lot of laughs.
I bought a copy of She Is the Earth.
Me fail? I fly! 