This week on Streets of Your Town, we speak to renowned author and proud Wiradjuri woman Dr Anita Heiss, who is a special guest of the 60th Brisbane Writers Festival coming up in May.
In Brisbane, and many areas around south-east Queensland and northern New South Wales, floods have inundated our homes, towns and cities.
This on top of two years of living through the pandemic has hit local communities hard. Artists, writers and musicians were already at a low ebb, with little help from governments in their time of crisis.
While Australian artists may have been largely abandoned during the pandemic, they are now gathering to raise money for those inundated by flood.
Some may say that gathering to talk about art in the midst of a crisis is flippant. But Anita tells me on the podcast, it’s actually crucial for communities to recover.
“By May, I think we’re going to see this enormous celebration, not only of books and literature and authors being able to meet their readers and vice versa, but the fact that we can all come together in one place again after so long,” Heiss said.
“The festival this year will take on a different role because it is a place where people can come together and escape for a little while, through fiction or through poetry, through children’s stories and so forth, and also be around like-minded people with visions for the global village that we live in.
It’s a big 60th anniversary year for the Brisbane Writer’s Festival, which will also celebrate its status as the longest running writers festival in Australia with more than 200 events from May 3 to 8.
Heiss is also looking forward to reflecting on the ten years since the first edition of her pivotal book ‘Am I Black Enough For You?’, with “the matriarch of bookselling” Fiona Stager.
“Her wonderful bookshop, Avid Reader in West End has done lots of things during the floods as well. We were all up there charging our phones and our laptops. She made pots of tea for the elderly neighbours,” Heiss says.
“In the last 10 years since the original edition of ‘Am I Black Enough for You?’ came out, I’ve started learning my traditional language, we have seen obviously life in a pre and post COVID world and how we navigate that as authors but also just as individuals in society.
“We’ve seen the Black Lives Matter movement that had been going on for three decades in Australia, but of course became more prominent with the very public death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. In Brisbane alone, I marched with 36,000 other people in that massive march.
“We’ve had a renaissance in First Nations writing, and so I offer 20 specific reasons on why I think readers should be engaging with black literature in Australia.
“We’ve seen Cathy Freeman become one of our nations darlings, and it’s been two decades since she won gold. But at the same time, we’ve seen another Australian elite athlete, an Australian of the Year, Adam Goodes be almost crucified in the final years of his playing in the AFL for the Sydney Swans, a twice Brownlow Medallist. I’ve tried to throw a bit of a spotlight on those two sporting legends and Australians of the Year to see why the nation treated both those athletes quite differently.”
Heiss is pleased that First Nations knowledge and history has become better acknowledged and respected since that book was first released. She will also speak about her new novel Bila Yarudhanggalangdhuray, about the great flood of Gundagai.
“I’ve had all these people tweet me and message me about how, because of what’s been happening in Brisbane and the Northern Rivers, the story resonates with them,” she says.
“And now we’re hearing back then the local Wiradyuri people warned the settlers not to build in this area, the flood place, because it would flood and they didn’t listen, and of course they lost all these lives.
“There’s things resonating today, things that could have been done better, and how important it is to be listening to Indigenous knowledge of land and waters and climate and so forth.”
Anita says writing, and books, have never been more important, to give people solace in times of struggle.
“We are also seeing what’s unfolding in the Ukraine, another travesty, and I think there’ll be plenty of conversations on panels about how we can see the world through different lenses and through perspectives that can hopefully make more people more empathetic to what’s happening outside of our own circles,” she says.
A new feature of the Brisbane Writers Festival is “Brisbane as a Storied City”, curated by Nick Earls, pairing ten writers and poets with the places they have drawn inspiration from.
Events in that program include a banquet dinner with The Family Law author Benjamin Law at Sunnybank’s Landmark Restaurant; Yumi Stynes in conversation with Pig City writer Andrew Stafford at iconic music venue The Zoo, and a special presentation of Clare McFadden’s The Flying Orchestra, featuring the Queensland Youth Orchestra, at Brisbane City Hall.
Anita is particularly excited by the move to make many of the BWF events free with the option to donate what you can afford, while other events are ticketed; enabling a more diverse audience to attend.
“That means for those people who can afford to pay $20 or $50, that’s great, and they will cover it for people who don’t have that capacity,” Heiss says.
“And I think that is a wonderful opportunity, because it means nobody misses out.
“In some of the bigger festivals where ticketing is quite expensive it does limit people being able to attend one or more. So I think that’s a great initiative.
"I love festivals because I get to meet my readers and I get to hear what they liked, what they didn’t like sometimes. I get to hear that too and that helps to make me a better writer, I think.”
Behind the Scenes
So an added bonus of this week’s Streets of Your Town episode is that by listening to it in your favourite podcast app or by clicking on the link above—you can get a glimpse into how a journo puts together a longer feature story for publication. I’ve been writing for In Queensland for a couple of months now—and this is the story that came from a couple of interviews with Anita and the director of the Brisbane Writers Festival Sarah Runcie. Listen out in the podcast and see if you can hear the grabs I picked out for the In Queensland story (link below) and how writing for the ear differs to writing for the page.
The pen is mightier—Six decades of proof that Brisbane is a truly storied city
I loved putting together this story for In Queensland on the big debut of new opera production The Sopranos. The gendered violence against women in much of the operatic canon and how we respond to it with modern eyes is a vexed and complex issue. As part of that ongoing debate, Opera Queensland has found a way to celebrate the power of women in opera. As writer of The Sopranos and acclaimed poet Sarah Holland-Batt said, “opera is an artform all about women’s power”, and those aspects are what she wants to celebrate in this production—such as the tremendous power and virtuosity of the female voice rising above the orchestra’s, on an equal footing with the male voice. I found this a fascinating debate to explore—hope you do too.
Modern twist: Opera Queensland welcomes change with open arms
And I also highly recommend getting to this show if you can—Black Cockatoo at The Powerhouse. It’s great to see this tribute to the incredible feats of Australia’s first international and all Indigenous cricket team finally make it to Brisbane after overcoming the challenges of bushfires and a worldwide pandemic to go on tour. This team of 13 First Nations men from Western Victoria including the great Johnny Mullagh were international sports stars, but rather than have their feats celebrated, they were moved off their lands onto missions on their return home from their triumphant tour. They embarked on the treacherous voyage to England and the unknown in 1868, all in the name of cricket.
It's cricket, but not as we know it as Black Cockatoo finally lands on stage
And this story—I just love it. It’s not mine, but oh how I wish it was. We need more stories that put a smile on our dial. Celebrate the feats of Chicken with me! I only have to look at the first photo in this story to crack a wide eyed grin.
Life of Chicken social pages blossom as the storm chaser goes on adventures
Talk again soon my Wandering Journo tribe!
Don’t forget to reply to this email and let me know any story ideas you want me to follow up!
xx Nance
Anita Heiss on First Nations writing