Video transcript
2019 NSW PRC author interview – Ambelin Kwaymullina

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TAMARA RODGERS: Hi, I'm Tamara Rodgers from the Premier's Reading Challenge. We're at Riverside Theatre Parramatta for the Sydney Writers Festival Secondary Schools Day. We're going to be joined by some students from Goldston High School who'll be having some conversations with the fantastic authors on the programme. We're really excited to be able to bring you these interviews. Thank you to the Sydney Writers Festival for having us along. And we'd also like to thank the Premier's Reading Challenge programme sponsors, our media partner News Local, and our supporting partner Dymocks Children's Charities. Thank you so much for your support.

INTERVIEWER: I'm from Goldston High School, and I'm here to interview Miss Ambelin. How have you been doing today?

AMBELIN KWAYMULLINA: Fantastic, loving the Sydney Writers Festival.

INTERVIEWER: One of the things I loved about the Interrogation of Ashala Wolf is the main character has aboriginal Australian heritage. Why do you think it's important to have representation in young adult fiction?

AMBELIN KWAYMULLINA: It's important for everyone, but particularly children and teenagers, to be able to see themselves in stories and to see themselves authentically in stories. So to see stories written by aboriginal people about being aboriginal, which is really what the Tribe Series is. It's drawn really strongly on my experience as an Aboriginal person, on my culture as a member of the Balgo people, on the values my family has, and how they pass those values onto me. It's science fiction, but it is in many ways really just a representation of my reality.

INTERVIEWER: In this book, people from Ashala's tribe are locked up, because they are different and the government fears them. What inspired that?

AMBELIN KWAYMULLINA: So the Tribe Series is based on the stolen generations, so two generations of my family were taken away. And a lot of the laws and institutions I wrote into the series, I wrote them into a speculative fiction context, but they're based on real laws. So the law that Ashala is subject to divides people into three categories, people who have an ability and they are illegals, people who don't have abilities and they are citizens, and people who have an ability but is considered benign, and they are exempt.

So while I wrote that as speculative, it's based on an actual law. It's based on the West Australian Native Citizenship Rights Act 1944, which provided what was purportedly a form of citizenship for Aboriginal people, but really what it was doing was exempting them from racially based restrictions that only applied in the first place, because they were Aboriginal. And in order to get your citizenship, you had to say that you were essentially going to give up your Aboriginality, that was the only way to obtain it. So these laws said they were offering some form of belonging, but actually they were deeply hostile to Aboriginality, and they were very damaging to aboriginal people. And I was exploring those laws in the context of the Tribe Series in a speculative fiction way.

INTERVIEWER: It's very interesting, because I found out not so long ago that one of my generations came from the stolen times as well, which I just found out. And that's pretty cool to know that other people have it as well, actually a lot of people have it. Yes it's kind of a sad thing, honestly.

AMBELIN KWAYMULLINA: Yeah, I think it's increasingly better knowing than it was. For a long time those stories were just aboriginal stories that we talked about amongst ourselves, but a lot of other people didn't know them. And I think now there's much more education, and people do have a much better understanding than they used to.

INTERVIEWER: When you make the main characters, how much of yourself do you put into them and any reasons for choosing those characteristics of yourself?

AMBELIN KWAYMULLINA: With that series, I always felt that Ashala was the character most like me, which is why the story is dominantly told from her perspective. And then the other characters also a bit like me, but not as much as her, as she was when I understood the best. But really I think a bit of myself probably goes into everything I write. And think as a writer, you're not always aware of how much goes into it until maybe you read it back or people say, oh, I could see you in that section of the book. One thing I was conscious of was there's a character in that book called Jaz, who was always from the beginning heavily based on my brother Blaze.

So It's a fairly defined character. He never does what anyone tells him. Whatever you're going to think he's going to do, he goes and does something different. He was an incredibly easy character to write, because I just had to think what would Blaze say in this situation and then write it into the book. And anyone who knows Blaze reads that book and says, that's Blaze, isn't it? That Jaz character, that's really Blaze. And I'm like, yeah, basically it is.

Also Jaz is a fire starter. He can control fire. And if Blaze had a power that would be his power. We'd probably all be a little scared of him. He wanted to get a fire pit a few years ago, and nobody thought it was a good idea. We thought that he would probably cause some damage with that fire pit, because things do tend to go wrong when he tries to build things. So we discourage the fire pit notion quite strongly.

INTERVIEWER: Pyromaniacs. What can you do about them? What books did you grow up reading, and what effect did they have on you in writing?

AMBELIN KWAYMULLINA: Well, when I was a teen, there was really a super limited range of books I had access to and certainly not the books that are being written now. So very hard to find books about aboriginal people when I was a teenager, hard to find books about really all nationalist people when I was a teenager. And these days, of course, there was a much better selection of books. There are so many more voices speaking, and there's some amazing books being published. And there is now also a lot of aboriginal young adult books, but there never was when I was a teenager.

So I read all sorts of books, but I think my problem was, and I think is a problem that's echoed by a lot of marginalised writers in my generation, is that we never saw ourselves in them. And so then when we got older, we started to write the stories we wish we'd had back then.

INTERVIEWER: One of the things that I admire about your writing is that you can write in lots of different genres, because the Tribe Series is dystopian fiction while Catching Teller Crow is more of a paranormal mystery. What's your favourite genre to write about and why?

AMBELIN KWAYMULLINA: I suppose I'd see it all as speculative fiction of some form or other, and that is my favourite genre. I like stories that allow you to break boundaries a bit more. And I think strictly fiction allows you to do that. It gives much greater scope for imagination. And I describe what I do as indigenous futurisms, which is a form of storytelling where indigenous writers use a speculative fiction genre to challenge colonialism and imagine indigenous futures. And so that's what I try to do in my work. And I just really enjoy working with spec fic.

INTERVIEWER: Are you planning on writing in any other genres like romance or horror?

AMBELIN KWAYMULLINA: No, I think this is pretty much it. I'm writing another one at the moment, which is sort of a interplanetary dystopian type one. I'm not even sure what genre you'd call that particularly except broadly speculative fiction. But that's just what I love.

INTERVIEWER: What's your favourite book to write and why?

AMBELIN KWAYMULLINA: I think the first book in the Tribe Series was my first novel. So the first novel, I think, that will always have a special place in my heart. And my first picture book was a book called Crow and the Waterhole, and it's still my favourite, because it was the first one. It was also the first time I illustrated anything. And at that point, I didn't really know how to illustrate.

So the publishers said to me, oh, you know, would you like to illustrate this book? And I was like, oh, yeah, I'd love to illustrate it. So they said, go and make a storyboard and bring it back to us, and we'll have a look at it. And I was like, yep, make your boss a storyboard, don't you worry about that. Then I had to go ahead and Google storyboard, because I didn't know what one was. These days, having found out what a storyboard is, which is essentially how you're planning out the pictures, much better at illustration now than I was back then.

INTERVIEWER: What inspired you to write picture books and adult fiction mainly?

AMBELIN KWAYMULLINA: The picture books were where I started. And partly, I guess, because I'm an artist as well as a writer that began me down the path. But I always wanted to write a novel, so I'd always been writing novels for a long time. I just never published anything. So Ashala was the first novel that really came together for me.

And actually Blaze was the one who gave me the title for that. So he came to my room one day, and he's like, I've got a great title for a novel. And I'm like, OK, what is it? And he's like, The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf. I'm like, that's a really good title. What's the story? He's like, oh, no story, I've just got the title. He said, I'm giving this title to you and off he went. So from that point on I started to think about what the story would be. And once I had the first line, which was he was taking me to the machine, I started to write it from there.

INTERVIEWER: Thank you so much for being here with me today, Ambelin. It's been amazing talking with you. I hope everyone watching out there today enjoys reading your incredible novels as much as I did while they work to complete the Premier's Reading Challenge.

AMBELIN KWAYMULLINA: Thank you so much for the interview.