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Eight books that have shaken and shaped us: Unearthing our First Nations classics

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Eight books that have shaken and shaped us: Unearthing our First Nations classics

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"It's hard for any man/ To be caged in a prison cell/ But if your skin is black/ It's like burning in hell."
When Graeme Dixon wrote those lines in his poem Regrets, he knew what he was talking about. Born in 1955, the Noongar man spent much of his early life in institutions, including jail. He knew about Black deaths in custody and had been on the receiving end of police violence.

During a spell in Fremantle prison he began to write poems that bore witness to his experiences. As fellow poet Ali Cobby Eckermann describes them, they are "a poignant portrayal of hardship in a disadvantaged life ... streetwise and honest".

When he was 25, Dixon decided to keep out of jail. After a battle with alcohol and drugs he met his wife Sharmaine, who encouraged him to develop as a writer. He studied at the University of Western Australia and Curtin University and lectured on Aboriginal history and social justice issues. UQP published his first poetry collection, called Holocaust Island, Dixon's name for Australia. The book won the inaugural David Unaipon Award in 1989, but in time it went out of print.

Dixon died in 2010, unaware that Holocaust Island would become a classic. It has been reissued as one of eight award-winning books in UQP's new First Nations Classics series, designed to bring the work of some of our best authors back into the spotlight. The series features a diverse range of fiction, nonfiction and poetry and each book is introduced by an acclaimed contemporary First Nations writer.

Writer and poet Yasmin Smith, who edited the series, acknowledges that "classic" is a word used to describe revered work that has been in the canon for a very long time. But of course First Nations people have been telling their stories for far longer. UQP chose "classics" to describe works by First Nations writers "that stand out within our own community".

Smith, who is of South Sea Islander, Northern Cheyenne, Kabi Kabi and English heritage, chose "really culturally significant" books from UQP's long and rich backlist. She consulted the authors, or in cases where they had died, their families.

"We strove for a crosshatching of genres and authors to revive books that have been prominent across different decades ... It's always good to be putting old books back into the hands of new readers."

Some of the authors are already well known. Tony Birch's Miles Franklin-shortlisted first novel, Blood, his tale of a brother's lifelong promise to protect his sister, is here; and so is Mununjali person Ellen van Neerven's groundbreaking first book, the 2014 story collection Heat and Light, which Alison Whittaker says in her introduction was passed around in widening circles and greeted with surprise, thrill and awe. It was "blak, queer, sharp, horny, experimental, speculative, weird" and "it shook something out of us".

Also on the list is Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, first published in 1996 under the name of Doris Pilkington and now reissued under her Aboriginal name, Nugi Garimara. Her account of how her mother Molly led her two sisters on an epic walk across remote Western Australia to find their parents became a worldwide sensation in 2002 when Phillip Noyce released it as a film, Rabbit-Proof Fence. The book and the film still stand as a condemnation of the Stolen Generation policies.

Other books have undeservedly faded into the background since they were first released. They all draw on lived experience. Ruby Langford Ginibi's memoir Don't Take Your Love to Town was a bestseller in 1988. She lost her mother when she was six, grew up on a mission, moved out at 15, lived in huts and tents in the bush and raised nine children. In her introduction Nardi Simpson hails her as a brave Black matriarch who "lived the life she wrote; she birthed and raised the characters in it".

Wiradjuri writer Jeanine Leane's 2011 short-story collection Purple Threads is based on her own life growing up in Gundagai with her nan and aunties, with unpredictable visits from her mother. Another fiction collection is Archie Weller's The Window Seat: Ernie Dingo's introduction remembers Weller as an old mate, a quiet bloke who told bloody good yarns.

Herb Wharton's first book Unbranded, released in 1992, is a novel based on his life as a drover in the outback and is full of vivid accounts of scrub running, bush races and rodeos. Kev Carmody says in his introduction that Wharton has masterfully combined oral recollections and Indigenous cultural concepts into the written word.

Since these books were first released there has been a boom in publishing First Nations writers. UQP publishes such acclaimed authors as Tony Birch, Evelyn Araluen, Ellen van Neerven, Larissa Behrendt, Melissa Lucashenko and Tara June Winch. Other publishers have joined UQP in putting out books that have won awards and have become bestsellers.

"We're everywhere," says Yasmin Smith. "We've always been telling our stories, but now we're winning incredible prizes across the continent. There's a real resurgence, a hunger for First Nations stories."

She is confident there is enough quality UQP backlist to make the series a regular offering, beginning with another eight books to come out next year. There is also the possibility of collaborating with other publishers and their backlists.

Making an important impact are the cover designs by Jenna Lee, a Larrakia, Wardaman and Karajarri woman. Each book is a different colour and has a window-like circle showing an abstract pattern to represent its unique features. "They are sneak peeks into the stories and they will really pop on the shelves," Smith says.

One question that is hard to answer is whether Australia has become more enlightened, or is still Graeme Dixon's nightmare Holocaust Island. In her introduction to his book, Ali Cobby Eckermann says that though much progress has been made since 1989, Dixon's writings are still an emotional mirror to what many Aboriginal people experience today.

Yet the series also offers hope in the exuberance and fun and warm connection revealed in so many of the stories. As Yasmin Smith says, these books are a celebration of First Nations writing.
First Nations Classics (UQP) are sold as a pack for $150. Tony Birch will host a celebration of the series with a special gala event, Writing Blak Legacies, at The Wheeler Centre, Melbourne, on July 6. The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.

Jane Sullivan is a books columnist and reviewer for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

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'We've always been telling our stories': First Nations classics released

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Streetwise poetry, tales of a brave matriarch and books that have shaken and shaped us: The University of Queensland Press has identified eight classic texts by Indigenous writers.

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Ellen on racism and misogyny in sport for The Garret podcast

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Ellen on racism and misogyny in sport for The Garret podcast

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ASTRID: Welcome. It is such a thrill to have you back on The Garret, Ellen. Congratulations on . This is your first work of long form nonfiction. Given that it comes out in May, 2023, most people won't have read Personal Score when they listen to this interview. Can you introduce us to this new work?

ELLEN: I feel unnervingly calm about it, which is quite interesting, I think. I haven't always felt calm about this book coming out, because I was very, very anxious in completing this book. And then in maybe the last two years I've been very anxious about this book, and I started to think about why that might be the case. Why more than other books, basically. And I thought, well, this book has had the longest journey. It's probably been about eight years on this journey, of first trying to write it and first doing a little bit of writing around it, and then actually having made the book and it coming out. And that's probably double the length of the period it took the others... I've written three other books... For them to have been made. It's understandable that you're feeling double the emotions for everything. Double the anxiety, double the relief when you finally get it across the desk to the editor, and just the weight of it kind of made sense because of the time that it had taken to work on it compared to the other books.

ASTRID: In Personal Score, you are talking about sport in Australia and you are asking the question, what does it mean to play sport on First Nations land? You look at the racism and the misogyny that is inherent in Australian sport, but also international sport. And you are talking about yourself. This is not a pure work of external nonfiction. There are very clear and beautiful threads of memoir in here as well. With that very long journey to publication, eight years as you just said, why did it take so long?

ELLEN: I think I had to work out what it was and how I was going to write about it, and a lot of things as they do happen in that time. And I think initially perhaps I saw it maybe being fiction, and then I realised that creative non-fiction was going to be the best container for the work. As you mentioned, it gives me the possibility to have different textures. There's that personal memoir that you spoke of, there's journalism, there's history, and then there's also poetic passages as well. Yeah, I think I found a sense of, this is going to be the right form. And there was writing from eight years ago and then there was newer writing that was being woven together, as well as research and interviews. And I guess there was a lot of questions that I had, that I wanted to explore in this work.

And a lot of them are meant to be quite open-ended questions. As you said, it speaks to really, really big things about misogyny and racism, and queer phobia and transphobia, particularly in Australian sport. And I wanted to do that at every level. Looking at professional level sport, and examples of having very mainstream events, as well as more community and grassroots level as well. I wanted to disrupt the idea of binaries of all kinds, and I wanted to write all the sports stories that I wanted to read, basically. I remember there was one point in the journey of writing this where I was like... Well also, it's a big book. A few people have said that to me, like Michaela McGuire from Melbourne Writers' Festival said when it came across her desk, she was shocked by the size of it. It's a bigger book than my previous books, and huge when you compare it to Throat, which was my more recent poetry book.

You can get lost in that process of writing, and I'm sure other writers would speak to that experience as well. You can get lost when you are writing such a lengthy book that has more than 40 chapters, and each of the pieces, some of them are quite different to each other, and you're sort of creating this architecture for the work. And I was just thinking, 'Oh, there's so much that I want to write about'. I was doing this thing when I was a little bit blocked where I was like, 'Well, what are all the things that you want to have in this book?' I just wrote a list. I guess one of them would be writing about pregnant athletes, for example.

Like, 'I have to include this in this book because this is a book about women's sport'. So that's just an example. And then I got to over a hundred and I thought, 'My gosh, this is big. This is going to be a really... I'm maybe not going to include all of these'. It was a process of gathering, and I really relied on my experience working in poetry and putting poems together. Putting poetry collections together was helpful, but also fiction as well was a huge help in terms of writing this, because I really wanted to write an emotional landscape. That was a really big thing that I wanted to include. And for the reader to go on this journey that a few people have told me that is compelling, which is kind of an interesting thing to say about a work of creative nonfiction that covers so much ground.

But yeah, I was like, 'Well, that's good'. I guess that's what I was thinking when I was writing it, wanting to create this sense of all these places that are such a central... Or of this book, country is such a central core of this book, thinking right back to these strong memories of me being 12, 13, 14 and travelling for sport, and those drives, and my experiences of those places, and the things that happened in those times that of course are really heightened when you are that age as well. I wanted to feed that in, knowing that me writing about those experiences and those places would also unlock emotions in other people, and so then that would be a shared experience. So that was some of my intentions for the work.

ASTRID: Ellen, anybody who knows me knows that I am not a sporty person, and you made me feel many things as I read Personal Score, and your recollections of being your young teenage self, running out onto the field, you even made me remember myself running out onto the netball court not knowing what I was doing there, but still having fun with my friends. You evoke things in your reader, and it is a beautifully written work, but I also think it is a significant work in terms of how readers and everybody in Australia considers sport, and how we approach it and what it means. I'm going to admit one of my biases here. I don't know very much about sport, Ellen, but I live with an American who works for the AFL. I exist in a bubble that includes a lot of sport. Personal Score is now on his bedside table for him to read with a matter of urgency, I should say. I wanted to ask your experience as someone who is a creative, and you write poetry, and you exist in the art scene and are beloved in the art scene in Australia, but you also exist in the world of sport. Sometimes I feel there is a tension there between creatives and sport, and apart from the obvious thing, which is sport gets way more money than the arts, how do you navigate the experience of both?

ELLEN: Yeah, and that also is a good question. It also comes out in the book, it also comes out in the motivation for writing the book. I think a lot of people will have their own experiences of this, because I think it's common to enjoy both sport and artistic pursuits. And I also think it is common to just favour one as well. I think when I was younger, I did feel a really strong sense of tension, and it wasn't tension that necessarily hurt me. I wouldn't use any of those strong words. But I just it found quite interesting I guess, between me being in a writer kind of existing in that environment, but also being really into sport. And so I would be in my footy kit and I'd be at a poetry reading, because they were always at the same time as well. It is almost like you have to choose.

I actually have a really beautiful memory of performing, sort of doing an opening performance for Uncle Archie Roach at the Judith Wright Centre a few years ago, and then having a grand final later that night. Actually having a neighbour come with me to the Judith Wright Centre and then drive me to the final, because I don't drive, so that's definitely sometimes a barrier to be able to go to matches. And so I was thinking, 'Oh, I'm just going to have to choose one or the other because of the timing'. and doing both, being able to have that beautiful experience meeting Uncle Archie and performing on the same stage. So I think those are the kind of nights where I'm like, 'My life is complete', because I got to do both.

I think sometimes a certain camp of literary people can think that sport is anti-intellectual, it's all about the body, of course rightly responding to some of the toxic attributes of organised sport in this country can produce. And likewise, I've had the same conversations with people that I've played sport with who don't really understand the arts, and there might be this suspicion when I sort of explain what I do. Not everyone, I'm just talking about a certain group of people. And so that's kind of a hard thing to communicate, and I think sometimes there's this pressure to choose between one or the other. But like I said, I've always seen it as a very fluid thing because a lot of my family members, a lot of mob... We love the arts, we love sport. You can be at a writer's retreat for Aboriginal writers, tortured underwriters, and then we could be writing all day and then we could be watching the State of Origin or something that night, and everyone will get into it.

I've seen the community in both, and I've actually seen a lot of parallels between both worlds. Yeah, thanks for the question.

ASTRID: Reading Personal Score has made me reflect on an experience I had about two years ago. I went with some friends to see Roxane Gay and Jamila Rizvi in conversation live on stage at the Melbourne Convention Centre, and that was a phenomenal arty, writer reader kind of event. And then we walked out and of course it was AFL season, and walking back towards the centre of the city, there was like a hundred thousand people coming out of the MCG, high on a great game that they saw. And kind of seeing this crowd mix, it was a beautiful thing. And it was a lovely, lovely moment of the arts and sport physically meeting as a crowd as they crossed. And I don't know, I've been reflecting on that after reading Personal Score quite a bit.

Now, this is being published in May, and it's in time with the 2023 Women's World Cup. If we think about the logistics of publishing and selling books and all of that, that strikes me as a very different way to publish a book than your previous poetry collections. How different is it for you on that side? You're with the same publisher, UQP, but I don't know, are you going to different events? Are different things scheduled in order to talk about Personal Score?

ELLEN: Yeah, I was going to tell you my schedule for the year only to realise that a lot of it's embargoed, so I won't talk to that. But I will say that I definitely am going to try and see as many matches as possible of the Women's World Cup. And like you said, it's not as if UQP were Aviva, feeling my publisher was forcing me to finish this book in time for the Women's World Cup. But we definitely had conversations about it and it does, like you said, add a different layer when you're writing a book that will come out when an event is happening. Because for me it was a motivation I guess, because I was thinking so much about country, which is, like I said, such a present theme in this book. And I was thinking, 'Well, what is country going to feel like when we have this event that I've been waiting my whole life to have, and be able to go see?'

And I think it's going to be huge. Like I said in my book, I went to the last Women's World Cup in France, and I think this one's going to be way bigger, and it's going to be here. And for anyone who doesn't know, I believe it's this winter, so I think the final will be in August. So July, August. The book will be out for a while before then, and of course it's not just a book that is about this event. It's just going to be out there at the same time as this event, and there's going to be many conversations that are going to be had before it, and there's going to be many conversations that are going to be had after it.

ASTRID: You're not on social media, are you?

ELLEN: No.

ASTRID: That strikes me as an incredibly good life choice. You also strike me as a relatively private person. In parts of Personal Score, you are writing about yourself, you are writing about gender identity and orientation. You are writing about your experiences on and off the field. That is a profound sharing with the world. I teach, and a lot of students are in the process of or considering writing about their experience, their identity, sometimes their trauma. I wanted to ask you the motivation for putting that into the world.

ELLEN: Yeah, that's a good question. A big question, a good one. I'll circle back and just talk about some of my favourite writers that have influenced me writing this book. So non-fiction writers specifically, which helped me think about writing non-fiction. I see myself as someone who moves through genres because it's a very fluid way, it's a way to move freely and tread lightly and be nimble, be agile to use various sports metaphors. But I really needed to read the works of Billy-Ray Belcourt, Maggie Nelson, Helen MacDonald, and others, to be able to see what I wanted to do, and feel that sense of that openness of putting yourself on the page, but knowing that you are doing it for the reader, and for other people, and that it's a collaboration with the reader. And choosing those moments to dive deep and choosing those moments where you might just want to sit at the surface a little bit.

Whenever I was feeling like, 'Oh, I'm not sure how much I want to reveal here. Have I revealed too much?' I would think about those writers and the journey that their books took me on. And then I was listening to Mahogany Browne speak the other day, who's an incredible poet. And she was talking about trauma, writing trauma, I think in much more elegant terms than I can. And what's an interesting thing that she said in this talk was about how much we equate writing a book, producing a piece of art, with healing or therapy or something like that. It's become equated to that, but for me, it's not that.

And maybe for some people it is, but she was sort of saying something that I really, really identify with. She was saying, 'Writing the book is not the therapy, it's not the healing, it's the first step. It's the object that you can take to the therapist, or you can use as sort of a tool to realise, what's the next step? I've written my story down. I've written my hurt down. I've written these hurtful things that have happened not just to me, but maybe to my family, my community. What's the next step after that?' And that's crucial.

I think it was something that I really needed to hear, because writing this book wasn't cathartic at all. It was painful, it was a struggle. Well, that's my approach to writing. It is hard, and it hurts. You are thinking about whether it is worth it, and you are having conversations with other people about whether it is worth it. But I saw a way forward with this book, and I saw that it fit into my journey not just as a writer, but as a person as well. I hope that answered your question.

ASTRID: Absolutely, Ellen. What you just said about being in collaboration with the reader was a really beautiful phrase. Personal Score does feel like that in many cases. You are reflecting on your experience on books you've read, books that have influenced you, games that you played, so many different aspects of your life. And as you mentioned earlier, you cover other people's stories as well, in this book. There are elements of journalism, and I wanted to specifically draw listeners' attention to the essay 'Trans Sporting Utopias', given that the news is sometimes not a very nice place in 2023. In that essay, you interview several people about their own experience, putting you in a very different vantage point in that piece of writing. And I wanted to ask, as a writer, how you approached those interviews.

ELLEN: Yeah, thank you. Some of this book was already published by that time in other avenues, other journals, other means, before this book comes out. And that was one of them that I was writing as a piece that existed as a standalone piece on its own, but I always knew that it was going to make its way into the book as well. And it's through Griffith Review. I received a fellowship with them, which allowed me to think about all the ways that I could approach writing a story about trans people and their relationship with sport, which as you alluded to, is a really kind of an active pushing against mainstream media and anti-transness, that kind of anti-trans agenda that exists out there in the world and that are always popping up in new ways, particularly in sport. The conversation around sport and trans people always seems to be about exclusion. There are very few stories that are just about trans people enjoying their sport, or their achievements in sport.

So constantly coming against these hurtful and violent sort of attitudes towards sports people, trans sports people, that can really be very harmful, particularly young people who are trans, or gender questioning, or non-binary. I think I wanted to approach writing a piece that would be a different kind of piece. And I was writing it through the lens of my own experience, but other people's experiences as well. And so that's why I really wanted to write kind of a journalism that was coming from a community perspective and from a plural perspective, and in friendship with the people that I interviewed, some of who are really good friends as well. I wanted to write the sort of piece that they would feel like I captured them in all of their fullness as people, and that they would be proud of. I was sort of writing portraits of them.

And again, I do write about professional trans and non-binary athletes, but again, I'm also writing about people who don't play sport professionally that might just have a kick on the weekend, might be really into weightlifting as my friend Ali is, and write about how... Chart their experiences from a young age to now, and how they feel about sport, and what they imagine a more inclusive and a more radical and trans sporting world could look like in the future.

I felt so honoured to have their voices in the book. Definitely always imagined that it would be a book that would have other people's voices in it. And it kind of makes me think about how in Throat, that became part of my practise to include, with permission and with respect, other people's voices, particularly people that I'm very close relationally with, so my mom and my auntie. So to have that, to use those same approaches to write that particular piece, which as you said, does appear in this book. I think it sort of appears in maybe last section, I think.

ASTRID: It is a beautiful essay. Thank you so much for your time today, and real congratulations on Personal Score.

ELLEN: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure to talk to you as always, and have a lovely day.

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Ellen van Neerven on racism and misogyny in sport

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ASTRID: Welcome. It is such a thrill to have you back on The Garret, Ellen. Congratulations on . This is your first work of long form nonfiction. Given that it comes out in May, 2023, most people won't have read Personal Score when they listen to this interview.

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Writing A Future Self (or against permanence) - an essay by Ellen van Neerven

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Writing A Future Self (or against permanence) - an essay by Ellen van Neerven

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The act of writing is more than testimony - it is expansion.

Sometimes I don't recognise myself on the page - that's necessary.

When the new book was finished - I thought of the bunya tree across the way: its tough bark, the sweetness in a new morning - and flowers.

When the new book was finished - I remembered what a writer-friend said about cages.

(How her memoir put a metal trap over her body and there was so much bleeding and public bleeding and it was weighty and severe and accumulative - and if she had known the cost...)

In my fiction, I wrote the near-future - and some of it came true. (First Nations art grew in prominence and visibility, architecture changed, our mob faced increased surveillance, the completion of a city grew more grotesque and destructive, exploitation and colonisation continued.)

In non-fiction, I splice together personal memoir with history, journalism and poetry. I expand my understanding of language and embodiment - my consciousness grows. (Friends reintroduced themselves with new names over the course of the writing of the book. Loved ones passed away. Sources on the internet mysteriously vanished.)

Too indecisive and fickle for tattoos - instead my pen finds the pond of my shoulder, the bone of my ankle. The book is called Personal Score - in P.S., left is personal, right is score.

I speak to a (different from above) friend on the phone - is this how you usually feel before the release of a book? she asks gently.

Maybe I am a bit more nervous this time, I say.

I have been in progress for more than eight years (the more time, the more pressure to get it right).

I believe our mental instability and persistent dissatisfaction in life can be attributed in part to being writers - the anxiety about a permanence that can never be perfect.

We live with our past selves in print- yet we are allowed to grow. At any chance we are given.

How do we write a self that will continue to expand and twirl across the eons of our limited time?

If I write about my current health, how might that affect my future health? If I write about being intimate, how might that affect my future intimacy? If I write about my body, how might that affect my future body?

A friend can help futureproof against self-sabotage when the writer wants to rip out every single word from every single page. (I am told by the publisher that this stage of the editing is about finding what 'I can live with.' And that 'only I will know what this is'.)

Writing successfully captures feelings of a specific moment in time yet speaks to the impermanence of expression, a future where identity may shift. (I highlight this tension in the book's form and the woven prose style).

Writing across genre to stay nimble, light in feet, glide and duck-dive under waves.

Writing future genders on billboards and on pavements, especially on streets me and my family use to get home.

Reading old blurbs feels just as jarring as any misgendering but also indicative of past lock, break form.

When the first copies of the book arrive in the mail - the writer can often feel feelings of regret, mild panic and avoidance ... maybe even a sort of grief (what was mine now is ruined) against more 'normalised', more 'expected' feelings of pride, acceptance and joy.

I don't feel any of these anxieties when I'm editing someone else's work - getting the published book in the mail only brings feelings of joy and closure.

Part of the process of writing a book over a long stretch of time is combining work written years ago with new work, weaving them together. I found myself obsessively updating every detail of old work to try to get to the closest version of me now (but soon giving up and realising that it was okay to present stories that represented parts of yourself that were a little less present now).

Today, my music subscription service suggests my most-listened-to artists are Mitski and Aldous Harding. Next month it will be SZA and Christine and the Queens.

I've known writers who obsessively change versions of their books at every new edition - tweaking bits and pieces years after the book first went to print. I didn't understand this obsession until recently, but I asked myself how much it would affect my ability to move on to the next project. How can we stay in the hallway of multiple designs?

A cousin told me of his hesitancy to publish a book - he 'didn't want to be pinned down'. For him, the book as a record felt more permanent than music as a record. (Maybe this also has to do with who is pressing the button. He is comfortable pressing the record button himself. He doesn't know who would be pressing the button at the printer when the book takes flight as paper and bone.)

My writer-friend suffers - reliving her story through the prism of a cage. (And I said, 'oh no,' let it not be like this.)

The act of writing and the sharing of the work has been falsely equated to healing. I listen to Mahogany L Browne on a live stream, speaking at the Schomburg Center. She says writing the book is not the therapy. The book is what you bring to therapist. (I think about the object of a book being the start of a conversation, not just between writer and reader, or reader and reader, but a writer and themselves.)

When is the work done, like completely done? Who is there to tell me it is?

When I have one day free I like to go out to the bay and maybe get some fish n chips from the place on the corner and just lean in to this perspective of being a child once who came here and sat here.

When I have one day free I like to go to a Pilates class advertised for people who have injuries. No questions asked about the injury and why it hasn't healed. On days like this, I take any opportunity to move more slowly.

Some of us want to write the story and then wipe our hands clean of it. After all, to some of us, writing is surgery.

Christine and the Queens says in an interview he doesn't owe anyone scars and I think about how the whole book was writing against scars.

Who knows us better - our past or our future?

All of this is to be in dialogue with the people who kept me alive - firstly, My Ancestors.

I'm frying mushrooms when I get the book's first endorsement in a text message from my publisher. The term 'glowing endorsement': does that equate for the shine on my face? (I have just finished my endorser's astonishing new book. It's been one of those days where writing feels futile. I'm taking a spare moment to make myself an indulgent lunch of gnocchi with a beetroot garlic mushroom sauce when I get this text message. To be seen by a writer whose words I have been so attached to feels too good to be true- does this make all the defeated days worth it?)

Writing is an act of patience and resolve.

A friend calls me up to tell me she will love me whenever or whatever - and does she need to book me an escape on release day? (Like maybe west coast where our other friend is.)

Small silent stories with water qualities are not encouraged in a world of ever noise.

After all, we were told to make a statement, leave a mark. And what about the marks our books leave on us?

Will we be haunted by empty libraries, returns, the sound of wind that sweeps through lonely places.

Our books will become blank sheets, and we will become fibre. Maybe all this is to touch the earth, to be in a peaceful and necessary state of decay.

In one of many midnight browses, my mouse hovers over the icon to buy a pale-yellow t-shirt from a trans-owned business that says in rainbow lettering 'I only want to impress myself'.

Writer panic - inevitable. (Ringing up the editor the day before the book is going to print, persuading her to check one last thing. Convincing yourself during the writing process you have somehow sleepwalked yourself into multiple dilemmas. The editor writing back a few hours later saying that, unsurprisingly to her, there were no issues brought up in this final check.)

Do you even remember writing a book? Or is it now out of your system like medication.

Every project comes with a map of fears, an inventory of anxieties, multiple full-on disturbances to the nervous system.

Writing this book was about holding my nerve more than anything else.

Writing a future self with the bunya tree across the way and the seasons of meaning, rain falling. Trying to stop myself from running back to a place that's no longer there.

Writing the self - me as a person who will continue to grow and change, and love and live, echo brightly, and flourish.

Ellen van Neerven is an award-winning writer of Mununjali and Dutch heritage. Ellen has authored two poetry collections, Comfort Food and Throat, one work of fiction, Heat and Light, and a non-fiction title Personal Score: Sport, Culture, Identity.

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Writing A Future Self (or against permanence)

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In the fourth essay in the series, Ellen van Neerven writes about the experience of finishing their new non-fiction book Personal Score: Sport, Culture, Identity (UQP, 2023) which splices together personal memoir with history, journalism, and poetry.

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What does it mean to play sport on First Nations land?

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What does it mean to play sport on First Nations land?

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This is not a beautifully written book about decolonising Australian sport. This is an ugly book that was born of the ugly language I grew up hearing in this country. This book is me scratching my way out of the scrap of the schoolyard, just trying to stay alive.

So writes Ellen van Neerven in the introduction to their latest book, Personal Score. "I have a score to settle," they continue.

In this book, they well and truly settle the score - as a Blackfulla, an athlete and as well as a former amateur player, a self-proclaimed "armchair enthusiast of the sport we call 'the world game': football, sometimes called soccer in this country".
Review: Personal Score: Sport, Culture, Identity - Ellen van Neerven (UQP)
Weaving together race, Indigeneity, sports, sexuality, gender, class and Country, they offer something no sport historian has.

Ellen shows both another side of themself and a unique perspective of the sporting field, asking: "What does it mean to play sport on First Nations land?"

Perfect Score, through a mix of memoir and poetry, cleverly invites us to question what it means to play on a "Country that is rich in story", on a playing field that is almost always uneven for Blackfullas.

Prominent and personal Black sporting moments

The sporting field as a site has offered many iconic moments for mob, both in victory and as victims of racial violence visited upon us - from spectators, selectors, and sporting clubs and associations.

Many of us are familiar with Cathy Freeman's gold-medal-winning lap of honour with the Aboriginal flag, or Donell Wallam's match-winning goal on debut for the Diamonds. And with Aboriginal men's innumerable, yet memorable, defiant stances against racism in both rugby league and Aussie rules.

Van Neerven doesn't visit those familiar iconic moments. Instead, they take us into the private moments they've experienced as a soccer player and as a queer non-binary Blackfulla growing up in Brisbane.

Van Neerven reflects on the humiliating readings of their body, of being deemed too "masculine appearing", of secondhand uniforms, and being ethnically othered. All the while, they reflect on their own relationship to the Country on which they were competing, in any given moment.

They reveal the intimate relationship our bodies have with Country, and the significance of sport as an expression of an embodied sovereignty.

Van Neerven takes us to the everydayness of the battlefield that is the sporting field: from the dressing sheds, to late-night training sessions, to their own backyard. And they share their innermost insecurities.

There's an honesty, and an intimacy, to this text that I am not sure we deserve.

Van Neerven takes us to places I'm sure they've long held as memories, as trauma, as guilt and incongruities, as questions about themself. They share the concessions they've made, from shaving their body hair, to their silence on issues of Indigeneity.

But like the best Blackfulla texts, van Neerven reclaims their power through reclaiming their own narrative, much in the way Nicky Winmar did when he stood defiantly to claim, "I'm Black and I'm proud".

Strategising survival on the sporting field

Now, I don't get soccer, nor do I understand the passion people have for it - but van Neerven makes me wish I did. In reading their story, I felt perhaps I had missed something in not loving the game like they do. The iconic soccer names and events were lost on me, but van Neerven's clever use of sporting analogies to chart their personal journey of acceptance and defiance spoke so very clearly to me as a Black reader.

Van Neerven most powerfully demonstrates their skills - as a writer and soccer player - in the chapter titled "Skills". They poetically step us through each technique, from controlling the ball with their chest, to chipping the keeper, to taking on a player using the famous "Cruyff turn" move. Each skill is juxtaposed with the parallel life lesson it taught them: binding their chest, chipping away at self doubt, and taking on the world.

The skill of heading the ball, as taught by their father through kicking "balls at my face until it gets dark" speaks clearly to the experience of Blackfullas - whatever their sporting code - as we experience the never-ending barrage of racial violence and indignities.

Van Neerven contrasts the technique of heading the ball with how to head a player.

This is how you head a player ...

If they slander your people

chin down

forehead first

all the power from your waist

Perfect Score offers something crucial to Black readers whose bodies have been misread in all kinds of violent ways: a space to exist, perfectly. And van Neerven honours Black theorising throughout the text, as they make sense of survival, sovereignty and sporting fields.

It's not just the players Van Neerven is concerned with - they take us to the people who form the backbone of local sporting clubs, protecting them in the face of floods and fires. Like Sterling McQuire, a Darumbal and South Sea Islander man, former player and groundskeeper of Pilbeam Park, home to the Nerimbera Magpies Soccer Club in Rockhampton.

He states:

here at Pilbeam Park - that might just be a little piece of ground but I'm looking after country [...] Nerimbera, it's a Darumbal name: I'm where I'm supposed to be.

With Perfect Score, van Neerven reminds us that sport, for Blackfullas - pre- and post-1788 - has never been just for recreation. It is a calling, as McQuire so powerfully points out. A responsibility that compels us to compete on and care for our people and our land: a land that also tells an ugly story of fires, floods, and colonial violence.

Though van Neerven describes her book as "ugly", their story isn't an ugly one. It is a beautiful story of Blackfulla love - for sport, for Country. Most importantly, it's a story of finding love for ourselves.
Ellen van Neerven will appear Melbourne Writer's Festival, where they are curator of the Big Debate: Sports vs Literature on 6 May, and at Brisbane Writers Festival on 11 and 13 May.

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What does it mean to play sport on First Nations land? Ellen van Neerven explores sovereignty and survival on the sporting field

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Ellen van Neerven cleverly invites us to question what it means to play sport on a 'Country that is rich in story', on a playing field that's almost always uneven for Blackfullas.

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What capacity does sport have to connect, empower, and divide us as individuals, teams, and society?
Guest:
Ellen van Neerven, award-winning writer of Mununjali Yugambeh and Dutch heritage and author of Personal Score.

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Ellen van Neerven's Personal Score - ABC Radio National

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What capacity does sport have to connect, empower, and divide us as individuals, teams, and society? Award-winning writer of Mununjali Yugambeh and Dutch heritage Ellen Van Neerven talks about their new book, Personal Score.

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Allayne is an internationally published Children's and Young Adult author who lives in South Australia. She plays the guitar, sings, and sometimes she illustrates. Allayne is a multiple arts grant recipient and a South Australian Premier's Reading Challenge Ambassador. She's served on literary boards, and her novels have been listed for various awards.
Paper Planes (Scholastic) was a 2016 CBCA Notable, shortlisted for the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, and is included in the Australian Heritage Literary Project Untapped Collection. A Cardboard Palace (MidnightSun Publishing) was a 2018 CBCA Notable, published in Sweden. Our Little Secret (Scholastic) was listed for the Golden Inkys, and in 2022 a new edition was released by Ligature Press. The Centre of My Everything (Penguin RandomHouse) was listed in the 2019 Davitt Awards and shortlisted in the 2020 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature. Sensitive (UQP) is published in Russia, and was shortlisted in the 2020 Australian Speech Pathology Awards, and is a 2023 Outstanding Book for Young People with Disabilities - awarded by IBBY - International Board on Books for Young People. That Thing I Did was released March 2022 and has received rave reviews, including five stars in the Australian Book Review. Selfie - YA novel (Text Publishing) is out April 2023.

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This podcast episode is produced by Jen Pitch: @virtualcreatrix

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‎The Sunshine House: 2.5 Selfies with Allayne Webster on Apple Podcasts

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Allayne is an internationally published Children's and Young Adult author who lives in South Australia. She plays the guitar, sings, and sometimes she illustrates. Allayne is a multiple arts grant recipient and a South Australian Premier's Reading Challenge Ambassador. She's served on literary board...

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#LoveOzYA Talks: Allayne Webster chats about SELFIE