The Author is Not Dead, Part 1 – on culture, belonging and writing what I know

A few months ago I was commiserating with a friend about our books not making the shortlist of an award round we’d both entered. My friend was more upset than I, suspecting racism. I joked that our category already had one Aboriginal work so they’d already hit their quota and didn’t need any more. I was joking because I just didn’t feel as invested as my friend. I really don’t think my work is entitled to shortlists and prizes, and considering I wrote my book for my community, and that it is very niche genre fiction, I’m not surprised that mainstream settler judges just aren’t that into it. It’s also not a perfect book. It’s my first, not my best; it’s the book I wrote to learn how to write fiction. Besides, it already won an award as an unpublished manuscript, as did some of the stories separately, in other prizes. So it’s all good, truly. Bottom line is I’m just happy my book is out there in the world and my community are pumped on it.

I wish that had been the end of the conversation, but my partner had overheard our talk.

‘Mykaela,’ they said when I hung up the phone, ‘do you think it’s because of the ancestry versus belonging thing?’

Ah yes, that thing: three times now I’ve read comments wondering why or by what permissions I wrote this book set in the community I belong to when my bloodlines are from elsewhere. I tried to brush this whole thing off and get on with my day simply because I’ll never know the answer, and that’s probably a good thing. But it stuck in my mind like a thorn, and I can’t stop flicking at it.

I didn’t want to write this out let alone publish it, but I have to – mostly as a matter of cultural pride and rigour, but more practically as it might affect my reputation and opportunities if these things aren’t cleared up. (I’ll circle back to this in Part 2, but for now please take me at my word.) Now for the shit part – publishing this essay might affect my reputation and opportunities too. Rock and hard place, but I’ve made my choice. And I’ve very deliberately chosen to publish this on my blog rather than somewhere else, so I can’t hide behind an editor or publisher, and so I don’t have to cut or water anything down. I’m standing in my own truth, or whatever – exactly as I’ve been advised to do.

There are a few reasons I’ve broken this longer essay up into two parts: first, altogether, it’s over 6500 words, and who wants to read that in one sitting? I can’t really cut it down as the granular details are what make my case. Also, there are two very different dynamics at play with this recurring issue, so I’ve separated them out with this first part dealing with the first two instances it happened and the second part with the third. Last but foremost – and apologies for being cryptic – it seems that the person who the second part is concerned with probably needs a bit of breathing space at the moment, and as much as I have a bone to pick with them, I want to respect their health over my own desires. So it might be some time before I publish the second part – maybe weeks, maybe months.

But for now, let’s get right into the weeds.

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My debut book Always Will Be (UQP 2024) is a speculative fiction collection, where all the stories are set in different versions of the future, in the Tweed. I wrote these stories as part of my Doctor of Arts thesis, submitted in December 2021 at the University of Sydney. My thesis was examined by Professor Jeanine Leane and Doctor Natalie Harkin, two creatives and scholars I’ve long admired. They both gave my work glowing praise and passed me without corrections in September 2022. At the time I’d never met Jeanine, while Natalie and I had met briefly in 2017. Neither of them knew me or my family from a bar of soap. Here is one of Natalie’s comments in her feedback:

The vibrancy to this work stems from Bundjalung country and knowledge. As a Dharug [person], acculturated to Goori culture living, learning, and growing up in Bundjalung country, I would have liked to know more about Mykaela’s Dharug story and blood memory, and what led her to so firmly identify with Goori identity and standpoint which is so central to this research, and to her life and work. This is something to expand on and consider when hopefully publishing the exegesis, and to stand firmly in her truth.

This is a fair comment, I think, and although I did touch on this story in my exegesis, perhaps I should have foregrounded it earlier to give it primacy, and expanded on it for clarity. The truth is, I’ve never had to explicate my belonging in writing like this – and I did not want to name close family members or detail our relationships for safety reasons (I have a stalker who will no doubt be reading this – hi loser!).

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Back in 2021, I excised the creative component of my thesis as a short story manuscript and entered it in the Queensland Literary Awards David Unaipon Award for an Emerging Aboriginal Writer. It didn’t get a look in that year, but I entered it for the second time in 2022 and it won. This was the fourth time I’d entered in total; I’d entered my novel Last Rites of Spring twice before. As part of the State Library of Queensland’s administrative protocol, each of the four times I’d entered I was asked to provide a Confirmation of Aboriginality certificate. The CoA I always provide is dated 1999, from the Tweed River High School ASSPA organisation, where I went to high school from 1997-2002 and then worked as an Indigenous teacher’s aide from 2003-2007. I’d never needed a CoA before this date, but I remember getting this as I needed it to apply for a Centrelink study supplement when I was in Year 9. This is not a generic statutory declaration, which can be written and signed off on by anyone. It shows that I am claimed by my community. I belong.

Both times I submitted Always Will Be for the Unaipon Award, in my cover letter I also included a brief bio and statement on my position. Here’s the relevant part:

I’m a Dharug descendant and I belong to the Tweed Goori community through my Bundjalung family and other relationships…I’ve worked in Aboriginal education since 2003, and my research explores my community’s past, present and future.

I began writing these stories for my doctoral project Goori Futurism at the University of Sydney. My writing of place and people is based in my own lived experience as a life-long and active part of my community, from which my imaginings grow. My cultural responsibilities inform my ethical imperative to write Goori Futurism – to give hope to our jahjums and young people.

I was ecstatic when I was notified that my manuscript won on the 8^th of August 2022. I wasn’t given any further information beyond that. I am unaware of whether either the 2021 or 2022 judging panels saw my note or my CoA, and whether or not it factored into their decisions either way.

I negotiated with UQP to push my publication date back from 2023 to 2024 so I could attend to important health and family business and finish up some other projects. Over the next year or so I edited my manuscript slowly, adding a few extra stories in and polishing the rest, then I resubmitted the manuscript to UQP and worked with the brilliant editors Margo Lloyd and Ian See to zap any bugs and make my stories shine.

We were soon talking of book covers and endorsements. I was against asking anyone to do all this unpaid labour of reading from scratch and writing a blurb, so I offered to ask Jeanine and Natalie as they’d already read and loved my stories. My publisher also suggested we use the Unaipon judge’s citation – and that’s when I realised I hadn’t seen it before.

So, on the 23^rd of August 2023, a few months away from printing and a full year after I found out I won the Award, my publisher sent me the judge’s wonderful citation for the first time – along with a note about cultural permissions. I’ve never met panel chair Cathie Craigie, or judge Jared Thomas, but I have worked with judge Jasmin McGaughey, first as editor of This All Come Back Now (UQP 2022), where her excellent story is included. I’ve also been edited by her as my story is in her recent anthology Words To Sing The World Alive (UQP 2024). Here are the judge’s words:

ALWAYS WILL BE is a stand-out collection of forward-thinking, futuristic short stories. The voices and yarns we find inside this manuscript are exceptionally well-written, experimentally disruptive and possess a distinct drive to share authentic futures in imagined worlds that challenge and embody Goori sovereignty in every sense. Saunders’ writing is brave, radical, highly innovative and entertaining. With its themes potentially drawing interest from an education market, ‘Always Will Be’ feeds an awakening appetite for speculative fiction (and other forms of Indigenous Futurism) work by First Nation authors, and sits alongside recent commercially successful titles such as Unlimited Futures (Fremantle Press, 2022).  

We would encourage QLA to request Mykaela get written permission from traditional owners in Tweed Heads around her manuscript before proceeding further.

My spirit soared at first, then sank right down when I read the last part. Here I was so close to publication and I had only just seen this now, leaving me in a difficult position. I could either ignore the judges, even if I kinda appreciated them attempting some cultural diligence in this easily-grifted industry, or I could cave in and find some random elders to reverse engineer their consent for a book about to be published, and which I began writing six years before – to ask them to read my book, for all those unpaid hours, and sign off on something for the sake of a protocol that originates outside of my community.

But what if I chose people who said no? What then? Would I let other people veto my book I worked so hard on? Or, if I was unlucky enough to choose someone who took issue with how queer the book is, would I attempt the impossible task of excising the queerness from the stories and the characters, as if this was even possible? Not a chance.

What if I cherry-picked some mob to okay the book just as a formality, maybe people in family? Or if I found some people to pose as traditional owners and sign it off? If it could be that easy, what would be the point of this exercise? What difference would it make in this case whether I did this or not?

Conflicted, I asked my publisher to clarify with SLQ and/or the judges if possible. A SLQ staff member replied:

I hope Mykaela isn’t worried about this – we shared that note in October just as part of the UQP handover process. The comment from the judges was just for us to tell UQP, as part of this process in October 2022. Just a general comment/note from the panel about protocols that of course Mykaela would be fully aware of (I’m sure UQP understands these well too).

The panel had no issues or concerns at all. And certainly did not request anything more from Mykaela – just a general note. They were very happy to award the prize to Mykaela!

I didn’t feel assured by this response. It felt too blasé to address the judge’s serious request, but I wasn’t going to reach out to the judges and put them on the spot as that’s not a very cool thing to do.

This put me in a shit position because if I refused to do what the judges asked on principle it might be construed as spitting in their faces, which wasn’t the case. I respect all of the judges and am grateful for them choosing by manuscript. The Unaipon award was life changing for me. It’s not their fault I didn’t see their recommendation until a year after they wrote it. Nor is it UQP’s. These things happen. Awards and publishing are amorphous processes with many different moving parts and these oversights aren’t anyone’s fault per se. Also, Aboriginal protocols aren’t the same everywhere, and we are only just starting to figure this stuff out in the literary arena. Still, I didn’t want to be seen as difficult or disrespectful. I just respectfully disagreed.

I was brought up with cultural responsibilities and I take cultural protocol seriously, as a community person and as an Aboriginal researcher. Unlike some Aboriginal writers and artists, I know that it’s not right to make money off someone else’s struggles, or to stories you have no connection to. I know how to seek permission for research, and with this comes the knowledge of when permission is needed and when it is not. This was not one of those times. I was not researching real people or collecting their stories to present to outsiders, else I would have had to go through the very rigid ethics process at Sydney Uni (which I didn’t). I wasn’t profiting off other people’s pain. I was making up worlds and stories from my own mind, which is informed by my own life – my own blood, sweat and tears from living in the Tweed. Births, deaths, weddings, funerals, fucking, fighting, working, partying, friendship and enmity, love and estrangement, loyalty and dishonour. You know, everything that makes up the big life I’ve lived.

Ultimately, I refused to seek retroactive permission for a book that I had already written, but especially when that book was written from my own experiences, not using the stories of others, about a place I grew up in and belong to. These stories are based on my own hopes and fears, which might or might now be different to the hopes and fears of everyone else in my community. Still, Always Will Be is a work of speculation. These stories take place in futures that haven’t happened yet, that probably won’t happen. The book is total fiction.

I refused to find some local blackfellas to pressure them into signing off on a book they haven’t read, or make them read it for free, just to assuage the consciences of a white publisher or black judges I have no responsibility to. I’ve never sought permission to write made up stories about my own life, family and community, nor will I. I might have, if writing non-fiction, or fictional characters from another community or about another country. Some Aboriginal writers should be doing this, certainly. But I am writing about a place and people that I belong to, and any blackfella in Tweed who knows me and my family can tell you that for free.

Still, I was starting to learn that what is a no-brainer for me is not so for outsiders.

My solution was to insert several paragraphs upfront in Bugalbeh, my acknowledgements section at the back of my book, explaining my belonging to the Tweed. I am ashamed to admit that I wrote this for an outsider audience and I wrote it in haste and panic so as not to delay printing. I hoped this note would head any further questions off at the pass. It’s adapted from the short note I’d submitted with my Unaipon manuscript and expanded. I took Natalie’s earlier feedback on board, though I felt a little like a fish trying to explain water. Here is the relevant part in full; it precedes my thank yous proper in the section:

As a Goori and Koori person, it is important to introduce myself so that you know where I belong, and to whom, so that we can move through these acknowledgements relationally. I am a descendant of Dharug, Lebanese and Irish peoples, and I belong to the Goori community of the Tweed, which is where this book is set.

I do not have a Bundjalung bloodline but I am Goori by acculturation: I grew up in the Tweed and I belong to its Goori community through my Bundjalung and South Sea Islander family, and through other types of relationships. Tweed Gooris are the people I belong to and who claim me and it reflects on them whether I do right or wrong out in the world.

In writing this book I don’t claim to speak as a traditional Bundjalung owner but as a life-long and active part of my community. My writing of place and people is based on my own lived experience from which my imaginings have grown. Ever since I was young I’ve been involved in learning and teaching, sports, disability support, research, and other community and arts organising. All of my writing and research to date has been rooted in the Tweed, which is where my worldview comes from and where it’ll always return. My work will always be firmly situated in this specific grassroots context rather than in a generalised pan-Indigenous setting. My cultural responsibilities informed my ethical imperative to write these stories: to give some kind of hope to our jahjums that, no matter what happens, we always will be here.

Still, I’ve stepped lightly in this respect: I haven’t presented any secret or sacred knowledge, I’ve written generic Goori characters rather than basing them on actual people, and I’ve written about important themes that concern many blackfellas. I haven’t written history, I’ve imagined futures, and so the cultures in these stories are just as made up as the rest of the world building is.

I do not speak for the Tweed Goori community, rather as one person from this huge, sprawling, multigenerational, multicultural network of interrelated people that crosses time and space, as well as lines of class, gender and sexuality. I’ve written from my own vantage point that is located in my own specific identities within this network. Over the last few years I’ve spoken to many people in my family and community, about this book and also about the doctoral research that informed the stories. Everyone has been really happy with what I’m doing and that’s good enough for me.

I could have kept writing more in this section but I didn’t want to detract from the thanks that follow or overexplain the whole thing. I figured if anyone from my community had a problem with my book I’d let them growl at me, and in the meantime I’d stand by what I wrote and why. And I trusted other readers to take my words in good faith and believe me and to understand why I wrote this book. But that wasn’t to be.

Once upon a time, when I first toyed with writing this essay, I would have started to wrap things up here. But I never got around to writing it because it wasn’t a priority – until the next instance happened.

So for now, this has been the meat and bones of the first two instances. Out of respect for the health of the party concerned in the third instance, I’ll post Part 2 of this essay when the time is right.