Image: Canva. Photograph by A. D. John (Supplied).
It was late September 2023, and I was peering into my laptop screen. Four boxes filled the display, three of them occupied by members of the Penguin Random House staff. There was a senior editor, a marketing coordinator and, most nerve-racking of all, the managing editor. The final square was inhabited by a seasoned story consultant. I remember thinking he had a friendly face, and I needed one of those. This was it—the final interview that would decide if I would be awarded the Write It fellowship.
I was expecting to be grilled, interrogated and dragged over the proverbial hot coals. However, I quickly learned that wasn’t going to be the case. These arbiters of literary taste were truly interested in what I had to say. They wanted to know what had motivated me to write my novel manuscript. That was an easy question to answer: the ‘why’ had been gestating in my thoughts since I was a child.
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Growing up, my Wiradjuri heritage was always in the background, just out of reach. It often felt like a phantom limb—an intrinsic part of me, yet elusive and intangible. This was what it was like for a lot of the Koori kids I knew in my small rural town in the 90s. Our understanding of culture and country was vague at best. We craved the voices of our elders and ancestors, but they had been muted. My mother always told me that storytelling was in my blood, which explains why I devoured books from a young age. I remember feverishly writing short stories that my friends would swap with one another at primary school. Looking back, I realise writing was a tool for self-discovery, although it would be years before I fully understood who I was. During my high school years, friends asked me to teach them a few ‘Aboriginal words’. I knew none so, eager to impress, I made them up. I still remember this interaction quite clearly; it was the first cultural wound that festered and exposed a hole in my hazy sense of self.
Growing up, my Wiradjuri heritage was always in the background, just out of reach.
Years later, I learned of ‘The Great Silence’. Coined by Australian anthropologist WEH Stanner, it refers to the systematic exclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ histories, cultures and contributions in mainstream discourse. Nowhere was this ‘cult of forgetfulness’ more prevalent than in the literary scene in my youth. There were very few Indigenous writers being celebrated and championed in the mainstream as they are today. Most of the books written about our culture were authored by white folk. What’s worse was the blatant ignorance in the way they wrote about the Aboriginal experience—like we were all the same.
While there are threads that link us, each Indigenous group has its own distinct stories, ceremonies and practices. Connecting with my own culture changed my writing. I remember stumbling across the Wiradjuri Dictionary app created by Dr Stan Grant, Elizabeth Grant and Midnight Byron in my late 30s. It was my first skin-on-skin contact with Wiradjuri language. Hearing those words spoken out loud made my soul vibrate—like someone was welcoming me home. Even more moving were the words ‘Wiray Ngiyang, Wiray Mayiny’ written on the app’s credit screen. This phrase translates to ‘No Language, No People’. These poignant words made me want to dedicate my future to showcasing Wiradjuri stories and celebrating our culture. The more I immersed myself in my people’s history, the more the voices of the old ones called me back. Writing became a form of therapy and exploring culture and language created the link between me in the ‘here and now’ and the ancient past of my ancestors. It gave me a sense of belonging to something larger than myself. I wanted to use my writing as a vehicle to dive deeper.
I’m not much of a plotter, though my novel uses the conventions and established tropes of its genre—crime fiction. The detective character I had in mind for my story would be a beacon in the dark. She’d be resourceful, intelligent and committed to seeking justice for the victims some townsfolk in her community wanted to ignore.
An excerpt from ‘The Rainbow Serpent’ manuscript by A. D. John. Image: Supplied.
The Penguin Random House team had been keen to understand why I wanted to write a crime novel. I’d recently read Dan Box’s true-crime book Bowraville. It infuriated me to learn how the local police had dealt with the murder investigation. It made me think: If it’d been a bunch of white kids that had gone missing, would things have been different? Would the cops have taken the kids’ disappearances more seriously? To me, this story bore the deep scars of the Great Silence and synthesised with my own memories of childhood—specifically the slumberous sawmill town where I grew up.
The more I immersed myself in my people’s history, the more the voices of the old ones called me back.
Setting was an important part of my novel. Approximately 44 per cent of Indigenous people live in regional communities like the Shoalhaven, where my hometown of Tomerong is located. One of the senior Penguin Random House editors said that my fictionalised town of Comerong felt like a real place. This was because I drew from my memories—the smells, the sounds, the intense beauty of the bushland and the small-town characters with larger-than-life personalities. Tomerong was a wondrous town to grow up in, especially during wet season when the electric cold rain would hammer down in relentless sheets. This downpour lasted for days at a time and would cause the creek that ran through our property to swell and break free of its banks. The creek transformed from a calm trickling pool to a turgid, devouring torrent that raged across the landscape. My vivid recollections of this place became the backdrop for the novel.
Tomerong, NSW. Images: Supplied.
My book also has a preternatural twist. As a young writer, I always gravitated towards stories about small towns and the people that inhabit them but especially to those with a supernatural component. Stephen King was the first writer to whom I felt a strong connection, as it seemed like his novels held up a funhouse mirror to the rural life that I knew all too well. Horror and fantasy became a gateway to a genre I fell hard for—magic realism. The works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, specifically One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo are some of my favourite stories. Magical realism—especially the Latin American variety—often interrogates colonialist authority and history, inspiring my approach to crime fiction.
But the greatest breakthrough in crafting my novel’s distinctive style and structure came from closer to home. When I discovered the works of Alexis Wright and Nardi Simpson, I found the missing key. Their narrative style, sometimes labelled Aboriginal Realism, exudes a beautiful, timeless fluidity that is reminiscent of magic realism yet more tightly bound to an Indigenous epistemology. By employing non-linear, cyclical storytelling, they challenge Western narrative traditions and perspectives. These narration techniques align with the concept of ‘Everywhen’, where past, present and future unfurl in unison, and profoundly influenced the way I approached my story’s narrative framework where the spiritual and material intersect and hold sway over one another. I wanted my protagonist to have a strong connection to the Dreaming, allowing her to see and interact with realities and entities that exist beyond conventional understandings of temporality. Moments from her past would intersect, sometimes violently, with the present as she visited key locations from her teenage years.
The greatest breakthrough in crafting my novel’s distinctive style and structure came from closer to home.
Displacement is the most important theme of my novel, especially the displacement of language. There are believed to be over 120 Indigenous languages spoken across the country. This is down considerably from 250-plus languages spoken in 1788. Over ninety per cent of languages are considered endangered (including Wiradjuri). Much of this is thanks to the systematic dismantling of culture through such atrocities as the policy of assimilation. Characters in my story speak English peppered with broken Wiradjuri as they have no elders to teach them how to speak the language fluently or relay cultural knowledge. In a way these characters reflect where I am now, meticulously collecting the fragments of my own identity and constructing my own pathways of understanding. I hope that in five years I have an even deeper understanding of who I am, where I’ve come from and where I’m going. I dream of a future where my body of work stands alongside that of other esteemed Wiradjuri authors like Tara June Winch and Anita Heiss, not only preserving our language and culture but also offering an often overlooked and alternative perspective to that of the Anglosphere.
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Weeks after my call with the Penguin Random House team, I received an email. Being the eternal pessimist, I had prepared myself for the worst. I remember staring at the subject line for what seemed like several minutes before gathering the courage to open it. I was shocked to discover I had been selected. I remember wondering what my twelve-year-old self—the one who daydreamed of becoming a published author—would have thought about this moment. When it finally sunk in, I did something I rarely ever do—I cried.
I’m currently working on the next draft of my novel with suggestions from a fantastic senior editor at Penguin Random House. I want to ensure the story is the best it can be, and it is so important to me that I include as much of my heritage as possible. It is up to us to ensure that our language and stories are never lost and that our ancestors’ voices will be there for future generations. I want to call them back—because Wiray Ngiyang, Wiray Mayiny.
