Queering Country:
On Heat and Light
by Ellen van Neerven

Queer Critics is our new podcast and review series exploring the Australian LGBTQIA+ canon. Listen to interviews, read the companion essays and learn about the trailblazers who paved the way. Subscribe/listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to find your podcasts—or tune in right here!

I love using ‘queer’ as a verb. It’s disruptive. Uncomfortable.

To queer something is to be transgressive, to reject binaries and rigid classifications. In the Encyclopedia of Diversity and Social Justice, US scholars Joshua Trey Barnett and Corey W Johnson write that it can be ‘one strategy for queer activists who want to unsettle or complicate normative practices, spaces, or discourses’.

Though valued gendered cultural practices exist within Aboriginal cultures, Dharug researcher Jennifer Evans argues that Country itself cannot be gendered and the queering of Country can be used as a vehicle to return Country’s agency.

The Aboriginal meaning of Country not only refers to land but also the waters and the skies and the many life forms that coexist therein. Country for Aboriginal people, as the Kombumerri academic and philosopher Dr Mary Graham articulates, is all-encompassing and vital to our ‘human-ness’ and sense of identity. It exists across spacetime where past, present and future are interwoven threads.

In an account of Lisa Bellear’s life and activism, Ballardong Noongar writer Timmah Ball notes how the late poet—a Minjungbul, Goenpul, Noonuccal, South Sea Islander woman and member of the Stolen Generation—identified as Blak before she identified as queer. This sentiment echoes the work of Bidjara and Birri Gubba Juru historian Dr Jackie Huggins and Goenpul academic and writer Dr Aileen Moreton-Robinson, whose writings in the late-1990s and early-2000s (and to this day) prioritise racial and cultural identity over gender.

I love using ‘queer’ as a verb. It’s disruptive. Uncomfortable.

Similarly, I am Wiradjuri before I am queer and female-presenting. I say female-presenting here because my concept of gender is further rooted in my cultural identity. I use the term yinna which translates to woman in English, but I don’t view myself through the rigid Western lens of womanhood.

In 2014, Mununjali Yugambeh and Dutch author Ellen van Neerven published their debut, Heat and Light. Its arrival was undeniably a dynamic Blak queering of the canon. Two things can be counted on, as in all van Neerven’s work: a grounding in Country and a large helping of gay.

To engage in Heat and Light in any meaningful way, this Blak-first lens bears acknowledgement. Country is in constant dialogue with queerness: its own and that of the characters in many of the stories. The book, which defies the traditional conventions of a short story collection, is contained within three separate yet relational sections—‘Heat’, ‘Water’, ‘Light’—blurring genre and form to create the space for Blak queer folk to exist within our own intersections. As Gomeroi poet and legal researcher Alison Whittaker wrote in her introduction to the 2023 First Nations Classics edition of the book:

In its own small role as part of a bigger shift, we have Heat and Light and Ellen van Neerven to thank for the fact that such a book – blak, queer, sharp, horny, experimental, speculative, weird – could be republished now and have kin on the shelf beside it.

The book is charged with sex and desire, softened by intimacy and complex emotion. Van Neerven is also an author who writes across genres and forms—poetry, creative non-fiction, speculative fiction—and here they mix what the publisher calls the ‘mystical’ and the ‘mythical’ with the mundane. But as Koori/Goori and Lebanese writer and critic Dr Mykaela Saunders suggests when talking about Blak speculative fiction, ‘these are not stories that diverge from reality, as defined in a Western scientific materialist sense. These stories are about our realities.’ In ‘Water’, the queering of Country occurs literally when Kaden enters a love affair with a ‘plant-person’, Larapinta. Reading from an ecofeminist lens, Italian academic Samuele Grassi positions ‘Water’ as a reimagining of sexuality alongside the colonial ‘heterosexualisation’ of place, the exploitation of natural resources and the perpetuated dichotomies that reinforce the two. This is particularly significant when Aboriginal peoples and cultures are so often relegated to a bygone era, concreted over by colonial and capitalist ideals. As Waanyi author Alexis Wright writes, ‘In the Aboriginal world, we know the apocalyptic realities of two and a half centuries of continual invasion.’

However, ‘Water’ also reimagines Aboriginal people in a near-present where we can reclaim our relationship with Country. The overtly speculative nature of the story heightens the queering of land and sea and people by removing rigid gender binaries and reinforcing Aboriginal and queer understandings of connection and relationality. In the introduction to Unlimited Futures: Speculative, Visionary Blak+Black Fiction, co-edited by van Neerven and Rafeif Ismail, van Neerven says that speculative fiction is ‘vital writing’ that is ‘fundamental to our storytelling and our worlds’. In shifting the mainstream perception of genre fiction, we can also reconceive the idea of where Blak queer bodies can and cannot exist. We can place Blak queer bodies in a futurescape once denied to us.

In re-envisioning the future, van Neerven also interrogates the past—particularly histories that were once hidden or griefs that the colony would rather not discuss. In ‘Heat’, it is the history of the Kresinger family. In one of the interrelated stories there is mention of the fringe camps or shanty towns that were common in South East Queensland in the 1950s. Pearl Kresinger is a personification of queering Country, firstly by being queer on Country and, secondly, by the way other characters position her: living on the fringes of society, subverting gender expectations, having an affinity to the natural world.

When I first read this collection back in the pre-pandemic days, the Brisbane council was rewilding a park near my inner-city flat where such a camp once resided, nestled on the banks of a swamp once peppered with waterlilies and filled with fish and waterfowl. Each morning, I’d drive past this park on the bus into the city and I witnessed it grow from a bare, browning land with only the hint of a creek. Now, the creek engorges and swamps with summer rain.

Two things can be counted on, as in all van Neerven’s work: a grounding in Country and a large helping of gay.

I still come to this park often to write or read or simply be. Right now, a noisy miner is swooping an ibis in the mossy shallows and a magpie is feasting in the dew-studded grass. A duck bathes in the pond and several ripples appear in the water where I suspect a small amphibian has come to the surface. On a wet spring morning, the footpath of the park is covered in tiny frogs, like a slimy obstacle course. The cool breeze whips my hair into my eyes, chaps my lips and I imagine Pearl Kresinger being ‘taken by the wind’.

For Pearl, wind is a carrier of things: of grey seeds young girls are warned not to touch, of those young girls themselves. In other works of literature, wind has many meanings. In The Mires by Māori author Tina Makereti, wind is a balm for the anger of the young and gifted Wairere, though too much can be destructive. In The Yield by Wiradjuri author Tara June Winch, wind communicates knowledge and is harnessed by Poppy Albert to create his Wiradjuri language dictionary before that knowledge can be blown further away and lost.

The queering of Country is not always obvious. It can exist on a metaphysical level—liminal, transitional. Queering can be as small as playing with tense, narrative perspective, the shifting back and forth in time. Or it can be as big as belonging to a place, to a community, but not seeing yourself in that place—a disjunction many Blak people, and especially Blak queers, are familiar with. This is seen in Heat and Light when Colin Kresinger runs away to Sydney and denies his Aboriginality in ‘Hot Stones’ only to try and return decades later in ‘Soil’, or in the strained and tumultuous relationship dynamics between Jodie, her brother Dave and his pregnant partner Sarah in ‘Sound’.

When I was in my early twenties, I started an internship. Cultural heritage and archaeology. My supervisor, who had a long career as an anthropologist in Indigenous communities, showed me around on my first day. We walked past a bookshelf in the main office, and I noticed a human skull sitting perched next to a series of books about Aboriginal cultures. Nausea rolled through my entire body. I didn’t ask if it was real.

After the tour, we sat in their office and they gave me some documents to fill out and said to me, ‘When we go out into the field, don’t tell anyone you’re Aboriginal. You don’t want to seem biased.’ As if my cultural identity is a coat I can shuck off. As if the Traditional Owners didn’t clock me the second I stepped on-site anyway.

In ‘Light’, the final section made up of both standalone and interconnected stories, there is an absence of homeliness, with characters wanting to escape or move on from their sense of place while also desiring belonging and connection to Country. In ‘Real Moment’, one character runs from queerphobia in their hometown to find Blak queer community on the streets of Sydney. Another escapes to the outback with their friend in ‘The Wheel’, measuring their emotional rather than physical distance from people.

The queering of Country is not always obvious. It can exist on a metaphysical level—liminal, transitional.

At a glance, these stories are seemingly about disconnection from Country. However, to reiterate Dr Mary Graham, Country is vital to Aboriginal peoples’ identities, and is just as present in the city as it is in regional or rural areas. But sometimes that connection is dislocated or distorted. Often this means a character’s sense of self needs to be teased out or negotiated. Sometimes this sense of alienation has severe consequences.

A lot has changed in the sociopolitical landscape since the publication of Heat and Light. Same-sex marriage was legalised across the nation. Janelle Monáe released Dirty Computer. Australia voted against an Indigenous Voice to Parliament and fascism seems to be on the rise again, but Kehlani pashed kwn against the hood of a car in the worst behaviour music video and altered my brain chemistry. That’s to say, there’s always something good to balance out the bad—or at least temporarily distract from it.

Six years after Heat and Light, van Neerven published ‘The Only Blak Queer in the World’, a poem from their poetry collection, Throat. There, they wrote:

I saw love for Blak queers everywhere. Outside the city the sky sent me hints, the walks on Country along the river kept me safe. I saw the colours of my own heart, and they were not the colours of isolation or fear.

With these words, van Neerven encapsulates the essence of Blak queer intersectionality. The way queerness exists within Country. That feeling of being read alongside friends and peers. And now this Blak queer visionary book rests proudly on many bookstore shelves as part of UQP’s First Nations Classics Series. With new waves of readers come more Blak queers who are finding themselves within these pages.

KYD’s Queer Critic Series is supported by the Cultural Fund, the philanthropic arm of the Copyright Agency.