This article was published in NSW Writers’ Centre Journal in 2014

What’s a white chick doing writing a black man’s story?

Just one of the issues I had to deal with when I was writing Back on the Block. But I’ll answer that question later.  Writing Bill Simon’s life story has taught me many important lessons about the craft of writing, especially when the storyteller is an indigenous person.

Sometimes you don’t realise what’s fresh about your topic until you’re quite a long way into writing it. The Stolen Generations is not a new topic, and I didn’t have a ‘hook.’  As I was writing, I searched for information about the daily life of the boys who were stolen and taken to the notorious Kinchela Boys Home in order to see what other life stories about Kinchela were out there.  There was nothing.  I began to get excited.  Perhaps this is the first book that describes life as an inmate at Kinchela, I thought.  I sent a submission to a publisher specialising in indigenous issues with this claim. Bingo. I was correct.  I also began to realise that perhaps Bill Simon is the first person to describe in detail decades of life on The Block in Redfern.  Bingo again. I wouldn’t stress over the hook ever again.  Just start writing. If you write it, it will come.

Memory is an unwieldy beast, can be unreliable and can change as people reflect upon their past.  A way around this problem is to interview other people who were there at the events being described. Interviewing family, relatives and friends also gives the writer a greater sense of just who they are writing about.  Interesting things happen when we delve into memory. When Bill described his court hearing after being stolen, he said that the judge had banged down his gavel to end the hearing. A close friend and barrister read the proofs and informed me that Australian judges have never used gavels.  I hadn’t thought to check something like that. Bill was ten when he was stolen and decades of watching American television had seeped into his consciousness so that he had synthesised gavels into his memory of the day. This taught me to check small details.

My publisher warned me that when people say they want the truth told they mean it at the time, but when the final proofs arrive, many get cold feet.  This proved to be the case. Suddenly private and sensitive information, which has been handled by only a few people, is about to go out into the public domain. Bill was suddenly worried about his violent past, particularly the violence towards his partners, being in print.  Had he requested that those parts be cut out, I would have respected that decision, but I pointed out to him that if we edited those violent incidences out, then his turn around later in life to a compassionate advocate for the stolen generations would have a less dramatic impact. Readers needed to see both ends of the spectrum to appreciate the remarkable change in him.  He agreed that the story would resonate more with readers if we left those parts in.

A humbling thought and one that should compel every writer to get it absolutely right is the fact that there is always somebody out there who knows more about your subject matter than you do. With historical research, leave no stone unturned.  Sometimes there is conflicting information out there.  If necessary, go to the highest authority on the subject you can find. Email university professors, other authors, local archivists, and government bureaucrats. Most will get back to you (except government bureaucrats!) and are happy to help out.

We all leave a paper trail and men, and women form the stolen generations have an added one – their files from the Aboriginal Welfare Board. These files are in closed access in state records and archives and can only be accessed by the indigenous person in question and only after application. Many are not interested in applying for their files, and there is a reason for this.  When they finally open them and start reading it leaves many depressed and angry.  These files are government propaganda of the day and are full of untruths.  It was extremely upsetting for Bill to read his files.  As a writer of a life story, you have to delve into all aspects of a person’s life and make decisions about how to handle extremely sensitive material. In Bill’s case, I suggested that he respond to some of the things written on his files. Respond he did, vehemently.  I further suggested we include some of the original documents and his responses to them in the book.  My publisher agreed, and Bill felt like finally, he had some right of reply to the untruths recorded about him and his family all those years ago.

 Most Kinchela men cannot talk about their incarceration.  Bill wanted the truth about Kinchela to come out, but there were times when we had to stop the interviews as painful memories resurfaced.  At times I felt a sense of guilt, but he wanted to plough on, and so we did.  Since the release of the book, we have had many speaking engagements, and this is helping heal his scars. When a story is told many times over, one of the things that happen is that the storyteller is able to let go.  It doesn’t mean that a person’s story is watered down so that it isn’t painful anymore; rather, it is disseminated so that the audience takes a little piece of the story away with them. On a more subconscious level, the storyteller feels that others are now shouldering a small slice of the burden that has been carried for so long.

The area I struggled most with was voice.  At first, I rendered everything into the way Bill speaks.  Structurally as well I followed his mode of re-telling. Many indigenous people do not tell stories in the same way that non-indigenous people do.  I am very aware of the discourse around whitefella/blackfella collaborative projects, cultural appropriation issues, literary theory and put all that up against a backdrop of postmodernist thought about who has the ‘authority’ to decide what is ‘authentic’ and what is ‘good’ storytelling, it was enough to do my head in. I got bogged down and anxious.  But in the end, the manuscript didn’t work.  A friend in publishing gave me some advice: ‘Take off your academic hat and put on your writer’s hat.  Just tell Bill’s story in a way that will engage readers.’  I went back to the drawing board and Bill, Des Montgomerie (our other co-author) and I settled on a different style and structure.  It worked. And the answer to that question, which is always the elephant in the room? When people tell an indigenous person that only another indigenous person should be writing their story, it takes away the agency of the storyteller to make their own decisions.  People have said that a non-indigenous writer may have agendas.  But so, do other indigenous writers. The indigenous writing community, like any other writing community, is not a homogenous blob of consensus. The real answer, however, as to why a white chick wrote a black man’s story is very simple. It’s because he asked me to.