Life Writing When the World is Burning The Year in Australia

It is no surprise that in Australia this year a great deal of life writing has continued to emerge in conjunction with pressing social and political issues. The ongoing national crises of refugee and asylum seeker policy, gendered abuse, and racial discrimination continue to surface in both political and literary arenas, while unprecedented bushfires have decimated the country, bringing climate change back onto the public agenda with new fury. The right of individuals to live with dignity, in safety, and free from fear—and the ongoing challenges to these rights suffered in public and domestic domains—is a connecting thread across the year's life writing and a theme the genre is uniquely equipped to amplify.

Writing Asylum

In Australia, one of the most volatile issues for representation has been, for a number of years now, in relation to the experiences and lives of refugees who arrive (or attempt to arrive) in Australia by boat. In 2013, the Kurdish journalist and artist Behrouz Boochani was one of sixty asylum seekers intercepted by Australian authorities on a boat that had left from Indonesia. Between 2013 and 2017, Boochani was forcibly detained at the Australian-run Manus Island immigration detention center in Papua New Guinea (PNG), a facility that closed suddenly (and violently) in 2017 causing displacement and statelessness for hundreds of "unprocessed" detainees. In detainment and exile, Boochani has produced a remarkable body of testimony, including a documentary film and a series of diary-essays for mainstream news media. Boochani's memoir No Friend but the Mountains (2018), written from the Manus camp on a cell phone and delivered over WhatsApp to collaborators in Australia, was awarded in 2019 the Victorian Prize for Literature, Australia's richest literary prize (Wahlquist). Boochani was not permitted to attend the ceremony, a gala event held in Melbourne. When testimony turns to memoir, it takes the form of a prestigious literary product. No longer a digital stream of text and images but a hardcover, prize-winning book, the account claims coveted territory in the Australian literary sphere—but the author is yet to set foot on the Australian mainland. In No Friend, Boochani testifies in lyrical, shocking detail to the lack of safety and the ongoingness of daily struggle that characterize life in the detention facility—this is "prison literature" and strategic activism, poetry and diary, memoir and novel. His story does work his body cannot; it circulates in the Australian public sphere, raising awareness, encouraging activism, and speaking on behalf of refugees. What the memoir might achieve in terms of legal rights for asylum seekers in Australia remains to be seen, but it is hopeful that No Friend has won such a significant prize this year.

Writing Domestic Abuse

In her memoir Fake: A Startling True Story of Love in a World of Liars, Cheats, Narcissists, Fantasists and Phonies (2019), Stephanie Wood uses life writing to work through an individual experience to achieve both emotional catharsis and visibility for widespread issues of gendered emotional abuse. Stephanie is a successful journalist writing for some of the country's top mainstream media publications when she meets a man named Joe through an online dating service. Newly forty, childless, and a long-term romantic who has nurtured a dream of "the one," Stephanie is also at an emotional nadir. The tension in Wood's story is built on disbelief: the reader can't believe Stephanie is falling for the increasingly implausible stories that Joe is crafting—he explains away a nonexistent house, denies a very much existing wife and children—and Stephanie doesn't believe in herself. Her inner monologue is relentless; she is too needy, too anxious, too untrusting, too possessive. By the time Stephanie manages to end the relationship, she has spiraled into a deep depression. Her recovery involves rediscovering her journalistic power: she teams up with a female colleague, she tracks land records and bankruptcy deeds, and she interviews the "other woman," an ex-partner who Joe was dating at the same time. She consults psychoanalysts about whether or not Joe's behavior might qualify as psychopathic. She wonders to what degree her childhood or psyche has made her vulnerable enough to be his victim. She wonders why women are so often the victims in these kinds of stories.

Alongside her own story in Fake, Wood draws on psychiatry, anthropology, and cognitive psychology, as well as presenting various accounts of some of the more horrific global examples of what has become colloquially known as "catfishing"—in which a perpetrator conceals or manipulates their identity in order to con a victim, usually for financial gain. Unlike some of the horror stories Wood includes in Fake, she has "only" been emotionally damaged, a fact she begins to feel perversely grateful for, but no less angry about.

While Wood's personal experience is the catalyst for her memoir, in her searing deep dive into the crisis of domestic abuse in Australia, investigative journalist Jess Hill's See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control, and Domestic Abuse (2019) presents the results of four years of interviewing survivors, weaving this testimony into a wider psychosocial, cultural, and legal context, and subordinating the journalist as a subjective presence. In a prefatory section on method, Hill emphasizes that she has been determined to recognize the "distinct power imbalance" of the "journalist-source" relationship in crafting her account, and that she has worked closely with her interviewees, allowing them the opportunity to check and review, sometimes multiple times, the way their story is told: "Every survivor I interviewed was reassured that this was their story, not mine" (vii).

See What You Made Me Do presents and contextualizes the personal testimony of dozens of survivors, which has been, as Hill explains, a personal obsession: "I have uncovered much about myself, my relationships, society, power, and justice" (10). However, she is also careful to clarify that the work is not driven by lived experience—Hill has not suffered domestic abuse. It's a disclaimer and clarification that indicates an expectation or wider trend in journalism for mobilizing personal experience to investigative ends, and that, for example, characterizes Wood's memoir. Crafting a biographical account that maintains a focus on survivors does not, however, mean that Hill is no less personally invested. She is seeking to make a direct intervention in how such stories have conventionally been told (particularly within legal, institutional frameworks) to both shatter the stereotypes of who suffers domestic abuse and revise the language used to narrate and share these kinds of stories. This is a biographical project propelled by Hill's own obsession and desire to speak out on and intervene in a crisis of increasing proportion.

Writing after #MeToo

The publication of Wood's memoir of toxic romance and Hill's cultural reportage on domestic abuse, both of which foreground gender, add to a body of work that can be seen as still emerging in the aftermath of #MeToo, something the compendium Stories from the Australian Movement: #MeToo (2019) directly conceptualizes. In this hybrid collection of essays, poetry, fiction, and even a comic, the editors have assembled a broad-ranging and inclusive survey of responses and reflections that documents and narrates the #MeToo movement as it has gained ground in Australia. Stories from the Australian Movement opens with an epigraph from Tarana Burke, features a cover blurb from journalist Tracey Spicer, regarded as the figure who "launched" the movement in the Australian context, and includes work from Australian women who have also published memoirs this year. For example, Carly Findlay's essay "Us Too" discusses sexual harassment within the disability community, an important and controversial topic that Findlay nonetheless, and perhaps strategically, skirts in her upbeat memoir Say Hello (2019), in which she recounts her experience of living with the rare skin condition ichthyosis.

Ginger Gorman's essay in Stories from the Australian Movement, "Danger: Trolls Ahead," is also a companion piece to a full-length memoir. Troll Hunting: Inside the World of Human Hate and its Fallout (2019) is an investigation of cyberhate and online bullying, a world that Gorman has experienced. Gorman is a journalist and Troll Hunting is the result of a five-year long investigation that marshals research and commentary from a range of contexts. For example, Gorman interviews friends and family of media personality Charlotte Dawson, an anti-bullying campaigner who was the well-publicized victim of targeted online hate and who later committed suicide. Gorman too comes to this topic as a victim: in 2010 she'd written a glowing profile on gay men choosing surrogacy. In 2013, the two men who were the subject of her profile were convicted of child sexual abuse and Gorman was dragged into and vilified in the outpouring of mass outrage expressed online. Troll Hunting is an intimate ethnographic work that conveys Gorman's personal story of surviving online hate, presented as asides and in a series of diary-style chapters titled "Notes in the Margins," as well as functioning as a deep-dive journalistic exposé of the extreme world of online trolling.

Writing Minority

Telling one's own story is a powerful political act, particularly for subjects otherwise oppressed or marginalized within literary contexts or mainstream culture at large. Two anthologies published this year, Benjamin Law's Growing Up Queer in Australia (2019) and Maxine Beneba Clarke's Growing Up African in Australia (2019), foreground such narratives and attempt to remediate such marginalization. In line with the anthologies already published in this series, Law and Clarke have made space for first-time and amateur writers and a diversity of stories and experiences, and they shape an overtly political intervention into legacies of silence and othering that have characterized the experiences of these marginal groups in Australian society. A notable feature of all the Growing Up anthologies has been a commitment by the publisher to involve contributors in the curating, editing, and sharing of these stories as representative life narratives. Growing Up African, for example, presents the complex reality of African experience in Australia through life narratives from African Australians with diverse cultural, social, sexual, and ethnic identities and from across the African diaspora. It was edited by the increasingly well-known Clarke as well as Ahmed Yussuf and Magan Magan. Growing Up Queer includes over fifty contributors, a complex cross-section of queer experience rarely captured in mainstream media.

The power of writing and language and the damage of othering in the face of difference are also key motifs in Jessica White's compelling memoir Hearing Maud (2019). After contracting viral meningitis as a child, White grows up with near total hearing loss. In a country town with little disability support, though ensconced in a large and loving family, White only begins to access and learn sign language as an adult. She has learned how to live a "hearing" life, but "compensating" for her deafness requires acts of constant mental agility that, as White comes to see, incur a significant emotional and psychological cost. White entwines her own story with that of an archival subject: Maud Praed, the deaf daughter of the lauded nineteenth-century Australian novelist Rosa Praed. Though she had the opportunity, Maud was actively prevented from learning sign language by her ostensibly well-meaning family. As White retells and reimagines Maud's lost story, she comes to critical realizations about the deep cost of disability discrimination and achieves a profound reconnection with her own deaf identity, community, and language.

Writing Environment

But what of the life that cannot narrate itself, at least in prose? In Australia, well before the summer fire season has yet to officially begin, bushfires have ravaged the country at what experts argue are historically unprecedented levels of devastation (Morton et al.). The emergency has reignited a different long-simmering political fire: climate change. As scientists, politicians, and various public commentators have entered into the fray, writers too have been turning to the problem of a burning planet. In the essay collection The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet (2019), Australian creative writing scholar David Carlin and US-based scholar and writer Nicole Walker model collaborative writing as a strategic methodology for writerly activism. In a playfully varied series of essays, the authors correspond on a range of environmental issues, from carbon footprints to eroded beaches, to the mysteriousness of fungi and the banal sublimity of parenting "while the world is on fire."

The After-Normal recounts local and global debates, shares political opinions, and presents evidence-based commentary on environmental impact. The authors also seek to preserve "wonder." Their project is a deliberate rebuttal to a certain kind of environmental writing that is "depressing, humourless, shaming, guilt-ridden" (x). Here, autobiographical storytelling and personal voices are the primary means of connection and persuasion. Similarly, eco-memoirs published this year in Australia seek to juxtapose the autobiographical personal with the environmental political as a way of (ironically?) "humanizing" the fight against environmental catastrophe and foregrounding empathic identification. For example, Vicki Hastrich's elegant collection of essays Night Fishing: Stingrays, Goya, and the Singular Life (2019) records a life spent feeling connected to rivers and seas; her observations and reminiscences are tinged with nostalgia for what has been lost, and melancholy for what is yet to come.

In her latest book, a collection of nonfiction essays, Australian writer and essayist Sophie Cunningham also turns her attention to the pressing issue of ecological disaster. Cunningham has been building a body of work invested explicitly in issues of the natural world. City of Trees: Essays on Life, Death, and the Need for a Forest (2019) is an ecological testimony that includes previously published work, such as Cunningham's 2015 Calibre Prize-winning essay on walking in New York with an eye to the city's obscured natural and cultural history, and the 2017 "Biyala Stories," an essay first published online in a multimedia format during Cunningham's partnership with Nature Conservancy Australia. "Who will speak for the trees?" the Lorax famously asks in Dr. Seuss's ecological fable for children. Cunningham takes up the call in City of Trees, though she also wonders at the daunting challenge of the task: "is it possible to draw, or write, a forest?" (39). In a format that resonates with the simultaneous singularity and expansiveness of trees in a forest, Cunningham uses mostly paired essays, tree portraits interleaved with memoir, to assemble and mobilize a set of constitutive parts. In the opening essay, "Coast Live Oak (Quercus agrifolia)," historical anecdotes of and personal encounters with the coast live oak become a way of tracing the cultural significance of the species to humans. "Moreton Bay Fig (Ficus macrophyllla)" tells the history of the "Meeting Tree," a 150-year-old Moreton Bay fig that has been a significant gathering place for Aboriginal people, as Cunningham meaningfully puts it, "still living in their city" (123).

In Australia, as Melanie Pryor has observed, eco-autobiography is a complex space for the examination of self and nature, one that holds the promise of greater communication and understanding in relation to the natural world but that also risks instating a familiar dichotomy. Pryor quotes the naturalist Mark Cocker, who notes that nature writing historically has tended to reduce landscape to "an attractive green wash," a background to the story of self (392). In City of Trees, Cunningham presents a way of writing and thinking about nature that is directly attentive to the individual identity that a tree possesses within its species, and to (auto)biography as a mode of authority: "If the tree I'm writing about has a name," says Cunningham, "I use it. I assign pronouns like he and she, when that seems right" (175).

Conclusion: Life Writing Matters

Life writing in Australia, as Australian writing in general, has sometimes controversially been understood to lack a distinctive national character, a condition the Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan lauds as a virtue and deploys with mischievous and affirmative political spirit. Flanagan calls the Kurdish-Iranian Boochani a "great Australian writer" in his foreword to No Friend but the Mountains (x). Elsewhere, Flanagan has argued that whatever it might be that makes our literature "Australian" is not very important—indeed, is unimportant. What matters is writing that matters ("Does Writing Matter?"). In a year that has seen the defunding of a chair in Australian Literature by one of Australia's oldest (and wealthiest) universities, the dissolution of a fixed idea of national "literature" and the ascension of an expansive ideal of Australian "writing" seem timelier than ever. Prizes and awards—and professorial positions—remain revealing spirit levels for the ever-shifting discourse that shapes and defines how audiences come to literary representations. In life writing, the work of representation and of telling one's story as a way of speaking out for and on behalf of others remains a powerful mandate. The lifewriting texts that I have discussed for this review collectively demonstrate an ongoing commitment to nonfiction personal storytelling as a deliberate form of politics and activism. Life writing has long been associated with movements for social justice and reparation, so this trend is not unusual. Being able to note, however, an increasing intersecting attention to the rights and protections of vulnerable others (including the environment) that characterizes some of the more notable works this year seems significant. Australia is burning. But its writers are responding, as Richard Flanagan exhorts, "with ink, with keyboard. With thread, with flame, with our very bodies. Because writing matters. More than ever, it matters" ("Does Writing Matter?").