‘The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf’ and ‘Living on Stolen Land’
Kaya everyone, welcome to #DeadlyWABookClub! Over the next three months I’ll be analysing and celebrate the writing of Aboriginal authors from Western Australia. I’ll also be sharing some essays published in the journal JASAL, to raise awareness of the big thinkers of today who are discussing and critiquing Australian literature. This is all thanks to my writer’s fellowship from ASAL/Copyright Agency - thank you! Find out more at ASAL.
We’re moving into our second month of Deadly WA Book Club. The cold dry of Djeran still seems to be lingering in the air here in Perth, the wet and stormy season of Makuru not quite in full swing yet.
This week, we’re not quite finished with speculative fiction. I want to celebrate the writing of Ambelin Kwaymullina, a Palyku author and illustrator from the eastern Pilbara region of WA. She writes with incredible variety across many different genres, including young adult, science fiction, verse, poetry and non-fiction. One of her short stories, ‘Fifteen Days on Mars’, was included in the ‘Unlimited Futures’ anthology and discussed in my #DeadlyWABookClub post last week.
Today we are covering two of her other publications: young adult fiction and first book in a three-part series, ‘The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf (2012)’, shortlisted for Shortlisted for the 2012 Aurealis Awards in both the Science Fiction and Young Adult categories; and prose novella, ‘Living on Stolen Land (2020)’. Both publications, one a self-reflective prose and the other science fiction dystopian, find a way to speak to what Kwaymullina refers to as the fact that:
You are on Indigenous lands
swimming in Indigenous waters
looking up at Indigenous skies
There is no part of this place
that was not
cared for
loved
by an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander nation
- Excerpt from ‘Living on Stolen Land’ by Ambelin Kwaymullina
Excerpt from ‘Living On Stolen Land’.
‘The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf’ does this by telling a fiction story that is inspired by and draws comparisons to real historical injustices for Aboriginal people. She writes of a young girl who uses her ‘illegal’ power to protect her Tribe of the Firstwoods from the evil Chief Administrator Neville Rose. This is clearly a pseudonym for the historical and very real Chief Protector A.O. Neville, or ‘Neville the Devil’ as he was known by many Nyungar people. This nickname was well deserved, given that A.O. Neville was responsible for implementing much of the inhumane and genocidal acts of the Aborigines Act 1905 in his paternal and controlling role as Chief Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia, which he held from 1915 until 1947.
Ashala Wolf, the protagonist of Kwaymullina’s novel, has been captured by the barely fictitious Neville Rose, who plans to destroy the rest of her fellow runaway Illegals hiding in the Firstwood. She must go through a gruelling series of interrogations into her personal memories that might (or might not) betray her own people. Despite the grim source content for the book, Kwaymullina has managed to repurpose the dark history of Aboriginal people’s ancestors in Western Australia from something that was completely out of our people’s control, into something that provides power and strength to the characters of Ashala and her Tribe. By taking control of the narrative, Kwaymullina delivers a special kind of justice for real suffering – imagining the ‘what if’s’, had things gone differently for Aboriginal people.
Or, as Jane Gleeson-White puts it far better than I do in her essay, Contested land: Country and terra nullius in Plains of Promise and Benang: From the heart (2018): ‘By asserting these erased histories and relationships over official records and literatures of white Australia, they imaginatively reclaim their connections to country and reinscribe it as black land… The complex realities they go to enormous lengths to write are emphatically rooted in their cherished actual lands (p. 2).’
‘The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf’, I should add, is also just a really fun read for young people. I think it’s an easy-to-read story for youth to access and reflect on the true history behind the fiction; to imaging the suffering and cruelty young Aboriginal people living under A.O. Neville’s regime might have experienced and empathise with their descendants, who continue to be affected by the long-term impacts of these archaic and genocidal policies.
Excerpt from ‘Living On Stolen Land’.
This leads me right onto Kwaymullina’s next novella, ‘Living on Stolen Land’. She writes with bold, straight-forward prose – almost impossible to misunderstand and certainly impossible to ignore. Here, there is no need for interpretation or reading through the lines. ‘Living on Stolen Land’ is a manifesto, a call-to-action, a roar for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty and to decolonise the nation. A slim book of only 64 pages, I came to see it as a ‘Dummy’s Guide to Decolonisation’ that might be carried around easily in every settler’s back pocket when they become confused and forget whose country they are standing on.
While ‘The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf’ and ‘Living on Stolen Land’ seem quite tonally different when read one after the other, they are thematically linked in many ways. One of those themes is the assertion of environmental relationships. In ‘The Interrogation’, this happens with the description of Ashala’s strong connection to the Firstwoods and its aliveness – the woods have emotions, memory, feel pain and joy, and whose friendship and trust must be earned. Similarly, ‘Stolen Land’ expresses many verses on the unique relationship Aboriginal people have to country, such as: ‘the Ancestor / who is the hill / the Ancestor hill / who is family’.
Gleeson-White argues that this act of questioning the nature of Country, especially against the Western framework of ownership and property (by which most land is viewed in Australia), challenges the familiar literary tropes of ‘the outback’ or gothic noir postcolonialism so popular in literature. It contributes instead to ‘contemporary ecological debates, which hinge on rethinking western conceptions of the natural world, including land and its relationship with humans, and of the human itself (p.10, 2018).’
Excerpt from ‘Living On Stolen Land’.
Another theme covered in both books is settler colonialism. In one verse of ‘Living on Stolen Land’, Kwaymullina writes that ‘The denigration [of Aboriginal people] / justified the violence / enabled it / that is why the denigration is so necessary… without it / there is only the uncomfortable truth / that there was no justification for what was done / no civilising mission / no manifest destiny / Just a land grab (p.10)’.
It seems to me that the author writes again about the impact of the Aborigines Act of 1905 (which I’ve already discussed inspired much of ‘The Interrogation’ novel), hinting at the fact that the policy led to a steep increase in Aboriginal people’s suffering, isolation, manipulation, abuse… and so on. Simply stealing the land wasn’t enough, I argue Kwaymullina posits – the invasion was part one. In order to justify stealing the land, you had to break the people, if not get rid of them entirely (genocide) – part two. If that didn’t work (it didn’t, we’re still here), then part three involves the constant stereotyping, racism and continued paternal control of ‘Indigenous affairs’, which we see happen today. This ‘denigration’ she refers to appears in both of her novels. It acknowledges that colonisation is a process, not an event. Colonisation is ongoing and contemporary – and for this alone, Kwaymullina should be applauded for her contributions to literature.
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Question for your next book club: Discuss the ways that Kwaymullina personifies and empowers the land/environment/Country in either novel discussed here. What literary techniques or conventions does she use?
Note: If you’re interested in reading more regular book reviews for books by Aboriginal writers, I highly recommend you follow @blackfulla_bookclub on Instagram, they are fantastic!
