‘Unlimited Futures’ and ‘This All Come Back Now’

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.

This week we’re talking about speculative fiction by Aboriginal authors and I’m very excited about it. Speculative fiction in a broad sense is any fiction writing that departs from reality and leaps forward into the supernatural, the dystopian, utopian, and other fantastic daydreams. I want to share with you two anthologies that are national works in their scope but of course focus in on the West Australian contributors included in them. They are Fremantle Press’ ‘Unlimited Futures (2022)’, edited by Rafeif Ismail & Ellen Van Neerven; and ‘This All Come Back Now (2022)’, edited by Mykaela Saunders and published by UQP. ‘Unlimited Futures’ is ‘speculative, visionary Blak and Black fiction’, a mix of First Nations and Afro-Black voices. ‘This All Come Back Now’ is a collection of short stories from First Nations writers only.

In the forward of ‘Unlimited Futures’, Ellen Van Neerven, a Mununjali Yugambeh writer, talks about how writing to genre like science-fiction or fantasy is something that hasn’t usually been encouraged or expected of from First Nations people. Often it is memoir writing that has been more visible in literature, as a generation speaks important truths on the historical and ongoing experiences Indigenous people face in Australia. However, Van Neerven says that “sometimes our communities feel like they have to write for a certain audience, sometimes there’s pressure as a First Nations writer to represent all First Nations people. We wanted to free people from those pressures (p. 13).” In this way, the editors view speculative fiction as a form of hopeful writing – showing ways that the world could be and should be.

Extract from Claire G. Coleman’s ‘Night Bird’ in ‘Unlimited Futures’.

‘Fifteen Days On Mars’ by Palkyu author Ambelin Kwaymullina is one such hopeful story. A young woman and her mother move from their utopian dimension to an unknown planet nicknamed ‘Mars’ somewhere in the deep universe, which they are intent on transforming from the suburban mirage of colonial settler life to what they know could be a better world, one in harmony with nature, where all people are equal. After they discover a neighbour is being abused by her husband, the protagonist decides to help her new friend ‘solve’ the problem. Although on the surface the problem is about a brutish man who needs to be removed from the picture, I think this story is about the friendship between an Indigenous woman and a non-Indigenous woman, and how trust and mutual respect can be built over cups of tea, having hard, honest conversations and knowing how to apologise and move forward.

Noongar author Claire G. Coleman also makes an appearance with the visceral haunting of her Country, limping and forlorn after a million cuts from the wadjelas industry and mining in her gothic thriller piece, ‘Night Bird’: “I am crying for the phantasm of the life I never had; the life I could never have, my Country severed. I fear that I am going mad again, I fear that what I am haunted by is myself (p. 67).” And in ‘Thylacine’, Martu writer Jasper Wyld also writes about another kind of haunting, but one far more serene and gentle, in which the ghost of the Tasmanian Devil visits her each night during a paralysis of the body. In this near-future imagination, scientists have brought back the formerly extinct animal in Frankenstein-like experiments, only to find the animal is a zombie, with none of its former instincts or personality. Can the protagonist find the lost souls of the thylacines?

‘This All Come Back Now’ also discusses the need for speculative fiction about First Nations mob to be written by First Nations mob. Koori author Mykaela Saunders writes: “…for most of its history the Australian spec fic publishing industry has been hostile to our stories and indeed our presence, while mining our cultures and pillaging our spirituality to trade in tired themes and tropes (p. 7).” For Saunders, this anthology is a way for the genre to be spoken with authenticity by First Nations voices, and for themes such as ecocide, state-sanctioned violence and eugenics to finally be given a spotlight, rather than ignored completely, as has been the case for many years.  

Extract from Timmah Ball’s ‘An Invitation’ in ‘This All Come Back Now’.

‘In His Father’s Footsteps’ by Broome-based Bardi writer Kalem Murray is a warning lesson to children to take their ancestor’s advice seriously. We see a rebellious teenager stray off the path in the humid mangrove to the cries of a wailing woman… In a similar vein of the validity and reality of Aboriginal spirituality, Jabirr Jabirr man Loki Liddle writes about the serpent who lives un-ageing, immortal and shapeshifting in human forms, wreaking violent vengeance on any person who disrespects the order and balance of all things. And in Ballardong Noongar writer Timmah Ball’s piece, ‘An Invitation’, the author exists in a reality where Australia’s buildings are inexplicably crumbling and falling into deep crevasses in the ground, much to the horror of the ordinary settler descendent, and to the bemusement of the protagonist. Other WA writers include Noongars Archie Weller and Kathryn Gledhill-Tucker, who both find a way to express a love for their culture that goes far deeper than the restrictions of the genre itself.

In ‘Magical Realism and the Transcultural Politics of Irony (2019)’, Maria Takolander discusses how Waanyi author Alexis Wright’s magical realist novel ‘Plains of Promise (1997)’ uses irony to break down the traditional perspectives on colonialism and speak instead to an authentic view on sovereignty. Indigenous writers like Wright, she argues, use magic realism, a genre that fits within speculative fiction, to draw attention to the “overwritten but unfinished business of the past… and repressed colonial trauma… [clearing] the way for a powerful assertion of Indigenous sovereignty (p.7)”. Which ultimately, Takolander argues, keeps Indigenous culture something dynamic, contemporary and very much alive.

Extract from Kathryn Gledhill-Tucker’s piece ‘Protocols of Transference’ in ‘This All Come Back Now’.

This is important to note because speculative fiction is sometimes an uncomfortable genre for Indigenous writers, when at first glance, the genre tells us that our stories are fantastical and unreal – that the audiences believe by writing to the genre, we are also acknowledging our cultural references to be untrue. However, for many writers in these anthologies, the imagination and the fantasy mix in with very real beliefs.

For instance, in Archie Weller’s short story ‘The Purple Plains’, evil white monsters called djanaks, a symbolic representation of violent colonial settlers and Western greed, have been made far more powerful and destructive in this fantasy world than in our own. But the idea that the First Nations tribes who meet for a corroborree are the ‘keepers of the trees’, the protectors and custodians of Country, with Dreaming stories and songlines sacred to those places, is very real to the author. As are the references, made in multiple short stories in both anthologies, that time is not linear, but that past, present and future mingle as one. In this way, by taking control of the genre’s steering wheel so to speak, First Nations authors writing speculative fiction are enjoying the pleasures and empowerment of imagination, metaphor and visionary writing, while standing strong in their culture and beliefs.

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Question for your next book club: Analyse a short story from one of the anthologies and see if you can figure out which parts are imagination, and which parts are real to the author. Did the stories challenge your own beliefs or assumptions about Aboriginal culture?

Extract from ‘The Purple Plains’ by Archie Weller, in ‘This All Come Back Now’.

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!