On 6 May 2018, I was a part of the Sydney Writers’ Festival panel ‘Owning Your Story’ at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre alongside members Winnie Dunn, Monikka Eliah, Omar Sakr, Shirley Le, and Evelyn Araluen.
On the panel we discussed how we came to be involved in SWEATSHOP and explored the need to reclaim our stories from simplistic mainstream depictions as a step in decolonisation. Winnie Dunn, for example, talked about the fact that Chris Lilley in Summer Heights High and the spinoff show Jonah From Tonga was one of the first depictions of Tongan-Australians—and it was a white man who painted his skin brown and wore an afro wig.
One scene, in which a brownfaced Lilley stood in front of a class and pretended to be illiterate, inspired rage in Dunn’s brother, who turned to her and said, "I can f---ing read". Lilley’s visual depiction in popular media perpetuates and legitimises demeaning stereotypes of Tongan-Australians, and her brother’s anger comes from its inaccuracy. Representation, in a simple sense, can be thought of an image that is supposed to reflect the reality that exists outside of it, and this failure made it a limited and negative one.
Further, Lilley depicted Jonah as lazy, crude, musical, and conniving, a depiction which White Australian boys delighted in re-enacting at Dunn’s high school. The consequences of Summer Heights High, then, align with what Jamaican-born British intellectual Stuart Hall speaks of as representation’s “formative, not merely expressive, place in the constitution of social and political life”. Representation is not merely an image of an outside reality: Lilley’s representations instead shape the very way we perceive, talk about, and act towards Tongan-Australians.
Chris Lilley (centre) in Jonah from Tonga. Source: ABC Australia
Representation, in a simple sense, can be thought of an image that is supposed to reflect the reality that exists outside of it, and this failure made it a limited and negative one.
For Dunn, as with the other members of the panel, owning stories means taking back the power of representation from White creators. By highlighting the intelligence, tenderness, and beauty of Tongan-Australians and contextualising these limited, negative representations within structural inequalities, Dunn hopes to reclaim the humanity of her community through complex and honest representation. This is how SWEATSHOP Writers’ Collective hopes to empower culturally and linguistically diverse communities.
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In the Q&A that followed, we received a question from a middle-aged woman who identified as White. Hella Ibrahim, editor of literary journal Djed Press, as follows:
"I really like what you said about sharing your stories rather than owning them. I think that’s fantastic, I would love to read all of your stories. But I just, as a – full disclosure, I’m White – I just want to know what you think you have to gain by calling me “sh*t”. Everything you’re suggesting we do to you, you are doing back to us, and I just want to know what you think you have to gain by that."
This was in relation to Dunn saying, "White people are sh*t" at some point during the panel. By taking "White people" to mean her personally, then moving to the collective "we" and "us" of White people, the woman positioned herself as a representative of all White people and spoke as such. While she started off by saying that she would have loved to read our stories, implicit in her question was the withdrawal of her and by extension the White nation’s support if we did not answer her in a satisfactory way. She presented herself as a tolerant White Australian whose threshold for tolerance was breached by our behaviour. This points to what anthropologist Ghassan Hage’s White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society articulates as the phenomenon of tolerance, where White nationalists “engage in this form of acceptance to live in a fantasy space where the Australianness of the ethnic other appears as if it is under their control at a time when the migrant is becoming inexorably Australian independently of their will”. She spoke as if her feelings were central to our success. In reality, after the panel, members of the audience approached us on the panel and offered us words of support and solidarity. This was the community that we reached out to, and they reached out to us.
She spoke as if her feelings were central to our success.
I would like to take the woman’s question seriously, however. Do we think every White person is ‘sh*t’? No. In SWEATSHOP we have White friends, family, lovers, colleagues, and supporters. At the same time, certain people by virtue of their Whiteness have had detrimental consequences on our lives. As Dunn’s example above shows, Chris Lilley is not simply an individual who happens to be White: he uses his position within society as a White man to shape and maintain the way we think and talk about Tongan-Australians, Black Americans, Chinese-Australians, and Japanese-Americans. That he has been offered a new series by Netflix shows the nature of his White privilege: instead of being held accountable for the damage he has caused, he is instead rewarded for his willingness to punch down, supposedly in the name of free speech. In a certain light, he is also a gross caricature of White masculinity, obsessed with the penises of Black and Brown men made hypermasculine through imperial and colonial stereotypes. Lilley shows that individuals in Whiteness, rather than abstracted power structures, are complicit in perpetuating such depictions.
Her inability to separate structural criticism from personal attack is not unique. The previous week, at the event ‘Rising in the West: Writing from the heart of Sydney’, held at Katoomba Cultural Centre, I, alongside Omar Sakr and novelist Rawah Arja, shared our stories and talked about being writers from Western Sydney. I wore a shirt from the band Divide & Dissolve that read, ‘Destroy White Supremacy’. After the event, an elderly man, with a four-legged walking stick and nose so riddled with blood vessels it was bright red, approached me. With his free hand he held my upper arm in a vice-like grip. ‘Your shirt,’ he said, ‘You telling us all to get fucked, then?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘I am against the structures that say that people who look like you are superior to me because of your skin colour.’ His grip loosened. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Then we’re on the same side.’
I was fortunate that this conversation not escalate further. Dunn had a similarly productive experience recently on the , where the White Australian host Kel Butler asks Dunn how she [Kel] should write from the perspectives of people who are not White. Dunn said that:
"Even if the intentions are good, then it very much so becomes a problem of repeating colonialism."
When Kel agrees and draws parallels between that and her opposition to men writing women’s stories, Dunn expresses surprises at Kel’s receptiveness: “I’ve never heard that from a White person before…out of ten [conversations], one person listens.” While this experience was positive for both sides, the converse of Dunn’s surprise is her cynicism walking into these conversations, having been ignored or dismissed by White people in the past. This is exhausting when we have to have the same, often fruitless, discussions.
The White woman centred herself in her question and in the event, which is a shame because we really did speak for a whole hour beforehand.
The white woman centred herself in her question and in the event, which is a shame because we really did speak for a whole hour beforehand. There was a panel, which I would like to re-centre. We had discussed at length our aspirations not only for ourselves as writers, editors, and academics, but also for our respective industries. To answer the woman’s question, we were attempting to evolve the conversations around diversity, seizing the power of representation for ourselves as members of culturally and linguistically diverse and Aboriginal communities, and being honest about our feelings on the industry in the present. The White woman demanded that we explain our existence, regressing the discussion to how racism works. We had been reduced to ambassadors for anti-racism. As Black American writer Toni Morrison says:
"[T]he very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being."
This is exactly why groups like are integral to developing literature unique to culturally and linguistically diverse communities. In not having to explain ourselves to a White gaze, by being on the same understanding with regards to how White writers have co-opted the stories of our respective communities for personal profit, we can focus on developing a unique literary aesthetic. The results of such a process speak for themselves in our anthologies and , which features new and emerging voices across Western Sydney from writers of migrant, immigrant, refugee, and Aboriginal backgrounds.
Stephen Pham is a Vietnamese-Australian writer from Cabramatta. He is a member of Sweatshop: Western Sydney Literacy Movement.
The article is part of a collaborative series by SBS Life and Sweatshop: Western Sydney Literacy Movement which is devoted to empowering groups and individuals from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds through training and employment in creative and critical writing initiatives. Sweatshop is directed by Michael Mohammed Ahmad. The Big Black Thing Chapter. 2 alongside other SWEATSHOP publications can be purchased from the website ().
