DREAM FOR OTHERS® | EP #13: Consciousness Raising (with Dr Anita Heiss) You are listening to the Dream For Others® podcast with Naomi Arnold, Episode 13. ​ ​ Dream For Me, Dream For You, Dream For Others®. And now your host, ​ ​ award-winning life and business coach, Naomi Arnold... Hi there! Thank you for joining me on the podcast today. Those of you who have been listening since the first season, before I moved to solo episodes, would know that I used to do long-form interviews on the show. I got to speak to some of the most amazing people and I wanted to reshare some of those interviews with you, in case you’ve joined us in more recent times or want to listen to components in more digestible blocks. So today, I’m going to re-share part of my interview with one of my favourite authors Dr Anita Heiss. Before doing that though, I wanted to let you know that if you are located in Central Queensland, Dr Heiss will be visiting Yeppoon in May. I am on the executive committee for a local women’s networking group called Busi Women Inc and we’re bringing Dr Heiss to town for some community events in the ​ ​ naomiarnold.com |#DreamForOthers | Ⓒ 2018 ​ ​ area - one of which you’re invited to. You can find the details under the event tab on the Busi Women Inc Facebook page and on my Facebook page too. ​ ​ ​ ​ Okay let’s jump in and listen to Anita... For those who aren't as familiar with you and your work as me, would you mind introducing us to what you do and how you came to be doing it? So, I actually started writing back in 1992. I was writing comic scripts for Streetwize Comics and I wasn't very good at that. I tried very hard and I did it for two years. But while I was doing that, I started writing and doing some journalism in columns and so forth where I could use a bit more flair and use a larger word count. So in 1994, I quit that job at Streetwize to write a book. I didn't know that I would write more than one book, I didn't know that I'd be talking to you today having published almost 20 books now, but I wrote a book called ‘Sacred Cows’ and really it ​ ​ ​ ​ was a reaction to my time at university where all the books on the shelf there were written by non-Aboriginal people and some of those people had not even been to Australia. All the books I got off the shelf that had about anything to do with Aboriginal people and Aboriginal Australian history or that involved Aboriginal society, failed to use Aboriginal voices so I thought I would write a book about Australian society looking at a sacred cows - Skippy and Vegemite and the backyard barbecue - in a satirical way, just to make the point that we are bicultural people. But even me writing that kind of book had me engage with Australians to make that an authentic piece and that was a springboard for my writing. I didn't know I’d write another book, but I was then invited by Scholastic Australia to write a historical novel called ‘Who Am I? The Diary of Mary Talence’ about the ​ ​ stolen generations. I wrote that around the same time that I was doing my PHD on Aboriginal Literature Publishing and then the rest, as they say, is history. Even though you write in a number of different contexts, there seems to be an underlying theme through a lot of it where you are trying to raise consciousness on something, or play some part in creating change or awareness. That's absolutely right. I want to do a few things and I started writing because I wanted to write Aboriginal stories, with Aboriginal voices, and Aboriginal women in particular into the Australian literary landscape in a way that we had not been written before. naomiarnold.com |#DreamForOthers | Ⓒ 2018 ​ ​ So for instance, I wrote the first commercial women's novels with Aboriginal characters and that was writing us into a space where we were women with careers and women who were educated and women who had families and women who wanted relationships and had friendships, just like other Australian women. So, yes, breaking down those stereotypes for a start is what I wanted to do. But also within those stories, which might be set in Sydney or Melbourne or Canberra and Brisbane, weaving through the stories of relationships and friendships themes of black deaths in custody, themes of human rights like the NT Intervention, looking at indigenous intellectual property in the arts and so forth and using my characters to have dialogue and have storylines that are real for myself and the women in my world. I was the first person in my family to go to university and graduate from university and also the first Aboriginal person to graduate with a Phd. from the University of Western Sydney so I feel a huge sense of responsibility to use the platform that I now have through education, and the privilege that comes with having a platform, to try and make changes in a way in some way through the arts. My mother was born on an Aboriginal mission in Cowra. My grandmother was one of the Stolen Generations and was in service, and so I feel that we still have a long way to go in terms of change in this country and that writing, whether it's commercial fiction or children's books, is one way of making this nation think and making them think about what their role is in terms of making social change as well. I love that. When I was reading ‘Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms’, I just ​ ​ loved seeing how even though something is fiction and a novel that you were raising my consciousness there of what it was like to be an Aboriginal person living in Cowra on a mission with less rights than those who were in the prisoners of war camp nearby for example. Well, thank you. The Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms was obviously a story that's very close to me because that's my family history and it's interesting because I had the idea for that novel when I was in Hawaii at Pearl Harbor. It made me think about the way in which history had been documented in our country and obviously history is often documented by the coloniser as opposed to the colonised. And I was thinking about Cowra and what I knew about the breakout and none of it had actually been written or documented. World War 2 talked about aborigine involvement (there were Wiradjuri names from Cowra, from the Talca who we remember), but also only 4.5 or 4.6 miles in a direct naomiarnold.com |#DreamForOthers | Ⓒ 2018 ​ ​ line from that POW camp was another camp of Aboriginal people where my mother was living at the time of the breakout who had lived under the active protection. There was an assimilation policy at the time and Aboriginal people lived with fewer rights, less access to nutritional food, less access to medical supplies and so forth than Japanese POW’s. Don't get me wrong we provided the care that we should have provided to prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention and that's a good thing, but whilst most people know that story, they don't know the other story. And for me it was important that Australian readers understand the complete story around that town at that time - a town that quite proudly recognises its relationship and the ongoing reconciliation it has with Japan, but that it doesn't necessarily have with its local Indigenous people. So that novel uses a build up to a love story to drive it, because I wanted people like yourself and women in book clubs and women who lie on the beach and women who catch trains to work who want to read about relationships and strong female stories, but may not pick up a book or might not have thought to read a book by an aboriginal author, will buy and read and talk about a book that actually talks about the human condition and the frailties of relationships in families and also male and female relationships. Obviously in that novel we’re looking at a young Wiradjuri girl Mary and a Japanese POW Hiroshi thrown into a situation and, as war does, makes people behave in quite extraordinary ways. We’re looking to make Australian readers understand the humanity behind caring for each other, particularly in a time of war, and that in the instance of love in particular, love knows no boundaries - least of all race. You can feel yourself really connecting with those characters and what they're going through and then it often triggers you to go research further about the realities. I really hope so. It's interesting because you write a book and the authors focus on the characters and the dialogue and wanting to have a rich story and a plot that will make readers want to take reading but you can't control the way a reader reads your work because we write through a lens and everybody reads through with their own particular lens. When I wrote ‘Tiddas’ which was set in Brisbane, I had people read it as a love letter ​ ​ to Brisbane, I had people read it in different ways and engage with the five main characters in different ways.