As a non-fiction author dedicated to the ongoing trauma of violent colonialism, I was ineluctably drawn to confronting the same in fiction, Paul Daley writes
about this issue, and the autodidact and professional researchers involved in the theft heavily instructed the novel.
Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morningRenny is an impossible character. He is nobody who lived. Yet fragments of his experience are drawn from those of many of the men who operated remotely as researchers, missionaries, frontier cops and general “adventurers” and carpetbaggers in the 19th and 2oth centuries.
Perhaps the biggest challenge was finding the correct authorial voice. This is always a test. But I determined that while this Black-white story of colonisation’s bitter legacies required me to write strong Indigenous characters, as a non-Indigenous writer I would never seek to inhabit them. They emerge through the eyes of two first person, non-Aboriginal characters.
The experience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of religious missions was diverse and complex. For some it was positive. For many it was largely negative. For others it was more nuanced. While the place, Jesustown, is drawn from my imagination, it was, like my characters, instructed by many books and articles, and visits to several old missions. At one of them, a former resident spoke of the generational cruelty they had endured there.
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