We Come With This Place: Debra Dank on her debut and what comes next

Ahead of the London Book Fair, Think Australian talks to author Debra Dank, whose debut memoir is in the running for three NSW Premier’s awards and the Stella Prize, about the book’s journey to publication, what she hopes international readers might take from it, and plans for her second book.

Your book We Come With This Place (Echo) has been shortlisted for three NSW Premier’s literary awards and longlisted for this year’s Stella Prize. Can you tell us about your process of writing it?

Certainly the lead up to the book kind of happened in all the ways you listed—years in the making, in a burst, winding, ruler straight, collaborative and yes, insanely private but created for public sharing. It is the recount of some of the events which have shaped and impacted lives in my family. As a process then to complete the PhD, it was important and significant to do justice to those whose acts have been recounted in words. I was conscious of treating all of those ‘characters’ with the utmost respect but also with the gentle love I have always received in my family.  And I needed to remain true to who they are and what they did and not create a false, shiny new discourse.

Due to the book starting its life as part of my PhD, with no intention to be a book, my supervisor was so very supportive and helpful in making me understand that I could shape this into what I would like for it to be. She was truly such a big part of what the final product is. For example, I didn’t want chapters because that is not how these stories work, so she said, ‘don’t have chapters’. Associate Professor Antonia Pont provided the opportunity for me to be courageous in making this work for these stories hence episodes and the nonlinear storying as it exists in my community became the format of this narrative collection.

Can you share what considerations or protocols you had to think about when telling this story? 

Both my parents have passed away but for many years, both mum and dad urged me to write down some of our stories. My parents are amazing people—I cannot speak of them in the past tense because they are still here—so I had their desire and permission to write about our stuff. I really wanted them to be represented in ways that were authentic, and again, not shiny. My aunt was also part of the permissions that were vitally important to me. She was beside me as I raised my children on Country. She is also now passed away, but she taught me so much about being Gudanji/Wajaka, she walked me and my children across our Country and taught us with more patience than a human body should be able to contain. I tried desperately hard to be what my parents and my aunt would expect of me.

Non-human relationships and the protocols of how my community engages with our non-human kin was and remains a normal behaviour. It’s how and what we do as Gudanji/Wakaja people. Listening carefully, in ways that are different to the understanding I have of the utilisation of a ‘sense’, is done through a whole-of-body listening. Only when we listen with our whole body do we hear the stories of those non-human kin. If we, Gudanji/Wakaja mob, don’t listen in this way, then we lose the opportunity to live well with Country and then bad things happen. This is one of the big protocols I was taught as a child and it is one of the big protocols that I have taught my own children.

And how did the book find its publisher?

Just prior to submitting my thesis, I asked a very dear friend to read over the narrative component of this thing. I have always been a consumer of literature and yes, have been, unintentionally, a little of a literary snob. Throughout my life I have continued to study—words and books really are my safe place—so the titles I read have been important literary contributions listed in University courses and I have always read theoretical texts. My production of a narrative was so far from my comfort zone, I needed reassurance that the narrative was readable. My friend called and said, we need to speak with a publisher. I was a little disconcerted because a publisher is someone who makes books so my identity has and continues to do a strange dance around consumer/producer. I am still struggling somewhat with imposter syndrome.

There were several publishers interested in publishing this collection of stories and I am grateful for their interest. I chose to publish with Echo, and the team there led by the very wonderful Juliet Rogers have been amazing and so very supportive. I have a further publishing contract with Echo to publish my next book which is the theoretical component of the PhD and is a discussion and exploration of the ways narrative exists in Gudanji community beyond vocabulary. I think we must pay greater attention to that. We must stop assuming that Western ways and definitions cover all cultures. So my next book is the one that I am really looking forward to because it brings me back to my safe place. The place about words.

Your book will find First Nations readers here, as well as a non-Indigenous audience—did you have a particular reader/readership in mind when you wrote it? And who do you imagine your international readers might be—what do you see them finding in it?

It is a little scary knowing that my words are now in a book which will make its way through a journey separate and distinct from me. I initially did this for my family … so my children could see our stories in a book—I imagined that I would have printed three copies of the PhD for each of my three children. It is now more than that.

I would like my readers to learn a little more about the first peoples of Australia and to know that we experience the whole gamut of life but more importantly, that we exist and will continue to exist as first peoples of our Country. I travelled overseas just prior to COVID and was told by someone I started a chat with that the world mostly doesn’t know there are ‘dark skinned’ people in Australia. That person told me they knew Australia to be a ‘white country’. I hope my readers find something of the courageous, strong, resilient Aboriginal people who have lived through the trauma and horror of colonisation and who continue being part of the oldest continuous lived civilisations in the world.

What has been the most pleasing or satisfying response you have had to your book from a reader?

I had someone say that my book spoke to them in ways that a book had never spoken to them before. I thought that was such a gracious thing to have said of a piece of writing. It was so important for me to hear that because I didn’t then, and I still don’t, see it as a comment on my writing ability rather a comment on the extraordinary lives of Gudanji/Wakaja mob. It seemed to offer a different kind of acknowledgement of our humanity.

You’ve been an educator for many years, what book or books would you recommend that you have found most valuable over that time? 

I have always felt safe with words and perhaps it was a reaction to how I saw my parents and other Aboriginal people being treated, that I often retreated to a place inside and between the covers of a book. Words were constant and I had control over which words I made important and which I put aside. Mostly as a child I read the English children’s classics—those with a horse theme anyway, and then of course the adventure genre captured my interest because I could relate, from the other side of the narrative, to those adventures. My relationship with the environment, of course, was very different to the idea of conquering lands but I could participate in those stories through my relationship of Country.

I have enjoyed much of the writing of Toni Morrison because of her ability to make words sing through the hardest of experiences. I enjoy spending time with the writing of Australian First Nations authors such as Ali Cobby Eckermann, whose poetry really is sublime and Tara June Winch’s writing with its ability to reshape the way you see the world. I love Walt Whitman’s poetry for the lyricism but one of my favourite authors is Emily Dickinson. I’d never really thought that I had such a preference for poetry but I like bite-size messages and wisdom in those chunks.

And finally, what was the last book you read and loved, and why?

Oh, this is such a loaded question for me because truly, the last local book I read was written and illustrated by my daughter Ryhia Dank. My daughter’s book is called Sounds and is a children’s book. My second granddaughter, Ryhia’s daughter, is 11 months old so for me to read a book to her that was written and illustrated by her mother and which contains images telling almost secret stories we can read through those images is the biggest of privileges and encompasses the critically important need for all communities to have access to literature that they have participated in the production of.

We Come With This Place is published by Echo Publishing.

Category: Think Australian profile