Speaker 1: Hey there, it's Ruby Jones and I'm back to introduce
Speaker 1: another episode of Read This Our Sister podcast, hosted by
Speaker 1: Editor of The Monthly and King of the Book Nerdes
Speaker 1: Michael Williams. It features conversations with some of the best
Speaker 1: and most beloved writers from Australia and around the world.
Speaker 1: In this episode, we're going to hear from filmmaker, historian
Speaker 1: and writer Sanila Ginape. She's just released her first nonfiction book,
Speaker 1: it's called Black Convicts. Before we do, Michael is here
Speaker 1: to share a bit about their conversation. So, Michael, Sandila
Speaker 1: Chin Gabe's new book. It's this fascinating and fresh look
Speaker 1: into Australia's colonial history and it challenges some long held
Speaker 1: preconceptions about the way that our nation was shaped.
Speaker 2: Can you tell me a bit about how the book
Speaker 2: does this?
Speaker 3: Yeah. Sandy is an extraordinary storyteller and has been working
Speaker 3: as a journalist and a filmmaker for many years now.
Speaker 3: She writes regularly for both the Saturday Paper and The
Speaker 3: Monthly and I'm a big fan of her work. And
Speaker 3: part of what's so exciting about this novel is, in
Speaker 3: many ways, it's the culmination of a whole lot of
Speaker 3: the stuff she's done before. You may have seen a
Speaker 3: few years ago on SBS a documentary that she made
Speaker 3: called Our African Roots and won a number of awards,
Speaker 3: It was critically acclaimed. It's back up on SBS on
Speaker 3: demand at the moment if you want to catch it.
Speaker 3: But in it, she looks at the unrelenting whiteness of
Speaker 3: the way in which we talk about the First Fleet
Speaker 3: and the first wave of kind of invasion and settlement
Speaker 3: into Australia. The point that Santy makes is that actually
Speaker 3: amongst those convicts were a number of people of African descent.
Speaker 3: In the First Fleet, at least fifteen of the convicts
Speaker 3: were of African descent, and by eighteen forty that number
Speaker 3: had risen to about five hundred. So it was a
Speaker 3: significant part of our history, but one that never features
Speaker 3: in the conventional way Australian history is told in the
Speaker 3: pictures we see, in the stories we tell.
Speaker 1: And Michael, you're someone who's curious about the world. You
Speaker 1: read a lot, you know a lot about Australian history.
Speaker 1: So did what Sanchi discover Did any of it come
Speaker 1: as a surprise to you?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Look, I mean I think as a lot of
Speaker 3: our listeners would have experienced themselves ruby. The way in
Speaker 3: which Australian history is taught in school follow certain conventions
Speaker 3: and expectations. I think it's improved since I was at school,
Speaker 3: but you know, my memory is it was all stories
Speaker 3: about bush rangers and Burke and Wills disappearing into the
Speaker 3: desert and a whole lot of white convicts coming over
Speaker 3: here and speaking with broad Cockney accents about how they
Speaker 3: stole some apples back in London streets. There's a kind
Speaker 3: of sepier toned idea about Australian history. And while we've
Speaker 3: gotten perhaps a little bit better about understanding the dispossession
Speaker 3: of First Nations people in this country, we still don't
Speaker 3: understand the full implications of the British Empire, of the
Speaker 3: way in which the colonial project was built on things
Speaker 3: like slavery, and that did play a part in the
Speaker 3: founding of the nation I know as Australia. And what
Speaker 3: Sandy does is brings that to the fore again in
Speaker 3: a way that is bracing and challenging but also incredibly enlightening.
Speaker 1: Coming up in just a moment, Santilla Chigabe is rewriting history.
Speaker 3: Santilla is a natural born storyteller, but she grew up
Speaker 3: learning stories about her life through a largely white European lens.
Speaker 3: It seemed to Sandy that people like her got to
Speaker 3: read about history, but never to write about it.
Speaker 2: I'd always loved reading and writing when I was a kid,
Speaker 2: and I was obsessed with writing. I remember my family
Speaker 2: got our first computer. My brother would always play like
Speaker 2: video games like FIFA, and I would always write pleas
Speaker 2: and like that was the thing that always excited me.
Speaker 2: And I didn't really think about writing as a career.
Speaker 2: I didn't really think, but I remember being fascinated by
Speaker 2: people that told stories. And then journalism became like a
Speaker 2: very accessible entry point for me because I saw people
Speaker 2: that looked like me doing and I was like, Oh,
Speaker 2: that looks like a really interesting career. Like I think
Speaker 2: I want to do that because I get to tell
Speaker 2: stories and I get to be curious, and I get
Speaker 2: to meet people. And I remember thinking, Okay, where do
Speaker 2: you go if you want to be a journalist? And
Speaker 2: you know, growing up in the nineties and dear and
Speaker 2: I do. She was on SBS and she had a
Speaker 2: name that most people couldn't pronounce, kind of like me.
Speaker 2: And I was like, I think that's that's where I
Speaker 2: want to go. I want to end up at SBS.
Speaker 2: And it was a bit of a detour because I
Speaker 2: had to classic sort of like migrant thing of studying
Speaker 2: to become a doctor and then realizing that that's not
Speaker 2: what I wanted to do. And I loved community radio.
Speaker 2: I did a lot of stuff with SIN and then
Speaker 2: that summer I remember having the very difficult conversation with
Speaker 2: my mum and saying, I don't I don't think I
Speaker 2: want to do this medicine thing. I think I want
Speaker 2: to pursue a career in journalism. And my mom, you know,
Speaker 2: reacted anyway that I think most parents would. I mean,
Speaker 2: she was worried because she was like, I don't know
Speaker 2: if youre gon't make any money doing this. Also, she
Speaker 2: was also looking at it from a you know, you're
Speaker 2: a black woman. I don't really know if there are
Speaker 2: any opportunities for you in the world and things like that.
Speaker 3: But you'll be unsurprised to hear Sandy made those opportunities happen.
Speaker 3: On lunch breaks from r MIT, She'd walked to fed
Speaker 3: Square to the SBS officers and asked to do work
Speaker 3: experience knocked back rebuff told they didn't offer such things. Eventually,
Speaker 3: through sheer, bloody mindedness and tenacity, she got them to
Speaker 3: give her an unpaid internship, an internship that led to
Speaker 3: her first full time job as a junior radio journalist.
Speaker 2: And I remember this one day I was assigned to
Speaker 2: a story and it was an elderly couple and had
Speaker 2: gone to their house and they were retired and the
Speaker 2: wife had health issues, and they were so excited to
Speaker 2: have visitors in their home because it's that thing of like,
Speaker 2: we don't get to talk to anyone. And this man
Speaker 2: used to be a photographer when he was younger, and
Speaker 2: he'd taken photos of all of these amazing people. And
Speaker 2: he starts to bring out the books, and his wife's
Speaker 2: like making tea and bringing out the biscuits and stuff.
Speaker 2: And I remember the Camo just being so irritated because
Speaker 2: he was like, you came here to ask three questions,
Speaker 2: We have to go. And I'm thinking, blessed, isn't this love?
Speaker 2: Like you know what I just felt? It just felt
Speaker 2: so extractive, like to go in, particularly sometimes going in
Speaker 2: on the worst days of people's lives and knowing that
Speaker 2: you're only asking three questions for a story that's going
Speaker 2: to be a minute and a half that most people
Speaker 2: probably won't even pay attention to. And I sort of thought, gosh,
Speaker 2: do I want to do this for the rest of
Speaker 2: my life? What I did enjoy was the time that
Speaker 2: I got to spend with people. I was like, I
Speaker 2: like this, how do I find a way of being
Speaker 2: able to spend more time with people? And at the time,
Speaker 2: as luck would have it, I was moderating a conversation
Speaker 2: with a filmmaker at a film festival and we got
Speaker 2: off the stage and she grabs my hand and she's like,
Speaker 2: we need to talk, and she says to me, you
Speaker 2: should be making documentaries. And I was like, what she
Speaker 2: was like, you should be making documentaries, Like I've never
Speaker 2: really thought about that because I've never seen anyone that
Speaker 2: looks like me making documentaries. And that's how I started
Speaker 2: making documentaries. And then that then exposed me to the
Speaker 2: wider narrative storytelling, and that was when I was like,
Speaker 2: I've found my groove. This is where I'm meant to be.
Speaker 2: But that thing about representation, honestly, I.
Speaker 3: Was going to say twice, now you've mentioned that idea
Speaker 3: when trying to work out a path for yourself of
Speaker 3: having not seen people who look like you in those
Speaker 3: roles in the telling the story and the ways in
Speaker 3: which anywhere, but particularly acute in Australia, the idea of
Speaker 3: being a migrant voice, the idea of being a person
Speaker 3: of color, the idea of your blackness defining and potentially
Speaker 3: limiting the opportunities that are available to you. Is that
Speaker 3: a sense that you've had right through your career that
Speaker 3: this is an option for you, this is not or
Speaker 3: you have to model it before you can do it.
Speaker 2: I think it's both. To be honest, you know, we
Speaker 2: talk about representation a lot, and I think in a
Speaker 2: sense it's kind of lost some of that just because
Speaker 2: it's so of used as a term. But what I
Speaker 2: will say, when you are young, you're so impressionable, and
Speaker 2: you're looking to people around you for clues about how
Speaker 2: to do this life thing, and when your options are
Speaker 2: very limited because you're not seeing people that look like you,
Speaker 2: and then your family also want seeing people that look
Speaker 2: like you, and they're also helping to shape how you're
Speaker 2: moving through the world and the choices that you're making
Speaker 2: what tends to be available. Then becomes very limited. And
Speaker 2: that's even before you enter an industry and start to
Speaker 2: sort of kind of go, Okay, I think this might
Speaker 2: not be what I want to do, and I might
Speaker 2: want to do something else. But even before you attempt
Speaker 2: to try, there isn't an option available, right, And I think,
Speaker 2: what has helped me. I've just always been curious. I've
Speaker 2: always kind of gone, let me just try it, let
Speaker 2: me see what's going to happen. But I also know
Speaker 2: that not everyone is necessarily motivated by that kind of instinct,
Speaker 2: and for some people, not seeing themselves in a certain
Speaker 2: industry or in a certain role already eliminates that completely,
Speaker 2: and you don't try.
Speaker 3: You delivered the twenty twenty three ew cole lecture around
Speaker 3: the question of who gets to tell history, and as
Speaker 3: you recount in Black Convicts and elsewhere, for you, that
Speaker 3: question about permission to be a historian is a really
Speaker 3: important one that, maybe more even than journalism or documentary
Speaker 3: filmmaking or other forms of storytelling, being the kind of
Speaker 3: gatekeeper who's allowed to write and tell history was a
Speaker 3: sanctified category that you felt you had to find your
Speaker 3: way into and accidentally did.
Speaker 2: And when that Fenny dropped. I was like, oh, my gosh,
Speaker 2: why have we certainly is marginalized, and I say this,
Speaker 2: you know, not on behalf of other marginalized people.
Speaker 3: What do they all think?
Speaker 2: But you go through life having your narrative written on
Speaker 2: your behalf and you don't question it at all, And
Speaker 2: you get to a point and I had a moment
Speaker 2: where I went, why did I believe the history that
Speaker 2: I was told in school that was written by white men?
Speaker 2: And not to say that that history isn't valid, but
Speaker 2: I thought that I couldn't write history. I just thought
Speaker 2: I couldn't write history. History was told to me. I
Speaker 2: couldn't tell history. And when I can't overstate how liberating
Speaker 2: that realization.
Speaker 3: Was for me.
Speaker 2: And it's changed how I moved through the world because
Speaker 2: now I feel like I am in control of my
Speaker 2: life in a way that I did not think before.
Speaker 2: Before I felt like the world was shaping my life
Speaker 2: for me, and in many ways it still does. I
Speaker 2: mean structurally and systemically, all these things still continue to
Speaker 2: dictate the outcomes of your life. But in terms of going, oh,
Speaker 2: actually I can determine what my life looks like to
Speaker 2: a degree because it is not being written for me,
Speaker 2: you know, and history has a way of convincing you
Speaker 2: that you are a certain thing, and particularly histories around
Speaker 2: colonization and colonialism where, certainly from the African perspective, majority
Speaker 2: of the histories that I read growing up and that
Speaker 2: I was told it was almost as though black people
Speaker 2: were passive and there were submit and they just kind
Speaker 2: of accepted that. But obviously when you think about it now,
Speaker 2: it's like, yeah, who is just going to be like, yeah,
Speaker 2: take take my house without any kind of resistance, right,
Speaker 2: You will get people that all fight back, But that
Speaker 2: wasn't the center of the story. The story was always
Speaker 2: about the people that came and what they did and
Speaker 2: the so called good that they did. And then you
Speaker 2: move through the world and having that then still being reinforced,
Speaker 2: Oh you should actually be just grateful, you know, And
Speaker 2: you don't realize how much that subconsciously shapes how you
Speaker 2: move through the world, and so you enter spaces not
Speaker 2: feeling like have a sense of ownership when you do,
Speaker 2: like this world belongs to all of us, right, And
Speaker 2: so when I had that realization, I was like, oh,
Speaker 2: my gosh, I don't have to be in the passenger's
Speaker 2: seat of the world. That I want to live in
Speaker 2: I can contribute to kind of reimagining what that looks
Speaker 2: like and my position, my viewpoint is valid, you know,
Speaker 2: for something like that to happen for me in my thirties,
Speaker 2: like my late thirties, I was like, gosh, it's still
Speaker 2: something that I still try to process about how it
Speaker 2: has impact to me and how I moved through the world.
Speaker 2: But it really we talk about stories and sometimes don't
Speaker 2: realize just the power of stories. And for me, the
Speaker 2: process of this really really really reinforced like words, stories,
Speaker 2: language are incredibly powerful, and it made me realize just
Speaker 2: how important it is for those of us that are
Speaker 2: creating stories to be very aware of that power the
Speaker 2: whole process of writing. So I was incredibly scared. I
Speaker 2: was like, here, I am upending how wide Australia has
Speaker 2: seen itself for a very long time and the mythologies
Speaker 2: it's told itself about itself, and it's not used to
Speaker 2: people like me telling it. We're the ones that get
Speaker 2: told right, and that triggers emotions and feelings in people.
Speaker 2: And I was aware that the work was going to
Speaker 2: be scrutinized and I was like, well, I don't want
Speaker 2: to give them the reason to dismiss these people's stories.
Speaker 2: And so as much as I would have liked to
Speaker 2: push some things further, I just pulled back and I went,
Speaker 2: We're going to stay with what the Colonial Archive is saying,
Speaker 2: and within that try and move and try and make
Speaker 2: certain points. It was hard because of that, like, I
Speaker 2: don't ever want to write anything that limits me in
Speaker 2: that way.
Speaker 3: Again. When we come back, Sandy shares the inciting incident
Speaker 3: that set her on the path to writing Black Conducts
Speaker 3: and reveals how the ghosts of the Archives lived with
Speaker 3: her during the writing of this book. We'll be back
Speaker 3: in a minute. While the idea of black convicts had
Speaker 3: been percolating in Santilla ching Gabe's mind for many years,
Speaker 3: was during the summer of twenty eighteen that things shifted
Speaker 3: into focus. You might remember it was January of that
Speaker 3: year and Peter Dutton, who was Minister of Home Affairs
Speaker 3: at the time, announced that Victorians were scared to go
Speaker 3: out to restaurants because of African gang violence. It was
Speaker 3: idiotic and transparently racist, this attempt to scare white Australians
Speaker 3: into demonizing their neighbors, and it scared Sandy too. But
Speaker 3: for very different reasons.
Speaker 2: I remember I was overseas at the time and I
Speaker 2: got a call to be on a panel to discuss
Speaker 2: that incident, because at that point I've been writing about
Speaker 2: those narratives and how the media was also complicit in
Speaker 2: essentially perpetuating racist narratives because you know, he's saying that
Speaker 2: people of African descent are predisposed to commit crime because
Speaker 2: of the color of their skin is racist and yeah,
Speaker 2: and I remember thinking, I've been talking about this and
Speaker 2: nothing's changing, it's not cutting through, and I don't know
Speaker 2: what it was. And then I remember returning and just
Speaker 2: feeling so and I said, I can't, I don't want
Speaker 2: to be part of this panel. But I remember being
Speaker 2: very frustrated about it. And then I remember being at
Speaker 2: an event, the Broadside Dinner. There were people there who
Speaker 2: had very strong opinions about what was happening and why
Speaker 2: the media was reporting on it, and a few commentators
Speaker 2: were saying to me, oh, well, you know, it's like
Speaker 2: an Aussie rite of passage. Basically, we do this for
Speaker 2: every wave of migration. The Greeks, the Italians, they've all
Speaker 2: copped at the Vietnamese. It's now the Africans turn and
Speaker 2: people would say to me in a way that was
Speaker 2: very dismissive of my contribution. And when I had that conversation,
Speaker 2: I was like, this is dumb. And also I was like,
Speaker 2: there's an element of anti blackness here and why aren't
Speaker 2: we talking about this? And I just sort of thought,
Speaker 2: there has to be a place of thinking and how
Speaker 2: do we talk about this in a way that gets
Speaker 2: people to realize that people of reckons don have been
Speaker 2: here for a while and if you want to talk
Speaker 2: about our place within the contemporary sense, that has to
Speaker 2: be considered, and that if you are going to sort
Speaker 2: of start talking about it in the way that the
Speaker 2: media have reported on it, that is very racist. Because
Speaker 2: people don't commit crime because of the color of their skin.
Speaker 2: A lot of factors contribute to that in any community,
Speaker 2: but most of the time it's failures and government policy.
Speaker 2: So this thing happens and I return home and I
Speaker 2: knew because I've done a story when I was working
Speaker 2: at SBS as a journalist about a South African convict,
Speaker 2: David Steerman, So I knew that there was a convict
Speaker 2: in colonial history. But then I just sort of thought,
Speaker 2: if I can find evidence of people on the first
Speaker 2: fleet because I'd heard about it and then I'd gone
Speaker 2: to an exhibition and seeing a label, then maybe, just
Speaker 2: maybe we can stop talking about this and then start
Speaker 2: thinking about wolf people have been here at the same
Speaker 2: time as white people. What does that then mean.
Speaker 3: The book shifts very gracefully between the kind of bigger
Speaker 3: picture of the early colonial project and the various factors
Speaker 3: that led to it, the various implements of British Empire
Speaker 3: that ran through it all. And so it tells that
Speaker 3: story on the one hand, and then it also tells
Speaker 3: these individual stories of these figures who are part of it.
Speaker 3: And one of the tensions that's apparent from very early
Speaker 3: on is by placing these black convicts in that story
Speaker 3: where we've forgotten to include them for so long, or
Speaker 3: they've been wilfully kept out of it for so long,
Speaker 3: one of the things that happens there is their involvement
Speaker 3: or complicity in the dispossession that was the early colonial project.
Speaker 3: You know that this is not a story about goodies
Speaker 3: and bad is this not a story about you know,
Speaker 3: the righteous or the damned. It's a story about what
Speaker 3: happens in a colonial context when people are trying to
Speaker 3: make a life for themselves, sometimes at the expense of
Speaker 3: one another. How tricky was that part of telling the story.
Speaker 2: Probably the hardest chapter for me, and I would say
Speaker 2: writing about encounters that these black comics had with first
Speaker 2: people's But it also did a wonderful thing, which is
Speaker 2: it reminded me that history is not the place that
Speaker 2: you go to be comforted.
Speaker 3: Or absolved.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, And I think because we are so used
Speaker 2: to these narratives that center figures individuals in history that
Speaker 2: have done remarkable things, and we look to them as
Speaker 2: kind of like I want to be like this person
Speaker 2: or whatever. And the problem with that flawed kind of
Speaker 2: obsession that we have with that sort of narrative is
Speaker 2: that it dismisses the fact that humans, by our nature,
Speaker 2: are incredibly flawed and incredibly complex, and that on the
Speaker 2: one hand, you can do something incredibly remarkable but also
Speaker 2: make decisions that centuries down the line people look at.
Speaker 2: And there's a story that I tell of this black
Speaker 2: comic from Barbados, Robert James, and how he is involved
Speaker 2: in one of the biggest legal cases of the time
Speaker 2: during the period of slavery, And the interesting thing with
Speaker 2: him was that he was effectively found guilty and what
Speaker 2: should have happened, because this is just what happened during slavery,
Speaker 2: was he should have been executed. But at the time
Speaker 2: there was this governor who was sort of like a
Speaker 2: temp that can put it that way, And if you
Speaker 2: were governor, you were also head of the judicial system
Speaker 2: in a lot of these British colonies. And so he
Speaker 2: reviewed the case and he feels like there's been a
Speaker 2: miscarage of justice. He doesn't pardon Robert James, but he
Speaker 2: does send the case to London for a review because
Speaker 2: he's kind of going, I really don't think this guy
Speaker 2: got a fairtra and that puts him in the ship
Speaker 2: because all of the white people on the island are going,
Speaker 2: what are you doing? This guy should have been like executed,
Speaker 2: Like what are you doing? And so he puts his
Speaker 2: own life in jeopardy. But yet he only believes that
Speaker 2: there is a rule of law here and I'm adhering
Speaker 2: to what is required of me in this capacity. But
Speaker 2: at the same time, this acting governor, he was also
Speaker 2: a slave owner. It wasn't like he was going to
Speaker 2: invite Robt James over to his house for a cup
Speaker 2: of tea right, and both these things can be true.
Speaker 2: And I think how that helps me in thinking about
Speaker 2: even in the contemporary sense, particularly when we get obsessed
Speaker 2: with a binary way of thinking and looking at people
Speaker 2: and essentially expecting morally perfect humans, particularly when people do
Speaker 2: things that we don't like and we're very quick to
Speaker 2: put them in the bin. It's not to say that
Speaker 2: we shouldn't critique and challenge, but I do think that
Speaker 2: history does show us that there is so much complexity
Speaker 2: in how humans show up in the world, and it's
Speaker 2: neither right or wrong. It is just a very complicated experience.
Speaker 3: But it does lead in the book, and one of
Speaker 3: the great strengths of the book, because it leads to that,
Speaker 3: you know you have the big questions, to address them
Speaker 3: sufficiently requires very deliberate, narrow decisions, right down to the
Speaker 3: level of individual words. It's really interesting to me that
Speaker 3: you very consciously, when talking about slavery, resist using slave
Speaker 3: as a noun, but instead talk about it adjectivally enslaved
Speaker 3: people rather than slave, and that the deliberateness of that
Speaker 3: in this book I really appreciate and respect hugely. I
Speaker 3: think it's terrific. Can you talk about decisions like that
Speaker 3: that you made.
Speaker 2: So when I first started, like you said, I went
Speaker 2: in looking for a couple of individuals and then decided
Speaker 2: to once bare, they just started to show up in
Speaker 2: them in the hundreds, and it was like being at
Speaker 2: a gravesite. Really, it's just all of these names of
Speaker 2: these dead people. And then they all moved into my
Speaker 2: house at the same time. Sounds weird, but they all did,
Speaker 2: and so I could feel their energy and I was like,
Speaker 2: these were people, living, breathing people in all of their complexity,
Speaker 2: And what does it mean to be in a system
Speaker 2: that subjugates you, your children, your future children, their children?
Speaker 2: And what does it mean to exist? What does it
Speaker 2: mean to resist? And I'm like, well, these people, yes,
Speaker 2: they were enslaved, this is what the system was doing
Speaker 2: to them, but they weren't slaves. That wasn't how they
Speaker 2: would have occupied intimate spaces right within their family. They
Speaker 2: would have been mother child, whatever that dynamic was. But
Speaker 2: what the system was doing to them was what was
Speaker 2: defining their experience.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: But then again it goes back to how these narratives
Speaker 2: we have taken on, particularly around slavery, and that the
Speaker 2: experience of slavery was very different in many ways to
Speaker 2: what we're traditionally used to, but also that as slavery
Speaker 2: evolved and the mechanisms around that, people were of forwarded
Speaker 2: certain freedoms within that system, which also then complicates the
Speaker 2: whole how we think about slavery. Right, people could grow
Speaker 2: their own vegetables, people could gather, but there were certain
Speaker 2: things that they could do, and they were using those
Speaker 2: things to resist. And that's why for me, it's so
Speaker 2: important to remember that, Yes, the experience was absolutely horrendous
Speaker 2: and one of the worst crimes against humanity in modern history,
Speaker 2: but I am sure that even in those moments, people
Speaker 2: found ways to experience joy, whatever that would have looked
Speaker 2: like within that context. And I think remembering that and
Speaker 2: remembering that it would have looked very specific to that context,
Speaker 2: is very important in centering their humanity.
Speaker 3: It's incredibly moving. At the end of the book is
Speaker 3: a table where you list the names, and in fact,
Speaker 3: the design of the book, which is gorgeous, has the
Speaker 3: names across the cover. The centering of the human beings
Speaker 3: seems to be at the heart of this historical project.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. There's probably two versions of the book that I
Speaker 2: started off with and then there was a moment in
Speaker 2: twenty twenty, particularly Black Lives Matter happening, that forced me
Speaker 2: to zoom out and sort of think about empire, think
Speaker 2: about all of the inheritance. And during that process, I
Speaker 2: remember sort of thinking whenever we think about not just
Speaker 2: who gets to write history, even when we think about
Speaker 2: historical actors that have something to tell us about history,
Speaker 2: they generally aren't people from the margins, right, And what
Speaker 2: I wanted to do was to send to these people
Speaker 2: and sort of go, they have something to teach us
Speaker 2: about Empire, about how this continent got to be colonized.
Speaker 2: My former research supervisor, Melbourne Zoe lad Law, she did
Speaker 2: this project where she found that something like two thirds
Speaker 2: of pre federation governors in Australia were essentially governors that
Speaker 2: were working in slave colonies and former slave colonies. So
Speaker 2: you've got these colonial figures who are coming here to
Speaker 2: effectively govern, who were being shaped by everything else that's
Speaker 2: going on where they are, so of course you're going
Speaker 2: to have this stuff happening here as well. And that
Speaker 2: was very important for me because I was like, we
Speaker 2: have to be thinking about how all of that has
Speaker 2: then led to where we find ourselves in contemporary sense,
Speaker 2: even when we think about the displacement, the genocide, dispossession
Speaker 2: of First peoples, the British were doing that in other
Speaker 2: territories before they finally got here, and thinking about those
Speaker 2: actions and thinking about how that treatment the fact that
Speaker 2: by the time that Australia is being colonized, slavery was
Speaker 2: at least one hundred and fifty years in, and they
Speaker 2: had refined that system of labor exploitation, and they'd refined
Speaker 2: the ways in which they could control people for profit.
Speaker 2: And that started to show up, whether it was in
Speaker 2: the convict system, whether it was systems of slavery, whether
Speaker 2: it was in soldiers that were being used as labor
Speaker 2: to protect colonial interests, later on in indentured servants as well.
Speaker 2: I mean, you had all these people that were being
Speaker 2: moved around to serve empire, and the way that you
Speaker 2: controlled them was to subjugate them to various degrees. And
Speaker 2: I just sort of thought it was very important that
Speaker 2: we thought about that, because when we think about that,
Speaker 2: it helps us make sense of where we now find
Speaker 2: ourselves in the contemporary selves.
Speaker 3: Because the other endpoint of that subjugation, or not endpoint,
Speaker 3: but the other injustice lies in the way the story
Speaker 3: gets told and what gets remembered. So while you're addressing
Speaker 3: the core of your subject matter, actually it's the telling
Speaker 3: of that subject over generations that cements certain ideas, that
Speaker 3: limits and constrains certain players. That is perhaps the most
Speaker 3: acute thing that you're redressing in this work. And with
Speaker 3: that in mind, tell me about epistemic injustice.
Speaker 2: I had such a big conversation about this with Ben,
Speaker 2: my publisher, because I was like, there's no whay around
Speaker 2: this bend. I have to just use this language because
Speaker 2: it's very academic y language. But when I came across
Speaker 2: this framework, I was like, oh my gosh, it makes sense.
Speaker 2: This philosopher mirand Africa came up with this concept of
Speaker 2: epistemic injustice, which is essentially it makes an argument that
Speaker 2: because of all of the social and political factors, they
Speaker 2: contribute to who we believe and who we don't believe,
Speaker 2: and these things tend to mirror social and political things.
Speaker 2: So like, for example, if you're a black person who
Speaker 2: calls the police to report a crime, the likelihood of
Speaker 2: you being believed is not very like high, right, versus
Speaker 2: a white person who might automatically be believed by the police.
Speaker 2: And so the epistemic and justice kind of framework allows
Speaker 2: us to sort of understand who is considered an authority
Speaker 2: in something and why are they being believed, And you know,
Speaker 2: gender plays a part in that, race plays a part
Speaker 2: in that all sorts of things, and this then becomes
Speaker 2: the thing that starts to determine knowledge and who gets
Speaker 2: to be seen as an authority on knowledge, but also
Speaker 2: whose story gets centered. And when I realized this, it
Speaker 2: made a lot of sense because I was like, yes,
Speaker 2: part of the reason why we don't know about a
Speaker 2: lot of these black comics is racism, yes, but what
Speaker 2: is the thing? Because what I found was that over
Speaker 2: the years people have written about them, and like, you know,
Speaker 2: Marcus Clark wrote about one of the black comics, David
Speaker 2: Stemen in the nineteenth century, but he's there, but he's
Speaker 2: not there in the story, as in he's writing about
Speaker 2: David Steman, but actually the whole point of the story
Speaker 2: is to talk about British humanitarianism and how wonderful Governor
Speaker 2: Burke is. Right, so the story is about him, so
Speaker 2: you get a sense of like he's there, but he's
Speaker 2: not quite there. And that was what I wanted to
Speaker 2: get to to get people to understand that sometimes you
Speaker 2: can talk about people, but you're still erasing them. And
Speaker 2: it's a thing that continues to show up in the
Speaker 2: contemporary sense as well. And I this is very pessimistic,
Speaker 2: but I still think that even though I've written this book,
Speaker 2: I still think that these histories will continue to be erased.
Speaker 2: But what I am excited about, I will say, is
Speaker 2: just how people choose to respond to these histories. I'm
Speaker 2: excited to see how in galleries and museums, labels are
Speaker 2: updated to reflect a lot of this stuff that is
Speaker 2: now going to be fat like the fact that people
Speaker 2: will now say it from a place of like oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: this is something we already know, like there's this context,
Speaker 2: and that they can position Australia within broader conversations around
Speaker 2: this sort of stuff, so that when you're thinking about it,
Speaker 2: you're like, oh yah, yeah, they're these connections even within
Speaker 2: our own history.
Speaker 3: Santilla Chingape's new book, Black Convicts is out mouth.
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