Indigenous writer Bruce Pascoe: 'We need novels that are true to the land'

When Bruce Pascoe released his non-fiction book Dark Emu: Black Seeds, Agriculture or Accident? – which drew evidence of precolonial Aboriginal Australia food production from diaries of early explorers, challenging their categorisation as hunter-gathers – he didn’t anticipate the subsequent flood of interest. He’s been busy fielding collaboration requests from food companies, restaurants, permaculture groups, schools and, most recently, a production company about a possible television adaption. “I’ve been amazed at how ready Australia is to start talking about those issues,” Pascoe says.

With 29 books to his name, including the 2013 Prime Minister’s Literary award-winning Fog a Dox, Pascoe is co-headlining this weekend’s Victorian Indigenous literary festival, Blak & Bright. In his keynote speech he will look at how Indigenous writers are re-storying Australia’s past and penning new narratives.

Pascoe has strong words about Indigenous representation in Australian literature, highlighting a number of prominent writers whose work he says have been incorrectly dubbed “reconciliation novels”, including The Secret River by Kate Grenville and books by Tim Winton, Peter Goldsworthy and Patrick White.

“They’re very, very good writers. I’ve read them all, and I continue to read them. But when I get to the parts about Aboriginal Australia I have to put the book down, because it’s so wrong,” he says.

Pascoe has had “civilised arguments” with Grenville about her 2005 novel, contending that the Aboriginal characters of The Secret River have no agency. “They’re just there as cardboard cutouts for the white actors to act against.”Indigenous choreographer Stephen Page worked on a Sydney Theatre Company adaption of the novel, currently in its encore season, and tells Guardian Australia: “I initially had a strong emotional reaction to the book and the representation of our people.” The company worked with Dharug man Richard Green and made additions to the work. “We gave our mob the respect they deserved by giving them their clan name, Dharug, and the authority to speak in language.”

Page says he also recognises the angle Grenville was coming from, “that she was writing from the white perspective and it’s a historical novel that reflects the attitudes of the time”.

For Pascoe, too many writers glean their knowledge of Indigenous Australia from non-Aboriginal sources, rather than first building genuine friendships with the community, establishing mutual trust and aspiring to authenticity. “Australians will write well about Aboriginal Australia and Aboriginal Australia will encourage them endlessly, but it has to be the result of knowledge, not out of prejudice,” he says.

“We need to write from the heart, rather than using Aboriginal Australia as a theme, and most of the other stories I’ve seen use it as colour and movement, and for thematic vibrancy.”

Pascoe recommends the works of Samuel Wagan Watson, Melissa Lucashenko, Kim Scott and Alexis Wright as “the kind of books which really challenge Australia’s idea of itself”. And while his list is short on non-Indigenous Australian writers, he is quick to stress this is not about throwing up walls around black stories. Rather, “you whitefellas, if you’re going to write about blackfellas you have to write about them as well as you do when you write about whitefellas”.

Pascoe says Australia doesn’t need to write about white people or black people – “we need novels that are true to the land”. He is a fan mid-20th century American novelist William Faulkner’s rich and broad writing about his country and “whoever happened to cross his path”. Colour hardly gets a mention, but the reader is aware of it from the voice of who’s talking, what their history is and what has happened to them, he says. “That’s what we’ll have to learn to do in Australia. We have to learn to reflect the country not white colony.”

Pascoe grew up in a “conventional sort of home” that spoke English (“I love English, I adore English literature,” he says), and says his family denied their own Aboriginality for a long time. When he investigated the “glaring absences” in their family story, he was inevitably drawn into Aboriginal society and culture.

When I ask Pascoe how he would like to be described, in terms of his heritage, he says “as a complicated Australian, like all Australians”.

He has a “complex” racial background, which includes Bunurong (south-central Victoria), Yuin (NSW south coast) and Tasmanian Aboriginal, as well as ancestry from Cornwall in the UK. Pascoe acknowledges his colonial background and love of the broader Australian culture, but says he always comes back to the fact that in his bones he feels Aboriginal. “It doesn’t matter about the colour of your skin, it’s about how deeply embedded you are in the culture. It’s the pulse of my life,” he says.

Many of Pascoe’s books are written in English but awash with Indigenous language words, in particular 2001’s Earth and 2002’s Ocean. Words like bangondedook or mirrouk warnagi are often used without translation and act as signposts for Wathaurong or Bunurong culture. “They were my attempts to bring two cultures together to tell the two stories in tandem, with both cultures having equal weight,” he explains.

Pascoe is a long-time student and teacher of Wathaurong language and in recent weeks has begun, with the permission of elders, to work on the resurrection of the Yuin language. “I’m translating some of of our ceremony back into language, and that’s incredibly fulfilling for me. I can’t tell you how much it means to me to find those words and then speak those words on country.”

As all multilinguists know, culture is embedded in language and Pascoe shows how the “woman-centric”-ness of Yuin culture, “where everything arises from Mother Earth”, is evident in its words. In contrast to the biblical genesis story of Adam and Eve, in Yuin culture the first person in the world was a woman (nyaadi) and the second was a man (tunku). The other day Pascoe came across a particularly beautiful phrase: “We come from our mother’s breath” (bingyadyan ngallu nudjarn jungarung).

Sometimes Pascoe surprises elders who claim to have forgotten language with words that suddenly unearth dusty memories. “One of my old aunties is dead now, but I used to test her,” Pascoe says. When he said the word for grass, she immediately snapped, “Don’t be disgusting, you don’t say it like that. That’s women’s business.” Pascoe was amazed. “Just by pronouncing it incorrectly I’d said an indecent word. So even though she said she knew nothing about language, when I tested her with it she came up with a dozen words that we didn’t even know about and she didn’t know that she’d remembered.”

Upon my request, Pascoe later emails me a few other Wathaurong words:

Kardinia Park in Geelong was named after kardineu, meaning “the rays of the early morning sun”. (Since 2011 the Geelong AFL football ground has been known as Simonds Stadium after the naming rights were sold.)

Pascoe lives near the Victoria town of Mallacoota, which means “the place where there is sacred white clay or ochre”. His grandson is called Marlo for white ochre.

The bella wein of Bellarine peninsular near Geelong means: where we lean on our elbow (bella) beside the fire (wein) while looking out over the sparkling sea. Pascoe adds, “the construction is complex so that the word sparkle has both a land and sea reference”.

When he signs off, he throws in one, final phrase: “Kun gadgee (safe journey/see you again), Bruce.”

• Bruce Pascoe is speaking at the Victorian Indigenous Literary festival Blak & Bright on 20 and 21 February