[D66] Tyson Yunkaporta — Antithesis Journal

[R.O.]

  Tyson Yunkaporta — Antithesis Journal

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Antithesis Journal
antithesisjournal.com.au
9 min
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<https://getpocket.com/redirect?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.antithesisjournal.com.au%2Fblog%2F2019%2F8%2F19%2Fantithesis-author-spotlight-tyson-yunkaporta>

Tyson Yunkaporta, photographed by James Henry. Image used with 
permission. Tyson Yunkaporta, photographed by James Henry. Image used 
with permission.

*You have a book coming out with Text in September –* */Sand Talk: How 
Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World/* 
<https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/sand-talk>*/./ We’re really 
excited to read it. For readers who are unfamiliar, can you give us a 
little context for the book?*

It is basically a reversal of the usual business of explaining 
Aboriginal culture to a global audience – instead, I'm examining global 
systems from an Aboriginal perspective. The goal is to start 
out-of-the-box conversations with everyday people and see what falls out 
of diverse dialogues that might resolve some of the complex 
sustainability issues facing the world. I try to impart a sense of the 
pattern of creation and how we might begin to live within that pattern 
again. To sustain my oral culture point of view I play around with 
language and the very nature of print - each chapter is based on 
real-life yarns and then carved into traditional objects, with the 
knowledge then partially translated into text for the book. I also write 
in the dual first-person – an Aboriginal language pronoun that doesn't 
exist in English but which I translate as ‘us-two’, which serves to 
bring myself into relation with the reader, forming a kinship pair.

*Can you tell us a little about your writing process for /Sand Talk/, 
and how long it took you to write?*

Well the yarns took two decades, the carvings took two years, and the 
book itself took two weeks. I wrote the first half in a week staying at 
Varuna on a writer's retreat, then I had to snatch a dozen half-days 
over the next month while juggling two babies and full-time work. Our 
traditional knowledge transmission and production is very complex and 
takes a lot of time. It is very difficult. Print-based knowledge 
transmission is far less complex and requires a lot less discipline and 
thought, so that part was fast and easy.

*Many readers of the blog are aspiring or established editors. Can you 
tell us a little about the editing process that you underwent with /Sand 
Talk/?*

My editors at Text Publishing were geniuses who had never worked 
cross-culturally before, but they very quickly mastered the oral culture 
process and collaborated with me perfectly on this. I began the process 
by making a massive boomerang covered in symbols that represented all 
the key knowledge in the book that I wanted to keep, and gave it to them 
to keep nearby while they went through and made suggestions. I was not 
married to any of the wordings in the book, as I don't really feel that 
print represents knowledge in any way, so I was happy to cut pretty much 
anything and rewrite with a better picture of the audience in mind. 
Those words on the page aren't my babies, so I'm happy enough to kill 
them. The images are far more important and those can't be altered. 
There was one chapter on gender I hated completely and rewrote from 
scratch to represent the knowledge better. I was stuck on that until I 
realised I couldn't write about women as a man alone, so I got a woman 
to co-write it with me. Then it worked. Most editing is protocol, I 
think. Get the protocols right and it all works out.

*You have a talk with* *Bruce Pascoe on 6 September for the Melbourne 
Writers Festival* 
<https://mwf.com.au/program/readings-recommends-indigenous-non-fiction-5697/>*. 
Do you feel that his work has carved a path for the discourse that you 
are opening up with /Sand Talk/?*

Our work stands on the shoulders of warriors like Bruce who have gone 
ahead and cleared space for us. Dark Emu means I don't have to explain 
and justify the basic facts of our existence – those fights have already 
been fought, so now we get to build on that and ask ‘Hey! What comes 
next?’ We have to honor the work of people like Bruce Pascoe, Marcia 
Langton, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Jackie Huggins and many others, by 
taking things now to the next level. They built the ground for us to 
stand on and paid for it in blood, so we can't just stand on that ground 
and recycle tired narratives. We need to innovate, increase, extrapolate.

*/Sand Talk/ is a work of non-fiction. The piece you are publishing with 
the /Antithesis/ journal is a work of fiction – /Bones in the Sky/. As a 
reader, I was so taken with how you create character. In /Bones in the 
Sky/ the characters feel very real for me. How do you write them? How do 
you create them?*

It's always a battle of ego for me. Every character I create just seems 
to want to say all the things I never thought to say in traumatic 
moments of lost dignity. So it's always this strident, Trump-like voice 
that comes out of me when I try to write non-fiction. I've written heaps 
of novels and they've all been terrible, unreadable, because of this. 
I'm just wrestling round with my demons right now writing these stories. 
My publisher tells me my short stories suck and I need to find the 
characters by making them talk first. So I'm working on dialogue for a 
bit now to get that Trumpy whining out of me. I find it hard to write 
female characters, because they always end up just being fantasies of 
what I'd be like if I had a womb. I have no idea of the inner experience 
of women and it's an impediment. Female writers have an advantage 
because most of the media they have to consume is from a male point of 
view, which isn't that hard to figure out anyway. I'm working on an 
Aboriginal Viking saga at the moment. I'm imagining what would have 
happened if a blackfella showed up in Norway back in Beowulf's era, and 
how he would cope with that. I'm struggling like hell, because of course 
my main character Raedwulf is complaining a lot ...

*Do you have a first reader? Do you have a desired readership in mind as 
you write?*

My flawed relationship with women mixes this up for me too. I try to 
write for everybody, but mostly I'm writing for women in a kind of ‘is 
this okay – am I on the right track? kind of way. Seriously, I got 
issues with seeking approval from females. I'd like to say I'm working 
on it, but I have absolutely no idea where to begin. Most men have 
little enclaves where they decide what to share and what not to share 
with women, but I'm not invited to those because I hate sport and porn 
and gambling, so I'm pretty much just making it up as I go along. Things 
are a lot clearer in my own community, but if you're writing for the 
marketplace you have to write for audiences beyond our community, and I 
am quite confused about gender relations in that world.

*You have moved from Far North Queensland to Melbourne. Do you return to 
where you grew up? And how have you found the transition? Has it 
impacted on your writing?*

I had to go back up home last year for a couple of months, just for my 
own survival. Seriously, how the hell do people live in cities? 
Apparently this one is the most livable one on the planet, and it is 
absolute hell on earth so I can't imagine what the other cities must be 
like. People must be constantly screaming on the inside. Airfares back 
home are expensive so I'm kind of trapped here at the moment. As soon as 
I sell a few books I'll be on the first plane back. I'm trying to set up 
an extended family business for the book sales to go into – like a 
communal capital model to take care of everyone's needs, but I'm finding 
it hard to get an accountant who knows what I'm talking about and can 
figure out how to make the tax work. Once I get that sorted out I'll be 
able to get home regularly again.

*What were you like as a child? Were you always a storyteller?*

I was deaf until I was eight – otitis media is a pretty common condition 
for us. Post-op I could hear what everyone was saying but found I didn't 
like it much. I was a weird, introspective kid as a result. I still am. 
I read Jane Eyre when I was ten and it made me start writing stories. I 
was at this crappy little barefoot bush school at that stage, filled 
mostly with kids from construction camps, back in the day when you got 
the cane every day (especially if you were a brown kid). They did these 
IQ tests and I got 180 so that might explain the weird introspection as 
well. For the kids, that behaviour could only be translated as ‘poofter’ 
so I got knocked around some. I went to a lot of remote schools like 
that. Then I hit puberty and my IQ dropped along with my balls and I 
woke up here. It's all a bit of a blur.

*Do you have other writing projects that you are currently working on?*

I have to do a lot of academic publications to keep my job, so I'm 
mostly writing that stuff, but referencing bores the hell out of me. 
Ethics applications drive me nuts, especially when I'm trying to justify 
my use of message sticks for data collection. My book only counts as one 
publication point and I have to hit seven, so I'm flat out with that. I 
have two babies so there's not much time to write what I want to write, 
especially when I work by carving everything first then translating it. 
It's hard to find space in the city to carve wood with a tomahawk and 
knife without people calling the cops – and I live in a flat the size of 
a shot glass so I don't have a backyard to use. But somewhere in all 
that I'm working on my Viking novel. It's a bit of a parody of the Peer 
Gynt myth, which for me captures the essence of the Anglo soul. That's a 
soul that needs some unpacking, under the Aboriginal gaze. I think that 
work is long overdue and I do love turning lenses around.

*Aside from researching, writing and working as a senior lecturer at 
Deakin University, you also create traditional tools and weapons. Who 
taught you this skill? What does creating these items connect you to?*

I've only been doing it since the nineties, so I'm not a master carver 
yet but I'm on my way. I've learned a lot back up home with family, 
making things for sale and also for ceremonies. But I've learned from 
old fellas all over, from NSW to WA. Us carvers just seem to find each 
other, although we're quite a rare breed now. There's plenty of people 
pumping out ‘artifacts’ with power tools but only a few of us still 
doing it by hand. A lot of my research has been on haptic cognition from 
the point of view of a wood carver. Haptic cognition describes neural 
processes that happen beyond the brain and even the body. For example, 
when a tool or object becomes an extension of your mind. It is a real, 
measurable phenomenon and I think it is the key to understanding 
consciousness and the way humans make meaning and memory. My methodology 
is called ‘Umpan’, which means carving and cutting, but has also been 
adopted as the word for writing. So of course, understanding the 
psychology of traditional carving would be my pathway to making meaning 
through print.


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