This episode includes a discussion of Indigenous people who are now deceased. Please take care while listening. Hey there, it's Ruby Jones. All week, we're sharing our favorite episodes from our sister podcast, Read This. It's the show where every episode, the editor of the Monthly and book fiend, Michael Williams talks to another incredible writer. Today we're hearing from you all away, musician and writer Narti Simpson. Michael Williams joins me. Now, Hi, Michael,
Hi Ruby. So Michael, from what I heard Nati Simpson's debut novel, it made quite a big impression.
On you, It really did. Ruby. It came out back in twenty twenty and I read it, I think during COVID Lockdown, and it was just one of those ones when a debut comes along and you think this is a writer who I will follow through their career now, you know, like I just trust them completely, and this was one. It's doubly exciting when it's an Australian voice,
and Nadi Simpson is fantastic. People might know she's part of an acoustic duo called the Stiff Jins, and I'd listened to their music for years, but as talented as she is as a musician, she is doubly trebly so when it comes to her writing. It's a book about intergenerational injustice. There's a lot of grief and sorrow in there,
but actually overwhelmingly it's this big, loving story. It's incredibly beautiful and her origins as a musician are clear in the way she writes is kind of beautiful, writing like.
Poetic And before this conversation, before this book, you actually booked Nadi for the City Writers Festival, didn't you.
Yeah, I before I was at the monthly. I was artistic director of Sydney Writers Festival for a couple of years and so one of the things I was able to do back in twenty twenty one was asked Nati Simpson to be part of our opening night lineup and she spoke incredibly. Everything that made me already a fan of her work was there. But part of what she talked about was in the past being invited to Sydney Writers' festivals to play music or to give an acknowledgment of country,
but not as a writer in her own right. She talked about standing in the wings watching these big international writers go out and talk about their work, and she thought, you know what, I am going to go out there one day and I'm going to do that myself. And she did, and as a writer, she really earned her place on that stage and continues to her new books called The Bell Bird and as a follow up to a debut that I loved so much. It's every bit is exciting and shows that she's the writer to watch.
And when you.
First met her, I believe you met her husband as well, and I wanted to ask you about what he said to you. Who he said that you reminded him of.
Yeah, no good, thanks true. I really appreciate that. On an excellent thing to bring up. Her husband's name is George. George is a lovely man, but he's also an idiot. He followed me around the party at the festival incessantly calling me Jack Black and shouting Jack Black across the drinks function. So that was fun. Big hello to George.
What a superstar of all the celebrities to be compared to, I'm just relieved I never heard of Zach glaphanarkus, I've got.
Away with it.
Michael Williams. Michael Williams, the one and Only Michael Williams, Thank you so much for your time.
Absolute pleasure.
Coming up in just a moment. Nardi Simpson is breaking her own rules.
I think maybe I would like to start with the things you learned from some of the Crocodile that from the start with the Bell Bird you knew that you wanted to do differently or you wanted to build.
A I wrote a list of things I was not going to do for this book, and so then did not write a thing for a year because I you know, it was all up in my head. I was talking with somebody about this a matter of minutes ago. The more you think about it, the more you constrict yourself and the feeling. It's about feeling, writing feeling. So I did.
I had a page of things I didn't want to do, which were, you know, things like I didn't want long flowing sentences, and I didn't want creator beings and all the things that I'm probably good at, you know, trying to think my way through what I wanted to be rather than being who I am. And once I broke every one of those rules, once it became you know,
I got to write something here that's gold. I've gone long enough not writing I need to start, and I started breaking my rules and that was the beginning point for an evolving story that was a negotiation between who I wanted to be and what I actually was. And you know, the Bell Bird was a kind of a spilling out of who I wanted to be and what I didn't want to do and where I actually was. That's the best way for me to talk about it.
Did you have a similar list before Song under Crocodile or for that? It was much more organic.
It was organic. What I was trying to prove to myself there was that I could do more than just music. I was trying to prove to myself I was more than a musician. And of course I got to a stage in Song of the Crocodile where I was stuck and beautiful Grace Lucas Pennington, who was helping me through the black and white experience, asked me to bring forward my musicality because I was stuck on something and I said,
it's not working. You know, I'm getting so frustrated. She said, Naughtie, what if I was to say to you as the music in this stanza, so that's not a restriction anymore. I can actually she's asking me to bring forward who I am. So you know, it's sort of like history repeating. I made the hurdle at the beginning of the second book and jumped over it myself and worked out that, you know, just don't restrict yourself because of a creative
idea needs to flow. Yeah, and the point for thinking and constructing things will come later, usually with an editor, and they will help you get over yourself.
Get over yourself, but also like trust yourself as well, like not just get over yourself, but give over to your own instincts, give over to your own individual qualities that you bring to the story, to the writing, because it sounds like you in different ways. Both times were caught up in an idea of what you should be doing or what it should look like to be a writer, rather than what it felt natural to you.
Yes, and also this kind of idea of what is valuable to bring forward to somebody. I'm still trying to work out what it is I can give in a written form, because for me music, you know, I know that I want to share a feeling, and then I think when I pick up a pen on sharing a thought, and I struggle with, well, what's the tangible walk away my hands, moving, feeling, grabbing thing that I can give
to somebody. And I still haven't worked out the language of the exchange in a book because it's so insular and so singular. Even though I do it to make somebody feel, I still haven't quite figured out how to channel creative thought through my body into another body.
Yeah, in terms of different expressions of creativity, how much this is someone who's clearly not a musician asking this question. So I may be revealing deep reserves of ignorance. I'm sure I am. But it feels to me like there's something weirdly more of a tangible object in words on a page than there is in a piece of music. There's something about something printed on paper that feels like it belongs to a different tradition where you're held to account on it for much longer.
It's there, solid, and it doesn't disappear, it doesn't kind of go into the ether that it doesn't exist as a memory.
Yeah, like a great piece of music, you're like, oh, I was in the room and saw that performed, and it was the most beautiful thing and I can't quite capture in words, But I have a muscle memory of what was to be. There a good book that connects with you. You can go back and pick it up, open the page. Yes, you change, you approach it differently, but it's still the proof of it is there.
Yeah. I heard somebody talk about the performative artifact, and that has a really loaded implications for me, being part of a community that has suffered at the hands of an archive, and also this idea of a performance versus
practice and all these things. So all this stuff is swirling around me, and I'm trying to find a way for I would initially say the river of but you know, Bellbert is really the wave of the wave of the tangible and how that anchors you and holds you in a place where maybe you want to keep flowing out
and in with greater things. You know. I'm trying to sort of work out how to talk about how can you be that little bit of sand that moves with the tide or the rip, knowing that you know, you've got this big book here that is asking you to also be that gathered moment. So when I got my twelve copies of Bell Bird and I thought my dad was one of eleven, I thought, oh, I could give. I could have one at home and then give one to all his siblings. But then, actually that is not
the right gift. Even though it's everything that I it's all the ways I have grown thanks to them, the bestowing of a book is actually a kind of not the right way to show how they've affected me. And you know, I think Michael about I didn't want to say, oh, here's this book because I didn't want to. I didn't want to give my aunties and uncles in Waga a book because I didn't want it to be confronting for them.
But then you know, my cousin, said her Nan, whose dad's sister, the eldest of the eleven, bought the audio book. She's gone too now. They would lay on her bed and listen to me and my words because I read the audio book, and you know, Auntie, Georgina and Nikola would sit on the bed and they'd listened to a little bit, and then they'd go and do something else. And I think actually that my words were part of
their relationship. That's the beauty for me. And you know, as people disappear and dissolve and move into other realities or whatever, the book is not the thing. The words around who we are is a beautiful offering.
Yeah, Whereas with Song of the Crocodile, you know, it's very much around your family's country. The bill Bird is set in and deeply concerned with the country you were born in and have lived most of your life in, but not your ancestral country.
It's the salt the salt water shadow.
Yeah, it's clearly a place and country that's shaped You explain to me the difference between that and ancestral country in terms of what you own, because there are like for lots of people, they're going to be like, well, you were born me, you've lived your life there, why can't you tell the story of that place in the same way.
For me, it was very I was, oh, part of the list of things I didn't want to do that I actually kept was I wanted to use a story as a way to uphold somebody else's sovereignty. As you know, I'm fresh water woman, and I'm informed and colored by that, and I know the value that that has in my life. That's not the only way the world works. I get a lot of cultural spiritual zessed from my mob, as
other people get from theirs. And I live on somebody else's sacredness, so how can I use language to uphold their sacredness? And that's what really the Bell Bird was for me, an exercise, I don't mean to trivialize it, but a practice in living inside somebody else's sacredness and making something that honors me but references them. So the bell Bird references a little baby, a real baby that lived for a matter of months in Sydney at the
time of colonization. I am not culturally connected to that baby or her parents, yet the story of her life is foundational for me, a foundational teaching and how to be somewhere that belongs to someone else.
It's a particularly acute example, and I think you handle it really sensitively and really beautifully in the book. It's the great power of the book is how important that baby, that little girl is, But how much space you give her, how much you kind of walk around her rather than directly to her. Because what strikes me is, as you say, she's a real historical figure. She had this brief life. Her parentage was significant in terms of the time and
the place and the figures. But it would be very easy to instrumentalize her as a kind of symbol of something rather than as a living, breathing human being. How did you get to the human part of her?
I think her breath was sacred, and a sacredness that is not open to me. But I love to weave words and feelings, and I think it is an act of respect to play with everything that was around those in and outs.
When we return, Natti Shar's why she wants to be more like the character she's written in this book and reveals why it took decades for the stories from her elders to finally make sense to her. We'll be right back. The engine of this novel is a story in the present day, one that follows a young poet and activist
called Jenny Dilboll. Her name and her power to represent the possibility of change echoes the novel's historical tale, even as the way she moves through the world is decidedly contemporary.
Ginny Dilboom is a character in the book that I wish I was her. I'm just going to say, I'm just going to say it, I really wished I was her. And if I had to explain why she's in there, she is the promise that that little girl was. You know, at the time, that little baby was an inheritor of serious cultural business and also the future of what was going to happen in this place that we all walk around on now. She was going to be the boss of what has happened and what will come. And she
didn't thrive. And so Ginny is my way of bringing an idea of a young black girl who has the world at her fingertips. That's why she's in the book, Genny Dealbong. You know, she's a poet that makes words and sticks them in buildings, and that's the way that she colonizes the places that she owns.
I'm not surprised that you wish you were her. I think i'd defyre anyone to read it and not wish that they were. But you seem pretty Genny to that. What are the elements she has that you long for in yourself that you don't quiet have.
Well, she was young and she didn't care about what she should do or be, which is where we start today. There's no way she'd make a list of things she wasn't going to be. And I think her youthful fierceness is something I never had.
She does have the power to be made clearer in who she is by dickheads instead of them wearing her down, instead of her being broken by them or feeling like this isn't a space for me, or I can't write my poems, I can't make my art. She instead, in the face of dickheads again and again, is just like n that resolves me in who I want to be. And that seems pretty admirable.
Yes, and she is alone in doing that. Wow, you know I need fifty people around me to make me feel brave enough to do the thing that I want. She's by herself, she is you know. I want to say, a flick or a feather oscillating in the everywhere and doing a thing without connection. That's powerful. That's strength to be isolated, maybe, and alone and small in the greatness and still have the courage to do what you want.
One of the things I particularly love in this book is how you write about and capture time. It moves between two timelines, and there's this and that, but actually it doesn't. That's not the relationship you have with time in this book, And that's not the relationship that the story you're telling has with time, it loops back on itself. It's not this, then this, then this. Can you talk about how you got the idea of time right for the purpose of the book.
Yeah, it'd be one of those things I reckon, Michael, if I thought about it canpletely muck up. And it's also helped by having these ageless Eels and grandfather Wales who are really just reflections of people. I know. Yeah, I know, I know, great whale. I've been taught by that man. Another fellow who passed away while I was writing Very important you and man South Coast and New South Wales, Uncle Max Harrison. He is a great whale.
He's gone into he's whale dreaming, but while he was on land he was sharing all those learnings with me. And so those people are timeless. So if you're lucky to experience that ageless and it's not mystical and magical, but it's ancient and ageless in a really complex, tangible way.
I think when I interviewed Melissa Lukashenko about Eden Glassie is the phrase aboriginal realism, which magic realism. It's not describing what's going on here. This is aboriginal realism.
Well, you know, it misses the point when people sort of say that those creator beings are a release. Actually they're the they're the structure. It's beautiful to be able to work within that. And you know, I have the same thing about fiction. What people call fiction is our reference section.
You know.
That's the way our stories are, the way we need to be. You can't negotiate, so then we get to play with those kind of things as well. But I don't know if I thought about time, i'd get it wrong. It's just that I know I sit next to ageless people and get to have their wisdom soak into me, and it's as my and as you can get.
I think part of what I so love about that is you sit next to you, don't you know, you don't come after, you don't have a debt to This is not something from the part. The whole point of the agelessness and the timelessness is you sit alongside and next to you. You're sharing those stories, you're telling them, you're hearing them.
We're so lucky, you know. And that old man too, He used to tell a story Uncle Max about when he was taken by his masters, he calls them, when he was a young boy. He's taken on a journey with his masters, and he was told to go and fill the billy with water and come back and bring it back. And he would tell this story a lot, and I never actually got it. He said he'd feel the billy, take it back to his old pop, who
would kick it over and say no, go again. And he do this, you know, a few times, and he said, I couldn't understand why he kept kicking the water out. He asked me to go and feel the billy, and I did it, and he said so I went down to the edge of the water, and I thought, what's this old man trying to teach me? And I just started playing with the water. And then after a while, I thought, I'm just going to try it one more time. I filled the billy and I put it next to him.
He said good. And that's how he told the story. And he would tell it the same way every time. I thought, what is going I don't get it. I don't get it. Maybe he's missing a bit or something. And he passed away and I was thinking about it, and then I actually understood what he was trying to teachers that don't just take you need to go and interact and dream and think that was the water that the old fellow wanted. But I think back for the amount of years that I never understood that story, and
it was just waiting for me. It was waiting for me in the future, my future me to understand what the teaching was. And so it took you know, I knew him for twenty years. He passed away three years ago. I only understood it a year ago what he was teaching me. But it was waiting for me in the future. It was about, you know, when he was a little boy seventy years earlier.
Yeah, it's all all on a continuum, but also at the same time letting into itself.
Yeah.
How has I mean talk about the list of rules you had for yourself on the second book and your idea about the kind of writer you were, But how has having had readers changed the kind of writer you are? That sense of people coming back to you with, oh, you know what, here's what I took from your book, or here's what it meant to me, or here's what it awoke in me. Has that surprised you and has that changed the way you approach story?
I feel very it's not grateful there's some other level of grateful when people come up that they've read the book, or they've thought about things, or I get a bit shame. You know, I sit in the shame because I'm so grateful, and that's how I interact with it. It's just like I am very humble about that. But that's where I stay. I'll tell you when I think about audiences while I make it, because I put all my energy and hope
of a connection in the making of it. When I do it, when I ask them to unwrap the present, and then when they got the present, that's up to them. By the time the last full stop, my work's done. And that's your fellow's business. You can own that, and that's yours.
Nadie Simpson, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you, Michael.
The Bell Bird is available at all Good bookstores now and if you're googling to find it, it is b E L B U R D Bellbird. You can listen to the audiobook, which is equally gorgeous.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Read This. We'll be back tomorrow with another episode and you can hear all of Read This by searching for it wherever you listen to podcasts,