When I was a kid, my mother would take my sisters and I for camping holidays in the height of summer. Of the recurring destinations, Malakuda was a particular favorite. On the edge of Crowaging along National Park, at the mouth of this series of beautiful inlets, so on the far north coast of Victoria, and it's one of those places where while the year round population is only about a thousand, in summer, when the camping round is full, that number
is more like eight thousand. I remember those long, glorious days splashing around on Becka Beach or sitting in the basketball hall watching the makeshift cinema. But of those entertainments, the absolute pinnacle was the Farmer's Market each weekend, not least because it was a reliable source of second hand books. It was there one summer, having exhausted the reading i'd packed for the holiday, that I picked up my first
Bruce Pasco novel. In hindsight, it's clear to me that the quiet bloke with a big beard who sold it to me was the author himself. This wasn't a second hand stall. This was someone who loved to write, making a connection with potential readers in between the DreamCatcher Stall
and the Homemade Chutneys. That more than two decades later Bruce Pascoe would be a household name was unthinkable at the time that he would still be writing, still honoring his commitment to telling a great story that is utterly unsurprising. I'm Michael Williams, and this is Read. This the show about the books we love and the stories behind them. It was twenty fourteen when Bruce Pascoe went from being a prolific yet relatively unknown writer to public enemy number
one in Australia's culture wars. That was the year he published his now infamous book Dark Emu and Its Reexamins Nation of accepted historical accounts of pre invasion Australia. It's a book that struck a chord. More than three hundred and sixty thousand copies have been sold so far, and it's inspired various spin off books, from a young adult edition to entire books published to refute its claims about
First Nations people and their relationship with the land. Newscorps in particular, have expended a lot of energy framing Bruce as this ahistorical force of propaganda. Its nasty, ugly stuff, but part of What I like about Bruce Pasco is his calm, implacable generosity. He's engaged critics and detractors and welcomed the debate. For all the attempts to co op them into the culture wars, Bruce is not so interested. He has other stories to tell, and the latest one
is his novel Imperial Harvest. It's set in thirteenth century Mongolia, and it follows a one armed soldier yEnc as he contemplates the expectations of others and how a single person can navigate war and colonialism with grace and endurance. And it begins with a disclaimer, this author's warning that sums up how Bruce Pasco approaches the world.
This novel tells a story of great armies, the calumny of powerful men traveling across the vast lands of Eurasia. But if there's a date here or a town there which seems strange, remember that history tosses all fact in the air, so the victor can choose his own confetti. In this case, the confetti is chosen by the losers, so be patient. It's not always possible to catch the policces in their original order, and in any case, it will be confetti again tomorrow. Don't be dismayed by this fact.
You're alive, aren't you.
I love the idea of returning to confetti and also telling your readers not to be dismayed. I mean, often, particularly with historical fiction, we have this anxiety of not just what's true and what's not, but what's a legitimate speaking position from which to tell history and what's not? And setting that note at the front of the novel seems to be saying, it's a book. It's here for you to have fun. See what it sparks that there is a lot of implied goodwill in that request of your readers.
And because of that, it ends in a restaurant where people enjoy wine, they enjoy food, and they enjoy sharing it, and they are slightly alarmed by their company. It was meant to be a kind gesture of asking people not to hate, but to come together a little bit. And you know, it's easy for people to polarize their situation and to take positions. But I'll never forget being told by a very old Hawaiian woman that when you're having
these arguments, leave no one behind. In my own town of Malakuta, there are debates which have ended up being polarized when a perfectly good, compromised situation was available. You know, compromises messy, muddy, unsatisfying to most people, but they're usually more right than wrong. And we need to treasure the messiness of democracy because the cleanliness of autocracy is to be aboard. And we've seen no good example in the
world of autocracies where marginal groups weren't flayed. So I hope we can sit down in a restaurant together, the restaurant being the world and keep talking.
When people think Bruce Pasker, they don't generally think thirteenth century Mongolia. So what's that about.
Yeah, I know everyone was expecting a certain kind of novel, and it did come as a bit of a surprise to a lot of people. But the whole idea of the novel is to look at the propensity of men to commit violence. Where does it come from? And I didn't want to just concentrate on the Europeans because people are expecting me to be critical of European colonialism, but there are other examples of colonialism, and Genjis Khan is as good as anything.
It's one of the biggiest. That's a decent one to go for to leave.
Well, to cover an entire continent is pretty ambitious before.
We get to carn temperamentially, is that typical of you, Bruce, Like you know what people expect from you, and so you're determined not to give it to them.
It wasn't a determined nation. This novel. I've been writing for fifteen years, so it began before Dark Emu. So I'm not a curmudgeon in that sense. I am a curmudgeon in many senses, but not that particular one. It's just the way my thoughts have been going, and they're a little bit out of sync. But to me it
doesn't matter. I'm just looking forward to talking about the book and for readers to wonder about the book, and then let's have a conversation about it, because it's the conversations very timely.
The conversation is incredibly timely, and sadly it always will be a conversation about the nature of war, about the ways in which it impacts a life, a psyche of people. More generally, you're always going to be blessed with that feeling topical.
Yeah, Look, when I went to school, I was taught that war is the natural condition of man, and I thought at the time, what a bleak prospect for the world, what a bleak prospect for people, individuals, that we have to do that. I remember in primary school listening to the last post on Anzac Day and being so deeply affected by it because you know, our family had lost people in both wars, and there were very emotional services, and I thought, Gee, we're just going to keep doing
this forever. There'll be a new Anzac Day and it'll just repeat ad infinitum. And I thought, how sad that was. But I didn't have the resources as a kid to look at whether or not that is the truth. And I've been very fortunate to have met and lived with people who have another experience of the world, original cultural world, and our families are connected to that story, and it's a story without war. So what I'm really hopeful for is that Australia can have this conversation that is war
the natural condition of man? Is there another way for humans to behave towards each other? And I think there is. I think that's a fabulous philosophical challenge for this country to think that it might have on this continent a solution to what's happening in Palestine at the moment.
I love that idea and it's a kind of stirring and wonderful thought, but I can't help but feel that colonial Australia, settler Australia does what so many countries do in its national myth building, which is it appears to believe that war essential for your sense of yourself. We fetishize that experience of war rather than look for a way to never reproduce it.
Yeah, we see it as essential to ourselves and that you know, if an argument gets to a certain point, then eventually you will go to arms. And that's a legitimate political and philosophical stance take. So to consider something else is going to take maybe two hundred and thirty years,
and I obviously won't be around. But I'm determined to contribute to that debate and for Australia to consider that their idea of Australian history might need some refinement, or that what Aboriginal Australian people were doing was not hunting and gathering. See by the turmoil that has erupted subsequent to that discussion taking place, that it's really hard to change people's minds and that they won't change them peacefully.
I do think there is something in what you had to endure in response to dark Ema that is a real precursor to the way the Voice referendum took place, which is that there was a request, an offering of a space for a conversation, and instead of responding to that in good faith and taking it as a conversation, recognizing that there might be ground to be met in the middle, there might be disagreement, there might be whatever,
but the conversation itself is valuable. Instead of responding in that way, the response was vitriolic and violent and about tearing down rather than about being willing to take the chat further.
Yeah, I think there is a great parallel there. But I believe strongly that say, in one hundred and fifty years, when kids at university is sitting down to do their essays, that they will be looking at the events of last year and the no vote will be a footnote. But I think Australia has an enormous and positive opportunity to lead the world intellectually on this point. Not always. You know, it's not a league ladder, and you don't remain champion forever.
But in this particular little moment of time, I think Australia can make a really decent contribution to world conversation about how we behave as humans. And what I love about the old people and all the so called myths is it's really philosophy that we're talking about, and that philosophy is one of enormous piece about the kind of structures you put in place to control humans. Because the
human is a really difficult animal. The human will always be jealous, always be violent, always be loving, always be honorable. That mix that is in all of us, the humans always going.
To be like that.
But to consider how best to use each of those, suppress some and enhance others, I think it's an enormous thing. I just think it's a great thing for humans to consider and for us to discuss. It's not a blueprint that will be built tomorrow. It's up for discussion.
It's one of the things I so enjoy about your intellectual and cultural contribution generally, Bruce, is the optimism I don't understand.
I'm sorry.
I'm glad you hold it, and I wish I shared it, and that is great. But the generosity of inviting the conversation, inviting the chad, responding to your critics by saying, absolutely, let's talk about it. That's not like. There are very few people in public life I can think of who have more grace when it comes to believing in the value of what you're doing, beyond whether people agree with you or don't agree with you.
You can blame my mother and grandmother for that, Yeah, because they insisted on decency and I haven't been able to escape that tug in my brain. But also I think I'm in a good position to be in the argument because you know, obviously over eighty percent of our family is white and a small percentage is Aboriginal. So I've got an obligation to buy sides, and I've got a huge obligation to white Australia because that's where most
of our genes come from. I have an obligation to that side of the family to say, look, I'm not ignoring the Cornishman, I'm not ignoring the Englishman. But there's this other thing, and it's Australia. This is where we can have an effect on the history of the country.
When we return. Bruce Reveal's whey seaside towns are places of descent. We'll be right back. I remember reading one of your novels many many years ago and being so moved by the way you wrote, being so kind of carried along by the story. But also you write books clearly from a place of having an idea about the world that you want to share, you want to prosecute, you want to imagine.
Yeah, And I was talking to Melissa Lukashenko and Deborah Dank yesterday morning about Charles Dickens. This is a good conversation, good literary conversation, because we'd all read Dickens and we'd all felt touched by his compassion. But I've just read Priya Satia Times Monster where she talks about Dickens's fascism as well, and that was incredibly disappointing. But he's a human.
He's a flawed human. We're all flawed humans. And it was just a fascinating conversation, and it's very relevant when we're having these conversations. It's never black and white. The shades of gray and other literary reference are immense, and we have to accommodate that. We have to continue to have the conversation rather than saying you're too white or you're too black, you're so gray, and just keep talking.
And democracy is the slowest beast on earth, but it's a very very good beast to have in our paddock.
So accepting that you knew you wanted to write about the nature and the legacy of war and colonialism, you knew you wanted to begin that story that journey in the Northern Hemisphere, and you knew that actually European colonialism wasn't the path that you wanted to look at. That kind of explains thirteenth century Mongolia as a choice. But tell us a little bit about a particular one armed horseman called Yene and why he was the vessel for the story that you wanted to tell.
Well, I really wanted to choose someone who history would ignore. He wasn't a general, he wasn't even a particularly brave soldier. He was nothing. He was on the scrap heap of humanity. But he had the good fortune to fall into the company of a really good man who was also never going to be noticed by history, a baker, a Miller. But that Miller, his life's journey had taught him because of the pain he had endured that people need care. So in a way, it's Penkei who is the driver
of the story. Yen say, he's just swept up in the stream and becomes more worldly and becomes more aware of his position as a human and finds himself in a position to make change. So I wanted an anonymous person. When I began writing Imperial Harvest, I was very anonymous. You know you mentioned having read my novels. Well, I wondered who bought that book, because I've written seven or eight novels and the sales of each was really small.
I reckon I bought it from you in person in Malakuda. That's had the camping ground there, And when the market's set up and I bought it from you, then I'm a camping holiday.
Yeah. Well, we sold books from that little tent for a decade or more, nearly two decades. And the conversations in that tent, if they ever got to the Australia's spy agency, we've been all in trouble because it was a ferment of rebellion.
I think the spy agencies known not to look at Malakuda, that it's a hotbed. There's dangerous stuff going on there. They're better to turn a blind eye.
Well, one of my novels talks about seaside villages as being places of descent because fishermen don't give us stuff about anyone.
Yeah, and they've got time to talk things through. It's not about action. It's about about scheming.
It is, and in imperial harmsy or a whole groups of sailors and fishermen, and that's what they do. They because their life is on the sea. They feel themselves totally independent of the land, and they have contempt for politicians and their pirates. You know, the sea and piracy go together.
It's one of the very nice things about how the book functions. Imperial Harvest functions. And you kind of alluded to this before. But because it centers around a protagonist who is passive is the wrong word, but is kind of buffeted by war, by circumstance, by history, it means that the characters who emerge around the fringes of the story are often incredibly compelling. They're pushing it forward in really interesting ways.
Well, I'm glad you see it like that, because I was afraid that my mangling of history would have become a theme because it's not an historical novel because I've shifted geographies, I've shifted historical events. But I'm more fascinated by people than i am by history, and people generate history. But it's more or less like an aside. It's the people themselves, and I think goodness and badness drive the world, and it's that's up to us to decide which is which.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Finally, just because I have to ask for myself, because I haven't been back for years, how's Malakuda going post the fires?
Malakuda is its wonderful self. You know, three rivers, two lakes, the ocean. It's hard to destroy the beauty of that. The bush recovered very quickly, the people not as quickly. Friends of mine put the roof on their house a fortnight ago after losing their house in the fire. Another good friend of mine was a renter, doesn't have a house at all. The psyche of the town is different, And maybe it's my age group because I've lost a lot of friends I've known since nineteen seventy in the
last few years. I know are the real rebels and rat bags and the people with whom if you caught their eye in the street. They would not let you go because they'd want to talk to you about politics. They'd want to tell you how disgraceful the Australian cricket team is all that conversation. A lot of that's gone, So the fun for me has gone out of the town.
But there are young kids that are making their own legends and their own society to which I'm not a party, and I have to get used to that because I'm an old man.
We all have to get used to that, one way or the other. But as long as you keep writing books, you've got that entry point straight back into that. You can be an old man on the edge keeping an arc.
Like writing such a wonderful thing. You know, I look at musicians, you know, take in their cello onto the airplane, artists you know, with rolls and rolls of fine paper, and and you know I jump on the plane with a buyer.
Yeah. Perfect, perfect, Bruce Pasco, thank you so much for your type.
Thank you.
Bruce Pasco's latest novel, Imperial Harvest, is out now and you can get it at all good independent bookstores, And just to piss off Andrew Bolt, go buy another copy of Dark Emu while you're at it, Just to twist the life before we go, I wanted to tell you what I've been reading this week, and we could probably give over an entire episode of Read This to talk about cover endorsements in the book industry. That they're known as puffs. That's where another writer is asked to give
a recommendation for a new book that's coming out. If you love this person, then you'll love this book. That kind of thing, and there are fabulous stories about it. Some writers I'm going to name us writer Gary Steinard for Exit, are so synonymous with cover endorsements that actually it doesn't mean anything to hear from them anymore in
that capacity. But when a new book lands on my desk and it has a cover endorsement from Eleanor Catton and Max Porter, when it compares the readability of that book to Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow or Audrey Iffernegger's Time Traveler's Wife, then I kind of know it's going to be my cup of tea. The book in question is a time travel romance, a spy thriller, a workplace comedy. It's called The Ministry of Time. It's by Kelly and Bradley, and Frankly, I can't wait to get back to it.
You can find these books and all the others we mentioned at your favorite independent bookstore. That's it for this week's show. As always, rate, review and share. It helps us enormously. We don't normally do TV recommendations on read this, but I have been adoring the new HBO show The Sympathizer.
You may be aware it's an adaptation of Vie ten wins Pulitzer Prize winning novel a few years ago, and next week on the show, I talked to the man himself about his new memoir and why becoming a writer made him a man of two faces.
The more I acquired English, the more I became a better reader, the more I learned about English language literature of the Anglo American tradition. The more I became a writer, the more I became an American, the further away I was taken from my parents. And that that alienation, I think, is, you know, partly what motivates me as a writer and gives me the fuel and the motivation to be a writer, which led to some success. But it's also ironically the alienation that distanced me from my parents.
Read This is produced and edited by Clara Ames, mixing and original compositions by Zalton Fitcher. Thanks for listening, See you next week.