This episode of Read This includes discussion about Indigenous people who are now deceased. Please take care while listening.
A ba Borghini Babughy.
That's the music of Sydney acoustic duo The Stiff Jinns, Colleen Briggs and Nadi Simpson. They've been writing and performing together for over twenty years, and as gorgeous as it is, you shouldn't just know Nadi Simpson from the voice she sings with on the page. In the written word, she's even more impressive. Nadia is a yuwella eye woman from
Freshwater Country in northwest New South Wales. Her debut novel was twenty twenty's Song of the Crocodile and it was one of my favorite Australian debuts in years, so moving and wise. It somehow managed to be about grief and sorrow and intergenerational injustice, but at the same time was suffused with joy and love. And there's no other way
of saying this music. It was crazy talented. Before I became editor of The Monthly, I spent a couple of years as the artistic director at Sydney Writer's Festival, and one of the things that I got to do when I was there was asked Nati Simpson to be part of our twenty twenty one opening night lineup. She stood on that stage at Sydney Town Hall in front of a couple of thousand people, and she absolutely blew the
roof off the place. She talked about the tradition of stories in which she placed her own work, and about making the leap to conceiving of herself as a writer. I was so impressed and such a fan. I even forgave her husband George for incessantly telling me I looked like Jack Blade. Her second novel, The Bellbird, is out now and it doesn't disappoint. It tells several stories, some old, some new, that circle around the baby girl born at the very end of the eighteenth century to parents Barangaroo
and Benelong. The two brief life of that child, Dilbam or Bell Bird, echoes through to the present day in a story about fragility and strength, about mothers and daughters, about owning one's own truth, a story about how to make art. I'm Michael Williams, and this is read this the show about the books we love and the stories behind them. This new book began its life with an overheard conversation on a train and a half remembered story about a little girl the bell bird on a.
Train in a city Sydney going down to the Circular Key and I walked straight on the train and in that sort of open vestibule bits and there was these ladies having a yarn too loud, too loud they were, and it was like all of a sudden, I was in the front row of a theater show and they were talking about one lady was trying to they were moving house, and they was asking a house, the house hunting going Oh, we saw one place and it was too small. We saw another place and we didn't like
the backyard. And then we saw another place and there's a room where could convert to a games room, and they had a pool, and we thought, we'll show the kids on the weekend and if they like it, we'll put in an offer and then the universe will decide. So that and then it was this stopped Redfern. So the doors open right while they're talking about the universe, and we pulled up at Redfern station and I just
I remember getting so wild with these women. I'm thinking, that's not how that is not how the universe works, and getting really worked out and sort of getting frustrated and hearing Redfern made me even more wild. It's definitely how it's not how this universe works. And then getting really angry made me sort of think, well, how do you know what? Wait there? Why are you expending on your energy getting wild with them? You don't know how the universe works. And I honestly couldn't tell you how
that little bell bird came into my mind. But while I was in the grips of feeling so strongly about how wrong they were and how I didn't even know, the memory of that little baby came into my mind. So it was those ladies, Redfern and Dilbilm the bell Bird all happened at once. That's when I realized what I wanted to write.
I think, maybe I would like to start with the 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 them.
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 call 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 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 could. I was stuck on something and I said, it's not working. You know, I'm getting
so frustrated. She said, Nadi, what if I was to say to you as the music in this stanza? And I thought, 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 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 so 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 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 are 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.
In terms of different expressions of creativity. How much this is someone who's clearly not a musician asking this question so 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, 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 it 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. I'm trying to find a way for I would initially say the river of but you know, bell Bird 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 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 listen 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 in 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 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. Just 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 in how to be somewhere that belongs to someone else.
It's a particularly a cute 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 and I think it is an act of respect to play with everything that was around those in and outs.
When we return, Nardi shares why she wants to be more like her 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 Ginny Dilbull. 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 Dilboll 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 wish 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, Ginny 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 defy anyone to read it and not wish that they were. But you seem pretty genmy to me. What are the elements she has that you long for in yourself that you don't quite 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, and it's just like, no, that resolves me in who I want to be, And that seems pretty admirable.
Yes, And she is alone and 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 a 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. Yeah.
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 I'd completely 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 the 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, she used the phrase aboriginal realism. Well, she's magic realism. That'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 modern 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 that 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 fill the billy, take it back to his old pop, who
would kick it over and say no, go again. And he'd 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 fill the billy, and I did it, and he said And 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 into a rap 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 heating into itself. 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?
Oh?
That sense 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 and say 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. When they got the present, that's up to them. By the time the last full stop my work's done, then 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 Bell Bird. You can listen to the audio book, which is equally gorgeous. Before we go, I wanted to tell you what I've been reading this week and a plug for two new crime novels, one from an old favorite and another from an Australian author who if you haven't started reading, you should start now.
Ian Rankin's latest John Reabers book is out now. Fans of the series will have been reading him for decades like I have. The new books called Midnight and Blue and it's an absolute cracker. And I wanted to also mention Christian White, whose new novel The Ledge has one of the best twists in a crime novel you read this year. White is absolutely terrific storyteller. He's Melbourne based and his well worth a read. You can find both those books and all the others we mentioned at your
favorite independent bookstore. That's it for this week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends about it and rate and review us. It helps a lot. Next week, I'm read this I chat with legendary Australian writer Tim Winton about his new book Juice.
In this moment on the Knife's edge, as we are, I'm asking myself, I'm asking my culture, and I think I'm asking lawmakers and the people who inhabit the sea suites who seem to have such an inordinate influence over our lawmakers. Do you have the juice to make the hard decisions, to make the right decisions? Are you on the side of life or are you on the side of the money.
Read This is a Schwarz Media production and it's made possible thanks to the generous support of our sponsors at ar Group. The show is produced and edited by Clara Ames. Mixing is by Travis Evans, with original compositions by Zalton Fetcher. Thanks for listening, See you next week.