My earliest memories of learning Australian history at primary school are distinctly Sepia Toned. I remember classes about bush rangers and gold rushers, ANZACs and the First Fleet, Birkenwill's wandering off into the desert with those camels. Even in the mid eighties, the understanding of frontier wars, of dispossession and unseated sovereignty was limited at best. More often than not
it remained completely unspoken. The colonial legal myth of Terrannalius was still pretty effectively applied to how Australia's history was taught. Silences and absences are so often key elements to the building of national myths, and so too is this pervasive impatience with nuance or complexity. Convicts transported in the First Fleet were all pale, white guys with Cockney accents who had stolen an apple in some Dikenzian backstreet of London.
Bushrangers were white guys with shaggy beards and Irish names. Certainly none one of them looked like John Caesar. In the history books of my childhood. John Caesar's probably best understood as Australia's first bush ranger. He arrived in Sydney on the Alexander in seventeen eighty eight, and Caesar was black. Is one of at least fifteen convicts of African descent in those first ships. By eighteen forty there were almost
five hundred of them. You can see them in the margins of portraits painted at the time, you can find glancing mentions of them in the historical record. But for the most part they remain invisible, whitewashed out of our history. And it matters for a range of reasons, not least because understanding the links between the colonial project in all its forms, between empire and the convict system and slavery allows us to better understand the truths behind our national
idea of ourselves. And all of this comes to bear in a terrific new book. Santilla Chingape has been a journalist and a storyteller for years, but in the story about these absences from the historical record, she found what she had been working towards for her entire career, the story of Australia's black conflicts. I'm Michael Williams and this is read this the show about the books we love and the stories behind me. I'm a big fan of
Sandy's work. She's a regular contributor to The Saturday Paper and The Monthly, and I've been lucky enough to work closely with her for a few years now. She's also a formidable filmmaker. The project that eventually became Black Convicts started its life as a critically acclaimed and award winning documentary Our African Roots. It's streaming on SBS on demand now. Santilla is a natural born storyteller, but she grew up learning stories about her life through a largely white European lens.
It seemed to Santy that people like her got to read about history, but never to write about it.
I'd always loved reading and writing when I was a kid, and I was obsessed with writing. I remember my family got our first computer. My brother would always play like video games and like FIFA, and I would always write plays and like that was the thing that always excited me. And I didn't really think about writing as a career. I didn't really think, but I remember being fascinated by
people that told stories. And then journalism became like a very accessible entry point for me because I saw people that looked like me doing it and I was like Oh, that looks like a really interesting career, Like I think I want to do that because I get to tell stories and I get to be curious, and I get to meet people. And I remember thinking, Okay, where do you go if you want to be a journalist? And you know, growing up in the nineties and Dar and
I do. She was on SBS and she had a name that most people couldn't pronounce, kind of like me, and I was like, I think that's that's where I want to go. I want to end up at SBS. And it was a bit of a detour because I had to classic sort of like migrant thing of studying to become a doctor and then realizing that that's not what I wanted to do. And I loved community radio.
I did a lot of stuff with SIN and then that summer I remember having the very difficult conversation with my mum and saying, I don't I don't think I want to do this medicine thing. I think I want to pursue a career in journalism. And my mom, you know, reacted anyway that I think most parents would. I mean, she was worried because she was like, I don't know if you're going to make any money doing this. Also, she was also looking at it from a you know,
you're a black woman. I don't really know if there are any opportunities for you in the world, and things like that.
But you'll be unsurprised to hear Sandy made those opportunities happen on lunch breaks from r MIT you should walk to fed Square to the SBS officers and asked to do work. Experience knocked back, rebuff told they didn't offer such things. Eventually, through sheer, bloody mindedness and tenacity, she got them to give her an unpaid internship, an internship that led to her first full time job as a junior radio journalist.
And I remember this one day I was assigned to a story and it was an elderly couple and had gone to their house and they were retired and the wife had health issues, and they were so excited to have visitors in their home because it's that thing of like, we don't get to talk to anyone. And this man used to be a photographer when he was younger, and
he'd taken photos of all of these amazing people. And he starts to bring out the books and his wife's like making tea and bringing out the biscuits and stuff. I remember the Camo just being so irritated because he was like, you came here to ask three questions.
We have to go. And I'm thinking, Blessed, isn't this love? Like you know what I just felt.
It just felt so extractive, like to go in, particularly sometimes going in on the work stays of people's lives and knowing that you're only asking three questions for a story that's going to be a minute and a half that most people probably won't even pay attention to. And I sort of thought, gosh, do I want to do this for the rest of my life? What I did enjoy was the time that I got to spend with people. I was like, I like this, how do I find a way of being able to spend more time with people?
And at the time, as luck would have it, I was moderating a conversation with a filmmaker at a film festival and we got off the stage and she grabs my hand and she's like, we need to talk and she says to me, you should be making documentaries.
And I was like what.
She was like, you should be making documentary Like I've never really thought about that because I've never seen anyone that looks like me making documentaries. And that's how I started making documentaries. And then that then exposed me to the wider narrative storytelling, and that was when I was like, I've found my groove. This is where I'm meant to be. But that thing about represent Honestly, I.
Was going to say twice now you've mentioned that idea when trying to work out a path for yourself of having not seen people who look like you in those roles and the telling the story and the ways in which anywhere, but particularly acute in Australia, the idea of being a migrant voice, the idea of being a person of color, the idea of your blackness defining and potentially
limiting the opportunities that are available to you. Is that a sense that you've had right through your career that this is an option for you, this is not or you have to model it before you can do it.
I think it's both, to be honest, you know, we talk about representation a lot, and I think in a sense it's kind of lost some of that just because it's so used.
As a term.
But what I will say, when you are young, you're so impressionable, and you're looking to people around you for clues about how to do this life thing, and when your options are very limited because you're not seeing people that look like you, and then your family also want seeing people that look like you, and they're also helping to shape how you're moving through the world and the choices that you're making.
What tends to be available then becomes very limited.
And that's even before you enter an industry and start to sort of kind of go, Okay, I think this might not be what I want to do, and I might want to do something else. But even before you attempt to try, there isn't an option available, right, And I think what has helped me. I've just always been curious. I've always kind of gone, let me just try it,
let me see what's going to happen. But I also know that not everyone is necessarily motivated by that kind of instinct, and for some people, not seeing themselves in a certain industry or in a certain role already eliminates that completely. And you don't try.
You delivered the twenty twenty three ew cole lecture around the question of who gets to tell history. Yeah, And as you recount in Black Convicts and elsewhere, for you, that question about permission to be a historian is a really important one that maybe more even than journalism or documentary filmmaking or other forms of storytelling, being the kind of gatekeeper who's allowed to write and tell history was a sanctified category that you felt you had to find your way into.
And accidentally did.
And when that Fannie dropped, I was like, oh my gosh, why have we certainly.
Is marginalized, and I say this, you know, not on behalf of other marginalized people.
What do they all think?
But you go through life having your narrative written on your behalf and you don't question it at all.
And you get to a point and I had a moment where I went, why did.
I believe ve the history that I was told in school that was written by white men? And not to say that that history isn't valid, but I thought that I couldn't write history. I just thought I couldn't write history. History was told to me. I couldn't tell history. And when I can't overstate how liberating that realization.
Was for me.
And it's changed how I moved through the world, because now I feel like I am in control of my life in a way that I did not think before. Before I felt like the world was shaping my life for me, and in many ways it still does. I mean, structurally and systemically, all these things still continue to dictate
the outcomes of your life. But in terms of going, oh, actually, I can determine what my life looks like to a degree because it is not being written for me, you know, and history has a way of convincing you that you are a certain thing, and particularly histories around colonization and colonialism where, certainly from the African perspective, majority of the histories that I read growing up and that I was told it was almost as though Black people were passive
and there was submit and they just kind of accepted that.
But obviously when you think about it now, it's like, yeah.
Who is just gonna be like, yeah, take take my house without any kind of resistance, right, you will get people that will fight back, But that wasn't the center of the story.
The story was always.
About the people that came and what they did and
the so called good that they did. And then you move through the world and having that then still being reinforced, Oh, you should actually be just grateful, you know, and you don't realize how much that subconsciously shapes how you move through the world, and so you enter spaces not feeling like have a sense of ownership when you do, like this world belongs to all of us, right, And so when I had that realization and I was like, oh, my gosh, I don't have to be in the passenger's
seat of the world that I want to live in. I can contribute to kind of reimagining what that looks like and my position, my viewpoint is valid, you know.
For something like that to happen for me in my.
Thirties, like my late thirties, I was like, gosh, it's still something that I still try to process about how it has impacted me and how I moved through the world. But it really we talk about stories and sometimes don't realize just the power of stories. And for me, the process of this really really really reinforced like words, stories, language are incredibly powerful, and it made me realize just how important it is for those of us that are creating stories to be very aware of that power the
whole process of writing. So I was incredibly scared I was like, here, I am upending how white Australia has seen itself for a very long time, and the mythologies it's told itself about itself, and it's not used.
To people like me telling it.
We're the ones that get told right, and that triggers emotions and feelings in people. And I was aware that the work was going to be scrutinized, and I was like, well, I don't want to give them the reason to dismiss these people's stories.
And so as much as I would have liked to push some things.
Further, I just pulled back and I went, We're going to stay with what the Colonial Archive is saying, and within that try and move and try and make certain points. Was hard because of that, like, I don't ever want to write anything that limits me in that way again.
When we come back, Sandy shares the inciting incident set her on the path to writing Black Conducts and reveals how the ghosts of the Archives lived with her during the writing of this book. We'll be back in a minute. While the idea of black convicts had been percolating in Santillaching Gabe's mind for many years, was during the summer
of twenty eighteen that things shifted into focus. You might remember it was January of that year and Peter Dutton, who was Minister of Home Affairs at the time, announced that Victorians were scared to go out to restaurants because of African gang violence. It was idiotic and transparently racist, this attempt to scare white Australians into demonizing their neighbors. And it scared Santy too, but for very different reasons.
I remember I was overseas at the time and I got a call to be on a panel to discuss that incident because at that point I've been writing about those narratives and how the media was also complicit in essentially perpetuating racist narratives because you know, he's saying that people of African descent are predisposed to commit crime because of the color of their skin is racist and yeah, And I remember thinking, I've been talking about this and
nothing's changing, it's not cutting through, and I don't know what it was. And then I remember returning and just feeling so and I said, I can't, I don't want to be part of this panel. But I remember being very frustrated about it. And then I remember being at.
An event, the Broadside Dinner.
There were people there who had very strong opinions about what was happening and why the media was reporting on it, and a few commentators were saying to me, oh, well, you know, it's like an Aussie rite of passage. Basically, we do this for every wave of migration. The Greeks, the Italians, they've all copped at the Vietnamese. It's now the Africans turn. And people would say to me in a way that was very dismissive of my contribution. And when I had that conversation, I was like, this is dumb.
And also I was like, there's an element of anti blackness here and why aren't we talking about this? And I just sort of thought there has to be a place of thinking, and how do we talk about this in a way that gets people to realize that people of a reckons don't have been here for a while, and if you want to talk about our place within the contemporary sense, that has to be considered, and that if you are going to sort of start talking about it in the way that the media have reported on it,
that is very racist. Because people don't commit crime because of the color of their skin. A lot of factors contribute to that in any community, but most of the time it's failures and government policy. So this thing happens and I return home, and I knew because I've done a story when I was working at SPBS as a journalist about a South African convict, David Steerman, So I
knew that there was a convict in colonial history. But then I just sort of thought, if I can find evidence of people on the first fleet because I'd heard about it and then I'd gone to an exhbission and seeing a label, then maybe just maybe we can stop talking about this and then start thinking about wolf people have been here at the same time as white people. What does that then mean.
The book shifts very gracefully between the kind of bigger picture of the early colonial project and the various factors that led to it, the various implements of British Empire that ran through it all, and so it tells that story on the one hand, and then it also tells these individual stories of these figures who are part of it.
And one of the tensions that's apparent from very early on is by placing these black convicts in that story, where we've forgotten to include them for so long, or they've been wilfully kept out of it for so long. One of the things that happens there is their involvement or complicity in the dispossession that was the early colonial project. You know that this is not a story about goodies and bad is this not a story about you know,
the righteous or the damned. It's a story about what happens in a colonial context when people are trying to make a life for themselves, sometimes at the expense of one another. How tricky was that part of telling the story?
Probably the hardest chapter for me, I would say, writing about encounters that these black comics had with first people's But it also did a wonderful thing, which is it reminded me that history is not the place that you go to.
Be comforted or absolved. Oh yeah.
And I think because we are so used to these narratives that center figures individuals in history that have done remarkable things, and we look to them as kind of like, I want to be like this person or whatever. And the problem with that flawed kind of obsession that we have with that sort of narrative is that it dismisses the fact that humans, by our nature are incredibly flawed and incredibly complex, and that on the one hand, you can do something incredibly remarkable but also make.
Decisions that centuries down the line people look at and question. There's a story that.
I tell of this black comed from Barbados, Robert James, and how he is involved in one of the biggest legal cases of the time during the period of slavery. And the interesting thing with him was that he was effectively found guilty and what should have happened, because this is just what happened during slavery, was he should have
been executed. But at the time there was this governor who was sort of like a temp I can put it that way, And if you were governor, you were also head of the judicial system in a of these British colonies. And so he reviewed the case and he
feels like there's been a miscarage of justice. He doesn't pardon Robert James, but he does send the case to London for a review because he's kind of going, I really don't think this guy got a fair trial, and that puts him in the ship because all of the white people on the island are going, what are you doing this guy should have been like executed, like what are you doing? And so he puts his own life in jeopardy.
But yet he.
Firmly believes that there is a rule of law here and I'm adhering to what is required of me in this capacity. But at the same time, this acting governor,
he was also a slave owner. It wasn't like he was going to invite Robert James over to his house for a cup of tea, right, And both these things can be true, And I think how that helps me in thinking about even in the contemporary sense, particularly when we get obsessed with a binary way of thinking and looking at people and essentially expecting morally perfect umans, particularly when people do things that we don't like and we're
very quick to put them in the bin. It's not to say that we shouldn't critique and challenge, but I do think that history does show us that there is so much complexity in how humans show up in the world, and it's neither right or wrong. It is just a very complicated experience.
But it does lead in the book, and one of the great strengths of the book because it leads to that you know, you have the big questions, but to address them sufficiently requires very deliberate, narrow decisions, right down
to the level of individual words. It's really interesting to me that you very consciously, when talking about slavery, resist using slave as a noun, but instead talk about it adjectivally, you know, enslaved people rather than slave, And that the deliberateness of that in this book I really appreciate and respect hugely. I think it's terrific. Can you talk about decisions like that that you made?
So when I first started, like like you said, I went in looking for a couple of individuals and then decided to once bare, they just started to show up in the in the hundreds, and it was like being at a gravesite. Really it's just all of these names of these dead people. And then they all moved into
my house at the same time. It sounds weird, but they all did, and so I could feel their energy and I was like, these were people, living, breathing people in all of their complexity, And what does it mean to be in a system that subjugates you your children, your future children, their children, And what does it mean to exist? What does it mean to resist? And I'm like, well, these people. Yes, they were enslaved, this is what the
system was doing to them, but they want slaves. That wasn't how they would have occupied intimate spaces right within their family, they would have been mother child, whatever that dynamic was. But what the system was doing to them was what was defining their experience.
Right.
But then again it goes back to how these narratives we have taken on, particularly around slavery, and that the experience of slavery was very different in many ways to what we're traditionally used to. But also that as slavery evolved and the mechanisms around that, people were afforded certain freedoms within that system, which also then complicates the whole
how we think about slavery. Right, people could grow their own vegetables, people could gather, but there were certain things that they could do, and they were using those things to resist. And that's why for me, it's so important to remember that, yes, the experience was absolutely horrendous and one of the worst crimes against humanity in modern history, but I am sure that even in those moments, people found ways to experience joy, whatever that would have looked
like within that content text. And I think remembering that and remembering that it would have looked very specific to that context is very important in centering their humanity.
It's incredibly moving. At the end of the book is a table where you list the names, and in fact the design of the book, which is gorgeous, has the names across the cover. The centering of the human beings seems to be at the heart of this historical project.
Absolutely.
There's probably two versions of the book that I started off with, and then there was a moment in twenty twenty, particularly Black Lives Matter happening that forced me to zoom out and sort of think about Empire, think about all
of the inheritance. And during that process I remember sort of thinking, whenever we think about not just who gets to write history, even when we think about historical actors that have something to tell us about history, they generally aren't people from the margins, right, And what I wanted to do was to send to these people and sort of go, they have something to teach us about Empire,
about how this continent got to be colonized. My former research supervisor, Melbourne Zoe lad Law, she did this project where she found that something like two thirds of pre Federation governors in Australia were essentially governors that were working in slave colonies and former slave colonies. So you've got these colonial figures who are coming here to effectively govern, who were being shaped by everything else that's going on where they are, so of course you're going to have
this stuff happening here as well. And that was very important for me because I was like, we have to be thinking about how all of that has then led
to where we find ourselves in contemporary sense. Even when we think about the displacement, the genocide, dispossession of First peoples, the British were doing that in other territories before they finally got here, and thinking about those actions and thinking about how that treatment the fact that by the time that Australia is being colonized, slavery was at least one hundred and fifty year and they had refined that system of labor exploitation and they'd refined the ways in which
they could control people for profit. And that started to show up, whether it was in the convict system, whether it was systems of slavery, whether it was in soldiers that were being used as labor to protect colonial interests.
Later on in Indentured Servants as well. I mean, you had all these people that were being moved around to serve empire, and the way that you controlled them was to subjugate them to various degrees, And I just sort of thought it was very important that we thought about that, because once we think about that, it helps us make sense of where we now find ourselves in the contemporary self.
Because the other endpoint of that subjugation, or not endpoint, but the other injustice, lies in the way the story gets told and what gets remembered. So while you're addressing the core of your subject matter, actually it's the telling of that subject over generations that cement certain ideas, that limits and constrains certain players. That is perhaps the most acute thing that you're redressing in this work. And with that in mind, tell me about epistemic injustice.
Oh.
I had such a big conversation about this with Ben, my publisher, because I was like, there's no way around this, bend. I have to just use this language because it's very academic y language. But when I when I came across this framework, I was like, oh my gosh, it makes sense.
This philosopher miround Africa came up with this concept of epistemic injustice, which is essentially it makes an argument that because of all of the social and political factors, they contribute to who we believe and who we don't believe, and these things tend to mirror social and political things like, for example, if you're a black person who calls the police to report a crime, the likelihood of you being believed is not very like high, right, versus a white
person who might automatically be believed by the police. And so the epistemic and justice kind of framework allows us to sort of understand who is considered an authority in something and why are they being believed, And you know, gender plays a part in that, race plays a part in that all sorts of things, and this then becomes the thing that starts to determine knowledge and who gets to be seen as an authority on knowledge, but also
whose story gets centered. And when I realized this, it made a lot of sense because I was like, yes, part of the reason why we don't know about a lot of these black comics is racism, yes, but what is the thing? Because what I found was that over the years, people have written about them and like, you know, Marcus Clark wrote about one of the black comics started Stemon in the nineteenth century. But he's there, but he's not there in the story as in his I think
of a David Steamon. But actually the whole point of the story is to talk about British humanitarianism and how wonderful Governor Burke is. Right, so the story is about him, so you get a sense of like he's there, but he's not quite there. And that was what I wanted to get to, to get people to understand that sometimes you can talk about people, but you're still erasing them. And it's a thing that continues to show up in
the contemporary sense as well. And I this is very pessimistic, but I still think that even though I've written this book, I still think that these histories will continue to be erased. But what I am excited about, I will say, is
just how people choose to respond to these histories. I'm excited to see how in galleries and museums, labels are updated to reflect a lot of this stuff that is now going to be fat like the fact that people will now say it from a place of like oh yeah, yeah, this is something we already know like there's this context and that they can position Australia within broader conversations around this sort of stuff, so that when you're thinking about it,
you're like, oh, yeah, they're these connections even within our own history.
Santilla chingo PE's new book, Black Convicts is out now, and before we go, I just wanted to give you another plug for Sandy's writing. She's got an excellent piece in the November issue of The Monthly. It's called bro Wave and it looks at the influence of people like Joe Rogan, that kind of rise of podcasters. I'd say this knowing that I'm a white, middle aged cis man hosting a podcast, but the one Sandy's writing about are
quite different. They're all toxic masculinity and none of them care about the books we love and the stories behind them. It's a terrific piece from Sandy, and while you're reading that issue of The Monthly, I also recommend the wonderful piece by Sebastians. It's on the death of Alice Munroe and how we might reread her differently in light of revelations after our death. You can find the Monthly and all the books we mentioned at your favorite independent bookstore.
That's it for this week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends and rate and review us. It helps a lot. Next week, on Read This, join me for a conversation with Rachel Kushna as we discuss her new book, The Book of Price shortlisted creation Like.
The more I worked on it, the longer I spent each day writing, the more hours I was there, the more vivid the world I was creating became to the point where I could really see it and feel it, and I was eager to get there every day. And it was like I was building this parallel universe that really glowed for me. And I love my life. I
love this world. But during the kind of intense fourteen months I was writing the book, I started to prefer it the world of the book for the duration that I was there.
Read This as a Schwarz Media production made possible by the generous support of aar group. The show is produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing by Travis Evans and original compositions by Zolmnfetcher. Thanks for listening, See you next week.