You can listen to the Front on your smart speaker every morning to hear the latest episode, just say play the news from the Australian. From The Australian, I'm Claire Harvey a special bonus episode of The Front for you today. It's the second in a special series honoring The Australian's sixtieth anniversary. We've asked six of the nation's most celebrated thinkers to pen their reflections on the past six decades in essays available to read at The Australian dot com
dot au right now. Today, the journalist and author Trent Dalton follows the thread that binds the thousands of stories he's written in more than two decades of journalism. It's that special Australian brand of resilience. Dalton came up as a feature writer for the Weekend Australian magazine, but exploded onto the global stage with his semi autobiographical novel Boy Swallows Universe in twenty eighteen. That's today's episode.
I want to briefly consider the notion that resilience is formed from love. So often do we Australians carry on in the memory of someone we've lost or in the name of someone we love.
What if it's actually loved that's.
Been keeping this whole wild and shimmering island moving forward for all these years.
This is the world renowned author in journo Trent Dalton. He's reading an excerpt for an essay he's written about resilience for The Australian.
I never really had to do twenty three years a journalism to work out why my mom kept standing up, moving forward, carrying on.
Through her darkest hours.
I've always known it was love, love of her four sons and love of me.
Stories about resilience kind of Trent Dalton's thing. He's written thousands of them about Australians who faced absolute terror and came out the other side, more often than not with a smile. But none is more compelling, more heartbreaking, more stirring than Trent's own story. Dalton grew up in the outer western suburbs of Brisbane with his single mum and three brothers. His beloved stepdad shared their home for a
while too. Down the road lived the former convict Slim Halliday, who escaped twice from Brisbane's Bogo Road jail before his conviction for the murder of a Gold Coast taxi driver. To Trent Dalton, Slim was just a funny old bloke who helped out with babysitting and family errands from time to time. But he was also a man who shared his uncharacteristic wisdom with a young family finding its way
in the world. As a kid growing up in Brisbane in the eighties, Trent Dalton saw the worst of it abuse, addiction, dealing, domestic violence, mental illness. His mom and stepdad were both in prison for dealing heroine before he was old enough to drive. Unless you count the time Slim holiday let Trent sit on his lap and steer his truck down the street when he was barely more than a toddler.
You know, you just carry these rocks.
I had some rocks from my childhood that I carried around deep inside me that I never told anyone about stuff that my mom went through. And you know, I'm talking about domestic violence, and I'm talking about imprisonment and things that I buried deep inside me that I explored as a journalist.
After almost twenty years in journalism, many of them spent as a feature writer for the Weekend Australian magazine, Trent Dalton shared a pivotal moment with the mum he adores as they loaded groceries into her car. She gazed at his then seven year old daughter and said, I wouldn't change any of it. Not long after, he sat down to write his own story for the next year. In the late hours, after work was finished for the day and his kids were in bed, Trent wrote the semi
autobiographical novel Boy Swallows Universe. It chants the turbulent nineteen eighties suburban childhood of Eli Bell and his older brother August or Gus for short. Fittingly, Dalton's mum was the first person to read it. They agree it's equal parts fact and fiction. There's a free spirited young mum struggling with addiction, a doting stepdad battling his own demons. Slim Halliday, whom they called the Houdini of Boggo Road, features prominently.
Some parts of the novel are embellished impossible, even, like the fact that Eli's taciturn older brother Gus can see into the future and writes his predictions in the air with his fingertip. But others are as real as real can be. The desperate, longing Eli feels for his incarcerated mother his own experience, writ large Boyce. Swallow's Universe was an instant bestseller. In fact, it was the fastest selling debut novel in Australian history, with more than a million
copies sold. Earlier this year, Netflix took this extraordinary story of Australian resilience global.
Arm Melo Baum. I've got a story.
What kind of story?
It's a crime story.
The seven part series stars Australians who've made it big in Hollywood, Travis Fimmel, Simon Baker and Phoebe Tonkin.
Things are going to GE's so good, we'll forget that.
Over Bear, the streaming giant said in January. The TV adaptation is its most successful Australian title to date, racking up almost eight million views globally in the first fortnight after its release.
And you told me you wouldn't to be a good person. This is a test.
Dalton says in his essay that it's our collective resilience that defines us as a nation.
These journalistic endeavors, I assure you have transformed my life. They have shaped me as a father, a husband, a brother,
a son and a man. I have no doubt this obsession is rooted in my need to make sense of the ways in which, through much of the nineteen eighties and the ninety nineties, I watched someone I love very very much, my Mum, overcome everything from drug addiction to imprisonment or domestic abuse, drawing on nothing from what I could observed, particularly Australian kind of inbuilt human resilience.
But if the global appeal of his own story, real and imagined, is anything to go by, resilience is a fundamental part of the human experience.
I'm deeply honored and deeply questioning of why anyone would ever tell me a story, and I get so proud when they do. Ordinary Australians can be just as interesting, and I love that if you sit with them long enough, their story will get that interesting.
There's time.
It's the time you're willing to put in, and I promise you every one of us has an incredible tale to tell.
Coming up what Trent Dalton learned about resilience from ordinary and extraordinary Australians. Join ours subscribers to read more stories just like this one at the Australian dot Com. You it might just wind up being a best seller be Back After This Break. For a long time, Trent Dalton's day job was writing features about the best and worst of Australian life for the Weekend Australian magazine.
It was so weirdly cathartic and weirdly healing and deeply empowering to go write those stories because of those incredible women on that newspaper. I was led by a woman named Christine Midapp on the Weekend ozmag for years and she's become a deep friend. But I think weirdly she suspected that I needed to do these things. I have no idea why she would just gently tap me on the shoulder and ask me.
To go do these types of stories.
And I just think she suspected it was a well somewhere deep inside that I could draw from, and I really did, and I did it for a decad And when I talk about resilience, I'm talking about this unseen thing that Australians have where we are bie and I firmly believe we do it through love. I think we do it for each other, we do it for our families, and I've really got an open heart for the people
who can't abide any longer. I wrote so many stories about the people who succumbed, you know, the people who couldn't get out of the cracks, and I loved that we had space for those people as well in our pages.
Over the years, Trent has knocked on the doors of much loved Australians like Mick Fanning and Betty Cuthbert. He sat with flood and bushfire victims, with workers, with parents, with those who'd experienced great loss, great joy, and everything in between.
I watched their faces turn from darkness to light as they shrugged their shoulders houseless and broken, and found silver linings and the most absurd troops. Well, at least it's not as bad as last time. That was invariably when some misguided and young media person standing in the main street to grant them battling a bad case of intra rectal craniolitis, would whisper something out of his rear ends
such as why the fuck didn't they move? Why because they had nowhere else to go, because they were penniless, because they were screwed by God and they're chosen insurer, and because they were resilient.
Many of those yarns have stayed with Trent, but one is forever wedged in his consciousness. It's the story of Paul Stanley, whose fifteen year old son Matthew, was killed in a coward punch attack in two thousand and six. Dalton calls Paul Stanley the most resilient man he knows.
Rather than be swallowed by his grief, he established a foundation in his son's name and worked to transform the way Queensland deals with youth violence in social se In his essay for The Australian, Dalton recalls the time he visited Paul at his home.
I will never forget the way he walked me out to the car after our chat, sunset in the suburbs, birds whistling. He asked me, just in the interests of filling a silent space with small talk, how the rest of my week was shaping up? And I told him that my wife was scheduled to give birth to our daughter in the Martyr Hospital in a matter of days. I explained I was going to be a dad. And Paul threw his head back and he laughed, and he looked back at me. I could see there were tears
in his eyes. I swear to you now they were tears of joy. This man who had just spent four brutally honest hours talking about the tragic loss of his son, had somehow, somehow dug deep inside himself to find the resilience and the love to find joy inside a quiet suburb urban moment between two men standing beside the Toyota hatchback that I drove my daughter home in three days later, you will never do anything more beautiful in your life, Paul said.
His reflections on the Australians past six decades have made it abundantly clear to Dalton that the paper's fundamental purpose is to shine a light on these stories, to bear witness and to help make sense of the madness.
I think the paper's role is to absolutely reflect our nation at any given time, and to do that you need to get to all parts of this country of ours. But the beautiful thing is that I had these people around me in really high important positions who said it was important to tap into that stuff as well, that that stuff belonged, that was just as important as the stuff in the business pages or the stuff in the
sport pages or the culture pages. And it's really important in journalism to speak to those people who have fallen through the cracks.
You can read Trent Dalton's stunning essay about resilience right now at the Australian dot com dot au. This episode of the Front was produced by Kristin Amient with support from Bianca far Marcus