17/06/2020

Australian Writers Ponder Future Ravaged By Climate Change, Pandemic In Speculative Fiction Anthology After Australia

ABC Arts - Hannah Reich

The future imagined by Michelle Law in her short story is terrifying. (ABC Arts: Claudia Chinyere Akole)



Sydney 2050: Circular Quay has been overrun by mud-encrusted ibises, the city's skyscrapers are mostly underwater, ferries rot in the harbour, and the Sydney Opera House's iconic sails are tipped sideways.

A young woman of Chinese and Singaporean heritage — wearing special "outdoor clothes" that help her withstand intense heat and UV rays — is trying to get to her Mandarin class, while deciding what to do with her illegal pregnancy.

This is the vision of our future painted by playwright and screenwriter Michelle Law (Single Asian Female, Homecoming Queens) in her short story Bu Liao Qing.

Law's story appears in After Australia, a new anthology that brings together 12 Indigenous writers and writers of colour to speculate about Australia as we head towards 2050.

The anthology is edited by Michael Mohammed Ahmad, published in partnership with Diversity Arts Australia and in association with the Sweatshop Literacy Movement Inc. (Supplied: Affirm Press)

At the moment it's hard to imagine what Australia looks like next week, let alone in 30 years, but like all good speculative fiction, these writers' words have as much to tell us about our present as our future.

"This isn't where we want to end up or where we want to go," Law says of the dystopia of Bu Liao Qing.

"It's a word of warning to not take for granted the privileges we have, as a very lucky country."

'History repeats itself'

Law says her story came from "the intersection of climate change and the idea that younger people than me have been robbed of this right to choose [their future]".

She started writing her story before Australia's nightmare summer of bushfires.

"Then the fires happened and I was like, 'Oh my God, I've predicted the future,'" she says.

In Bu Liao Qing, rising sea levels have made the CBD uninhabitable, so wealthy white folk have "colonised" Western Sydney, pushing people of colour out to the fringes.

"Western Sydney is often looked upon as 'other' or as a place that mostly ethnic people live, but it's really become the centre of Sydney in this dystopian future," Law says.

Law describes her imagined future as a cross between The Hunger Games and The Handmaid's Tale.

A key difference from both is how Law's story handles race, which is a factor that determines both the work people do and the way bodies are policed in her imagined future world.

"The hierarchy that already exists racially in Australia is even more pronounced in the future," Law says.

Law is now working on a small screen adaptation of her After Australia short story. (Supplied: Tammy Law)



Australia 2050 might sound like hell, but Law's story ends on a hopeful note, with the protagonist asserting some agency over her life and making a choice — to leave Australia in the same manner as her ancestors arrived, by boat.

"If I'm talking about 2020, 2050, or Australia in the 1880s — history really repeats itself," Law says.

She draws a line between a smallpox epidemic in Sydney in 1881-1882 that led to the vilification of Chinese immigrants, and racism against Asian Australians during COVID-19.

"So it's happening again," she says.

'I almost don't want to speculate anymore'

Poet Omar Sakr (The Lost Arabs) also found himself accidentally prognosticating in his short story White Flu.

Sakr started writing White Flu in early 2019 but it's set in the not-so-distant future.

The story is about a pandemic, but this one appears to be "particularly fatal" for white people.

Sakr says his story was partly inspired by the white supremacist conspiracy theory of "white genocide".

"I asked myself the question, 'What would happen if their myth actually became real in some fashion and white people were dying en masse?'"


In Sakr's satirical short story, the pandemic is in the background as the protagonist Jamal — a queer Muslim who Sakr describes as "adjacent" to himself — has his own dramas to contend with.

"I wanted to mirror how white people respond to the devastations that occur and that they inflict upon brown and black people regularly."

Sakr says that growing up he would see "Arab faces on news screens"; the victims of massacres, bombings or invasions overseas, or racist events at home.
"I've never understood how we just all get up and go to work the next day … I wanted to really come at that apathy in this story and be like, 'Yeah, white people are dying in the background.'"
The story includes references to swine flu, Ebola and Zika, and Sakr points out how quickly those viruses — and now COVID-19 — were racialised.

"When it awfully started to happen [again] … I felt like my story was coming to life in a really eerie and creepy way," Sakr says.

In White Flu, Sakr describes a mass migration from the West to Asia and Africa as white people attempt to flee the pandemic, mirroring recent border closures in response to COVID-19.

"I almost don't want to speculate anymore … I don't want to see that kind of coincidence again," says the author.

"I thought I was being extreme in the story, but I'm not. I'm just reflecting what is very real and very present in this world," Sakr says. (Supplied: Tyler Aves)

While the release of the opening paragraph of White Flu led to Sakr receiving death threats and violently racist comments on his social media, he is now working on a novelisation of the story, a "speculative memoir" that will be published by Affirm Press.

Bad characters and bad laws

Noongar writer Claire G. Coleman has built a career from speculative fiction, exploring our country's future and our past in her acclaimed debut Terra Nullius as well as her latest book, The Old Lie.

In Ostraka, her contribution to After Australia, we meet a character in an island detention centre who has been left stateless as a result of an Australian law introduced in 2039.

"A lot of my writing is about universalising the experience of minorities for the mainstream to understand them better, so I had this idea of mainstreaming how refugees are treated," Coleman explains.

The Ostraka Law "allows people of bad character to be ostracised", and is a reference to the ancient Athenian practice of ostracism — expulsion from the city for 10 years — as well as the stripping of Australian citizenship from Islamic State fighter Neil Prakash.

"I'm trying to warn people that if you allow the government to do whatever they want, the next time they might do it to you," Coleman says. (Supplied: Jen Dainer)



Coleman kept the language around what constitutes a "bad character" deliberately vague in her story and we never learn why the protagonist has been stripped of their citizenship.

"There's a lot of power in letting people make their own assumptions about what you mean," she says.

Coleman says that when a law lacks clarity it can easily be manipulated by the government and legal system.

"The thing in Australia is that mainstream people think that bad things can't happen to them — and that's ludicrous, anyone can suffer from a bad law," Coleman says.

Beyond warning about government powers and corrupt laws and punishment, Coleman is packing a few more messages into her short story.

"It's also about the dangers of hate, because hate is toxic to people who hate, as well as the people who are hated."

Flipping the narrative

More and more First Nations writers are turning their hands to speculative fiction, with writers like Coleman, Ambelin Kwaymullina (who is also a contributor to After Australia) and Alexis Wright masterfully writing alternative, Indigenous futures.

"A lot of Indigenous people have a lot to say, and having a method like speculative fiction gives us the power to say it," Coleman says.

When asked about the value of speculative fiction for writers of colour, Sakr cites anthropologist Ghassan Hage's concept of "white worry" from his 1998 book White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society.

Hage writes: "I, and many people like me, am sick of 'worried' white Australians — white Australians who think they have a monopoly over 'worrying' about the shape and the future of Australia."

Sakr says: "[This anthology] is us taking up that space and being like, we have our own ideas about what this country will be.

"I think that's partly why we're drawn to it [speculative fiction] — at least we have a measure of control [in this writing] that we don't have in life."


Law sees a similar value to the anthology.

"It flips the narrative for the first time," she says.

"It enables us to tell our stories from our perspectives, and for us to really shine a light on things that are uncomfortable, or things that we've historically swept under the carpet."

After Australia is out now through Affirm Press.

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