I’ve lived overseas for 12 years, the vast majority of my adult life. I visit Australia every year (global pandemics permitting) but I’m no longer allowed to vote. I consider Melbourne my home town and brag about it relentlessly but my accent has become hopelessly mangled. And though my nationality is the first line of my standard bio – Mikaella is an Australian writer based in Berlin – it’s rarely apparent in my actual writing.
My fiction already has a strange, hybrid quality; I write novels with my wife, Onjuli Datta, our two voices twining around one another with more than a decade’s worth of practice to create a shared language I step into as easily as my own. Onjuli is British, as is the heroine of our first novel, but, if we were taking turns, I skipped mine.
Our second novel, Feast While You Can, takes place in an unnamed but clearly European country, in a fictional town of our own devising. And while there ares many of my qualities in our heroine Angelina – her brash ruthlessness, her gleeful lesbianism, a streak of optimism so vivid it becomes occasionally dangerous – my Australianess is not one of them.
If in our first novel, the lack of Australia was an accident of plot (there is a passing mention of Sydney, like a hasty wave out the window for my homeland readers), in the second it was more deliberate. It felt wrong to write about an ancient and supernatural evil in Australia without engaging deeply and empathetically with Indigenous Australians, who have lived on this land for the past 65,000 years. I didn’t feel equipped to write a story that draws from mythological monsters or the all-too-real monsters of invasion and colonisation, and it’s not my story to tell.
Writing fiction, a great job where you get to sit at your computer and make things up all day, demands a kernel of truth. If you’re going to make lying your job, it warns, you’d better be talking about something real. “Write what you know” is a hoary chestnut of advice, so old and ubiquitous that it has suffered multiple waves of backlash (the science fiction writer Joe Haldeman called it “the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery”).
But it’s good advice in any genre. A world doesn’t have to be real for you to know it; a character’s identity doesn’t have to align absolutely with yours to see from their eyes.
Similarly, I don’t think it’s necessary to live in Australia to write beautifully and incisively about our country. Think about our expat classics (Shirley Hazzard, Christina Stead, Kate Jennings), our contemporary geniuses (Tara June Winch, Jessica Stanley). You don’t have to hunt for Australian writers who have kept their connection taut so they write about Australia and Australians with joy, anger, humour, tenderness, sarcasm.
There’s an expat joke in Berlin that while the city is full of Australians, we tend to avoid one another. I always feel at my most Australian when I’m the only Australian in a room. More and more, I sense that I’m out of touch. My siblings use slang I don’t know. I lose track of local politics. I mix up suburbs, streets, directions. I worry that I don’t really remember Melbourne, only my favourite stories about it. Sometimes I tell an anecdote and then sit up late feverishly factchecking myself, scrolling Google Maps to find an old and beloved route.
Writing anything is an exercise in vulnerability but the fear of writing Australia and getting it wrong, feeling it ring false or hollow, losing that sense of deep intimacy with character and place that the best writing offers, is also embarrassing and invalidating. If I can’t write Australia, can I call myself Australian at all?
I can’t avoid writing about Australia forever – not least because my cowardice has become interesting to me. Australians are starting to crop up in my next projects, a perspective here, an idea there, a character who elbows her way into the narrative and demands a point of view. And I have hope, because in the last round of copy edits for Feast While You Can, I noticed something: in the way the characters talked, in the landscape that flickered behind our Italian mountains, in a community that drives you crazy and makes you fiercely protective at the same time, in a huge and sprawling family with their door always open. It was subtle but unmistakable. It was an Australian accent.
• Mikaella Clements is an Australian writer based in Berlin. Her next novel co-written with Onjuli Datta, Feast While You Can, is published by Simon & Schuster on 30 October
