JL: It’s more like blood sisterhood, or something like that. Jackie called it Tiddaism. Those words are not necessarily problematic in their context, but they have a context that’s so culturally specific. And they might have had a problematic journey before they arrive.

There was an interview with Bobbi Sykes, who was a black activist being interviewed by a white female interviewer in the 70s, and they were talking about birth control and better access to abortion clinics, which is important, in one cultural context, but Bobbi Sykes said, this can be dangerous as well. The white person really lost her temper with Bobbi, and said, there’s Aboriginal women in Alice Springs living in creek beds with ten kids. And the guy interviewing – this was back in the day, before they could cut things too quickly – was Ray Martin, who had just discovered he was Aboriginal, and he became very angry with the white person as well, and, on television, stormed off the set, because she was so insensitive about these relative histories.

JF: How brilliant, to have that inadvertently captured on TV! A lot of what you’re saying speaks to a denial of Aboriginal peoples’ right to difference, which we see throughout institutions across this continent, and throughout the history of so-called Australia.

JL: Difference, and different values.

JF: You’re in the academy now, at the University of Melbourne. Before that, you spent time as a secondary school teacher before stepping into the tertiary sphere.

JL: I was also a researcher at AIATSIS (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies) for a while.

JF: How has your writing changed since stepping into your position as an academic?

JL: I think I’ve become a lot more critical of my own work, and that’s not such a bad thing, because it has to develop, and I’m really mindful about how writing for each person needs to grow. It does take up time. But, actually, teaching is quite good. I like teaching. I think the drawback in tertiary institutions is about the management culture and their inability to be flexible to diverse peoples, and to understand the needs of diverse people. For all sorts of people, tertiary institutions have become more depersonalised. There are fewer and fewer people you can go to, and more and more websites.

JF: Fewer humans, fewer supports, more forms, more robots.

JL: Less contact.

JF: Do you feel at times you’re doing battle with the academy from inside the academy?

JL: I think the academy can be very wearing … It’s a constant task. The cultural load is very high in the academy for First Nations people, and I’m sure it is as well for culturally and linguistically diverse and diaspora people in Australia. To crack the surface of white privilege is really difficult.

JF: Yes. White privilege is a force that continually reasserts itself, and it does so in overt but also in really sneaky ways.

JL: We had a review of our program recently. And we had a reviewer who was really offended by the term ‘white fragility’. They said, ‘I’ve never heard that before’. And I sort of laughed, and they said, ‘I’m really upset, and I’m really offended by that’.

JF: That’s a classic way of whiteness reasserting itself.

JL: When the rest of my work colleagues met this reviewer, they said they understood white privilege more than they had before. So, that was an advantage. But it was hard-won. It comes at a cost. It’s good that others can see white privilege more clearly by seeing it so blatantly, but I didn’t enjoy the process very much.

JF: To stay with this theme of white privilege, and fragility, and to touch on something that you’ve written a lot about, which is telling stories – and who has the right to tell which stories – I like to think we’ve moved beyond the once-unquestioned privilege that white writers once had in representing non-white writers in literature.

JL: To some extent that’s true, and to some extent, I go carefully. It’s across all intersections as well.

JF: Certainly not across the board, but I do see a lot of white writers who are now bringing a heightened level of reflexivity and a mode of useful anxiety, a kind of self-reflective anxiety, in their writing about their role in ongoing colonialism, and in their writing about cross-cultural relationships. What do you think white writers can bring to that space? Is there a way for whitefellas to contribute in a meaningful and an ethical way to writing about Indigenous-whitefella relationships, or is it still time to step back, shut up, give mob the space to speak and write? To ‘listen to the experts’, so to speak.

JL: I think, both. First and foremost, you gotta give mob the most space. Reflexivity is an answer there, too, and you do see it. But I think what you and I read is not representative, I’m afraid. Culture has had some shifts. But not as many as you’d like to think. Certainly, reflexivity is a good strategy for being thoughtful. Michael Griffiths, a settler academic at Wollongong, did some good work in a book called The Distribution of Settlement. It was like Michael was deconstructing a literary history through himself. That was good work. I had a PhD student write about what’s wrong with the way settlers try to belong. They were living in Maningrida at the time, working there, they’d been out there working as a teacher, and they’d been invited to stay by the community. They got a lesson in how to unbelong before you can begin to belong, and they wrote about that.

There is some good work out there. It’s not as representative as you’d like to think, Joan.

And also, I do think that attending to the cultural aspects of colonialism, it’s on the radar at the moment because people have been quite loud about it – like myself, but there’s plenty of other people. The blackness of First Nation-ness doesn’t exist in a vacuum. People are still not writing well about classism, that’s atrocious, the way people assume they can write working-class or under-class characters and assume that they can represent such communities. People are not writing well about power dynamics. In this role I have editing a poetry book at the moment, some of the works chosen come from open submissions, and one submission came from a former school principal, a poet who has won some prizes, and they wrote this poem of several stanzas, each one was called by the name of a different girl. It was invasive and appalling – mainly for its focus on working-class scholarship girls at an exclusive school. In this situation, I don’t really care if the poet has great command of language or technique – it’s the subject matter.