JF: Why do you think he’s been written out of history? I suppose he was an inconvenient character in the British story, which is the dominant history we’ve had passed down.

JL: They had a whole cross-cultural exchange where they gave some of the Eora people pens and pencils to draw with and they reproduced pictures of the Eora rock art which they then took back to France. That’s a very interesting cross-cultural exchange that the British never even thought of. They performed the Marseilles in Tasmania to see what the response would be. The Palawa people reciprocated with corroborree, and they had the French guys try to write scores for the music of the corroborree. I think Baudin got on the wrong side of a lot of people. He wasn’t an aristocrat, he was a true product of the revolution. Whereas he was travelling with a lot of aristocrats who were on board, like Francois Peron who is well-known. And the guy who some parts of Tasmania are called after, like the D’Entrecastaux Channel. Baudin also penned the first European call for Aboriginal sovereignty to be recognised and sent it to Governor King in Sydney Cove. King’s response was to send a party down south to ‘claim’ an island in Bass Strait now called King Island.

JF: Independent thinkers are often not all that popular in Australian colonial history.

JL: Also the guy died on the way home. He didn’t make it home. So, Francois Person wrote the official account in his aftermath, and he hated him.

JF: Well, that work sounds really valuable. Perhaps I could ask you at this point to speak a bit about critique in the Australian literary ecosystem.

JL: What I wanted to say about that is that any healthy writing culture is sustained and supported by a parallel body of literary critique of analysis and review that comes from within the culture that the writing is produced … that’s sort of equally as important as the creative works themselves, and that model is a way to engage with a particular set of stories in a particular cultural context. In print, in this case. But, it’s not particularly valued in Australian publishing circles at the moment, because – well, there’s a couple of exceptions – but it’s not seen to generate money. And that’s a problem because that plays back into colonial capitalism. Some things can’t simply be reduced to dollars and cents. Cultural exchanges can’t simply be reduced to dollars and cents.

JF: Absolutely.

JL: The flip side of that is the failure to invest in these things, to reproduce the status quo of a conservative society, which is monocultural. That is stunting of other literary cultures. And other critiques, like Shirley Le, who’s a Vietnamese-Australian critic, and Michael Mohammad-Ahmed, a Lebanese-Australian critic and author, have also written about the lack of space given to diverse reviews and critiques, and the easy charges of identity politics that come there. The idea of suppressing blak voices and blak critique falls into these very contradictory, hypocritical, and duplicitous colonial traps as well. For example, I have a series of interviews that could be used as really good critique, verbatim, but some publishers are balking at that, saying, well, these interviews will date very quickly. And I’m like, ‘date very quickly?’ That’s a real double standard. Is TS Eliot dated? Do you not use their interviews? Do you not use interviews from Patrick White, David Island, Miles Franklin? When those interviews and critiques are used, it’s called ‘historical’, not ‘dated’.

JF: It captures a historical moment.

JL: Exactly. So, I study western literature, and I don’t write in the time when books are banned here, or when women had to write under male pseudonyms to get published, or when people got arrested for writing anti-American activities. But I still appreciate engaging with the voices and listening to people who went through that time cause it informs where that western literary body is at the moment. And without that, it’s meaningless. The idea of calling one body of work that is trying to find a space to be, well, A, it’s not commercially viable, and B, it will date very quickly, or it will become dated, is transparently hypocritical, and dangerously so, as well. Imagine if I call Shakespeare dated – well, he didn’t do any interviews, so let’s think about people who did interviews, even within this century: Miles Franklin, Patrick White, Xavier Herbert, David Island, Shirley Hazzard, Katherine Pritchard. All these did post-1960s recorded interviews, and before that, interviews were written verbatim, which are still used in the teaching of literature around specific author and specific writing developments, because they evidence the ongoing narrative of the writing culture.

JF: So one answer to the question of how might individual reviewers do better, go deeper, do more, is a question of funding – a lack of funding – and another answer is that it’s part of a larger consciousness-changing project across culture in this country.

So we’ve talked a bit about writing practices that make hidden archives and the invisibilised people behind them legible and seeable. But you’ve also talked in your writing about the power of ‘flying under the radar’ – which makes me think of that old adage, ‘the wise woman works in unseen ways’ – I wonder if you could talk about that, in relation to the ancestors who raised you, the women you raised you, and in relation to the work you’re doing now in Australian lit.

JL: I wanted to say a little bit about the idea of ‘radical conformism’, that oxymoron. On the surface it may seem that people are conforming, just accepting things, just getting about their day-to-day lives. But in that ‘flying under the radar’ stance there’s the idea of the amazing capacity of things most small or seemingly diminished to make the most impact. In all that apparent complacency and conformity, there’s this system in place of listening, observing, watching, and picking up on all sorts of aspects of settler psychic values. Texts, patterns of behaviour, expectations, and in particular things like fears and phobias. What are these people particularly ashamed of? For the women I grew up with who worked for white women, these things were things like illegitimacy, reputations, inheritances, properties. And you kind of get an insight into how those things work, and how you might be able to unwork them, and undermine them. Or, unsettle those structures. There’s a scene in the novel Purple Threads where one of my aunties manages to intervene in a written document, not by doing anything illegal or fraudulent, but through the deliberate and very calculated undermining of a system. Knowing how to talk to people, and how to work people.

I suppose writing is a bit like that too. You learn a lot of techniques about writing in English, writing conventional things, before you learn how to un-write those, or unravel them.