MWF 2025 | Saturday 10 May Recap
by Sonia Nair
Sonia Nair is a Melbourne-based critic whose writing has been published by The Age, the ABC, Time Out Melbourne, Kill Your Darlings and The Big Issue, among others.
My second day at the festival is jampacked as I criss-cross town to attend myriad sessions, rushing into some just as they’re about to start, leaving others early to ensure I’m on time for back-to-back sessions.
Talking about his latest novel Entitlement which revolves around the corrosive power of money while touching on race and class, Rumaan Alam talks to Claire Nichols about how the much-touted American Dream is “noxious and potent”.
“Because of mythology and storytelling, we understand our role as citizens is to buy, acquire, increase. It begins to feel almost moral, that if you’re done your job as a citizen, you’re richer than your forebears."
“But what allows us to live with the contradiction of wealth? We’d never say it, but us believing that we deserve what we have is predicated on believing that people who haven’t achieved that have failed somehow.”
Inhabiting Black and white characters from the perspective of a second-generation Bangladeshi-American places Alam in the unique position of critiquing “the American understanding of race through this binary lens of Black and white”.
A “sexy” picture of polar explorer Graham Gore spawned an entire novel – Kaliane Bradley’s rollicking time travel novel The Ministry of Time. Echoing Thin Red Lines’ mirroring of the past and future, Bradley says writing fiction is a form of time travel itself.
“You’re deciding where a story begins and ends. You’re creating a discrete timeline, you’re able to go back any time you want, you’re defining what’s history and what’s narrative and how your reader travels through your story. Anyone reading a book is engaging in time travel.”
A second-generation, bi-racial British-Cambodian like her central character, Bradley contrasts the “hereness” and “thereness” of people displaced from time with the refugee experience.
“When refugees and immigrants talk about leaving a homeland, it’s a place over there that never changes in their recollections, but they’re not completely here either.
“There’s a lot of gaps in the second-generation experience, which requires an amount of creative engagement – not a truth-telling, but a conjuring of what that world might be.”
Sexiness rears its head once again in Horror, Hauntings and Monstrous Femmes – this time to describe the horror trope of possession in Feast While You Can. The latest book of partners in writing and life Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta was described as “a top-top-bottom love triangle where one of the tops is a disembodied ancient evil”.
The panel, moderated by Maeve Marsden and also featuring Argentine novelist and short story writer Mariana Enríquez, delves into the experience of inhabiting a female body and how this lends itself to body horror, queerness, straightness and the cultural lineages of horror.
As Marsden laughingly remarks at one point, Clements and Datta coming out as monogamous and Enriquez coming out as straight is “one of the most Melbourne Writers Festival things ever”.
Exceedingly funny in her blunt deadpan assessments of her work and life, Enriquez speaks about moulding European horror tropes to the Argentine experience and writing horror as a woman surrounded by it in her every day.
“Nobody explains what happens to you when you have a hysterectomy. One of my stories came from my friend’s mother being so attached to her uterus that she wanted it to be in a little fridge next to her in the hospital.
“But I thought because I live in the body of a woman and consider myself a woman, I could nail writing about the female experience. But no, you have to build it. It’s a language.”
Just like how Ministry of Time is less a time travel novel and more, in Bradley’s words, “people in the 20th century experiencing bureaucracy in different rooms”, Clements and Datta’s book situates itself in a capitalistic world where the monster takes over the burden of existing.
“Possession is a moment of absolute coercive control – you’re losing your body and mind and are being violated in this awful physical manner – but there’s also something alluring about someone else taking over your body and handling it for you. There’s an element of desire,” Clements says.
An event programmed by First Nations Guest Curator Nardi Simpson, First Knowledges First is chaired by Cheryl Leavy, who speaks to Darumbal and South Sea Islander journalist Dr Amy McQuire and Noongar doctor Professor Sandra Eades about the respective failures of western approaches in healthcare and media and how this collides with First Nations knowledge and understanding.
“Journalism is about producing knowledge, but a certain kind of knowledge. The imperial media has continually oppressed and resulted in the theft of land,” McQuire says, evoking the Northern Territory Intervention.
“Black conceptions of knowing are never understood and comprehended by white witnesses because it falls outside of their terms of references or it’s made substandard.”
Touching on western biomedical science, Eades contrasts the male-dominated field with Aboriginal rites of passages around birthing and dying.
“The sacredness of coming onto this earth is only mirrored by the same rite of passage as when we’re leaving the world. As humans, we’re born on to a country. There’s a sacred ceremonial part to being born on country.
“It butts up against a western system of pregnancy and childbirth, which has been, until recently, run by white men with very little appreciation of culture and ceremony.”
Aboriginal, community-controlled health and media organisations are of paramount importance.
Eades says these health organisations do not operate like a standard GP clinic.
“They are relational, place-based systems of care that flip power and relationships. People can walk through the door and be who they are. Sometimes, they bump into someone they’re connected to. That’s safety and trust. Everyone needs that when they’re at their most vulnerable.”
In the second event curated by Simpson, Blak Magic Women, which she chairs, McQuire appears again alongside award-winning Wiradyuri author Anita Heiss and Wergaia/Wemba Wemba singer and songwriter Alice Skye.
Simpson posited to her three panellists that this event would be a “kitchen table yarn of women weaving their lives for the audience” and it’s exactly that: a warm, convivial panel of First Nations women lifting each other up.
Touching on the festival’s theme of Magical Thinking, Simpson pays homage to the three women she’s assembled on her panel.
“Our regular state is magical. Connecting, resisting, finding meaning in those things. Magic, for me, is the reality of who all of you are.”
Trading stories on the strength of Blak women, self-determination in the spaces of media and publishing, and their own experiences pursuing a career on a land shaped by so much colonial violence gives way to the biggest laugh of the night, courtesy of Heiss:
“We don’t have a lot of commercial and romance writers. We’ve been loving and laughing on this country for millennia. I’m hoping I can discover the next Koorie Bradshaw.”
Closing off the panel with an intimate, deeply affecting poem and a beautifully rousing song about loss, Skye moves everyone to tears. There’s not a dry eye in the room.
