Indigenous author Anita Heiss: ‘Speaking language is an act of sovereignty’

Each week, Benjamin Law asks public figures to discuss the subjects we’re told to keep private by getting them to roll a die. The numbers they land on are the topics they’re given. This week, he talks to Anita Heiss. The Wiradjuri professor, writer and public speaker, 52, is an author of novels, non-fiction and books for children. Her latest novel is Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray (River of Dreams).

Anita Heiss: “When I started learning language [Wiradjuri], I came to a greater understanding of my own faith in my ancestors.”Credit: Paul Harris

MONEY

You were born and raised in Matraville, in Sydney’s south-eastern suburbs, the second of five kids. Did you grow up poor, working-class, middle-class or rich? Definitely working-class. Dad was a carpenter, constantly covered in sawdust, working seven days a week. Mum worked nights for 16 years at the Matraville drive-in. We didn’t have holidays, never had luxuries, no big gifts. My parents came from nothing, but created a life for their children and sent us to good schools. I went to a private Catholic girls’ school, with Volvos pulling up outside; my father would come in his Kombi, me sitting on a milk crate in the back. I got this work ethic from my parents.

How many books have you written? Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray makes about 18, if we include editing anthologies.

Does that mean you’re now rich? I’m rich in books. Unless you’re selling hundreds of thousands of copies, you’re not rich from writing. Studies show published Australian authors earn an average of $12,000 a year from their creative work and that it’s other work that makes up the bulk of their income. Lead me through the pie chart of your earnings. If we take out my salary at the University of Queensland [where Heiss is a professor of communications], I’d say 80 per cent of my income is from public speaking. What I get paid for one keynote can be the same as the advance on a book. But books give us the platform to talk about the issues.

In 2011, you were part of a group of plaintiffs who won a federal court ruling against columnist Andrew Bolt, who was found to have breached the Racial Discrimination Act. No one received compensation from that case. If it wasn’t about money, what was it about? We could have pursued a case around defamation and potentially made claims for money. But for me, and many others, it was about seeing a change in the way the media represents Aboriginal people and other minorities. It put the media on notice about what’s acceptable, ethical and lawful. It ensured media professionals understood they could no longer crucify Aboriginal people in their columns without being accountable to their readers. People who hadn’t read the witness statements or testimony asked, “What about my freedom of speech?” I’d say, “What is it you want to say about someone that you can’t say under the law?” If I never did anything in my life after that, I’d be okay with having made that contribution. Who am I to not take a stand when so many people before me have put their lives on the line for the rights of our people? I thought about Windradyne [an early 19th-century resistance warrior] and the war he waged for the Wiradjuri mob in the Battle of Bathurst [against the incursions of white settlers]. And I thought, “Who am I not to give it a crack?”

What is your greatest extravagance? I’m collecting something from every Tiffany & Co around the world. I don’t have kids, and I don’t have a man, so I buy myself things I’d expect someone to give me for my birthday and Valentine’s Day and Christmas. I’m the best Valentine I’ve ever had.

RELIGION

Are you spiritual, religious, or none of the above? Spiritual, but raised in a very Catholic household: my mother was a founder of the Sydney Aboriginal Catholic Ministry. She set up the Aboriginal Reconciliation Church at La Perouse in 1999, welcomed two popes to Australia and in 1998 dined with Pope John Paul II in the Vatican. But when I was old enough to understand that Aboriginal people would be practising our own ceremonies if it wasn’t for missionaries, I got quite shitty about being denied that right. And when I started learning language [Wiradjuri], I came to a greater understanding of my own faith in my ancestors.

Is there something to be said for non-Indigenous people learning Aboriginal languages, too? The Wiradjuri language, culture and heritage course I took at Charles Sturt University is open to everybody. There’s a range of people there for different reasons. Blackfellas go because we want to reclaim and maintain language. For me, speaking language is an act of sovereignty, part of us rebuilding our nation. It makes a difference to get up at a conference and acknowledge country in the language my ancestors spoke and my mum was denied. It helps non-Indigenous people understand the complexity of our culture. Our language is as complex as anybody else’s.

You’ve famously described yourself as a “concrete Koori with Westfield dreaming”. Discuss. There’s a lack of media representation of the one-third of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who live urban lives. The greatest concentration of Aboriginal people in this country is in western Sydney, but you’d never know that. What I try to do with anything I write is say, “I’m not trying to be anybody I’m not.”

What’s a mantra you live by? Don’t worry about failure; worry about all the opportunities you miss when you don’t even try.

BODIES

You took up running later in life, at 45. You run a lot, as in marathons. What does running give you? Endorphins that help to lift me during extraordinary periods of anxiety. It gives me time and space to think; it gives me fitness. It’s given me an extraordinary group of like-minded buddies who also run. And it’s free. It’s changed my life and now it’s addictive.

Besides running marathons, do you have any other physical superpowers under your belt? I can eat an entire pack of Tim Tams in one sitting.

That is brave. That is courage. I do it for the cause.

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