The Pull of the Moon
by Pip Smith
UWA Publishing
Pip Smith writes about The Pull of the Moon, her YA novel about detention on Christmas Island, for PaperbarkWords blog.
I didn’t realise this at the time, but work on my young adult novel The Pull of the Moon began in January 2010, when I visited the Christmas Island Immigration Detention Centre as a volunteer ESL teacher. I worked at the centre six days a week for three weeks, teaching men from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. Some had fluent English and postgraduate degrees, while others had never learned to read the English alphabet. The men I met at the centre during those three weeks have forever lived on in my heart, particularly one Afghan man named Ali who wrote that he missed the “tiny lives of the plum trees” that grew on the mountains behind his village. Before reading this, I’d always thought of a tree as one life, the way we often see a group of people as possessing one unifying identity, but to think of each blossom on a tree as a being a whole life, a whole world, instantly enriches that tree. The tree becomes a diverse community, a vibrant village, and I think of those words whenever I look at the plum tree in my own back yard (which, infuriatingly, has only ever produced one blossom!). I have kept the scrap of paper on which Ali wrote those words, and often wonder about the life he lives now, and if he ever planted a plum tree of his own on Australian soil.
What struck me most when spending time on Christmas Island was how the most remote Australian territory was a crucible for decision making taking place over five thousand kilometres away in Canberra. Kevin Rudd, our PM at the time, could be criticised in question time in the morning, and later that day the guards at the detention centre would be given a different set of instructions on how to behave. Never had I seen such swift policy-in-action! It seemed as if a politician flapped his wings, and recreation time would immediately be cancelled for three-hundred bored and restless men.
After receiving a grant from the Australia Council to write and research The Pull of the Moon, I returned to the island twice more: Once in 2018 to interview local Australians about their experience living alongside asylum seekers, and again in 2019 to join a bird-watching group as they tagged tropic birds and counted Abbott’s boobies. What continued to emerge in conversations was the memory of the crashing of The Janga, otherwise known as SIEV-221, into the island’s cliffs. What had been little more than a distressing news story safely contained within the frame of my television had been an event that continued to haunt those on the island, and many lived with PTSD eight years afterwards. As a memorial to this experience, I tried to faithfully recreate the crash, including the dismembering of the man who tried to jump, the babies and children floating face-down in the water, the desperate attempts of the locals to help despite the shocking conditions, and the locals who were asked by the navy to dive for the dead. All the events in the novel that take place after the crash are, however, completely invented. No girl ever claimed to find a missing boy in the jungle, no expensive search was ever undertaken to find him. It troubled me for a while: why stay true to history on some plot points, but pursue flights of fancy on others? After years of scratching away at this question at the back of my brain, I came to the realisation that these inventions were a method of exploring a theme: what are the effects of Australia’s policy of “silence”? What happens to children who experience trauma and are given no means to connect with those for whom they grieve? As a mainlander living a comfortable, cocooned life in Sydney, I realised how the policies of supressing asylum seeker stories which had begun under Howard broke down on Christmas Island. Here, on the frontline, it was impossible to look away.
But, of course, the trauma experienced by local Christmas Islanders was nothing in comparison to those who survived the crash. Children, like my novel’s fictional character Zahra, were turned into orphans and weren’t told about the death of their parents for five days, despite authorities knowing what had happened to them.
While writing this story I fretted at length over the ethics of appropriation. Was it wrong of me, a white Australian woman, to write chapters from the point of view of Iranians? I’m not sure I ever arrived at a concrete answer to this question, but I ultimately decided that stories such as these cannot be shoe-horned into any one perspective. The draft in which I attempted to do so was flat and lacking in empathy; it whitewashed history; it continued the “silence”. The braver choice, I felt, was to do everything in my power to thoroughly research those perspectives unfamiliar to me and live with the knowledge that my rendering of them will never be authoritative or complete—only a gesture towards understanding.
paperbarkwords.blog 