![]() ![]() I had been thinking at one stage about the somewhat invisible history of the Chinese in Western Australia, particularly in an area of South Perth once used as vast market gardens a century ago, which is now grassed parkland. The book had no single source of inspiration, but rather represents the convergence of several ideas. It’s a scenario I had been thinking about for a number of years before it crystallised into a narrative form. Given my preoccupation with strangers in strange lands, it was an obvious one to tackle, a story about somebody leaving their home to find a new home in an unseen country, where even the most basic details of ordinary life are strange, confronting or confusing – not to mention beyond the grasp of familiar language. This was uppermost in my mind during the long period of work on The Arrival, a book which deals with the theme of migrant experience. ![]() We often find ourselves in new realities – a new school, job, relationship or country, any of which demand some reinvention of ‘belonging’. It especially rises to the surface when things go wrong with our usual lives, when something challenges our comfortable reality or defies our expectations – which is typically the moment when a good story begins too. I did have a vague sense of separateness, an unclear notion of identity or detachment from roots, on top of that traditionally contested concept of what it is to be Australian, or worse, un-Australian (whatever that might mean).īeyond any personal issues, though, I think that the ‘problem’ of belonging is perhaps more of a basic existential question that everybody deals with from time to time, if not on a regular basis. A vague awareness of Indigenous displacement (which later sharpened into focus with a project like The Rabbits) only further troubled any sense of a connection to a ‘homeland’ in this universe of bulldozed tabula rasa coastal dunes, and fast-tracked, walled-in housing estates.īeing a half-Chinese child at a time a place when this was fairly unusual may have compounded this, as I was constantly being asked ‘where are you from?’ to which my unsatisfactory response of ‘here’ only prompted a deeper inquiry. At least this was far more positive attention than the occasional low-level racism I experienced growing up in 1980’s Western Australia, and which I also noticed directed either overtly or surreptitiously at my Chinese father from time to time. More specifically, my parents pegged a spot in a new northern suburb that was quite devoid of any clear cultural identity or history. One contributing experience may have been that of growing up in Perth, one of the most isolated cities in the world, sandwiched between a vast desert and ocean. Whether this has anything to do with my own life, I’m not sure, it seems to be more of a subconscious than conscious concern. Looking over much of my previous work as an illustrator and writer, such as The Rabbits (about colonisation), The Lost Thing (about a creature lost in a strange city) or The Red Tree (a girl wandering through shifting dreamscapes), I realise that I have a recurring interest in notions of ‘belonging’, particularly the finding or losing of it. The following is an extract from an article written in 2006 for Viewpoint Magazine, describing some of the ideas and process behind this book. He is helped along the way by sympathetic strangers, each carrying their own unspoken history: stories of struggle and survival in a world of incomprehensible violence, upheaval and hope * With nothing more than a suitcase and a handful of currency, the immigrant must find a place to live, food to eat and some kind of gainful employment. He eventually finds himself in a bewildering city of foreign customs, peculiar animals, curious floating objects and indecipherable languages. ![]() A man leaves his wife and child in an impoverished town, seeking better prospects in an unknown country on the other side of a vast ocean. The Arrival is a migrant story told as a series of wordless images. ![]()
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