Interview #206 — Annette Shun Wah

by Smriti Daniel

Annette Shun Wah is a writer, producer and theatre maker. She is currently Artistic Director of Contemporary Asian Australian Performance (CAAP), and of the Adelaide Festival Centre’s OzAsia Festival, the only major annual festival framed by the cultural engagement of Asia and Australia.

Annette speaks with Smriti Daniel about how her family’s long and fascinating history in Australia, her bold career choices and the joy she finds in celebrating Asian Australian identities through the arts.

Your family’s heritage goes back some 150 years in Australia. So, it would have been your great-grandparents who came here in the 1800s? Did you grow up hearing about them?

Yes, my great grandfather came to Darwin in 1878. He was a merchant, and he apparently wanted to set up a bakery in Darwin. But at the time, Darwin—or Palmerston, as it was called then—was the first port of call for the steamships that came down from Asia, and also from Europe via Asia. And there had been several attempts to set up a settlement there, a proper settlement in the port, that had all failed, because it was such a remote place and a lot of the early settlers struggled. But on this occasion, a lot of Chinese businessmen came and established the settlement. And so, when my great grandfather arrived in the 1870s, there were probably more Chinese in the Northern Territory— something like, six to one Chinese compared to the others.

My family moved around a lot—from Australia to China or Hong Kong and back. They all eventually managed to get through the White Australia Policy and prove they were who they said they were and came back to Australia. And that's how our family was established here.

That history just fascinates me because all the things you learn about Chinese Australian history, it's all encapsulated in my family's personal journey.

You paint a vivid picture. You've also said that you didn't know that much about your mother. I was curious about that history, on your maternal side, and whether that has been something you’ve wanted to explore.

My mother died giving birth to me so I never knew her. My family was not very forthcoming with information—it wasn't something we talked about and it wasn't something I really brought up until much later in life anyway, when a lot of people had passed away, or there weren't many memories. It was painful for my immediate family, so they didn't really talk about it. But her background was interesting in that when my father met her, she lived with a foster parent. If I was to try and trace her background, it would be very difficult because of that. So, I think I've just resigned myself to the fact that I'll never know.

I laughed out loud at the opening line of ‘Spiderbait’, your essay in Growing up Asian in Australia: ‘You don’t have to go back to medieval times to find the worst jobs in history. Not if you grow up on a poultry farm run by Chinese parents with a cleanliness obsession.’

Between murdering hundreds of spiders, and trying to save chooks in a Queensland heatwave, it sounds like an unconventional, but possibly very Australian childhood.

My family was trying to hold on to their Chinese culture to some degree but yes, in a sense, it was very Australian, and we were living in the bush surrounded by trees and wildlife and cane toads. I remember every time when there was a big storm, I used to have to run up to the chook sheds to close the doors, to keep the rain out, and try not to step on all the cane toads that were hopping along and yes, the thunderstorms sometimes sparked terrifying bushfires.

My brother and I were the only Chinese kids from primary school through to high school. At home, we spoke Chinese because my stepmother who had come from Hong Kong didn't speak any English. We ate Chinese food and we had Chinese customs, but we did not engage outside of our home very much.

What did you imagine your future life would be like, at that age?

I had a pretty wild imagination. When I was very small, I was quite sickly. I had rheumatic fever as a child. So they would always take me to see doctors who took years to diagnose the problem. I initially thought that I was going to be a doctor because I could see the respect that my parents gave to doctors. It really wasn't until the latter years of high school, when someone said to me, ‘Do you really want to be dealing with sick people?’ that I reconsidered.

I was very interested in writing, very interested in music. If I could do what I really wanted to do, I would have been a rock musician—but that wasn't very realistic for a Chinese girl. I considered journalism, but my elder brother pointed out that we didn't know anyone, and that it was a really competitive field. In the end, I got a scholarship to study social work; I thought this would help because my parents didn't have a lot of money.

But you found your way to Triple J as a presenter. I also read that George Donikian suggested you audition for a job at SBS, and that it could help you challenge racism. Did you find that to be true?

I still remember how he [George] rang me up one day, which happened to be a day when I had just been the target of a racist incident. It affected me in a way that really surprised me. Some young men had walked past and spat out something with so much hatred and venom, that it really took me by surprise. It was totally unprovoked—they just saw my face walking in the opposite direction in a public area. What surprised me was I sat down and burst into tears—that had never happened before. George rang me up and I just had to tell him about it, you know? He said I could do something about it by coming to audition for the SBS newsroom. I had no interest in being a newsreader but he thought I should be on television.

In the end, I got offered a job presenting music. I felt that just having my face on the screen, and doing a competent job was something unusual at the time. There was no diversity of faces on television then and I thought that if people could just see a variety of faces doing a good competent job, they would realise that they can just judge us by what we do and what we have to say rather than by the colour of our skin. I think it did make an impact. I developed a bit of a public profile, and so that message and that idea of getting a face out there to change the look of who was acceptable in the media could possibly happen. But it took a long time, a very long time.

It's never a straight path, is it? I mean, it's very struck by something that Jeff Yang (an American cultural critic) said to Beverly Wang and Benjamin Law on Stop Everything!, that this whole notion of representation is not because we want to see ourselves on TV. It's because when we can't tell our stories, other people project their stories onto us. Does that idea resonate with you?

That’s very telling. I think it's our job as cultural producers to produce a culture that reflects, resonates with and interrogates who we are, as a society and as a country and community. Very clearly, Australia's cultural output does not do that. Not for all of us. There are big gaps, there are big holes in that story. I think that's part of the reason why we have so much trouble coming to terms with who we are, our national identity, and getting along in a more harmonious way. The politicians will tell you we are an incredibly harmonious society—that just rings so hollow. We know that that's not the case but the only way to get over that is through education and understanding. I think it's so important that our culture embraces who we actually are. If our picture of Australia is as diverse as the reality, then that will stop this delusion people have about us being a ‘white’ country. It's a wake-up call that is long overdue.

Another milestone in your career comes with your debut role as an actor in [the feature film] Floating Life (1996). Do you remember your audition?

Yes! It was incredibly difficult because it was all in German. One scene was in German, the other scene was a big argument in Cantonese. I had studied German in high school and I grew up speaking Cantonese but my vocabulary is that of a seven-year-old. So I didn't have the language and they had to send me the script in English telling me I had to perform it in those languages. But I got through it and I got the role.

Floating Life was Australia’s first official entry into Oscar’s foreign language category. And yet the following four roles you were offered were for a waitress in a Chinese restaurant. It must have felt bewildering and frustrating.

Yes, I thought I'd get myself an agent and get some work off the back of that nomination. The first four roles I was offered were all in very different productions— but in every single one, the role was a Chinese waitress. And I thought, ‘Oh my god, this is ridiculous!’ [And then] I arrogantly said, ‘No, this is typecasting, I’m not going to go for roles like that’. That was really very naïve of me but it's a good indication of what was available then.

Yet, you carved a path. It's kind of extraordinary to me how you have, again and again, put yourself in an unfamiliar space, put yourself in a position of having to learn on the job as it were. Did you grapple with these decisions or was there a moment or a phase in which you've become more certain of yourself and your choices?

No, I think as you get older, you get less certain.

Oh no, that’s not what I wanted to hear!

When I was young, I had the arrogance of youth. I thought I could do anything. You know, I thought I was pretty smart. In high school, I thought I was the smartest kid around, and I did well at high school. So that's how I got over any of the nerves and fear in the early days.

As I get older, reality has hit. The older you are, the more you have to lose. Those doubts do creep in but fortunately, you're also wiser, smarter, you understand things more. One of my guiding principles in life is you don't want to have any regrets. This is not to say I don’t have regrets, I have many, but my rule is to not give myself cause for regret. If the opportunity is there, you think about it, you take calculated risks, and you go for it. And when you make that decision, you put everything into it. When you commit like that, there's less chance for fears and nervousness to get in the way.

When I think about my parents’ lives and the sorts of things that they had put up with during the war, and the hardships that followed, my life is so easy by comparison. I think the one thing that's given me confidence is I have two older brothers who are really wonderful. I know that they're always there. And that gives me the confidence that nothing can ever be so bad, right?

That’s beautiful. You’ve ended up working across radio, television, publishing and theatre—I wonder what threads you see connecting your work across those very different platforms and mediums?

It's all about ideas and communication, about connecting human beings and stories. It's just different ways of doing it; different media. The best things are the new, original ideas, the ideas that come from the heart, the ideas that have meaning, the things that connect human beings, not to mention the surprising things. They're the things that appeal to me. I guess that's the common thread through all of it—the power of ideas to change people's lives.

Going into Contemporary Asian Australian Performance (CAAP), were you at all intimidated by the challenge you had set yourself?

It wasn't like I wanted to make theatre—after all, I had my career in the media and I was starting to do more writing at that point. I didn’t really know anything about running a theatre company, I'd never applied for funding before, and I didn't really know what particular roles entailed or how things were done. While I thought some of my skills as a television producer would come in handy, it was still daunting. I'm sure I broke a lot of rules along the way because I didn't know what I was doing. Sometimes that was a good thing because I just sort of short-cutted my way to a few things. My public profile helped a lot—it opened doors to people who otherwise wouldn't have talked to me. And people were convinced that the mission I was on was a good one. Also, people are much more collaborative in theatre than they are in television and I was able to recruit the support of a lot of important people in the sector. That's why we were able to make some impact.

What has really excited you about this work and the kinds of stories that you've helped shepherd onto stages? Do the most successful pieces have something in common?

For me, it's just that the door is open now—there are pathways for these artists who clearly have so much to offer. There are still barriers, but the barrier of race is no longer as high as it used to be. This morning, I went into the rehearsal room at Sydney Theatre Company, where they were rehearsing a play by Michelle Law. She had come to our playwriting workshops in the past, as a writer who loved theatre but had never thought about writing for the stage. She went on to create Single Asian Female, which was a huge success. And now she has Top Coat which is being directed by Courtney Stewart, who came to us as an actor but through our workshop discovered that she loved directing, and is now Artistic Director of La Boite theatre company! But Top Coat is not the only one this year—there’s Golden Blood by Merlynn Tong, another one of our alumni, and then Laurinda at the Melbourne Theatre Company, co-adapted by Diana Nguyen who is also one of our CAAP directors. There are actors in the room, there are theatre designers in the room, all of whom have been part of our development initiatives. Our fingerprints are everywhere. So yeah, I feel pretty good about that. That's what excites me.

Is legacy something that interests you?

I guess that's what I'm building, but not intentionally. I just want to see a change in this industry that I've been in and struggled in all these years. The other day I was delivering a speech at an event; I told them I had been in the business, screen and stage, for 30 years at that point. Right from the beginning, I had been invited to speak at forums or events to talk about the lack of representation … and here I was, 30 years later, still talking about it. The room burst into applause. And I said: ‘No, that's not something to applaud, that is shameful. I'm sick of talking about it. We have to do something about it’.

Lotus [a playwriting skills development project, initiated by CAAP] was one of those things. Looking back over the last 10 years, we've been able to do something about it. Our focus has been pretty narrow—main stage theatre, primarily in Australia— because that's an area that really needed to change, to diversify. We've had an impact on this part of the sector and if that's a legacy, then I'm satisfied with that.

You’re also going down in history as the first Asian Australian to be an Artistic Director of the OzAsia Festival.

Yes—about time, eh?

It is important that community is there at every level, but particularly, you know, at the highest levels of management. Did you feel the significance of this as well?

I feel very fortunate to have the role, but I think it's come pretty late in the piece. It should have happened sooner, not necessarily with me, but with someone else. At the end of last year, we recruited a new Executive Producer, Joon-Yee Kwok and a Program Coordinator, Azusa Kyushiki. So, we're starting to build that team, not to the exclusion of others, but to make sure that there is an understanding within the team of the different cultures and nuances that people might otherwise miss. That’s the reality of putting a diverse perspective at the centre of things, which we all talk about and desire. We're in a place where we can build that now, where we can try and ensure that happens. We're still in the framework of a very white, bureaucratic setup but we're changing it and I feel really thrilled by that.

How did you approach putting the program together?

So, my thing is to make sure that there's strong representation of Asian Australian work that looks at who we are in modern-day Australia. I want to try and support collaborations between Australian and Asian artists, and I want to bring Asian works that give us a snapshot of what is happening in Asia, in terms of artistic practice, but also in terms of just what people are thinking about. What are their concerns? What are they talking about? What makes them laugh? What makes them cry? What is it that's hot right now? And I think that if the festival can do those things, it offers us an insight into Asia that we wouldn't otherwise have unless we were actually there. I wanted OzAsia to embody this connection between Asia and Australia.

As a final question, I'm curious about what gives you the energy and the commitment, you know, where the hope comes from, what allows you to go out into the world and create this change in such a beautiful, positive way?

It's a sense of justice, that drives me. It’s simply not fair. Plus, my firm belief is that for us to get over our problems as Australians, we really need to have a more diverse landscape. Also, I just want things to be more interesting. You know, I really am a snob. I really lose interest in and cannot pay attention to the same old stories and characters and things I've seen and heard a gazillion times before. I want new, fresh, exciting ideas. So, it’s partly selfish, I will say that.

But you know, when I think about the challenges I had, the sense of injustice and unfairness that I've had—I don’t want anyone else to suffer that or I just want to reduce it at least. When I think of those 30 years of painfully slow progress, I think of how many talented people were also there who didn't make it, those who gave up and went away. What a horrible thing for them, how unfair for them that they could not fulfil their potential in the way they wanted to. And what a great loss for the rest of us! We will never see or witness what they had to offer.

I think it's so important to try and make that possible. And the less it is about me, the more rewarding it is for me. When I see others' success, it just fills me with so much pride and joy. These are the most rewarding times of my entire life.