Interview #207 — Patrick Allington

by Lyn Dickens

Patrick Allington is a writer, editor and researcher. His books are the novels Rise & Shine (Scribe) and Figurehead (Black Inc.) and the textbook Making the Grade (OUP). His essays, short fiction and criticism have appeared widely. He is an Adjunct Senior Lecturer in Creative and Performing Arts at Flinders University.

Patrick speaks with Lyn Dickens about place, identity, and the role of creative communities.

I thought I’d start by asking about something we have in common. We’re both Asian Australian writers who now live and work in South Australia. Can you tell us about your experience in South Australia and how you think this has influenced your writing practice? Do you think your experience would be different in the Eastern states, or elsewhere in Australia?

I get a lot of pleasure—too much, probably—from poking fun at my home state: we’re half an hour and 30 years behind the eastern states, etcetera etcetera. But the truth is, it suits me to live somewhere that is outside the centre of things. It suits me to live my life in a place that is slightly slower, quieter, less jammed with people rushing here and there.

My family lives in the Adelaide foothills, on Kaurna land, and I work remotely (my workplace is in Sydney). I only go to the CBD occasionally, to have a drink or a meal with a friend, go to the library or Imprints booksellers, attend a book launch. Mostly, I drift along, doing my thing at my pace in my bubble. I cherish my bubble.

How did growing up in a regional area of the state influence you as a writer?

I find this an interesting question because although I think about my childhood often, I don’t usually do so in the context of your question. I don’t think all that much about place. I think more about my inner world, about what I thought, dreamed, hoped for, fretted about, than about physical locations. Still, as an adult I do draw sustenance from space, light, ocean, creeks, gum trees, koalas, etcetera.

I started my primary school years in the little town of Cummins, near Port Lincoln on Eyre Peninsula. I remember only random things: a little girl getting her finger caught in a concertina door; walking home with my big brother, learning to count to 100 (or tenty, as I thought the next number after 99 surely was); hiding under the bed one day for sport, so that my family, and a few others, went out looking for me; chatting and playing with my imaginary friends, Bulla (rhymes with ‘colour’) and Boozie, and their friend Bogga—who was no friend of mine.

My family spent five of my primary school years in Port Pirie, a small industrial city on the Spencer Gulf. I wrote stories during those years. A few years ago, at a Bad Diaries Salon event in Melbourne, I read my story ‘The man and the lady’, written in 1976 when I was seven years old:

Almost all of ‘The man and the lady’—all seven pages of it—reads and looks like a script. It’s not; it’s a short story. At the time I wrote it, I didn’t know how to write dialogue on the page. Reading ‘The man and the lady’ to a small audience at Bad Diaries Salon was both bemusing and huge fun. And the story was better received than some of my more recent writing.

But, also, if I’m talking about my childhood, I must mention sport. Nothing mattered more than the cricket and the footy. The great achievement of my childhood was when I successfully picked the Australian men’s team for the first test in the 1978–79 Ashes series and got to stay home from school to watch the first day. I turned sport into stories in my head. I read about sport relentlessly, and collected cricket books for many years. My obsession with sport did not lead to me becoming an elite sportsperson, but it did lead me to learn a great deal about reading, researching, analysing and storytelling.

In your essay titled ‘Writing about Asia from Australia: notes towards avoiding a firm view,’ you write that ‘Adelaide is a world-class place to be if you want to avert your gaze.’ I found this observation very striking. Can you expand on what you mean here?

Look, I love Adelaide—as I’ve said already, including its relative smallness, its slower pace and its reserved feel, relative to other cities. Adelaide gives you space to think.

But Adelaide can also feel like it exists in a bubble—as if separate from the world. I’m not suggesting that everyone in Adelaide has it easy—we have our fair share of unfairness and prejudice. That comment you refer to is, I suppose, a personal reflection on our particular type of complacency—the origins of which go back to South Australia’s historical claims of being different, exceptional. When I imagine the future, as the earth burns and sinks, the people of Adelaide carry on doing their own thing, not oblivious exactly but … unconvinced that the end of the world is as relevant to us as it is to others. And we’ll always have the footy.

It's a hard sensation—the averting of the gaze—to define and describe. I tried to write a novel about it, but never could get it right (as the various publishers who read it, sometimes more than once, would agree). I wrote a main character who exists in his bubble, living in a city/state that is itself disconnected from the rest of the nation, and in a nation that embraces the tyranny of distance when it suits us to do so. I’m told the novel lacks a plot, which I expect is true. But for me, the bigger problem was that in trying to write a self-absorbed character, I inadvertently venerated the unpleasantness of that character’s singular approach to his life, his surroundings, his world.

In the same essay, you also state that ‘Australia is genuinely diverse, open-armed and filled with Asian-Australians and all sorts of other Australians and Australia is racist and reactionary.’ Can you talk a bit more about this dichotomy? Do you think that contradiction and dichotomy can ever be generative?

To me, that contradiction is a big part of our national identity. It is nonsense that Australia is or should be monocultural or monolingual—that’s a straightforward falsehood. And yet the dominant culture, the appeal to a certain sort of mainstream Australia, is still hard to shake. I should add, however: I’m rooted in the mainstream that I wish was less dominant and domineering. Only in my dreams do I stand anywhere other than in my spot in the centre. If countercultures abound, if dissenters dream and act, I applaud them, admire them, support them in my way … but I doubt that I am them.

Your latest novel, Rise and Shine (2020), deals with a dystopian society, and was written before the COVID-19 pandemic. What inspired you to write this novel?

I wrote Rise & Shine immediately after I shelved the failed Adelaide novel. A big part of the Adelaide novel was about obsessions with food and drink. And I started thinking about a society in the future where something terrible had happened–a series or accumulation of global catastrophes in which human survivors had to find a new way to feed themselves because the earth was poisoned. So, I was still thinking about food and drink, but in a different way.

Broadly, I’m grappling with the (by now very familiar) theme of feeling a sense of optimism but also a sense of despair about the future. But I wanted to write about the future itself—not about the catastrophes (climate, nuclear war, whatever) that led humans to the brink of extinction.

And I wanted it to be funny. I hope it is.

A lot of your writing, such as Rise and Shine and your debut novel, Figurehead (2009), engages with political themes. Do you think that writers have a responsibility to be political? What do you see as the role of the fiction writer in the twenty-first century?

On an individual level, a writer has a responsibility to be as political as they want to be, and, for that matter, to define ‘being political’ however they wish. I wouldn’t dream of telling another writer what their responsibilities should be.

The themes in my writing reflect my preoccupations, my annoyances, my loves. I have just started a cricket novel (why not, given that I am working on two other unfinished novels). When I say I’ve started it, it’s all in my head right now, except for an opening line that is scribbled on a post-it note on my monitor: ‘Now that I’ve won, I’ll tell you what I did.’ It’s a political novel, in my mind. I’m writing it at night, lying in bed, in the moments before sleep.

What inspired, or made you decide, to be a writer?

Other writers, mostly, and other artists. And the book as a physical object (even though these days I’m happy to read from the screen). Also, I was never going to make it as a test cricketer—I could bat a bit, but in high school I got scared of the ball—and I wanted to try to excel at something.

What are you working on at the moment?

The short story in this [most recent] digital issue of Liminal is adapted from a novel that I’m nearly finished with. It’s about a princess, the daughter of a despot, who chooses to live in isolation at the top of a hill rather than go into exile. I have also been writing a follow-up to Rise & Shine. And, as mentioned, I have a cricket novel in my head.

It’s [also] been my great pleasure to have the chance, through a Juncture fellowship, to write several longer pieces of criticism for Sydney Review of Books. I consider myself a lapsed critic, really—I write very few reviews these days, after writing lots for many years. But I love the chance to engage with a book in more detail, consider its ideas, talk back to it. For example, writing about Sumana Roy’s fascinating non-fiction work, How I Became a Tree, compelled me to think harder about its themes and Roy’s approach than if I’d simply read it for pleasure.

You’ve worked as a lecturer in addition to writing. How do you balance writing with other commitments? What does a typical workday look like for you?

Generally, the day job wins. I was an academic for a few years, and before that a scholarly editor (and before that, a bookseller). More recently, I have been employed outside the university sector or publishing industry, although I am gratified to still be working with words.

I have blocks of time when I write regularly and with the sort of rhythm that is acceptable if not my ideal—an hour or two most mornings, before I get on with the day. And then I have longer stretches of time when the demands of the day job (which, in the end, pays the bills) wins out. Inside or outside academia, we are living, it seems, in an era that applauds and too often expects excessive hard work.

In summary, I do the best I can. And the best I can is sometimes ‘not too bad’, sometimes ‘not much’, and sometimes ‘nothing’.

How important do you think a sense of community is to writers? Is this something that has helped your own writing journey?

I can only answer for me. I am sustained by the South Australian writing, reading, publishing, academic, bookselling community. I don’t know that there is an ‘Australian writing community’—we are a disparate group, or disparate groups, and that’s a good thing. But another way of saying ‘I value the Australian writing community’ is to say ‘I love, admire and lean on my friends’. Writers understand writers—the ups and downs, the navigation of a bewildering industry, the slog and joy of it all.

Who are you inspired by?

I’m inspired by an ever-changing group of people—but people doing their thing their way, making something original, making something distinctly theirs. I am transfixed by the artist Hilma af Klint, although I am not a spiritualist and have never been to Sweden—and certainly not as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth.

I am inspired by many writers, local, national, international. The fiction of Alexis Wright astonishes me. She is, in my opinion, Australia’s best living writer—with apologies to several others (it’s not a competition but it’s a competition).

What are you reading and listening to at the moment?

I tend to read several books at once. Currently, among other books, I am working my way through Mirandi Riwoe’s short story collection, The Burnished Sun—such emotional depth. I’m dipping in and out of Griffith Review 76: Acts of Reckoning. And I’m re-reading for the millionth time, or perpetually reading, John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids. Plus, I read a lot for my day job.

Listening, when doing the day job: the Decemberists (a mix); when writing: Waxahatchee (Out in the Storm and Saint Cloud); about the house (cooking etc.): a new Lizz Wright live album (or whatever my daughters put on).

How do you practice self-care?

I just had an afternoon nap. I aim to walk every day, regardless of other things. I am a big fan of comfort food.

Do you have any advice for emerging writers?
Rather than dispense advice, I’m inclined to take it. An example: in her 2021 interview with Liminal, writer and editor Radhiah Chowdhury said all sorts of things many of us, in my view, would benefit from hearing about diversity, or its relative absence, in parts of our industry.

But okay …

I subscribe to a couple of well-worn pieces of advice. First: learn to wait. So much of being a writer is waiting for something to happen, waiting for someone somewhere to give you an answer about something. Second: find a balance between being realistic (setbacks, false starts, failures, rejections, the absence of money even when things appear to go well) and maintaining a high level of ambition.

Finally, this is not advice as much as something I continue to try to understand in my own work: on the one hand, for me, writing is sometimes about being patient, pushing through, and carrying on when a piece is not coming together. On the other hand, writing is sometimes about setting the draft aside for a while—a day, a week, longer if there’s no looming deadline—and coming back to it with a fresh perspective. Each of these strategies can be the right approach or the wrong approach at any given time. Knowing which one to pick when is an ongoing challenge for me.

What does being Asian Australian mean to you?

This is not a term I use to describe myself—and if I did so, it would be, in my opinion, a tenuous or even dubious use. In this context, my personal identity is something I cannot grasp and that, as an adult, I have not set out to try to unravel. I was born the child of a white Australian woman and a Thai man. I was adopted at the age of six weeks old, into a loving, generous, humanist, Methodist, lamb chops and three veg, white-skinned family. We don’t exactly look the same, which has caused some confusion for others over the decades. But this family is my family, my people (although I like to tell them that I raised the standard of the gene pool when I turned up). Their way of being is my way of being. Their culture is my culture.