Following on from the success of the 2020 anthology After Australia comes Another Australia, one of this year’s most urgent and vital new releases. Edited by Winnie Dunn, general manager of the Sweatshop Literacy Movement, the collection features fiction, non-fiction and poetry from 12 more boundary-pushing Indigenous writers and writers of colour who reveal another Australia hidden behind, beneath and beside the country we think we know. After Australia was published to critical acclaim in June 2020 for its fierce and forward-thinking reimagining of our future. Two years on in this unwavering follow-up, Another Australia undoes the myth of Australia as home to a ‘successful’ multicultural society, as ‘the Lucky Country’, and as a wholesome nation built purely on the hard work of its citizens.
In ‘Bad Transplant’, Amani Haydar, award-winning author of The Mother Wound, examines the complexities of domestic violence when our ‘multicultural’ nation fails to protect vulnerable women. L-FRESH The Lion – one of Australia’s leading hip-hop artists – fuses poetic lyrics with lively prose to reflect on how his Punjabi ancestry has made him into the person he is today in ‘I am…’.
Writer and curator Sisonke Msimang imagines what personal responsibility could contribute on the road to reparations for the Stolen Generations in ‘The Innocence Project’, while award-winning journalist, editor and author Osman Faruqi gives an enlightening history lesson on Australia’s and India’s interwoven pasts in ‘A Tale of Two Colonies’.
Other contributors include Shankari Chandran, Declan Fry, Shirley Le, Mohammed Massoud Morsi, Omar Musa, Sara Saleh, and Anne-Marie Te Whiu. Multi-award-winning author Nardi Simpson shares a conversation in Yuwaalaraay in the prologue, interlude and epilogue, and Lena Nahlous provides a thoughtful afterword that reminds us of the power of literature to move the dial and influence cultural and political change.
Within the context of the recent climate change-induced floods, the ongoing threat of Coronavirus and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Another Australia challenges readers to face head-on the world that we are leaving behind for our children and moves us to strive for a better future.
Another Australia, edited by Winnie Dunn, is published by Affirm Press in partnership with Sweatshop Literacy Movement in association with Diversity Arts Australia.
About the editor:
Winnie Dunn is the general manager of Western Sydney based literacy movement Sweatshop. She is a writer of Tongan descent from Mount Druitt and holds a Bachelor of Arts from Western Sydney University. Winnie’s work has been published in the Sydney Review of Books, Griffith Review, Meanjin, SBS Voices, The Guardian, HuffPost, Southerly and Cordite. She is the editor of several critically acclaimed anthologies and is currently working on her debut novel as the recipient of a CAL Ignite grant.