Winnie Dunn was just a toddler when her aunt first noticed her fascination with language – mesmerised by the writing on the back of a toilet paper packet. Growing up in one of the most disadvantaged regions of Sydney, hers was a household without books.
Three decades on, Dunn has become the first Tongan writer to be published in Australia and the first to be shortlisted for Australia’s most prestigious literary prize. Her debut novel, Dirt Poor Islanders, is one of the six books vying for this year’s Miles Franklin award.
“I’m so humbled,” Dunn says, of the nomination. “Just to be next to people like Brian Castro and Julie Janson is really amazing. So I’m really quite thrilled.”
Castro’s Chinese Postman and Janson’s Compassion made it onto the shortlist, alongside Siang Lu’sGhost Citiesand Fiona McFarlane’sHighway 13. The odds-on favourite, however, appears to be Michelle de Kretser’sTheory and Practice,which won the Stella prize last month; last year, Alexis Wrightwon the Miles Franklinafterwinning the Stella.
Dunn describes Dirt Poor Islanders as a deliberate inversion of Kevin Kwan’s bestseller Crazy Rich Asians, and the subsequent film that luxuriated in Asian wealth and excess for a global audience. Instead, Dunn focuses on her childhood stamping ground, Mount Druitt in Sydney’s west, with Dirt Poor Islanders following Meadow Reed, a half Tongan, half white girl who is torn between the comforting familiarity of family and tradition, and its mortifying capacity to relegate her to the fringe of her wider community.
“Crazy Rich Asians was really seen as this kind of radical, self-determined book – and I wanted to pay homage to that, but on the flip side,” Dunn said.
That flip side includes a frank exploration of class and cultural perception, as it relates to the Tongan diaspora.
“Pasifika people are seen as quite poor, but I wanted to bring this idea that dirt and the earth and the places you come from are actually quite rich in and of themselves,” she said.
Even the book’s title is defiant in that spirit – embracing, rather than avoiding, an economic reality in which many Pacific Australians live, and the way their lives are stereotyped in the media.
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Dunn was 14 when Chris Lilley’s Summer Heights High became one of Australia’s most popular TV shows. Hisbrownface caricature, Jonah from Tonga, left her feeling humiliated.
“It made me ashamed to be Tongan,” she said. “I remember going to school and there was this Anglo-Saxon kid wearing a sarong, strumming a ukulele and reciting quotes from Jonah. I felt like I was the butt end of someone’s joke.”
Seven years later an SBS film crew moved into her neighbourhood and made the controversial documentaryStruggle Street, which was decried by many western Sydney residents and some sections of the media as “poverty porn”. It made Dunn “feel like I was growing up in the arse end of Sydney … I didn’t feel like there was any room for people like me to tell their own stories.”
That all changed when Dunn met western Sydney novelist and educator Michael Mohammed Ahmad, and became involved in the local collective he founded, the Sweatshop Literacy Movement.
“It was the first time I really got to see self-determined storytelling,” she says. “It opened up a whole new world for me in terms of understanding that there was space for stories like mine.”
Today, Dunn is Sweatshop’s general manager, where she has served as editor on a number of anthologies showcasing writing from culturally and linguistically diverse authors, including Brownface, Sweatshop Women, Strait-Up Islander and Another Australia.
Dunn is the first in her family to attend university, and she believes it will be some time before another member achieves this milestone. Books and reading still do not feature significantly in her family’s life, but Dirt Poor Islanders does pay homage to the woman bemused by a toddler’s fascination with the words on a package of toilet paper 30 years earlier.
Her name is also Winnie Dunn.
In Tongan culture, there is no word for “aunt”, but the elder Winnie raised the child Winnie as a mother would, and remains her staunchest supporter. Dirt Poor Islanders dedication reads simply: “To Winnie. The richest gift you ever gave me was your name.”
The winner of the Miles Franklin prize will be announced on 24 July.