Paul Daley is an author, journalist, essayist and short story writer. His books have been shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s History Prize and ACT Book of the Year. He has won two Walkley Awards and the National Press Club Award for Excellence in Press Gallery Journalism.
Today Paul, to celebrate the release of his new book Jesustown, takes on our Ten Terrifying Questions! Read on…
- Please tell us about your book, Jesustown!
Jesustown is a multi-generational story about three generations of an Aboriginal and a white family and how they intersect in and about an old mission town in Arcadia, a remote part of the continent. The white protagonists are Patrick Renmark, a grieving, self-medicating and deeply flawed academic historian who, due to his diminished options, must go to Jesustown to write the biography of his storied grandfather, the adventurer and pioneering anthropologist Nathaniel – “Renny” – Renmark. There Patrick re-encounters the enigmatic Bakerman twins, Jericho and Tamar, who he’d last met on an ill-fated trip to Jesustown as a schoolboy when he had a terrible, life-shaping encounter with Renny. Patrick must negotiate a nightmarish and utterly chaotic archive as he searches for the slippery truth about his grandfather, who supposedly saved the local First Nations people from a government sponsored massacre but who also later ushered in, with disastrous cultural consequences, an international scientific team. It is about racial politics and cultural theft – specifically about the shameful stealing of ancestral Aboriginal remains that was widespread in this country well into the 20th century. It is about the foundation stories that white Australia clings to while ignoring so many unpalatable truths. It’s challenging material that I’ve been writing about in my non-fiction for many years, but readers assure me that its gentle humour steers it away from earnestness.
2. History is often thought of as set in stone, yet our understanding of the past is always changing, sometimes reluctantly. As a fiction writer, what interests you about this?
I’ve long been really interested in the increasingly contested space of Australian history. You know – the contest between how and when and where the Australian nation was founded. I grew up with an Australian history that told me that federation in 1901 was the culmination of a peaceful coming together of disparate colonies – that it was devoid of the cordite and cold steel that birthed nationhood elsewhere. But that was a lie. The white Australian federation was built on invasion and a colonial land-grab, and on violent dispossession and oppression of First Nations peoples who have never ceded sovereignty. There was – as there remains – strong resistance. But that resistance – the frontier wars that unfolded across the continent between Aboriginal peoples and their invaders – are not the wars that for well over a century Australian political and cultural leaders have promoted as the nation-forming and -defining wars of Australia. In that sense they’ve always said “nothing to see here – look over there to Gallipoli”. Gallipoli, 1915, is the invasion so much of our official history has clung to as the supposed forge of Australian nationhood. It’s a trope that successive generations of historians and writers have been challenging for decades now. But I think the pushback against white Australian myth-making is reaching critical mass. A big part of that is the embrace into the national story of 100,000 years of Aboriginal continental civilisation, and the clash with invaders for all its lingering traumatic reverberations. The story of Australia is Black-and-white. It’s a good time to be a fiction writer parsing this space.
I grew up with an Australian history that told me that federation in 1901 was the culmination of a peaceful coming together of disparate colonies. But that was a lie.
3. Your protagonist is Patrick Renmark, a ‘morally bereft’ popular historian. Can you tell us a little bit about where his character came from?
Well, Patrick is certainly nobody I know. In a way he’s an embodiment of the Australian feverishness surrounding Anzac and Gallipoli as the national foundation myth. He deals in absolutes – white-hatted Australian heroic Aussie soldiers versus evil enemy combatants, and noble white explorers and pioneers benignly conquering a supposedly un-peopled continent. He doesn’t write about women in Australian history at all. It’s all soldiers and dogs and horses of war! And he’s not really interested in the continent’s rich Indigenous past. He’s confused about his identity as a writer (unsure if he wants to be British or Australian!), as a son, father and a partner. The Americans would probably call him a “jerk”. In Australia, he’s definitely a “wanker” or just a plain “dickhead” which is what one of the key Black characters, Jericho, succinctly nails him as. I had fun imagining him. But like Renny, he was hard to live with and channel for all those years!
4. What kind of research did you do in order to get a feel for the history of a former mission town like Jesustown?
My research was broad and pretty general and often haphazard. I read many books and articles about early explorers, field anthropologists and geologists, and the very diverse Aboriginal mission experience in Australia. Over the years I’ve visited a few former religious missions in several states and territories. Ultimately Jesustown is something of fusion of some of them, of what I read and purely imagined. Before I really started writing the book and plotting too heavily, I got out some coloured pencils and a sketch-pad and drew the Jesustown of my imagination. It’s a clunky drawing, but it positioned all of the relevant landmarks – the cemetery and the local store, the footy oval of course, and Renny’s old place, No Pass. I always love, in both my fiction and non-fiction, intimately describing place and weather. And in many ways that was the most enjoyable part of writing this book (a diversion in some ways from the intensity of writing and re-writing two pretty difficult white characters!). Once I had that drawing, the place was alive in my head and I was away.
5. Who did you write this book for? Who do you wish would read it?
I’m certainly not pretending I’m telling Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people anything at all that they don’t intimately know. I don’t think there is a Black family in this country that is unscarred by the type of historical and contemporary racism and violence that is central to the novel. I wrote it with a broad general readership in mind – the same readership I write non-fiction for. If it introduces some people to a new and disturbing part of Australia, and if some find it unsettling or tough, then that’s great – because all non-Indigenous people who live here need to know about and own what happened. As a non-Indigenous writer who’s long been engaged with amplifying these parts of our national story, I feel like too much responsibility is burdened on Black writers to inform white people about this stuff. It’s the least I can do with the limited voice I have.
6. Can you tell us a little bit about your journey towards becoming a writer?
I always wrote as a kid – little stories, bad poetry, cringy diary entries . . . that sort of thing. I weaseled my way into journalism thirty-five years ago because I figured it was a good way to get paid to write while I figured out what I really wanted to write. I had a couple of mates who worked for newspapers and it seemed like an interesting and different way to make a living – kind of a writer but not really what I’d always had in mind. It was always my plan to only do it full-time for a few years and then to write books. But then I became okay at it and there were a lot of opportunities then that don’t exist for younger journalists today. I hung around full-time for more than twenty years until the publication I worked for, The Bulletin, was closed. I fell on the payout and started writing books, supplemented by my part-time journalism and other writing work. I’ve been really fortunate to make it all add-up for almost 15 years now. I think the great thing about writing to live is that you can do it for as long as your marbles hold out. Hopefully for quite a while longer in my case.
7. What do you love about writing fiction?
I love adding a thick layer of imagination to the people, experiences and places of my reality. I love starting to fill an empty notebook with happenings that can be inspired by something I saw on TV, by a news article – or by something I overheard in a pub or café. Sometimes these jottings don’t go anywhere. But sometimes they are a slow-burn. Some elements of imagined characters and happenings I first started scribbling down twenty years ago have made the pages on Jesustown.
8. What is the last book you read and loved?
When I was isolating with Covid recently I read The Sawdust House, written by my mate the Perth-based novelist Dave Whish-Wilson. Set in Chicago in 1856 it’s about an Irish-born ex-colonial Australian convict James “Yankee” Sullivan who becomes a renowned boxer. Dave is a brilliant stylist and a super re-imaginer of historical events and characters. I also loved The Idea of Australia by Julianne Schultz, a brilliant contemporary pulse-reading of the country (for all its faults and mythologies) that is to Australia today what The Lucky Country was in 1964.
9. What do you hope readers will discover in Jesustown?
That the past is not another country. That those who want it to remain buried can run but they can’t hide.
10. And finally, what’s up next for you?
I’ve started messing around with an idea I’ve had for a while. Honestly, it’s something a little easier. I’m drawing from the well of my own past. I’m very interested in the way some Australian male friendships work and how men who’ve known each other for a long time support (or not!) each other through life’s trials and tribulations.
Thank you for playing!
—Jesustown by Paul Daley (Allen & Unwin) is out now.
Bestsellers: Scott Pape and Ash Barty continue to prove a hit with readers! 
Bestsellers: Jane Harper and Aunty Donna prove a hit with readers!
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