The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf (The Tribe) (30 page)

“Yes, Georgie!” I shouted joyfully. “This is the real world!”

No novel is ever written alone, and especially not this one. A heartfelt thanks must go to everyone at Walker Books, especially Sarah Foster, who believed in Ashala’s story even when she had only one chapter of it; and Mary Verney, whose editorial input has brought out the world I saw in my head.

Beyond that, this book would not exist at all without the love and support of my family. Thanks go to Mum, who convinced me to keep writing when I wanted to quit; to Blaze, for the coolest title ever; and to Zeke, who twice intervened to put this story on the right path. Love you all.

Where do you get your ideas?
is a question writers get asked all the time, and more often than not, my answer is “Everywhere!” Writers, at least in my experience, run short on time, money, and energy — never on ideas. This perhaps has been especially so for me when I’ve been writing the Tribe series. I feel as though it is a story I’ve discovered more than one I’ve created; it is as if the characters have been taking me on their own journeys, which I’ve interpreted through the lens of my understandings and experiences. But there has been so much interest in the parts of Ashala’s story drawn from my cultural background that I thought it was worth saying something about the source of those aspects of the novel.

Aboriginal people of Australia have the oldest continuous living culture on earth. We are not a single homogenous group; we are many nations, and we hail from diverse homelands. Some of us are rangeland people; some forest and some desert; some river and some saltwater. We call our homelands our Countries. The Country of my people, the Palyku people, is dry, inland Country — but in case you are thinking of unending sand dunes, that’s not what it looks like. Palyku Country is a place of sharp contrasts and bright colors — red earth, yellow spinifex grass bleached white, purple hills, green gum trees, and blue sky.

The world that Ashala occupies is not Australia, of course. There is no Australia in Ashala’s time, and no anywhere-else-that-exists-now, either. The earth has torn itself apart; the tectonic plates have shifted, and a single, entirely new continent is the only piece of land remaining on the planet. But every landscape I describe in the Tribe series is inspired by one of the many biodiverse regions of Australia. So there really
are
towering tuarts; they grow in the Country of the Nyoongah people, in the southwest of Western Australia, and are one of the rarest ecosystems on earth.

In Ashala’s world, where people no longer distinguish among themselves on the basis of race, the word
Aboriginal
has no meaning. But she carries that ancient bloodline and has the same deep connection to the Firstwood that present-day Aboriginal people have to their Countries. For me, one of the most profound moments in
The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf
is when Ashala is being taken to the machine for the final time, thinking she is about to die, and the wind brings her the scent of eucalyptus from the faraway Firstwood. She has, or so she believes, no hope of escape, but she is not alone.

I am sometimes asked what advice I would give to anyone who wants to be a writer, and one of the things I tell people is to aspire to greatness; never model yourself on the mediocre. For me, the best storytellers I know are Aboriginal Elders. So in writing about the Tribe, I thought about the way the Elders draw you into a tale that is always more than it first appears. I thought, too, about the generations of Palyku women who have gone before me, who walked red earth and told the ancient tales of my people beneath the glittering stars of a desert night. Great storytellers, one and all. Their tales are like gifts that can continually be unwrapped, so filled with layers of meaning that you never reach the end of the wisdom a story holds or the comfort that it brings. And I tried to honor that tradition by writing a tale that was, first and foremost, a riveting tale — as their stories always are — but that also asked bigger questions about what has been, what is, and what will be.

My great-grandmother once described Australia as a place where everything lives and nothing dies. She was talking about a way of understanding the world as a web of living, interconnected beings; where everything is born from, and eventually goes back to, the greater pattern of life itself. The oldest of our stories tell us that our Countries began with the creative Ancestors, in what is often called “the Dreaming.” These Ancestors came in many shapes — magpie and kangaroo; butterfly and serpent; sun and moon — and through their songs, dances, and travels, the world was made. The reality they shaped is one in which everything is animate, and where rock, tree, river, hill, animal, and human are linked together in a pattern of relationships. This pattern moves and shifts, as all life moves and shifts, forming a web of interacting connections that stretches out to enfold our homelands.

In such a world, the fact that we humans may not always understand the voices of other beings — the cry of Crow, the murmurings of Rain or Wind, or the slow rumble of Rock — does not mean those voices do not exist. And it is through sustaining caring relationships with other shapes of life that we give substance and meaning to our own existence. When seen in the context of this greater pattern, all our actions and interactions with the world take on a larger significance. It is this idea that is captured, in much simpler terms, in the concept of “the Balance”— that “there is an inherent Balance between all life, and the only way to preserve it is to live in harmony with ourselves, with each other, and with the earth.”

In
The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf,
it is one of the clever old spirits of the earth who survives even through the destruction of everything else. He travels through the chaos, carrying scraps of life in his mouth, and arrives at what will become the Firstwood. Then, as he tells Ashala, he sings — to remind life of its shapes, strength, and its many transformations. Until life remembers its nature, and grows.

A dystopia imagines the end of the world. But in an animate reality, where everything has spirit and consciousness and agency, life cannot be easily extinguished. So to conceive of the end of the world is also to conceive of its beginning.

Everything lives, and nothing dies.

A portion of this note was originally published as a guest post on the Badass Bookie blog. Many thanks to Lisa for being part of the Ashala Wolf blog tour, and thanks as well to all the bloggers who’ve taken an interest in Ashala Wolf!