Fire represents power and control for an Indigneous teenager who lacks both, in Melanie Saward’s compassionate debut novel
- Written by Penni Russon, Senior Lecturer, School of Communication, Monash University
“From the moment I got here, I’ve wanted to set the whole of Brisbane on fire,” reflects Andrew, the protagonist of Melanie Saward’s debut novel.
Saward, a Bigambul and Wakka Wakka author, moved to Bracken Ridge in the northern suburbs of Brisbane as a teenager, after growing up in Tasmania. So does Andrew, who like her, is Indigenous.
When we meet him, he is in Year 10 and has recently moved to Bracken Ridge with his mother, Linda, and her boyfriend, Dave. Neither of them show Andrew much love or care and he is saving to return to Tasmania to find his father, who he is no longer in contact with.
Review: Burn – Melanie Saward (Affirm Press)
In alternating chapters, Saward fills in the back story. After eight-year-old Andrew lit a fire in his primary school’s bathroom, his father pulled him out of school and they all moved from social housing in an impoverished suburb of Launceston to a caravan in Port Sorell on the north-east coast of Tasmania.
The novel is structured around three main fires. The first is the one Andrew lights at his primary school. Then a fire lands Andrew and his closest friend Sarah, an adopted Indigenous girl being raised by religious parents, in the youth justice system. Threaded through the book, there’s the drama of a third, serious fire in Queensland, in which Andrew is implicated.
Fire is symbolic: it’s power and control for Andrew, who has precious little control over his life.
Reading as ‘invited guests’
In her chapter “Presencing” in The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel, Wiradjuri writer and scholar Jeanine Leane urges settlers to approach Indigenous texts not as “tourists” but “invited guests”. Writes Leane:
Presencing means the recognition that First Nations works are happening in the same ‘now’ as the settler reader. The writer and the reader are in the same moment in time, but this moment in time is interpreted from different cultural standpoints and perspectives.
I also had a Tasmanian adolescence. While my own experience was very different, I recognise the way poverty and deprivation press up against natural beauty in Saward’s novel.
As an adult living in Melbourne, I became gradually aware of the economic gap between the mainland and Tasmania. High levels of youth unemployment and lack of opportunity, low levels of education, limited health services, and an appalling lack of duty of care to young, vulnerable people were all part of my adolescence. They were reasons I left the state when I was old enough to do so.
The consolation of a Tasmanian adolescence was wilderness. I grew up in the foothills of a mountain, observing the way the weather moved across the landscape. I was soothed by the sound of Silver Falls, and the way streams of bright sun penetrated the fern forests on the pipeline track where we used to go to drink, smoke, bitch and have sex.
Despite living in Melbourne for nearly 30 years, I still feel the thread Saward writes about, connecting me to Tasmania.
Dad used to say that we were connected to Tassie, even though we didn’t really know who our people were. ‘It’s about where you’re made as much as where your people come from,’ he said. I never understood what he meant by that till Mum told me we were leaving. From the minute the plane took off, I felt the thread connecting me to home get more and more stretched.
Like Andrew and his father, I was made in Hobart. But I was the child of a third-generation Tasmanian mother descended from Scottish and Irish farmers and teachers, and a father who moved to Tasmania as a ten-pound pom after his first marriage ended.
When I was a child in the 1980s, we were taught in schools that Tasmanian Aboriginals were extinct, a lie that serves the idea colonialism is something that has already happened and exists only in the past – in remote, almost mythical, places like Botany Bay and Port Arthur.
By turning her gaze on the impacts of intergenerational trauma, Saward shows the full force of present-day colonialism in Australia.
I was tender towards Andrew and understood his rage. I was angry with his absent and neglectful parents. Burn, however, generates a type of “presencing” that allows you to see complexity in the way the past manifests in the present.
Inside family trauma
When eight-year-old Andrew first lands in Port Sorrell with his parents, he is happy there, fishing and riding his bike with his father. However, Andrew’s mother’s mental health worsens and Andrew’s dad withdraws, emotionally at first, before finally leaving town without saying goodbye.
Before that happens, Andrew’s dad takes him fishing in a tidal pool, but warns him not to swim there.
“We don’t know how deep it is,” he said the first time I started wading in for a paddle. “And we don’t know if there are sharks and other nasties trapped in there. They’ll be angry about being stuck and hungry. If a nice, warm, nearly nine-year-old boy gets in, they might think you’re their dinner.”
The tidal pool becomes a recurring image for trauma. In one scene, Sarah dares him to go skinny-dipping in the tidal pool. Andrew warns her against it, remembering his father’s warning. This scene poignantly foreshadows both Andrew’s resilience and Sarah’s inability to resist her own hidden darkness.
At first Andrew’s mother, Linda, reminded me of the cold, angry mother in Jasper Jones, a flat character with no redemption. But unlike Craig Silvey, whose loyalty lies solely with his young characters, Melanie Saward writes with deep compassion and understanding for Andrew’s parents.
We see inside family trauma, how the dynamics are self-perpetuating. The parents are confronted with the messiest, most vulnerable, most hidden and shameful parts of themselves – made manifest in Andrew.
We also bear witness to the role institutions play in exacerbating trauma associated with colonialism, such as ongoing disconnection from culture. School, youth justice, community housing and the health system all fail Andrew and his parents in multiple ways, even when individuals within these institutions mean well.
Crossover appeal
Burn has obvious crossover appeal for teen and adult audiences, with a strong adolescent protagonist driving the story. So it interests me that this novel has been published as adult fiction. In fact as a young adult author and once-upon-a-time editor of books for teenagers, I puzzled over the decision.
But ultimately, Burn breaks a particular young adult formula. When teaching young adult fiction to creative writing and publishing classes, I often ask Dr Lili Wilkinson’s four powerful plotting questions: What does your character want? What’s stopping them from getting what they want? What will happen if they fail? What do they need to do?
In this novel, there is nothing Andrew alone can do to break the cycle of intergenerational trauma. The only answer posed to the question, “What does Andrew need to do?” is: light fires. The most uncomfortable truth at the heart of this novel is that Andrew exists in a narrow space of limited possibility. He can’t save himself. Individual agency is not the solution to intergenerational trauma or broken systems.
Andrew lights fires under the adults who have turned from him and failed him. Andrew lights fires to disrupt colonialism and patterns of intergenerational trauma. Andrew lights fires which destroy, but Andrew’s fires also offer regeneration and renewal.
‘Who’s your mob?’
Something I particularly loved about this novel was the way the adolescent characters try to take care of each other. In Tasmania, Sarah and Andrew try and fail to imagine new futures for themselves, to generate a fantasy of who they might be. In Queensland, friends Doug and Trent strive to dismantle Andrew’s barriers. New love interest, Tess, makes clumsy attempts to connect with Andrew, and he in turn tries hard not hurt her.
In a white, middle-class novel about a young protagonist, these friendships might have become Andrew’s found family – the non-biological ties that so often permeate youth stories in the face of adult failure. However, Melanie Saward decides not to place the burden of Andrew’s continued wellbeing on his peers. Instead, she allows herself a speculative experiment in future thinking, within the framework of contemporary realism.
What could an ending for a kid like Andrew look like when youth justice is decolonised? Melanie Saward looks to the adults and the systems they control to step up and take control.
The question Sarah asks Andrew – “Who’s your mob?” – demands an answer, in order to end the cycle of trauma and create a hopeful ending. This question cuts to the heart of what it means to belong: to family, to Country, to culture and to your own story.
Authors: Penni Russon, Senior Lecturer, School of Communication, Monash University
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