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Australian author Michael Mohammed Ahmad
Australian author Michael Mohammed Ahmad. editor of the book After Australia Photograph: Hachette Australia
Australian author Michael Mohammed Ahmad. editor of the book After Australia Photograph: Hachette Australia

Speculative fiction? Who among us could have guessed our current reality

This article is more than 3 years old

A new anthology in which 12 diverse writers imagine Australia in 2050 looks more like a picture of the world as it is now

The country is on fire. The islands are beneath the ocean. The government has stopped the boats. There is a global virus that selects its victims across racial lines. The authorities are kidnapping refugees in the summer night. The police are assaulting a door-to-door salesman because his skin is two shades too dark.

Eighteen months ago I was asked to develop an anthology which imagined Australia in the year 2050. Originally conceived by the executive director of Diversity Arts Australia, Lena Nahlous, this book would bring together Indigenous writers and writers of colour from every state and territory in Australia to create a collection of short stories and poems in the increasingly popular literary form called “speculative fiction”.

In the aftermath of the Black Summer bushfires and amid the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as the Black Lives Matter protests, who among us could ever have speculated that by the time this publication was complete, it would look more like a picture of our current reality, rather than our inevitable future. 

As a starting point for this article, I was presented with a simple question: “What happens when 12 diverse writers are asked to imagine Australia in 2050?”

The answer hit me while I was breaking my fast on a halal Big Mac during the holy month of Ramadan. What happens? They do the one thing that creatives of colour do best: they don’t listen

As the editor, I envisioned a book that would imagine a world after empires, after colonies and after white supremacy. So I called it After Australia. However, the writer of Martu ancestry, Karen Wyld sent me a story which intertwined three historical timelines, disentangling the complexity of contemporary Indigenous identity. Award-winning author of The Permanent Resident, Roanna Gonsalves, wrote a love letter to the printing press, which examined the governor’s order in 1814. 

I wondered if I needed to inform these writers that their contributions did not align with the intended vision of the project, which was to imagine Australia’s future. But then, while searching through the bookshelves at Bankstown Library for an apocalyptic statement by some famous author to include in the book as an epigraph, I stumbled upon a quote by the black civil rights leader Malcolm X:

The future belongs to the people who prepare for it today. 

Author Claire Coleman, a contributor to the anthology. Photograph: Industrial Arc Photography 2016

All at once it occurred to me that Australia’s future could only be written on the foundations of our past and present. From the groundwork laid out by writers such as Karen and Roanna, the author of No Country Woman, Zoya Patel details a dystopian (not-too-distant-and-kind-of-already-here) future where bushfires have ravaged the ACT and our neighbouring islands have drowned. As the brown people are trying to get in throughout Zoya’s story, in screenwriter Michelle Law’s story, the brown people are trying to get out, while under the occupation of a fascist society that makes 1984 look like The Little Mermaid.

Meanwhile, Noongar author of The Old Lie, Claire G Coleman, introduces us to the Ostraka Law of 2039. Her story subverts the notions of systemic institutions and explores both the physical and psychological prisons that manifest in a racialised society. Newcomer Sarah Ross rewrites her experiences as the child of an interracial same-sex couple amid the rubble of the Taj Mahal. Emerging poet Kaya Ortiz plays out our future as a lyrical exercise in multiple choice. Multi-award-winning author and illustrator Ambelin Kwaymullina sends Australia 2020 a dire message from the Ngurra Palya of 2050, and writer and cultural critic, Khalid Warsame depicts an environment that will likely feel the most mundane and safe among all the stories in After Australia, until, you realise it isn’t.

Perhaps the most controversial contribution in After Australia is written by the poet and essayist, Omar J. Sakr. In his short story, White Flu, he dissects the vivid texture of multicultural suburbia against a global pandemic that will be frighteningly familiar to readers at this moment in time, only this particular virus seems to have selected “white” people as its primary casualty. On the day that the news about the coronavirus first broke out, approximately three months after Omar had completed White Flu, he sent me a text message: 

F***** strewth, fair dunkum, the flu is coming tru!

Poet and essayist Omar Sakr, another contributor to the anthology. Photograph: Affirm Press

However, as many may gasp at Sakr’s prophecy, the most fascinating aspect of White Flu is not the global pandemic in the background, but the narrative that takes place in the foreground: an Arab-Australian Muslim man from western Sydney is having an affair with his male cousin. Sakr is one of Australia’s few artists who knows how to strike at both ends of the culturally-conservative spectrum: Arabs and Muslims won’t care that the protagonist is sleeping with his cousin, but they’ll be shocked that he is gay, and white people won’t care that the protagonist is gay, but they’ll be disgusted that he’s sleeping with his cousin. 

In an equally prophetic story, a playwright and author originally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Future Destiny Fidel, lays bare the tragic future and destiny of so many young men whose only crime is that they are born with black skin. Future’s story, Your Skin is the Only Cloth You Cannot Wash, recounts an incident in which he was going from door-to-door selling solar panels to the residents of Mount Ommaney, Brisbane. Suddenly he was confronted and arrested by a group of white police officers after a complaint from a concerned citizen about a strange black man wandering the neighbourhood.

Future’s story arrives in a present where protests throughout the United States have erupted after the killing of George Floyd under the knee of a white police officer. This incident was straight off the heels of another “lynching” of an innocent African American male from Georgia, named Ahmaud Arbery, who was violently gunned down by two white vigilantes who claimed he looked like a man suspected in several break-ins in their area. 

Playwright and author Future D Fidel.
Playwright and author Future D Fidel. Photograph: Affirm Press

As Australians attempt to seize this moment and expose our own history of systemic and structural racism, particularly towards Indigenous communities, the prime minister, Scott Morrison, had some advice for us: ‘We don’t need to draw equivalence here.”

You’re a few hundred years too late, Morrison. We’re not speculating – this shit’s happening. 

In a country where Indigenous people are regularly assaulted by police; where young African men are demonised as “gangsters” by our news media and politicians; where Pacific Islanders are overrepresented in our prisons; where Muslims cannot conduct their Friday prayers without wondering if an Australian-born white supremacist is lurking outside with a machine gun; and where we cannot go into self-isolation without blaming four-and-a-half billion Asians – solidarity between Australia’s minorities is central to our survival.

By far the most unique aspect of After Australia is the way in which all the stories and poems converge into a unified voice speaking for our past, present and future as a whole. Wiradjuri writer Hannah Donnelly guides us on this journey with her collection of stories, Black Thoughts. In spite of the challenges we face as a nation, Hannah’s words remind us that there is hope as the world continues to unravel: “Our time is a loop. We’ll find our way back, before, after...”

After Australia, $24.99, is edited by Michael Mohammed Ahmad and published by Affirm Press in partnership with Diversity Arts Australia and Sweatshop Literacy Movement


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