Across her life and career, Winnie Dunn has accomplished many firsts: the first in her family to go to university, the first General Manager of Sweatshop Literacy Movement, the editor of the first Australian anthology written by women of colour and now, the author of the first Tongan-Australian novel.
Sitting down with Honi Soit, Dunn spoke to the weight and joys of such firsts, her journey in writing, and what it means for me to be able to tell her own story, in a way, in Dirt Poor Islanders, and dispel the countless representations that seem to indicate that there is one way to look or be Tongan in Mount Druitt.
Valerie: Growing up in Mount Druitt, what were the types of stories you looked up to and what were the stories you craved to see but could not find?
Winnie: The best way I can describe Mount Druitt is the opening title sequence of the first season of Struggle Street by SBS. It opens up to the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the camera moves through the city, and it ends on a welcome to Mount Druitt sign that’s covered in graffiti, and then a fart noise. Growing up in one of the most stigmatised and lowest socio-economic suburbs in Sydney, I often felt like I was growing up in the butt end of Australia. It’s somewhere where you couldn’t be creative.
It was only when I went to a creative writing workshop at Western Sydney University that I saw Dr. Michael Mohammad Ahmad for the first time. He was the first person of colour lecturer that I saw in a tertiary setting and he looked like a normal guy that I would have grown up with — he had a bum bag and was [also] a Doctor of literature. [In the workshop] he showed me a poem written about Western Sydney by two students. It was the first time I saw Western Sydney literature. I was just so moved and inspired because in that moment I got to see the originality and the artistic merit in the suburb and the class category that I grew up in. From there, I joined Sweatshop and the rest is history.
Sandra: I totally understand that. My 12-year-old brother started reading The F Team recently. He’s someone who does not like English, does not like reading. But he told me that he really liked this book, that he’s really enjoying it because all the kids in the novel are very similar to him. I think that sort of experience is really special and does foster that love for literature. And when you don’t have it, there’s nothing to keep you engaged with literature.
Winnie: No, absolutely. Degrees of literacy determine how we see what we see. Growing up with Struggle Street as the representation of the place that I grew up in — and that being the kind of only singular representation — there was no way I was not going to feel ashamed of where I grew up and feel like less of a person because that was the only mainstream representation.
A better example and stronger example of that is Chris Lilley’s Summer Heights High and Jonah from Tonga, which basically just made [out] Tongan Australians — and Pacific Islanders in Australia more generally — as a kind of really hyper sexual, hyper violent, illiterate joke for the rest of the country to make fun of.
So of course that would completely destroy and disrupt my sense of self. That’s why it’s so important to be able to kind of see yourself or see people like you in positions of status because it shows that there are alternatives to that kind of demonising mainstream narrative that you grew up in. Just being able to see a person of colour teaching in a university setting fundamentally changed the way that I thought about myself and ways that I could represent myself, because if not I just would have thought reading Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen three times in three different units was normal and completely fine.
Sandra: What is the moment you fell in love with storytelling and how did you actively pursue this career path?
Winnie: I always really loved storytelling. I always had an affinity for words to the point where my dad often tells this story where he would catch me reading the backs of cereal boxes or tissue boxes just to find words to consume. I loved Harry Potter as a kid, A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Chronicles of Narnia; all the classic children’s literature but [did] not understand that they were all white kids from England at boarding schools. Even if I did notice that, I just thought that was normal because it’s all I saw.
It wasn’t until joining Sweatshop and seeing Western Sydney literature that I actually thought writing could be produced in that environment and from that environment. For me, what kind of inspired me to write my own story was — what bell hooks says, moving from margin to centre as a revolutionary gesture — finding my birth mother’s diary.
In Dirt Poor Islanders (2024), Meadow Reed’s mum passed away from cancer at a very young age, and that’s based on my own lived experience. My birth mother passed away when I was four from cancer, and when I was in my second year of university my dad thought I was old enough and gave me a box of her old things that he had kept for like 20 years. There was a red leather diary with the year 1995 on it in gold lettering — which is the year that I was born — and my birth mother had filled out every page of every day with all her thoughts and daily activities. There’s even moments in that diary where she speaks to me directly, which is amazing.
Going through her diary, seeing her wide and curly handwriting, I understood that my birth mother also had an affinity for writing. I realised because she died so young — she was 27 — [she] never got the chance to tell her own story. In that sense, I was inspired to be a writer and to tell our stories. I felt a real personal, and kind of spiritual, responsibility to my birth mother to do that, just as she immortalised herself for me in her diary, it only felt fair to continue that legacy.
Valerie: You are general manager of Sweatshop Literacy Movement, and work alongside Dr. Michael Mohammad Ahmad. How has this role helped you both navigate the publishing industry but also help elevate your writing?
Winnie: Sweatshop is 100% the reason why I became the writer that I am and was instrumental in every single part of my book deal process. We really believe in self-determination — working from [a] grassroots level, dealing with all the hurdles that come with different forms of marginalisation, and working with each writer in stages to get them to a place where they can be a published author. I’m not saying that we can get everyone across the line but every writer is given the tools to think critically and write creatively. They’re creating that original contribution to knowledge, which is fundamentally what literature is.
Sweatshop really found me at a time where I was in a very isolated setting, being the first person in my family to go to university. I just had to figure out everything on my own, which was quite overwhelming while being on Centrelink at the time. I wasn’t working, I also didn’t drive so there was a lot of commuting and I was doing an unpaid internship. Sweatshop was the first place that offered me a paid internship.The paid internship changed my life because then I had more resources and access to the creative space without it being draining for me. It was giving back to me as much as I was giving to it.
Sandra: You mentioned Alice Walker’s term “womanist” in Volume One of Sweatshop Women, an anthology you edited. For our readers, it refers to “being a woman of colour who uses critical thinking and intersectional feminism to become responsible and in charge of her own equity and justice.” How does this translate across both your professional and personal life?
Winnie: Professionally speaking, Sweatshop Women, volumes one and two, are other first anthologies. You can see I’m obsessed with firsts as a person, sorry!
Sweatshop Women is the first Australian anthology series not only completely written by women of colour, but edited and designed by women of colour as well. For me, as an intersectional feminist I really wanted to make sure that on every level those two anthologies were self-determined by women of colour. We were making it in collaboration together because it’s not just about representation, it’s also about what happens behind the scenes. It’s all well and good to have a hundred writers of colour, but if all one hundred writers of colour had one hundred white editors, that’s a problem. [It’s] something that needs to be addressed in the arts industry, just as much as the chance to tell your own story in your own voice.
And so for me, that’s what [I feel] Sweatshop Women achieved. I’m actually quite proud of my work as an editor. I feel like I’m an editor first and foremost before I’m a writer. I think that act of helping weave people’s words is quite profound, which is why in Dirt Poor Islanders I made sure I credited my editors in the copyrights page, because they’re so fundamental to the writing process.
Writing is not a lone [endeavour]. Editors only ever make a work better. Even if they’re incorrect in their suggestions, they’re always right in their approach. If they read a sentence, and they go ‘Oh, that sounds a bit off’ you know their instincts are usually right. Again, it’s that [intersection between] equity, equality and justice. Why [is it that] the typesets of a novel get credited in the copyright section, but the editors are nowhere to be seen? That’s so ridiculous to me. There needs to be more respect and love to that real collaborative process between a writer and an editor, [and such collaborative processes] need to be more transparent in our industry.
Sandra: On your point about editors of colour, it’s not something we think about often; the importance of also having people of colour in the editing industry and not just authors, because while it’s really important to have your story showcased, you also need people behind the scenes who also know what those stories are.
Winnie: I’m talking about a very kind of utopian relationship between a writer and an editor, but if you’re a person of colour and you’re writing a story and you’re only having white people look at your work, they are going to fundamentally miss things or get something incorrect, which is then a detriment to the quality of writing and literature that could be produced if that editor was a person of colour, or of a similar background to the writer. That’s why I think having multiple editors is important.
What I really loved was that I got to have Stella Ahosizi Atiola, who’s Tongan, read over my work and she helped reshape and reform how I approached the Tongan language aspect of Dirt Poor Islanders. But it was also important to have Lee Mua, a white girl from Campbelltown, also read over my work and edit it because she’s one, from Western Sydney, but two, she gave me access to a space that I didn’t [have access to]. I don’t know what white women really like to read. I don’t know how they approach a story so fundamentally different, culturally and intersectionally, from themselves. I got to have access to that through Lee and in turn she got to have access to my community. So in that sense, having multiple editors is also really vital. And again, you just can’t be a writer without editing. I really, truly believe that.
Valerie: This might be a big question, but what is your view on cultural sensitivity readers?
Winnie: Cultural sensitivity readers are usually only brought up in that context of when a white person wants to write from an Indigenous perspective or a Tongan perspective or an Asian Australian perspective. In that sense, I reject the idea of cultural sensitivity because there is absolutely no reason why a white person needs to be telling my story or telling a story like mine. They are utilising and profiting off my knowledge whereas if I was just given the skills and the resources to do it myself, I would. I don’t like the idea of cultural sensitivity readers if it’s just going to empower white people to put on the skin and the accent of ‘the other’.
In Dirt Poor Islanders, there’s a chapter where Meadow is having a lesson in her gifted and talented class about creative writing, and she describes all of the students that are in her class. One student is Lebanese Australian, one is African Australian, one is First Nations. As Winnie Dunn the writer, am I going to write all these supporting characters who are different to me culturally, and do I need a sensitivity reader for that? I think it’s up to each individual writer to make that decision. I feel like the ethics of writing is always on a spectrum and it’s always moving in between two extremes. One is, I want to be a writer but it’s actually not ethical to write about anyone and anything other than myself. However, I can’t write a story where it’s just one character and not interacting with the world because I just won’t be able to tell any stories. The other extreme is that I’m just going to tell whatever story I want, in whatever voice I want and I don’t care. I like to think I’m in the middle of [the spectrum].
I write from my own perspective in a fictional sense and any other interaction that that has with other cultural ethnicities, they’re always secondary characters. I’m not talking through their perspective, but I am giving myself creative licence to create a Lebanese Australian character who talks like the Lebs that I grew up around. If you want a more nuanced story or character that’s Lebanese Australian, read works by Lebanese Australian writers like Dr. Michael Mohammad Ahmad or Sarah Ayoub. I just hope it’s a catalyst for readers to broaden their readership because there’s plenty of Australian writers out there to complement the reading of Dirt Poor Islanders.
Valerie: When did you find out there had been no Pasifika books written by Pasifika populations and for Pasifika populations in Australia? Was it as a young reader or when you ventured into Dirt Poor Islanders?
Winnie: It was actually quite sad that it came up in the writing of Dirt Poor Islanders. When you’re Islander, you grow up with representations from New Zealand and then you just kind of absorb that as your own.
So even though I’m Tongan-Australian and I grew up in Western Sydney, when I saw the movie Whale Rider (2002) for the first time, I thought ‘this is so familiar to me’. Similarly, Once We Were Warriors (1994), even though it was very traumatic and very questionable, its representation. There were elements of that that still felt familiar. I at least got to see people who looked like me.
Similarly, the New Zealander animated show bro’Town (2004) was about poor Pacific Islanders growing up in a socioeconomic area very similar to Mount Druitt, so their language and their jokes were very familiar to me. But it wasn’t until I started to write Dirt Poor Islanders that I was actually consciously aware of the fact that all those representations are from Aotearoa and are very specific to that place and so [I questioned] what’s the Australian version like? And the more I looked into it, the more that there was just nothing other than Chris Lilley.
That made me devastated, but also excited at the possibility that there was just so much space and room for Pacific Islanders in Australia to tell their own story. Before me, it was being done very minimally in a memoir sense: KING by Hau Latukefu, and No Bull by Vika and Linda Bull, who are two Tongan Australian singers. They got to write their memoirs in collaboration with other writers to produce that work. But I think that’s fundamentally different from producing a creative piece of fiction; having that Tongan-Australian voice in fiction and in a novel.
[When writing Dirt Poor Islanders] I realised how much Chris Lilley had monopolised the Tongan-Australian story and experience. But it was also exciting and liberating to be like, ‘okay well Chris Lilley’s monopoly over that story has to end somewhere.’ It’s amazing that I get to be part of that change.
Sandra: To add on, what does it mean for you to have this book published at this particular point in time and how do you feel about needing to carry the weight of reshaping these narratives?
Winnie: It’s so difficult because in the Pacific Islander culture broadly, children are taught to be humble and to never talk about themselves or express themselves. [It’s expected that they] just follow the narrative that their parents set, which is: you do your best at school even if you don’t graduate school, you go to work, you help your family, you give them money, you have kids.You just repeat that cycle and shouldn’t desire to go outside of that. Because it’s disrespectful to your parents and it’s disrespectful to your grandparents and it’s disrespectful to the community if you’re being honest and transparent about the complexities within our cultures and communities which are not always pretty, and not always uplifting or special.
So many people have told me that they were really confronted by the amount of lice and cockroaches and mud and muck and maggots that [were in the book]. They find it really gross, the overcrowded poverty aspects of my lived experience of growing up Tongan in Australia. You know, the kind of hyper real, disgusting stuff. But that’s what it means to live in an overcrowded home. Quite confronting and hard to deal with.
I had to really step outside of that community pressure of ‘no, stay humble, don’t say anything.’ You know, ‘don’t give people access to our community in that way. Don’t be honest. Just say everything’s fine and just live your life in that way.’
But where does change come [from]? Where does justice come [from], where does self determination come [from] unless you’re willing to break a few community and cultural rules in order to get there. So in my acknowledgement, I apologise to my family. I try my best to give a shout out to the other Pasifika creatives that I’ve had the pleasure of knowing or working with or working adjacent to.
I hope in time my community can see and appreciate just how important it was to be as honest and truthful and authentic to my lived experience in a fictional way as much as possible, to then create more avenues and more resources and more opportunities for other Pacific Islander creatives to add to that.
Meadow Reeds’ story is one very specific experience of growing up in Tongan-Australian or more broadly Pacific Islander or Pasifika in Australia. The story can only grow if more Pacific Islanders are given the opportunity to write their own stories. I hope the community can see that this is just one step in the right direction and hopefully it just grows from there. And if anything, I’m sorry. I tried my best.
For me it’s just like, if I didn’t do it we would still only have Chris Lilley and Summer Heights High that came out in 2008. How long do we have to live with that?
Valerie: How do you separate between writing a Tongan Australian versus someone in Tonga or a Tongan in another country? Because there’s differences in populations from country to country, even if they’re from the same origin.
Winnie: On a technical level, Dirt Poor Islanders is an ironic title but also it’s an inversion of Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians (2013). I made sure that the epigraph was also a quote from Crazy Rich Asians because it was that Hollywood version of how the West saw Asians, but then flipped on its head. I wanted to do that with Dirt Poor Islanders because everyone sees us as poor: financially, educationally, and spiritually. But we’re so much more complex and diverse than that.
Our stories are so rich because they’ve been so untapped and underutilised. I wanted to do the same as Kwan: everyone sees Asians as rich but what does that actually mean? Everyone sees Pacific Islanders as poor and useless, what does that actually mean? How can I subvert that narrative?
In terms of Pacific Islanders in other countries, mad respect to Aotearoa and New Zealand is all I can say, because they’ve always been at the forefront of producing Pasifika literature. There’s so many Samoan poets that come out of New Zealand that really integrate cultural aspects into that Western sense of poetry. The first Māori novelist, Witi Ihimaera — and obviously Indigenous, but has that connection to being Pacific Islander — paved the way for all of us Pacific Islanders to see what it means to tell our own stories and to utilise our cultures to inform how we approach the written word. Same with Samoan novelist Albert Wendt.
A majority of Tongan Australians live in Western Sydney but you also hear about Pacific Islanders who are forced to work in the farms on a visa and then they have kids. When I happen to randomly meet an Islander from Brisbane, it’s so foreign to me because I just assume we’re all from Western Sydney because that’s my lived experience. I’m excited where Pasifika Australian stories are going to go in the next ten years and I hope Dirt Poor Islanders is the catalyst because I do want to hear those stories that are not my own. At the moment it is the first one and I’m not even proud of [that], it’s a very lonely thing.
I hope Dirt Poor Islanders is just seen as a singular narrative where people can then start adding on and for Pacific Islander creatives to feel empowered to grow a genre of Australian fiction that’s about the Pacific Islands. One of my friends sent me a photo of this book stack at his local bookstore and Dirt Poor Islanders was in the First Nations category. I was there with Tony Birch, Jane Harrison and Alexis Wright. It’s technically true that Tongans are Indigenous, but there’s something called First Nations Australian literature that Dirt Poor Islanders is not a part of. Pacific Islanders in Australia don’t even have our own genre category yet, so it just was added there.
This is what it means to be the first — people don’t know where to put you and so I just hope it’s a stepping stone in the right direction.
Sandra: Moving now to our final question, and it’s about looking ahead to the future. What’s next in the works? Do you have any projects coming up that you’d like to share with our readers?
Winnie: This is always the most exciting question! I think what people often forget is, I’ve been working on Dirt Poor Islander since 2018. I got my first grant for it in 2019.
So it took me five years to write this thing. It’s out in the world. I know it only just came out, it feels so new to everyone. It’s old to me. I’m so over it. I had to read this thing five different times last year just to get it to the printers. Writers never want to talk about the work that just came out. They always want to talk about what it is they’re actually working on now.
So first and foremost, I just applied for a grant with Sweatshop and New South Publishing and hopefully we’ll hear back soon about the outcome, but I’m really wanting to work towards the first definitive anthology of Pacific Islander Australian writing. I did it online, like a kind of trial test run with Straight Up Islander for SBS Voices, which was a huge, huge, huge success; so much readership, and we even got a panel for Sydney Writers Festival!
So now I’m just hoping to produce a book with it and actually be able to go to schools in Western Sydney that are predominantly Pacific Islander with a predominant Pacific Islander population and work with young people to tell their stories to continue this idea of Pacific Islander Australian literature and what that means and what that could look like. So hopefully I’ll be working on that soon.
Also for some reason, Hachette when they signed me up, signed me for a two book deal, which I’m very thankful for. They really locked me in. So I’m contractually, and I think spiritually, obligated to write another book for Hachette. It will be a continuation of Meadow Reeds’ story. Dirt Poor Islanders is very much her childhood and coming into adulthood. It’s very much that kind of coming of age narrative. But with the second book and the continuation of Meadow Reeds’ story, I really want to explore our time, or her time, in university and what that actually [entails].
Because again, when you’re the first person in your family to go to university and you happen to be Pacific Islander, what are those specific hurdles and what are those specific challenges that she has to go through in order to graduate. [The ideas are] still fermenting in my head.
I also want the continuation of Meadow Reed’s story to be a kind of exploration of spirituality as well. You heard me talk about womanism and how emotional I got about it. I want to really tackle this idea of Pacific Islanders, and Tongans in particular, being very fundamentalist Christians, because [there was] a form of colonisation that wasn’t a stealing of our land, but a stealing of our souls. What it means for someone, for Meadow Reed to come to terms with the fact that she’s Tongan and be content with that, but what it then means to extend the idea of being Tongan. It’s not just about accepting that I’m brown skinned and I’m mixed race and I’m Christian and I live in a blended family.
I think of people like Sonny Bill Williams, who’s Samoan mixed-race football player. You’re a really staunch, outspoken Muslim, how does that extend and change the definition of being Pacific Islander in Australia? How can I extend it?
I just feel like Tongans in general are yet to have a spiritual awakening. I feel like we’re slowly getting a more kind of intellectual creative awakening, but so many Pacific Islanders that I meet still don’t understand that the Christianity that was brought to the Pacific Islanders by white people is a form of colonialism. I still meet so many educated Pacific Islanders who are like, ‘no, that’s so not a thing’.
Tongans are so staunch about it that I would love the opportunity to see how Meadow Reed explores inner worlds.
Dirt Poor Islanders (2024) is in bookstores across Australia.
