Above: Karen Wyld.
Magical storyteller Story by Stephanie Johnston. Photograph by Dominic Guerrera.
Adelaide Writers’ Week has always been a wonderful way to discover new writers from across the world, and 2021 was no exception. However for me, this year’s find came from somewhere much closer to home. Author Karen Wyld grew up in an old farmhouse on one hundred acres at O’Halloran Hill. The house and farm are long gone, but Karen has continued to live in the south for most of her life, making the Willunga Basin her home for over thirty years. A diasporic Aboriginal woman of Martu descent, Karen’s Grandmother’s Country is in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. Accordingly, her storytelling traverses the vast continent of Australia, spanning generations, straddling Aboriginal and European cultures, and criss-crossing a rich range of landscapes and subject matter. I first meet Karen at the book tent at Writers’ Week, where she is signing copies of her epic second novel Where the Fruit Falls, an award-winning family saga of how the impacts of colonialism and racism echo down the generations. In typical Adelaide fashion, we quickly discover how our paths have already crossed: she owned a bookshop in Port Noarlunga when I was a book publisher, and while I was making representations to the City of Onkaparinga on behalf of community groups, she worked in community development there. When we meet for coffee in Aldinga, it turns out Karen has also undertaken her fair share of community advocacy. As a sole parent she worked with other like-minded locals to establish a housing co-op in the Willunga Basin. The Hills, Vales and Coast co-operative went on to build twenty-four houses during her time there, and this volunteer work led to government support for postgraduate study, and an early career in social housing. Her local advocacy however continued: ‘I saw around me that people really needed services. There were no shops … we needed youth support and access to other services.’ She laughs that this might
26
have been in conflict with what my group was lobbying for, but we agree that what was needed was a balance between protection of our region’s rural character, and support for those who live here: ‘I think that at the moment we have got the balance right,’ she says, ‘but that could easily tip.’ Other initiatives included a food co-op for those on low incomes, two community gardens and a youth centre at the Aldinga District Centre, retro surf movie and music events at the Aldinga Bay Surf Life Saving Club, and establishment of the Southern Elders Weaving Group, a social enterprise whose work continues to this day. Despite wanting to be a writer from an early age, and some dabbling in the zine culture of the 1980s and 90s, it was not until later in life that Karen finally found the time to start writing seriously. ‘Do we ever have time to write though?’ she asks facetiously. Self-taught and challenged by dyslexia, her prose naturally evolved from technical report writing, to freelance opinion pieces, to narrative nonfiction and imaginative story-telling. IndigenousX, SBS and Meanjin were among the well-respected outlets who got behind her work, which eventually led to awards and publication of her short stories and novels. As Karen enjoys the success of Where the Fruit Falls, she is not resting on her laurels. She’s currently working on a master’s dissertation exploring whether the term ‘magic realism’ should be applied to First Nations literature, and specifically the work of Australian writers Alexis Wright and Kim Scott. Karen deftly fuses naturalism and realism with the mythical and the magical into her own narratives. Where the Fruit Falls intersperses dream-like passages and recurring symbolic emblems with reallife events, historical references and recognisable locations and landscapes. The result is a more intense reading experience, offering a deeper, and more nuanced understanding of the colonisation experience from a First Nations perspective. ‘It’s like the author being a magician,’ explains Karen. ‘We will use certain imagery, a sleight of hand, to direct the reader’s attention somewhere, but we won’t explain what that is. It’s up to the reader to work that out for themselves.’
