REVIEW
Culture exchange The Colour of Things Unseen by Annee Lawrence Review by Jenny Bird
‘I am unknown to most of you, and yet I call you my friends.’ - Sutan Sjahrir, Indonesia’s first prime minister, speaking to Australia in 1945
blurring of national border and boundaries that could uncover a plurality of being and cross-cultural and cross-national connectedness that we have yet to fully recognise and peaceably live with.’
In 2019, the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra mounted its first ever exhibition of contemporary Indonesian art. In a review for The Conversation, art critic Alison Carroll commented that the exhibition may as well have been from ‘outer space’, it was so ‘irredeemably “other”’. Carroll describes the relationship between Australia and Indonesia as ‘the on-again, off-again, try-hard, well-meant, scratchy relationship that struggles to get to first base.’
We follow Adi, the central character, from boyhood in his batik-making village in Central Java, through school and, via a scholarship, to art school in Sydney. Whilst he finds Australia and aspects of his art education challenging to his Muslim values, he makes good friends and flourishes as an artist. Throughout the book, we travel with Adi back and forth in time and in space as he grows from boy to man.
I for one admit to a scant and superficial knowledge of Indonesia. I went to Bali a long time ago. I have owned my fair share of batik sarongs. I have eaten a lot of satay and nasi goreng. But I have next to no engagement with Indonesia’s contemporary cultural world and I have no Indonesian friends. I am fed stories by the media that focus on people smuggling, radical Islamic terrorism, animal rights violations and the execution of drug smugglers and I cannot temper them with my own experience. Sydney-based writer Annee Lawrence’s debut novel, The Colour of Things Unseen, places the reader carefully and gently in a deeply personal story that asks us to consider our distance and separateness from Indonesian people. In an interview for Asialink, Lawrence describes the novel as ‘an imaginative 24 | WINTER 2020 northerly
Adi falls in love with Lisa, a young Australian woman from a conservative upper middle class family. Lisa is independent and has ambitions towards an academic career in the fine arts. Through their relationship, Lawrence explores the bumpy terrain of intimate crosscultural relationships – misunderstandings, the limits of second languages, and clashes in cultural values about family and gender expectations. Both Adi and Lisa take journeys that challenge them to revise the ‘things unseen’ that sit between them. Adi also comes to some painful adult reckonings with the shadows of ‘things unseen’ in his country’s recent history – the silencing during his childhood and youth of the violence and repression that occurred under Suharto’s regime.
