From a very young age I had an inkling that I wasn’t going to grow up and fall into a professional category that was expected of me. I was always creative, my mind wandered and I often found myself scribbling things, reading vociferously and dreaming of being able to influence people through the words I wrote down. I wanted to tell stories and I wanted people to listen to me but I remember continuously feeling that maybe there wasn’t a place for me to do these things in the country I’d called home my entire life. My childhood was spent in the 1990’s in Australia, a country that only a decade or so earlier had been implementing a strict White Australia Policy. When I was younger I didn’t see people that looked like me represented in mainstream media or really in the creative arts at all. I rarely had the opportunity to consume stories from people of colour, from migrants and even less likely, from women of colour. If I wanted to source these materials I’d have to step out of the Australian space and look elsewhere.
As a result I remember feeling that a lot of the books I did end up reading or the movies I went to see rarely left me feeling like they were relatable to me at all. In young adulthood, I was finally able to identify this and call it out publicly. Initially I was of course quite timid in approaching this issue because in some perverted way, I didn’t want to be perceived as being ungrateful to my adopted country. I wanted to do everything I could possibly do to fit in and that meant not acknowledging that I was different. The whole concept falls somewhere within that idea that’s it our responsibility as immigrants to assimilate and to do so in a way that is quiet and doesn’t challenge the status quo. That us migrant kids would always have to be grateful, and that gratitude meant never calling out the systemic discrimination that existed within our society.
As I got older I started to realise that if I wanted to see more diversity in writing and in the arts, then alongside advocating for it, I would have to be responsible for producing and modelling it out into my community and to society as a whole. To this end, I decided to create an online platform to elevate the voices of women of colour, women with disabilities and those who identify as LGBTQI+. It was my aim to use this space to tell the stories that were previously marginalised, to provide somewhere to showcase creatives who identify as facing discriminations based on their gender, race, ethnicity, ableism and sexuality. I wanted the stories of these women to be shared openly and to be consumed by people of all backgrounds in order to normalise the idea that Australian culture is more diverse than what has been allowed to be showcased previously.
I feel as if it is my responsibility to continue to provide towards this space, to keep up my own activism and to make sure our stories are heard. The goal towards this is that the next generation of brown kids that come through don’t feel like their experiences aren’t worth sharing, or that they grow up never seeing relatable stories played out on screen or anywhere else in the creative arts. I hope that they don’t have to face the same biases and assumptions tied to racism, as well as gender, that I’ve had to overcome within my artistry.
I hustle each and every day in the hope that our collective experience as creatives of colour isn’t hindered by bias which places us on the outside of our societies. Which has somehow rendered our voices to be muted in the past. I believe in the beauty and intricacy of our experiences, of our heritage, of our families and our cultures. And I believe that there is a space for these to be told in a very Australian/British/American and every other way whilst still holding on to that cultural diversity. There is room for this in the creative arts, there is room for representation and there will be more opportunities in the future. My life’s work will attempt to make sure of it.
I blog for Change. 