In 2021 Nardi Simpson attended the Prime Minister’s Literary awards ceremony – not with her Miles Franklin-nominated debut novel, Song of the Crocodile, but as one of three First Nations women who contributed chapters to a book by a non-Indigenous academic, Amanda Harris, that was shortlisted for the history prize. Simpson and her co-contributors were credited in the book but, as its author, Harris was the only name on the cover and the only person eligible for the award.
Looking at the other finalists in the history category, Simpson, a Yuwaalaraay woman, saw a pattern. “Four out of the five works were about First Nations communities and experience, but there was just one name squeezed up at the top [of each book’s cover] and that one name was non-Indigenous,” she says.
She’s not blaming Harris, with whom she says she has a strong relationship. “That’s how things work – I get it,” she says matter-of-factly. “But the repercussions for us is that the ‘one name’ then becomes the authority to speak on landscapes of knowledge; communities of knowledge.”
The experience was a turning point for Simpson. “My sister always says: ‘Be the alternative.’ And that really started my mind [thinking]: how can I uphold [someone else’s] story without telling it?”
That question has fuelled her sophomore novel, The Belburd, out this week. Like Song of the Crocodile, it interweaves a modern story set in a recognisable world with an imaginative universe that draws on cultural stories. But whereas the earlier novel was based on Simpson’s family history and ancestral country near Walgett and Lightning Ridge in northern New South Wales, The Belburd draws on stories from Warrane/Sydney, where she was born and lives. Stories that, as a Yuwaalaraay woman, she felt were not hers to tell.
The book opens in present-day Warrane/Sydney with Ginny Dilboong, a solitary young poet, as she artfully navigates a pretentious open mic night at a university bar. She endures cringeworthy expressions of faux solidarity and a misguided request to give a welcome to country by non-Indigenous students, even as they repeatedly mispronounce her name. Rather than deter her, the experience galvanises Ginny to embark on a guerilla-style campaign combining poetry and rewilding, writing verses on paper embedded with native seeds and planting them around the city.
“She’s the girl I wish I was,” Simpson laughs. “I wish I [had known] myself the way she does.”
Simpson only came to fiction after decades honing her craft as a singer and songwriter as one half of Stiff Gins, and then as a composer using classical instrumentation.
“I started singing because it was the only way I could be creative at school, whereas if I would have known myself a bit more, I would have started writing earlier,” she says. In novels, she says, she gets to “play around with language and ideas”.
This creative spirit is in full flight in The Belburd’s secondary storyline, which is set in and around Sydney Harbour in the late 18th century, and draws on saltwater stories as well as the stories of the Cammeraygal leader Barangaroo and the Wangal leader and mediator Bennelong, and their baby daughter Dilboong (in English, Bellbird), who died a few months after her birth in 1791.
Wary of “appropriating or telling” the stories of these real-life people, Simpson instead writes around them, weaving her own narrative and vivid, imaginative universes. Dilboong becomes the second narrative’s protagonist – but she exists as a spirit, a “soul egg”. Simpson will only tell her story before her birth and after her death.
Simpson says the idea for The Belburd came unexpectedly, on a train – while eavesdropping on a conversation between a group of white women, one of whom was hoping to buy a house. “[She] said, ‘We’ll put in an offer, and the universe will decide [if we get it].’ I thought, ‘That’s not how the universe works!’” she recalls.
It made her think about the unseen forces that govern and connect our lives. And, in that moment on the train, for reasons she still can’t explain, she thought about Barangaroo and Bennelong’s baby. The daughter of the “boss of the north shore” and the “boss of the Parramatta river”, connecting and inheriting from two great cultures, peoples, places.
“I thought: ‘That little girl [Dilboong] was the universe.’”
With the award ceremony experience front of mind, Simpson decided she would not write directly about the baby – or even refer to her by name. She signals this to readers via the unusual spelling of the book’s title: “I’m saying this is the story surrounding her, but I’m not telling her story,” she explains. “Her mob will do that, however they want.”
The same is true for her approach to the stories of Bennelong and Barangaroo. “I didn’t want to use them as a literary device for me to create a work. Forget it. Gross.”
For Simpson, this approach to writing the novel is as important as the novel itself. “I don’t want to write a book just to have a book on a shelf somewhere. I want to do it to say, well, there’s a way to approach this medium that is slightly different,” she explains.
“[It’s about asking], ‘How can I show I’m a beneficiary of this saltwater place without telling [its story], without owning it – knowing that my name’s going to be in big fat letters on the top [of the book]? How can I ensure that the story is a way that I uplift others?”
The Belburd by Nardi Simpson is out now through Hachette ($32.99)
