Helene Chung

“Being who I am, namely Australian Chinese and female—two distinct drawbacks in mid-20th-century Australia, especially in the small apple isle of Tasmania—I grew up totally outside the norm in white assimilationist Australia, when those with non-Anglo-Celtic backgrounds were expected to merge with the majority and forget their own cultural backgrounds.” 

“Writers seem to come into their literary prime, so to speak, later than other artists because it can take time and long years of lived experience to create something fresh and moving on the page.”

“Art is expressed in so many different ways and forms—you’re wearing a piece of art when you’re wearing my silk, but I see it as more of a design that’s made from pieces of art.”

“Working in telly, it’s astonishing how much writers’ rooms feel like the engine rooms of cultural production—whose stories we [decide to] tell determines whose humanity we value. I think the centrality of cis straight white characters in our major narratives facilitates a grave dearth of empathy in this colony.”

“So much of what we live is complicated or conflicted, and based in feeling, and not in words. Language allows us to get very close to saying what we mean, but to me it always falls just short.”

“This is why I always urge emerging writers to enter as many competitions as they can. I think competitions are a great entryway into the industry.”

“I think oftentimes … small details can be overshadowed when not openly discussed.”

“Neoliberalism has generalised this tendency by accentuating the ideology of ‘new beginnings’, and thus the self-made social subject that goes hand in hand with it: someone with brilliant ideas that come to them as if from nowhere and who is always ready to initiate something original and ‘revolutionary’.”

“I’m fascinated by the idea that every time you remember an event you’re adding slightly different details to it; it’s always evolving through memory.”