Lia Hills’ latest novel, The Desert Knows Her Name, is a work of deep listening. Set in the Wimmera region, in the fictional town of Gatyekarr, it traces the various responses of the townspeople to a girl who walks in from the land and refuses to talk. It is about the legacy of colonisation in Australia, deep longing, and connectivity to place. The various research methods, creative processes, and concepts that Lia employed to bring this novel to life are truly fascinating, so we asked Lia to tell us more about the story behind the story…
The Desert Knows Her Name was published by Affirm Press and is available in store now. Click here to read more.
1. The novel begins with a young girl walking out of the desert into a small town in the Wimmera. She doesn’t speak, and the longer she stays silent the more she upsets the townsfolk. This is such an engaging premise! Can you tell us where the idea for The Desert Knows her Name came from?
I’m glad you found it an engaging premise! That’s always a good place to start from. When I began work on this book, I wanted to think through settler relationship with the land and desire for belonging – the forms that can take and how they can become distorted and fetichised. But that’s just an idea. What I needed was a character who could drive all this, and she came to me almost as a vision one morning, fully-formed. I could see her, barefoot, silent, furtive, standing at the desert’s edge. This story is a reverse version of the lost-in-the-bush trope, and the girl works as a kind of return of the repressed – the less she says, the more people’s obsessions are revealed and projected onto her. I realised this would work as a story because when I asked people in the Wimmera about what they thought had happened to her, even though she’s a fictional character, many became quickly committed to their version of her story.
2. ‘Silence’ is a theme throughout the book, and one of the major silences you address is that of the ongoing legacy of colonial frontier violence. Can you talk about this strand of the book, and how you brought in First Nations knowledge systems and philosophies into the text in a collaborative way? I understand such collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous storytellers formed the basis of your PhD. Can you tell us more about this?
My PhD is about being a settler writer on stolen land, and the responsibilites and anxieties that carries with it, given that many settler writers have contributed to the silencing of other voices and the reimagining/ reinvigoration of the colonial project. It’s a tricky one because the act of writing itself is a taking up of space. But there’s also the question of the role settler writers might play in truth-telling and ending the silence around past and present consequences of colonial violence, as part of the burden of that work should be shouldered by the beneficiaries of colonisation. In my experience, it’s a constant process of listening and learning, dialogue and relationship building, with First Nations scholars, writers, activists, friends, community members and colleagues. As this book is set on Wotjobaluk Country, I also engaged regularly with the Barengi Gadgin Land Council over the duration of its creation. This allowed me to check various elements of the story that relate to culture and language, as well as the two Aboriginal characters in the novel, and to make sure the community was both aware of my project, but also had input throughout. It made the book so much better, and has led to some amazing connections and conversations that are ongoing.
3. One of your narrators is non-human. How did you rethink voice and style in order to more fully embody a different kind of being?
I speak-write my first drafts using speech-recognition software in situ on Country, which is a highly immersive process. It enables me to listen more deeply to the more-than-human presences around, above and below me, and incorporate them into the story I’m directly narrating on my laptop or phone. In the process, I attempt a sort of levelling, whereby humans are considered one species among many, human languages also treated the same. I ‘transcribe’ more-than-human languages, including wind through trees and birdsong, which are captured by the software, then try and make narrative sense of what emerges. The final result is a mix of deep time, layered interspecies histories, zoological details, and enough plot elements to make this narrative voice feel (I hope) as integral as, if not more important than, the three human ones.
4. The town may be fictional, but the larger regional setting of the Wimmera certainly isn’t. Why did you choose to set your story here? What was it about this area that spoke to you?
I went camping in Little Desert National Park about a decade ago and was fascinated by the proximity of a desert to Melbourne (about 3 hours away). I like to take readers into the unfamiliar familiar. For me, it helps see places anew and challenge preconceived ideas about their histories and the people who live there. The Wimmera also offers two generative imaginaries: that of the desert, and of the plains. Both carry with them potent mythical possibilities, although the plains less so in this country. And at the same time I tried to render a very real Wimmera – specific in the detail of its flora and fauna, and also whose Country it is. I think of specifity as political, because it stops a place from being generic, requires your attention and a degree of caring, about what happens/ed to it (environment degradation) and its people (colonial violence). It’s much harder to turn your back on a place and people you feel you’re beginning to know.
5. One of the main characters, Beth, is a regenerative farmer and seed collector who is trying to restore the land that past generations of her family have denuded. I imagine this, and other major aspects of the book, took a considerable amount of research! What was your research process like? Did you write and research in tandem, or do all the research before setting pen to paper?
I research from start to end: beginning with going out on Country with a Wergaia Elder; the last bits of research verifying the gender of different birds in the nature chapters so that I could avoid using the neutral and devaluing ‘it’. Over the years writing this novel, I learned how to harvest native seed by doing it, hung out with historical society members, walked regularly into the desert alone, learned what plants would keep me alive and which month this would be most viable, held a rifle to my shoulder, spent hours listening to birds talking to each other and the wind and started talking back, slept in my car beside a salt lake, engaged regularly with the land council, went to local festivals, and made many friends. And even now the book is out, I’m still learning about elements I researched – cultural, scientific, political – and these inform the way I speak about the book, as well as my ongoing work in that community.
7. You are also a poet and translator, as well as novelist. I’d love to hear your thoughts on translation, which is a fascinating and often overlooked artform. How do you approach translation? Is the translator a co-author, in your opinion, or invisible conduit for the work?
I approach translation like a writer. I try and work out what literary devices were most important to the source writer (if I can’t ask them directly) and how they’ve used them in their own unique way (sometimes different, sometimes similar to my own); then how that might work in English, taking into account when and where and why the text was written. I find it a similar imaginative process as getting inside a character’s head, except here much more is predetermined – a kind of dancing in chains, certain parameters set, but the capacity for artistry still there. I will often refer to the translating I’ve done as my own work – more the co-author model. Sometimes when I read a translated text, especially a novel, I sense the translator trying too hard to get out of the way, and it can flatten a text. The old adage about what is lost in translation should also be extended to the translator. For me, a good translation should draw on all the skill and experience a translator has in their own language, so that the new text is as alive as the original.
