The storyteller

Philip McLaren has never been afraid of a good yarn. Now, with his return to UTS, the award-winning author is working to uncover Australia’s forgotten past and to help us shape our future.

“Aboriginal people know how to tell stories,” asserts Adjunct Professor Philip McLaren. “They give you the subplots and the red herrings that send you off on a wild goose chase in the story line.”

As a Kamilaroi man, McLaren knows a thing or two about storytelling. “My people, my mum and dad, are from the bush and that’s what they did after dark – sit around telling stories. I remember I did it too. 

“When you tell a story, it doesn’t matter what it is, even when you sit around having a beer, Aboriginal people tell a proper story. They say: ‘Tell me a proper story’.

“And they’re good at it. You see most people tell stories, but they don’t have an ending.”

Philip McLaren age 3. Photo supplied by Philip McLaren.

For many, this is what McLaren is known for best. His first novel, Sweet Water – Stolen Land, won the 1992 David Unaipon Award for unpublished works by Indigenous authors. It went on to be published by the University of Queensland Press and McLaren says, that experience “changed my career”.

Prior to the award, McLaren had been an artist, an “almost famous” musician in Sydney rock band The Signets, a rugby player on the brink of a representative career and a television designer.

In fact, the idea for Sweet Water – Stolen Land came to McLaren during a five-year stint at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. 

“I was doing a film on an Indigenous Canadian, a young guy who was going from boyhood through to manhood, taking the rights of passage.

“When we’d finished I was driving out of the reservation feeling pretty smoking hot – didn’t we do a good job – you know? I just got to the outskirts of the community and it was the end of the day and I pulled the car over. There was a beautiful sunset, the sun was going down over the Pacific and I thought: ‘Why don’t I know this material concerning my own people? It’s not taught, it’s not in any books; if it is, it’s so difficult to find’.”

So when McLaren returned to Australia he set about finding out. To this day, the author ranks his research into the brutal Myall Creek massacre, the foundation for Sweet Water – Stolen Land, as his most hauntingly memorable.

It’s a research experience McLaren wants to replicate while at Jumbunna. “The thing I want to emphasise here when I talk to people about ideas and concepts is, if you think it’s exciting now, wait until you start to research it! It is always so much better.”

Philip McLaren age 21. Photo supplied by Philip McLaren.

With Jumbunna’s strong background in legal research, McLaren’s appointment is an ideal fit. “All my work contains Aboriginal protagonists. I write thrillers and crime stories but I also write historical work and a lot of academic papers.

“In this particular case, I’m attached to the research section of Jumbunna.

“As an adjunct I have a UTS travel stipend so I can move around, I can go to places featured in my stories and meet the people in situ. I can see for myself, ask questions and I can write about the actual place with some authority, which is very important to Aboriginal people.”

McLaren currently has three projects in the pipeline. The first is a screenplay for a feature film set in Tasmania. It’s a modern-day murder mystery that also deals with the return of the remains of Truganini (one of Tasmania’s last ‘full blooded’ Aborigines). The second is a light-hearted Hollywood screenplay about Queensland’s Min Min lights – unexplained orbs often passed off as UFOs. The third, Black Silk, is a sequel to his 2007 novel Utopia.

For the follow-up, McLaren hopes to draw on Jumbunna’s legal research expertise. “It’s set in an Aboriginal legal service, so I can examine some of the ridiculous Aboriginal cases that have become landmarks in this country.”

Already, McLaren’s early research has uncovered the ground breaking 1836 trial of Jack Congo Murrell – an Aboriginal man who, despite confessing to murder, was found not guilty by the courts.

“In my book Utopia, I’ve created a killing which is considered murder and at the end of that book, my readers found out who did it,” explains McLaren.

“But I’m writing a sequel because that Aboriginal guy has mitigating circumstances for committing his ‘crime’ and I’m going to write his defence based on the 1836 trial. I’m thinking of writing both actually; flashing back to the real story of Jack Congo Murrell, which is fascinating, and superimposing it over my present day story.”

Like many of his works, McLaren’s latest are set to uncover what he describes “as vague areas of traditional culture. That is the result when people are so demoralised and they’ve lost their language and their culture like I have. It’s interesting to see how people are trying to reclaim that.

“Our clan lands are huge in area and there are thousands of Kamilaroi people. They don’t have the language, but it’s coming back.” For many of his generation, McLaren believes, “it’s too late. But it’s not for some of my nieces and nephews and their kids; they are learning their language, the Kamilaroi language.”

Philip McLaren painting. Photo supplied by Philip McLaren.

He is particularly interested in “how to portray that in a screenplay? I’m mucking around with ways of telling that.”

In many ways, McLaren’s appointment is a return to home. Not only did he complete his PhD at UTS but the house he was born in and grew up in (with his six brothers and sisters) is located on George Street, Redfern, just around the corner from the UTS City campus.

“It’s not subconscious, it’s deliberate,” says McLaren. “I have a lot of history around this place. I used to run around here as a little kid with no shoes on.

“Actually just across the road where the brewery was, there’s a little alleyway that’s no longer there. I had family that lived there, an uncle was murdered in that street.”

McLaren’s past is part of his future. “Once you reach a certain age in Indigenous communities it’s your responsibility, and it should be everybody’s responsibility, to pass on anything you’ve learned along the way. I feel that responsibility now.

“I’m really interested in the universality of ideas and swapping concepts, not only in Indigenous areas. I’m interested in everybody’s field.

“I quite like the idea of being the old, doddering professor wandering around the university surrounded by all the young people with brilliant minds, you know the cliché. I like that. I like to think I could do that in my old age.” And, if the past is anything to go by, McLaren’s newest role at UTS is set to make for an interesting chapter, not only in his life but in Australian history too.