As a novelist I acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the Traditional Owners of the land on which I live and write in Sydney, Australia. I recognise their continuing connection to land, place, waters and community and pay respect to their culture, country and elders past present and emerging.
***
My current literary work is focused on cross-cultural experience and interconnection, with a particular focus on Australia and Indonesia. My novel The Colour of Things Unseen is set in Sydney and Central Java and was published in the UK by Aurora Metro Books (September 2019).
I have a PhD in creative writing from the Writing and Society Research Centre, Western Sydney University, and have had essays published in Hecate, Griffith Review, New Writing and Cultural Studies Review. An article, “R A Kartini and the ‘Clover Leaf'” – about the Indonesian feminist, R A Kartini (1879–1904) – was published in the online Edinburgh University Dangerous Women Project, and also in the book, Dangerous Women (2019).
As well as maintaining my creative arts practice as a writer (novel, biography, filmscript, essays), during my career I have worked in-house and freelance as a writer, editor, policy researcher, communications consultant, women’s health promotion officer, community development worker, and university tutor.
In 2018 I was awarded the inaugural Asialink Tulis Australian-Indonesian Writing Exchange which was funded by the Australia-Indonesia Institute and hosted by Komunitas Salihara in Jakarta, and Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Ubud. The six-week residency gave me space and time to work on my current fiction project which draws on historical research by Jan Lingard (Refugees and Rebels: Indonesian Exiles in Wartime Australia) and others about a small group of Australians who became active in support of the Indonesian nationalist struggle in Australia at the end of World War 2.
Annee Lawrence 