Annette Shun Wah: How Australian do you want me to be? Credit:Janie Barrett

Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size Annette Shun Wah lobs my question back with one of her own, like Ash Barty at the French Open. "Who are the famous Asian Australian actors of the stage or screen?" asks the executive producer of a professional arts company dedicated to giving voice to the contemporary Asian Australian experience through live performance. "Can you name them?" "Any?" Shun Wah ploughs on without pause. "Who are the famous Asian Australian playwrights, who are the famous Asian Australian directors, anyone? Any come to mind?" I think of Benjamin Law and sister Michelle, who write of their experience growing up Chinese-Australian. On the international stage is Sandra Oh, of the series Killing Eve, a triumphal casting decision seemingly made with no reference to her ethnicity. They exist but Shun Wah's right, it's not like names are tripping off my tongue. Annette Shun Wah: It's a problem if you don't see anyone you can relate to. Credit:Janie Barrett "If you look at theatre, especially mainstage theatre, until very recently it was very rare to see any actors of colour apart from Indigenous theatre," Shun Wah says, "and that's because there has been a sustained effort by Indigenous Australians to develop their stories for stage and screen. But for the rest of us who make up diverse Australia the results have been patchy at best." Shun Wah is the executive director of the Contemporary Asian Australian Performance (CAAP), based in Carriageworks, a stone's throw from Kindred Restaurant on Cleveland St, where we have come to lunch.


For the last six years, she has been trying to raise the visibility of Asian Australians actors, producers and directors while simultaneously developing storytelling projects for the stage. The company hosts a free online register of Asian-Australian actors, singers and dancers to help the casting of trained and talented creatives of Asian heritage in television, film and theatre. There are now more than 300 names, Shun Wah's rebuttal to the lazy excuses offered that there was not the talent pool of creatives from Asian heritage. Annette Shun Wah as a TV presenter in 1990. Credit: The cycle is self-perpetuating, Shun Wah argues. If Asian Australian actors aren't getting roles, it follows that the stories of Asian Australians aren't being depicted and without a diverse mix of faces and characters, Asian Australians are MIA from theatre audiences. "I think it is a real problem when you go to theatre show after theatre show and you don't see anyone who looks like you or you can relate to," she says. Tableside Shun Wah is elfin faced with red tipped hair, pretty much unchanged from her days as the urban-cool music presenter of The Noise. Occasionally confused with the former SBS presenter Lee Lin Chin, and Labor Senator Penny Wong with her, it irks her that it seems too difficult for some people to distinguish the three Asian Australian women from each other.


Shun Wah knows first-hand how difficult it is to challenge stereotypes. Among her various occupations - broadcaster, journalist, writer, and producer - she has dabbled in part-time acting. For her debut role, in which she played a Chinese daughter living in Germany, she was nominated for an AFI award. That 1996 film Floating Life was Australia's first official entry in Oscar's foreign language category. "I was up against Toni Collette. There was no way I was going to win." Shun Wah in Floating Life. Credit:Heidrun Lohr And yet she found it difficult to find an agent, and the next four roles that came her way were identical; each was for a waitress in a Chinese restaurant. "Me, in my arrogance, said, 'I'm not going to audition for any of these roles'," Shun Wah says. "It was a very long time before I got another audition. I woke up to myself and realised you can't do that, you can't challenge the system as an actor. It threw into stark relief how big the problem was." With Greg Aitkin, she published a book on Chinese-Australian cuisine and customs entitled Banquet in1999, but the fare at chef Matthew Pollock's Kindred, conveniently close to her work, is modern Italian, a menu of homemade pastas, sourdough bread, ricotta and butter made daily on the premises. The fire isn't lit but it's warm inside on a day that is overcast and cool.


We share an entree of housemade salsiccia, potato gratin and pear butter, and a plate of char-grilled octopus sitting on a bed of yellow split pea puree and adorned with watercress and fennel and paprika aioli. Shun Wah passes on wine. Once an Italian taxi driver had tried to reassure Shun Wah that acceptance for Asian migrants would eventually come, just as surely as the term "wog boy", cast around in the school playground, no longer held any sting for him. My family's heritage goes back 150 years in Australia Annette Shun Wah "But my family's heritage goes back 150 years in Australia," protested the fourth-generation Chinese Australian. "How Australian do you want me to be?" Shun Wah was born in Cairns, north Queensland, growing up in outer Brisbane on a poultry farm. Her great-grandfather had come to Darwin in 1878 when South Australia was desperate to establish a settlement around the port and the Chinese migrants were among the few to put up with the harsh conditions. When the Commonwealth took over administration of the Territory and barred Chinese from official port jobs, her grandmother moved with her merchant husband to Longreach, where they set up a general store in the main street and named it Shun Wah, denoting civil and harmonious dealings. The locals assumed it was the family's surname and the name stuck. "Apparently, my grandfather liked a drink so my grandmother ran the business. She had eight children. It was the 1910s and 20s and made the best meat pies anyone has tasted before or since. That's the book I'd like to write, about my grandmother, but I don't know enough, I will never know enough because everybody has passed on who could tell me."


The biggest gap in her family history pertains to her mother. Her parents met in China while on the run from the Japanese during the Second World War. It was not a conventional love match. Shun Wah believes her mother may have come from a poor family and have been adopted out to a childless couple before her father met her and brought her to Australia at the war's end. But she has no way of knowing. She died in childbirth having her. "There was my dad with a boy aged 12, a boy aged six and a newborn in Cairns." Shun Wah was two when her father made the pragmatic decision to find a new wife. Stepmother, Susan, was a seamstress in a Hong Kong factory with no formal education and no children of her own when she agreed to the arranged marriage. Char grilled octopus on a bed of yellow split pea puree, with watercress and fennel and paprika aioli. Credit:Janie Barrett Her new role was "tougher on her than anyone else", Shun Wah says. "She comes to Australia, doesn't understand a word of English, doesn't understand the environment at all. She made me nice clothes, loved dressing me up in nice outfits. She was a bit fashion conscious and wore great little kitten heel shoes. Then there was a falling out between my dad and my uncle and dad decided he would set up his own business with a poultry abattoir. So all of a sudden she's traipsing out to an abattoir in Queensland, in the heat, amid the blood and the guts and the feathers; it was putrid. It was bloody hard work." Ten years ago Shun Wah wrote a cheerful snapshot of those times in a groundbreaking anthology, Growing Up Asian in Australia, recalling her job as chief spider exterminator. Her stepmother would use a gas-jet burner to fry the webs in the barn while she was charged with stomping on the spiders that dropped to the floor. Very soon she came to understand the value of wearing a broad brim hat.

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