WINNIE DUNN. As a mixed-race third generation Tongan Australian woman I grew up in Miller, New South Wales, which is a very low socioeconomic housing commission suburb in Liverpool, South Western Sydney. Not many people from my cultural community have a lot of class privilege or privilege in general, but it was still a great place to live.

“Western Sydney raised me as much as I was being raised in Western Sydney.”

I lived with my parents, grandparents, aunties and my siblings. It was a very close knit and tight family unit, which is generally a very normal living situation for Pacifica-Australians.

When I was about ten years-old I moved to Mount Druitt and have been there ever since. Western Sydney raised me as much as I was being raised in Western Sydney. I have a very close personal connection to the places that I grew up in, which is why I write about them so often. They’re so misrepresented in Australian literature and mainstream television. The way I write about Mount Druitt in particular is to tell a truthful and honest story about what it means to grow up there and to combat class stereotypes about the suburb I live in.

THE PIN. Has it been a conscious decision to stay in Mount Druitt?

WD. Absolutely. I did go through a period of self hatred where I thought to be considered human and to be considered an artist I had to remove myself from Mount Druitt, but that’s changed as I’ve become more critically conscious over the years. It’s also the fact that in Tongan communities it’s so rare for a woman to have the agency or funds to be able to move out of home anyway.

Mount Druitt is a very beautiful place, as awfully as it can be portrayed. I think suburbs like Mount Druitt have a lot of stories within them that nobody is telling, or that nobody has the agency to tell. For me it’s a conscious decision to make art about Mount Druitt within Mount Druitt. If I don’t do it then documentaries like Struggle Street will try to do it for me and depict it as a very violent, poverty porn place to live in. It can be portrayed in more nuanced ways and not through stereotypical classist narratives

I read in a piece you wrote for Overland Journal that growing up you hated identifying as Tongan, what did it take for you to become empowered and proud of your identity?

WD. Growing up my nickname was ‘fie palangi’ which means ‘wanting to be white’ in Tongan. Growing up mixed race and feeling like I was so close to whiteness, I thought I could just pretend I was white and trick people into thinking it. For some reason even as a young, very uneducated person I still knew that my white peers were getting treated a lot better than me. That period lasted a long time and it wasn’t until I joined Sweatshop - Western Sydney Literacy Movement - that it changed. Sweatshop is basically a self determined collective that empowers indigenous and culturally and linguistically diverse writers and artists to come to centre with their voice and their art. The term ‘coming to centre’ was coined by African-American feminist bell hooks, who talks about the act of coming to voice. It means that marginalised people come to centre by using their own voice to articulate and dictate the kind of stories they want to tell.

Sweatshop was the most empowering place for me to be as a young writer of my background because nobody had ever told me that Tongan-Australian writing was important.

What drew you to Sweatshop?

WD. At the time I was attending Western Sydney University, and not that I questioned it, but I found it very surprising that all of my teachers were Anglo-Saxon. It is a university that really prides itself on being a diverse tertiary space so I couldn’t understand why all of the students were people of colour but all of the teachers were white. I didn’t really question it until I went to a workshop run by Sweatshop director Dr Michael Mohammed Ahmad. It was the first time that I saw a person of colour teaching at a university. I was drawn to that mirroring. I saw somebody from my community, who kind of looked similar to me. To see another person of colour in a position of authority was really empowering.

In Sweatshop I finally found a critically conscious space that was willing to actually teach me something new. At university I was just regurgitating whatever the teachers told me was the right way to read a book or study something. Instead at Sweatshop and with another person of colour I was able to start thinking for myself and thinking independently. The harsh critical feedback I received there was really important to me because it drew me into my state of being critically conscious today.

As part of the Emerging Writers’ Festival 2019 you’re participating in an emerging editors masterclass. When did you take the step from being a writer to an editor?