Kathryn Favelle: Good evening. Every family has stories to tell. But how do these tales translate beyond our lounge rooms and our kitchen tables? How can we use our family stories to better understand our own lives and to help other people understand their own experiences?

It's a delight to see so many of you here at the Library, whether you're with us in the room or joining us online. Tonight, we're here to hear from a panel of writers about their family stories in an event that we've called Memory to Manuscript: Publishing Family Stories. I'm Kathryn Favelle, Director of Reader Services, and one of the joys of my job is that I get to work with the team of family history reference librarians answering questions and queries from people all over the world about their family trees, their family stories.

I acknowledge Australia's First Nations peoples, the first Australians as the traditional owners and custodians of this land, and give my respects to their elders, past and present, and through them to all our Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Now, the National Library's collections enable Australians to discover, learn, and create new knowledge. Because of this, our collections and services support research and scholarship undertaken by family historians, creative writers, professional researchers, and sometimes those whose practise combines all three. Tonight we're delighted to be joined by a stellar panel of authors who have shared their family stories in a range of interesting and creative ways.

Tess Scholfield-Peters was a Seymour Scholar at the Library in 2022, researching the experiences of Jewish immigrants who arrived in Australia before the war as part of her PhD research. Tessa's first book, "Dear Mutzi: A Story of Love, Escape, and Finding the Forgotten," was published by the National Library Publishing team this year.

Andre Dao's debut novel, "Anam" won the New South Wales Premier's Literary Award for New Writing and was shortlisted for both this year's Miles Franklin and Prime Minister's Literary Awards. We are all on tent hooks because the Prime Minister's Literary Awards will be announced here next week. And Andre, we're wishing you all the best for a wonderful evening.

Sam Vincent is no stranger to the Prime Minister's Literary Awards either. Sam runs a cattle and fig farm in the Yass Valley and his memoir, "My Father and Other Animals: How I Took On The Family Farm," won the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Nonfiction in 2023.

Leading the conversation is someone who probably needs no introduction. Virginia Haussegger is well known to us as a journalist, academic, and National Library Petherick Reader, and she'll be leading the conversation tonight. Please join me in welcoming Virginia, Andre, Tess, and Sam.

Virginia Haussegger: Thank you, Kathryn, and thank you for that lovely introduction. It's a delight to be here, and it's wonderful to see so many Canberrans come out tonight on such a windy, cold evening. Well, I'm very excited about doing this conversation tonight. These three books have fascinated me, and I've been carrying them around with me for some time. They're very different, and yet there are some themes that run throughout each of them that are similar. Each of the books deal with family where a father or a grandfather is centred. But each work, I think, also tells us a great deal about the writer. The works are also about relationships, about memory, family, history, the importance of history. They're also about living memory too, and the challenge between what we remember, and what we forget and why we forget it. I thought it was very interesting that, as I said, each book centres on fathers or grandfathers rather than women. But women are in the background of each of these works, and I want to talk to the authors about that too, how they provide a sort of support cast in really interesting ways.

But because the books are so different, I'm going to do something a little bit unusual. I'm going to ask each of the authors to describe how you describe the book, what you say it's about, and who it's about. Now, Andre, I'll start with you, because you're closest to me. Yours is particularly challenging, I think, to describe simply. So how do you describe "Anam?"

Andre Dao: Thanks, Virginia. So it's, yeah, I call it a novel that's loosely based on the lives of my grandparents, and in particular on the life of my grandfather who was a political prisoner in Vietnam. And if I have longer, I sort of say, well, it began as a nonfiction project, sort of straightforward family history. And then along the way I realised that I was unable to capture the truth about my family, and that in fact, any one truth would be reductive. And so I was attracted to the novel form as something that would allow me to think through why we remember things, what we leave out necessarily when we remember, and what we make up as we remember as well.

Virginia Haussegger: Andre, can I ask you, when you were first speaking to a publisher about your manuscript, your book, did you have anything in mind that you could use as an example of the sort of book it was?

Andre Dao: That's a difficult question because I took so long to write this book. I made the mistake of talking to everyone that to say to everyone, "I'm writing a book." for many years and-

Virginia Haussegger: Bad mistake, bad mistake. Every time they see you, "How's the book going? Have you finished it yet?"

Andre Dao: Especially when you tell family that you're writing about them. Of course, that leads to the inevitable question. No, so I actually originally spoke to a publisher about it when I thought it was going to be a family history. And actually at that point the publisher said something quite unhelpful, which was, "Oh, that sounds like a really good straightforward story. You should be able to write it in about six months."

Virginia Haussegger: Great.

Andre Dao: And when I couldn't, you know, I felt like a failure and I thought that I wasn't cut out to do this thing. And so that took a few years to work through. And so when I came back to it, I really actually thought that I was writing it just for myself. And that was the way that I got through it, was to say, actually, I'm not thinking about some imagined audience anymore. That was the thing that was stopping me from being able to actually sit down and write what I wanted to write, which then made it sort of tricky to talk to publishers about, because when they said, "Well, what kind of book is it? Who do you think it's for?" And I'm sort of thinking, it's really just for me. But obviously you can't say that to a publisher. So yeah, that was sort of how that conversation went.

Virginia Haussegger: It's interesting. So it sort of freed you up once you let go of that initial conversation suggesting that it was straightforward and when you decided no, it was for you. So letting go of trying to fit a particular form or format and freeing you up somewhat, did that free up the writing?

Andre Dao: Absolutely. Yeah. It meant that I didn't have this reader over my shoulder saying, "This doesn't make sense," or... I mean, there were all sorts of voices going on. I mean, there still are, but I think accepting that I had failed and that I had failed multiple times to produce different kinds of books. So it wasn't just the family history. There was also a version that where it was, like, no, it's a love story. And then no, it's a spy novel.

Virginia Haussegger: A spy novel?

Andre Dao: Yeah.

Virginia Haussegger: Gee, I never picked that.

Andre Dao: Yeah, and actually, yeah, at a certain point, you fail so many times. And I had one or two very trusted close readers who were able to tell me that it wasn't any good. And once you get through that process of failing so many times, yeah, there is this point of liberation, which is going, well, it can't get any worse.

Virginia Haussegger: But Andre, how can you keep pushing on with a project that you felt had failed, or that you were failing in producing, and that even trusted readers were telling you it didn't work? What made you or allowed you to continue working on it?

Andre Dao: So in part, there was a compulsion. So I needed to do it. I needed to work through for myself what this man, my grandfather, what this woman, my grandmother, who they were, and what that meant for who I was. And then the trick that I discovered that freed me up in that was that I said, "oh, it's actually not my grandmother. It's not my grandfather. It's not me. It's these other versions of us that I get to play with". And I can have a conversation. My narrator can have a conversation that I didn't have. Maybe he can ask a question that I didn't ask in the room at the time before my grandfather passed away. What would happen if he had asked that?

And that, yeah, so then, I mean, I hate to say writing is therapy, but there was an element of being able to work through questions that I had for myself. So that was the compulsion part of going, well, I didn't get to have this conversation. and I didn't get to... And also there were research dead ends where as is typical of a lot of sort of refugee families, the paper trail doesn't get you very far. It runs out, so you have to make it up. And so this was a chance to sort of work through, well, what would change if this had happened in our family or this?

Virginia Haussegger: Fascinating. Thank you for that. Tess, how would you describe your book and how do you describe what it's about and who it's about?

Tess Schofield-Peters: Yeah, so my book is a reconstruction of my grandfather's early life. So he was born in Berlin in 1920 to two secular Berlin Jews, Max and Edith Pollnow. And he was, you know, had the misfortune of being born and then, well, born in 1920, and then he was 13 when Hitler came to power. And so he really got caught up in persecution and yeah. So it kind of, it sort of reconstructs that based on what I knew already. So based on memories that he had shared with me, and then also what he had written down and what he had said in testimony. And then also my sort of interpretation or I guess imagination of this time, which was drawn from this amazing collection of letters that I found kind of half, not halfway. It was sort of, I mean, I guess that resonated with me in terms of the shifting of the form depending on, you know, what you find, and kind of who you're writing for. And initially I wanted it to be just all fiction. I wanted to have a novel that was drawn, that was based on this story.

Virginia Haussegger: I'm interested to hear you say that, because there are times when I was so engrossed in the fiction, it's so beautifully written, and then would be sort of surprised when moving on or turning the page and you go back to a different form. A very different form. Almost a research form. Well, that can be challenging for the reader, but it's sort of fascinating. I wondered why you didn't just continue with the fiction.

Tess Schofield-Peters: Well, because I found these letters. So essentially there were, you know, 80 to 100 of these documents that were these typewritten letters all in German dated from kind of 1938 to 1940 that were signed that... So they were, the recipient was my grandfather who was called Mutzi by his parents. So it was, "Liebe Mutzi," "dear Mutzi," and then signed vater, father. And I can't read German unfortunately, but I knew when I found those that I had stumbled across something really incredible that really did change the whole course of the story. Because once I had them translated, it was just this sort of portal into the sort of personalities and the daily lives during this time of these people who I'd only really ever known as these kind of spectral pictures really in my grandfather's house.

And I just thought that I had that sort of documentary evidence of, you know, I mean, as far as letters can be thought of as that kind of concrete evidence. And they really became then the narrative tranche. And I found that, you know, of course, I fictionalised the scenes that I wrote, but they're very heavily based in what was written in the letters and what I had found.

Virginia Haussegger: It's fascinating too, though then when you at times include Q&A with Harry. You literally include what your question was to him and how he answered. Which was almost like, you know, the notes of a journalist, I suppose, and you've included that in the story. And I actually found that very rich because it sort of exposed the way he responded, and I guess, you know, makes us think as a reader more, or it makes us think even harder about how you then use that material or how it reflects on what we are reading in the letters, et cetera. That was actually very clever. Was that, again, was that something that you chose to do with an example or a template of that in mind, or that just seemed like an inevitable thing for you?

Tess Schofield-Peters: Well, there's actually a writer, she is a Swedish author called Joanna Adorjan, and she wrote a memoir called "An Exclusive Love," which was a memoir about her grandparents in a similar sort of vein. And she, yeah, she was kind of inspiration for me in that she would document these sort of conversations and then she would sort of have these kind of imagined scenes that were drawn from them.

So I'm really drawn to how imagination can sort of function in life writing and what the kind of boundaries are between that. And I guess, Andre, you kind of explored that as well a lot in your book too. There was... Yeah, so I loved your book so much. And Sam's as well. But you said something which I really, which really resonated with me, which is when you were, you know, you have a scene where your narrator is speaking to your grandfather and you say something along the lines of, "I am listening to myself listen." And sort of, there's that layer of kind of interpretation as you are speaking. And you're kind of narrating over, you know, what you're hearing in a conversation. And I thought, you know, that I was kind of thinking about that too. When I was speaking to my grandfather that you kind of... 'Cause the process of being a witness in a testimony or speaking to someone and having a dialogue is that there's the person that you're speaking to, and then there's you who are speaking, and you're constantly split between listening and appreciating what the person is saying, but then how you are kind of thinking and then conceptualising what they're saying at the same time.

Virginia Haussegger: And there are also moments when you questioned his own memory. I think there was an example in particular, which I thought was quite sweet, where there was reference to him being part of the Olympic ceremony. And you were saying to him, "But you know, as a Jew, how could you have been part of Hitler's Olympic ceremony?" Because I suspect you didn't believe that was possible. And he insisted on the truth of it, and you had to let that go. But the way you include it in the book is to let us know that as the writer, you doubt it, but you-

Tess Schofield-Peters: I did doubt. But I do believe that he was part of it, because years before, he did tell that story quite a lot to quite a few people, and he was exceptional gymnast. And so, and there was a gymnastics display in the kind of opening, not in the actual Olympic event, but in the opening ceremony. So yes, but as a person, you know, with obviously this historical context, it seems absurd, but yeah.

Virginia Haussegger: Well, it's fascinating. Your book and who it's about. And I just wanna add there that it took me, "My Father and Other Animals," which I think by the way, is fantastic title.

Tess Schofield-Peters: Such a good title.

Virginia Haussegger: It's a great title. But every now and then, I had to remind myself that there is a subtitle there too. How I came, "How I Took on the Family Farm." 'Cause your father dominates the book, but you are there too.

Sam Vincent: Yeah, so I guess the subtitle is the easy way of explaining it. So broadly, it's a memoir that recounts the six, seven years in which I worked with my dad part-time on our family farm and underwent this transformation from being someone who never thought that I would have a future in farming to then really enjoying it and wanting to take over the farm and ending up living and working on the farm now. And my parents are no longer working on the farm. But within that, there's a few different threads.

So I see it as a love letter to my dad. I really didn't know him that well until I started working with him. Not that there was anything majorly wrong with our relationship. I think he's just typical of a lot of boomer men, especially rural and regional Australian men who don't really talk that much to their children about their lives.

Virginia Haussegger: And he didn't think you were doing much with your life.

Sam Vincent: Yeah, yeah, and I kind of came to discover a lot about him that I didn't realise that he was quite a maverick and a gentle, environmentally-focused farmer. So then there's this other thread in the book, which is more kind of conventional journalism about how we grow food and fibre in this country and whether there's a way of doing it more sustainably. But I knew I couldn't just write about that. It'd be too boring. And so I was trying to kind of smuggle in these ideas couched around the memoir stuff.

And then most of the book, actually, we've talked a little bit about models and inspiration. So I had this very clear model for this book. It wasn't a memoir. It's a book called "Heat" by Bill Buford. He was the "New Yorker" magazine's fiction editor, and he quit to work in a kitchen in New York, and he ended up loving cooking. But he wrote about this kind of esoteric world that's behind closed doors while he was doing it. And I was trying to do the same thing with farm work. I feel like Australia is a very urban country that clings to this outdated image of itself as being rooted in rural Australia. And yet most of us drive past farms and don't really know what happens on there. So I was trying to really write about that from...

So while I was actually learning how to build a fence or castrate a bull calf, something like that, I was trying to put my journalist hat on and take notes about what I was seeing. And initially I'd already been doing that for myself. So when I started working with my dad, I was taking notes because I was so clueless. I wanted to remember how to... I remember learning how to tie a figure eight knot, which is how you link two bits of wire without joiners. And I was really bad at it, and I was drawing all these diagrams. So I already had these notebooks that were filling up with stuff like that and-

Virginia Haussegger: Were you taking those particular notes though, for you?

Sam Vincent: For myself.

Virginia Haussegger: Yeah, so not for the book at all.

Sam Vincent: So actually my first book was published 10 years ago today, and I think a week or two before that, I'd started working with my dad. And I had all these ideas for a second book, and they're all pretty rubbish. And I distinctly remember having a phone conversation with the publicist about my first book while I was helping to mark calves, vaccinate newborn calves. And I couldn't hear her because the lowing of cattle was so loud, and this publicist in Melbourne thought this was quite unusual. And I just thought, "Oh no, that's just kind of, that's just my life." And then I remember talking to the editor of my first book a few weeks later, and he was saying, you know, "What's happening in your life? Like, you really wanna write another book? Tell me what are you doing?" I said, "Oh, I have started working with my dad on the farm. He hurt himself, and I have to kind of help him out." And he was like, "Well, that's pretty interesting. Why don't you write about that?" And it hadn't actually occurred to me to write about it other than just for notes for myself until that point.

Virginia Haussegger: So when you did sign a book deal, it was well before, years before you actually started writing the book.

Sam Vincent: Yeah, so there were a few years between. So I was working on the farm for a few years and then I think I signed the book deal in 2017. And then for years I was just filling notebooks with this kind of first person observation stuff about what I was seeing. A few memories, things like that. And then, yeah, there was never any pressure when I would produce the book. I think we said, like, 10 years after it was signed. And the pandemic really saved me. I know we've come to talk of the pandemic like people did of the war. Or they had a good war, they had a bad war. I had a very good and easy pandemic. I feel embarrassed. I was locked down on a organic farm with lots of produce and fresh air and space. And that was when I took the time to start writing this book.

Virginia Haussegger: Yeah, I've gotta ask you, Sam, I love the way at the end your father asks you if he's in the book, and you say to him, "On every page." And he says something like, "Bloody hell then."

Sam Vincent: Yeah, I mean, as soon as I saw this, was asked to participate in this event, the first thing that I thought of was, you know, we're gonna talk about the ethics of writing about your family. I'll have to disclose how unethical I was. Because when I knew I was writing about my dad and my family, I had to shut out any notion that he would read it, because I just knew that I would self-censor too much if I was doing that. I'm the youngest in my family. I'm used to being bullied by three older sisters. I didn't want stuff to be-

Virginia Haussegger: Aw, you poor thing.

Sam Vincent: To be taken out prematurely. And so I just ignored it that, oh, he's not gonna read it, until it was pretty much done. And then I thought, oh, what am I gonna do now? So I got my mom to read it. And that was mainly as a fact checker. Anything that wasn't true was removed. But then we had a conversation about things that my dad, she didn't think would like, and I had to fight for a few things to be in, 'cause I kind of thought that he would probably convince me to take them out if he'd have read it, and I really didn't want that.

Virginia Haussegger: So, just briefly, did he like it?

Sam Vincent: It's hard to say. Yeah, he's very coy about it. I know he likes bragging about it when it suits him, but other times he says he is embarrassed. Yeah, I really don't know.

Virginia Haussegger: Has he read it?

Sam Vincent: He's read it, yeah. Yeah, he read it and he sent me a very formal sweet text message about it that was, yeah, it was very touching.

Virginia Haussegger: Okay, I want to now just talk about some themes that cross all of your books. And by the way, we are going to open up to questions towards the end. So if you've got your questions, please don't hold back, because I think there'll be plenty of questions from the audience.

I wanna ask about, well, you just touched on it actually, Sam, the ethics of writing about family, how all of you in the different ways that you have and indeed in the different genres that you've used and worked with, how you grappled with that very issue of what is truth and what is not truth. And both, Tess and Andre, you've touched on the fact that you've been liberated by using fiction. But I'm interested to know how much of a struggle it may have been in producing the work in your own mind about how far you may have strayed from truth and the ethics around that. Andre, is that something you grappled with?

Andre Dao: It's part of the reason why it took so long. Actually, I mean, I had a similar process to what you were describing, Sam, in that I made the decision that I wasn't going to share the manuscript with my family until it was locked off. So I gave it to them before it was published. So I sort of said to myself, I can't honestly say that I'll give them this manuscript and that I'll change things if they ask for them to be changed. So then I can't share it with them if still in the process.

And I mean, partly that came after, so before I wrote this book, I'd been working on refugee oral histories. And in that testimony work, you know, every sentence, every line was, we went back and forth with the interview subjects to make sure that they were happy with how they're being represented. And there was a whole politics of that project, of saying, "Well, these are people who haven't had any agency over their lives." So then I switched to this book about my own family in a way. And that was a hard, so partly I thought, oh, I'm just being really unethical here after having spent a whole lot of time developing a very, like, rigorous ethical framework.

Virginia Haussegger: Did you really feel it was unethical, or is it more about that you were swapping around or playing with genre? A bit of history, a bit of fiction, a bit of memory.

Andre Dao: There was, I came to realise that there was a fundamental selfishness to the project of writing this book. And there had to be. And then in fact, you know, I wanted to express something. And so part of, I guess the ethics of the book that I sort of try to explore is the ethics of taking up space, which is whether it's to be on, you know, unceded land or whether it's to be, to write a book, so that you're always, to stake a claim to space is always to sort of exclude, at least to some extent. And there's better and worse ways you can do it. But I think there was, at its core, there's something selfish.

And what I realised, so my ethical response to that wasn't to say, let's pretend that's not there. But instead let's push that as far as I can go and to say, "Well, then these are all my choices." And that's, so when you sort of asked before about the liberation or the freedom of fiction, that's what it felt like at first. And then I realised actually now that it's fiction, I'm on the hook for everything in here. I can't say about anything in that book, oh, it's in there because it happened, so it's true. That in a way can in some instances be a way to slide out of your choices or to wriggle out of being responsible. And so I came to see the fiction as a way of holding myself responsible in that. Yeah, family. Yeah, so.

Virginia Haussegger: It's interesting to hear you say that it was, you know, fundamentally a selfish process or had to be for you to do this, to finish it and to be liberated in a way that gave you the ability to write as you needed to write. The narrator, and I keep wanting to say you, because I know many of us would keep thinking of "Anum" as being nonfiction, but the narrator at times, I think you've captured that writer selfishness quite, well, very, very well, such that his own self-reflection about the selfishness of what he's doing, those long periods in the library, ambling, looking out the window and acknowledging that his life is one really of great privilege sitting there in the beautiful Cambridge library. Was that deliberate to try and reflect in fact, that selfishness perhaps you felt yourself?

Andre Dao: Yeah, so I hope that's where the gap between me and the narrator is there, in that I tried to turn up. And I think that there are times, obviously when, yeah, I mean, like my narrator, I had a young daughter when I was writing the book. And so there is at a very real domestic level, a selfishness to say, I'm going off and writing a book today while you look after the baby, right? Like, there's no way around that. But I tried to turn that up in the book to sort of sharpen that.

And I guess the sort of, the book hinges on really the narrator realising that he's been sort of agonising over his grandparents for this time. And then actually he has a family. And then the choice not to abandon the project about grandparents, but how to make that project somehow do something for his partner, for his children. And it's sort of, yeah, getting out of that rut of being stuck in the past and reorienting towards the future.

Virginia Haussegger: I wanna ask you all about the purpose. And we've touched on this, but let's just go a little bit deeper on the purpose of writing about our family, our elders, as a way of also writing about our own lives, which is quite interesting. Tess, particularly in your case, your grandfather had such an incredibly rich experience, and in many respects a heroic life. The trauma that he experienced as a young man at 18 or 19 is just unthinkable to most of us. But I couldn't help but wonder too, whether your fascination, and this really applies to all of you, but whether your fascination with his story was a way of giving, and your family story, giving a deeper meaning to your own life as in your own family existence. And is there a sense of justifying, again, your privilege and comfort by really examining that difficult life?

Tess Schofield-Peters: Hmm, yeah. Well, I guess I always wanted to... I mean, I guess the project kind of came from this really immense curiosity I had about Harry's early life and how that impacted the man that he became. And I mean, I do write that, you know, he kind of had many different lives in a way. Like, he was Mutzi when he was a child, and Hermann as a teenager, Harry when his name was Anglicised, and you know, then doctor and, you know, father, grandfather, And I only knew him as a grandfather, so I only knew him in this kind of last phase. And he was a different man to many different people.

And so I wanted to find a way to kind of reconcile my relationship with him, I guess, which was not extremely close. He was a very doting grandfather. I mean, he, yeah, he was an amazing grandfather, but he never really let you too close. And I mean, I had much more luck than my mom in being able to ask him questions, because I think, you know, he was a lot more tender with his grandparents and would kind of offer more. And especially in his later years when I took on more of kind of, like, a carer sort of role. And that was sort of the most time I'd ever spent consistently with him was, you know, like, a couple of times a week I would visit him in the nursing home and we would just kind of talk.

Virginia Haussegger: Do you think he found it a little easier to talk to you than his own daughter, your mom?

Tess Schofield-Peter: What do you think? She's in the audience? Yes, no, I think so. I think so.

Virginia Haussegger: Because generational divide though, I think it's quite, there's a certain distance there because yes, it does become quite apparent that you really quite, he's really opening up to you. Whereas at one stage you say about your mother, I think when you are helping her or you're going through the boxes because she's preparing to move and in fact when you find some more material, and she says at one stage, "Oh, I didn't talk to him about that," or, "I never asked him that." Or, "We that was never really talked about."

Tess Schofield-Peters: Yeah, he never spoke about his experience in the Holocaust. In fact, Lynn, his partner, the first time she ever heard anything about it was when she was in the kind of next room, and he was recording his testimony. And I think he would say, you know, little things. Like, one kind of anecdote that always is kind of like family lore almost is that when he returned home to the flat in Berlin after he'd been imprisoned in Buchenwald, that his father, Max, he opened the door and said, "Oh, well at least they gave you a proper haircut." 'Cause they shaved his head. And it sort of, and so he had this sort of way of, I mean, it's kind of, it's awful, but it was sort of this kind of, not, like, comedic, but then light. And then yeah, there are a couple of anecdotes like that, that yeah, kind of, it was more those sort of little fragments of story.

And that to me is such an incredible scene to have your son just turn up on the doorstep after experiencing that, 18-year-old son, after experiencing that, and then to say, to come up with that. I mean, it's such a sort of window into his character. And so for me, immediately I'm like, "Oh, my gosh, like, I wanna just write that." But then again, you know, it's, I mean, when you think about, you know, transforming these kinds of memories into writing, there are all these sort of choices that you make about how to sort of do that in a way that lets the reader know that it's your kind of interpretation of what happened, yeah.

Virginia Haussegger: Sam, did you feel yourself getting closer to your dad as you were, once you had decided that you were actually going to make a book out of all this note taking and job learning, et cetera, and working with him, did you consciously feel you were getting closer to him?

Sam Vincent: Yeah, definitely. And you know, when he eventually read the book, I think he realised how much I had loved working with him on the farm and the farm itself. I don't think he realised how much I loved farming by the end of it, until he read the book. So there was that very personal element to it. But looking back, I remember unashamedly plumbing his story for comic value. I thought he was a really funny character, and I wanted to share that with other people.

Virginia Haussegger: He is.

Sam Vincent: It had nothing to do with me and him. Something springs to mind early on when I was taking notes for myself. I remember one day we were talking about whether it was gonna rain, and he said, "Oh, let's get outta the and see what the ants are doing." And he pulled off this big rock, and he was studying the ants to see if they were more or less frantic than usual as a way of telling whether it would rain. And I put that in my notebook as, oh, that's kind of interesting bush knowledge, but then-

Virginia Haussegger: I'm always going to look under the rocks to know it's gonna rain-

Sam Vincent: Yeah, but then afterwards I was thinking-

Virginia Haussegger: Or not.

Sam Vincent: This is bizarre and eccentric and hilarious, and I want other people to know about that. I want them to know what my dad is like, and that he's someone who, when CDs became redundant, rather than throw them out, he tied them onto bits of twine and hung them from fruit trees as a way of scaring away birds when they would kind of shake around. So, yeah, there's that element that has nothing to do with me understanding him.

But you're right. I really, and it wasn't a conscious thing after a few years of working with him, aside from this project, just working with him aside from the book project, I came to realise that I understood a lot more about him and that I was closer to him than I had been. And that a lot of that didn't have to do with talking at all. It was just spending time together working, working on things together with our hands. This kind of nice silence, easy silence in nature.

Virginia Haussegger: What about your mum? Because she features, I thought, very strongly in the story, and yet she's in the shadow all the time. And there are moments when I wondered about you are very direct in noting your father's old fashioned sort of gendered way of understanding her role. And there are times when it clearly irritated you. But you didn't intervene.

Sam Vincent: Yeah, that, well, I had to put that in. Just stepping back about the selfishness of writing about family, one thing that comforted me, I knew it was a selfish act, but I felt like if I was going to write potentially unflattering things about my family, I had to hold myself to that same level and-

Virginia Haussegger: You ate her crumpet.

Sam Vincent: Yeah, everything is truthful in this book. And I was pretty incompetent. I still am at a lot of farm tasks, but also, you know, doing things like that that I'm not not proud of. I had to put that in. I couldn't edit that out.

Virginia Haussegger: Can I explain to people who don't know, Sam's mother makes a crumpet for herself. Sam's father comes in, cuts it in half, gives Sam half-

Sam Vincent: So he just assumes it. Yeah.

Virginia Haussegger: And goes to eat it himself, assuming it's for him, and it was for his mother. And his mother's standing at the door, walks out. Now you know that she was pissed off.

Sam Vincent: Yeah, yeah, and I also know that people were reading that they're gonna think that I'm not a very nice person, but that's the truth. And equally, there was a moment where I was, I had a calf, a cow in the cattle yards, and I was getting very frustrated with it. I actually lost my temper and I slapped it in the face. And that would've been easy to edit that out as well, to make my myself look better. But it needed to stay in if I was gonna be narky about my family as well.

In terms of my mom though, that's really interesting. This has come up a lot. A lot of people have criticised me who know my mom, and she's a huge inspiration for the way I farm. And she kind of turned my dad away from more conventional industrial farming to a more, a way that's a bit more in tune with nature. And I found it quite hard. I knew I wanted to bring her into the book more, but I found it quite hard in a lot of the scenes that me and my dad.

So that kind of, that action if you will, of straining up a fence or observing nature, my mom wasn't present for that. So I kind of didn't really know how to bring that in. So I did when I could, when we're having conversations around the dinner table or recollecting her own farming family history, but that was a kind of a technical challenge to bring her in. And I didn't actually come up with the admittedly brilliant title. And when my editor did, it very much frames it as a book about me and my dad. So yeah, I hope that I do honour her. But a good friend who's a filmmaker, and she read the first draft and she said, "You need to bring this gender stuff right to the start of the book. People are gonna ask, where is your mom?" That was on her advice that I brought that chapter to the start.

Virginia Haussegger: I'm going to throw it open to questions now, 'cause I know there'll be some of you in the audience who do have questions. We've got some floating mics. And I think we've got a question right up there. Just while the mic is travelling to pop your hand up so we can see you. Andre, I just, something I do want to ask you about is, you mentioned before that the work that you've done with Behind the-

Andre Dao: The Wire.

Virginia Haussegger: The Wire. And throughout "Anam" as well, your... Well, not throughout, but certainly your reference to thinking about the men on Manus Island. See I did it again, your. The narrator, let's say. The narrator's reference. It did make me think too about just again, your own position as the grandson of this rather extraordinary man, a Vietnamese man who spoke Vietnamese and French, was living in Paris when you got to meet him, and you were brought up as the next generation, or the grandchild's generation, speaking English and certainly not French. That those differences when dealing with your grandfather, did that heighten the fact that, a sense that you, despite your own, you know, having the experience, the family experience of being immigrants, you had a much easier path, a sort of a seamlessly easier path such that you could float between your Vietnamese and of course, Australia and English, et cetera. Whereas he was not able to do that, particularly in France.

Andre Dao Hmm. I mean, my parents were fond of reminding us that we've had it very easy. So, you know, there's no forgetting that. I mean, my grandfather, I mean, one of the things, the reasons why he was so fascinating to me was that, so in terms of that ability to flip between worlds, which is my privilege, most of my family, you know, as you say, were unable to pursue the things that they wanted to do when they were resettled, whether here or in France. And, you know, had to work with this other language and those kinds of things.

I think the thing that I found extraordinary about my grandfather was that he, there's a moment in the book where, you know, the narrator kind of turns around and looks at his grandfather's bookshelf for the first time and he realises, "Oh, there's William Faulkner on there." And so that's one of the, you know, the things that I made up and didn't make up. That's one of the things I didn't make up. And you know, partly there was the... So there's the first the feeling of like, "Oh, I didn't know that he would have Faulkner on his shelf. What kind of man is he?" And you know, "How does that change what I think of him?" And then going, "Oh, God, why did I think he wouldn't have Faulkner on his shelf? Why would I have assumed these things about him?" So I mean, he did live a life where he moved between many worlds and was an intellectual and so on. So I guess that's one of the reasons I was drawn to him.

Virginia Haussegger: We've got a question up here.

Audience member 1: I've got a question for Andre, Tess and Sam. I was just wondering, reading the books, that place was a big part, and I was reading, Andre, a place you have every right to be where you need not be embarrassed. And I was just wondering because Sam's, it's actually a physical location, being in Tess and Andre's, it's more an emotional place that sometimes it's left and it's all in a memory.

Virginia Haussegger: Hmm, fascinating. The issue of place. The importance of place, and also, Sam, for yours too.

Sam Vincent: Yes, it's-

Virginia Haussegger: Place is a character.

Sam Vincent: It's a huge part of my book, and I wrote about a place that I thought I knew well, but it was only when I started to learn how ecologically and historically going back thousands of years when I was learning about the First Nations history of what is now the farm that I realised I didn't know it at all. And so yeah, I was definitely writing about how I got to know the farm as I got to know my dad and viewing it from different angles.

Virginia Haussegger: Place, the question, and Pete, who I've had a discussion about these books with, has raised the issue with me too about how important, he knows Berlin very, very well, and was saying to me, in reading your book, how important was it, I wonder for you to visit those places and therefore for the reader to actually know physically the sort of places that you talk about.

Tess Schofield-Peters: So when I was actually writing the book, it was the COVID lockdown, so I wasn't able to go to Berlin. I had been to Berlin previously about 10 years ago when I was on exchange, when I was, like, 20. And it was a very different experience to when I went last year. I went back. It was kind of... A few of the cousins have also been back. There's this kind of sort of, not necessarily a pilgrimage, but it's, you know, sort of more of a mark of respect to go back to Harry's first address, which was Attilastr, which is now just kind of, it's on a main thoroughfare. And then there's this sort of just block of kind of ugly looking apartments, which is not the same building. And so I remember just kind of standing there and sort of, you know, thinking that I should, you know, be feeling something more that is, you know...

But then, so that was kind of my first experience, and it was quite a jarring experience, which I think a lot of, you know, a lot of people who return back to these sort of places that are so monumental to our, you know, which in my case, my grandfather's, you know, where he grew up, where he was born. But then last year I went back, because we had the Stolpersteine ceremony, which was where they put these sort of 10 by 10 centimetre brass plates into the ground at the last place of residence for victims of the Holocaust. So my great grandparents, Max and Edith, we had been on the wait list for four years to get them placed, and so at their last place of address, which was [unclear], there's two plates that say Max and Edith. And so the ceremony was, it was really beautiful.

Again, quite a jarring experience, because it was this ceremony, this memorial ceremony, which was kind of like a funeral for us. And I'm not Jewish, but there we had the Kiddush sung and performed, but then at the same time it was, like, a busy street. So there were people kind of walking past, there was roadworks happening, trucks. And so it was this real sort of intersection of place and of sort of the meaning of the place for different people.

Attilastr I think the cobblestone markers are really a powerful, really, really powerful symbol, I think. But what you just said then also made me or reminded me, you know, the power, therefore of the memory that you have now put into writing is incredibly important. Particularly when the physical place, such as what you just described, no longer exists as such. It's very, very profound. We have some more questions. We've got one over here.

Audience member 2: Thank you so much. My question is on the relationship to self. All of you mentioned the selfishness that might be inherent in writing a book. And I wonder how you might have changed during the process or after the process and your relationship with selfishness or yourself now. Thanks.

Andre Dao: I mean, so I came to think of the narrator of "Anam" as this self who was not me. And so as I sort of alluded to before, this narrator became a site for me to experiment, to give voice the thoughts that I would not yet attribute to myself. And in that process, I suppose I started to become more like my own narrator in a way. And so, I mean, before we started, Virginia, you asked, you know, to what extent is the book fictionalised? And you know, often people are really interested in that question. And I suppose I find that hard to answer, because certainly as far as that narrator is concerned, you know, he and I have kind of been interwoven through the act of writing. And, so yeah, so I guess that's sort of my sense of self in "Anam."

Virginia Haussegger: Do you have a strong sense of self in your book, Tess? 'Cause you are very present in it.

Tess Schofield-Peters: Yeah, that was... I found it quite tricky, I think, because as soon as you put I into a piece of writing it sort of, you're being then perceived on the page. And so I think it's interesting to think of myself as, even though it's, you know, it's life writing and that I, you know, referentially I am me in the book. I'm not kind of a... Although I guess I am. I don't know. It's such an interesting question. Yeah, I think... I guess that's why I sort of decided to do that in terms of just making it more kind of novelistic and to have those sort of fragments is to kind of demonstrate that it was sort of my kind of interpretation of what happened.

And I think it was important to me to kind of be transparent about the kind of anxiety I felt about representation and about kind of, you know, characterising and reconstructing these people who I'd never met. And I guess, yeah, I mean, in terms of sort of selfishness I guess there is. I mean, there's so much of the story that I, you know, I had the power because I was the writer, that I kind of left out and I sort of framed it in a way, because I wanted to show the story of my great grandparents, and that was what was important to me. But, you know, if someone else had written it or if, you know, my grandfather had written it himself, it would've been very different, yeah.

Virginia Haussegger: Very different. In the last few minutes that we've got, I want to ask all of you very briefly to share with us what advice would you give to people who are thinking about writing about family? All of you have spent a long time on these projects. Seven years, I think eight years, Sam, was yours. And how long was yours, Tess? Do you know?

Tess Schofield-Peters: I mean, officially writing probably, like, four.

Virginia Haussegger: Okay, about four years. But obviously a long time thinking about this. And Andre, you've told us 10 years. These are significant chunks of one's life. But what would your advice be to anyone out there or a writer who's thinking about writing about their family? Sam, you can go first.

Sam Vincent: Yeah, I mean, I definitely had the same approach as Andre in that I waited until my book was in the proof stage, so it was much harder to change things. That's when I showed even my mom the fact checking. And there's obviously different ways of going about it, but I know personally if I had given every little bit of the book that was about my sisters or other members of my family, my mom and dad, for them to read as I was writing them, it had morphed into something that wasn't a memoir from my perspective. It would be this kind of family story where everyone is coming at it from a different angle, and it wouldn't quite work. So I know personally, I definitely don't regret that decision I made that some people would think was highly unethical. But, you know, normal families talk about this stuff around the dinner table. I had to write a book about it, and my family could see how I felt, and I had to share it with a lot of other people in doing so, so...

Virginia Haussegger: Okay, so the message there though is to hold it close until-

Sam Vincent: That's just-

Virginia Haussegger: Toward the end.

Sam Vincent: Personal. I just knew the kind of brother and son I am, that I am pretty ready to please my family. There's one thing I changed in this book that was... So the book is entirely factual. And there was one anecdote that I remember so clearly. I'm 100% certain I had it correct, but my twin sisters made me take it out, because it has to do with something quite... So they now both work in child health, and it was some mistreatment of me when I was a kid, and they did not want their colleagues to know that they've done this. So, and that was a combination of me being kind of reverting to my childhood self of being bullied by all the siblings of taking it out. But also, I kind of, I saw that point, and I-

Virginia Haussegger: It's fascinating though, isn't it, with family, how... We have this issue in my family too. There's six of us. We remember the same story differently.

Sam Vincent: Yeah.

Virginia Haussegger: And there'll be arguments around our dinner tables goes, "No, that happened to me." "No, it happened to me." Yeah, memory's like that.

Sam Vincent: Yeah, memoirs are subjective. This is my perspective of my family.

Virginia Haussegger: My version of my memory, yeah. Andre and Tess, what would you advise to people thinking of writing about family? Andre?

Andre Dao: I mean, first I was just gonna say that there's a scene in the novel where the narrator sort of reflects on the fact that he wasn't hugged as a kid. And one night, the only time I really realised that my parents definitely had read it was that my dad brought it up at dinner and said, "That's you," to my mom. And then I didn't really know what to do about that, and we didn't talk about it. But then I noticed that the next time I came over, my mom started to make a real effort to hug my kids. And so I was like, "Okay, so you just have to write a whole book, get it published, and then you can have this conversation."

Virginia Haussegger: A lot of work to get that hug, 10 years worth. Wow.

Andre Dao: But I guess the advice would just be to start tonight, start tomorrow. Too many people have come up to me after these kinds of things and they've said, "Oh, you know, I too wanted to write something about my grandparents, my parents. But, you know, life has intervened." And so I think just get going-

Virginia Haussegger: Just start tomorrow.

Andre Dao: And the other thing was that when I had given up on getting it published and I was writing it for myself, I just told myself I would write 10 minutes every day. And that was just a sort of a daily practise that I would do. And you can always fit that in no matter what else happens. So yeah, get started and start small.

Virginia Haussegger: How often did your 10 minutes stretch out to an hour or two hours?

Andre Dao: Sometimes, yeah, when things, when the flow happened. But it was also great when the flow wasn't there and it just scraped through that 10 minutes and just go, okay, thank you. I can put it away.

Virginia Haussegger: Well done. That's discipline though. Tess, what would you suggest or advise to people wanting to write about family?

Tess Schofield-Peters: Well, in terms of the history and sort of the process of discovery, I mean, again, it's, you know, it depends on what sort of history it is, but in my case, I found out some really difficult things about my family that I doubt my grandfather even knew about kind of what sort of happened. And there is now such a huge sort of archive of all of this information, not just about the Holocaust. But yeah, so I found that at times I was quite unprepared for what I found out.

So yeah, I guess my advice would be, I mean, the sort of research process, I found it to be really incredible, because, you know, I discovered all this stuff that I didn't know, and that, you know, helped to kind of fill in the silence that my grandfather had left about a lot of things. But also, it was, like, quite a harrowing process at times. So I would just say sort of be prepared for that if you choose to, you know, go down that sort of path or if it's a traumatic history, in particular.

Virginia Haussegger: So to be gentle on yourself.

Tess Schofield-Peters: Yeah.

Virginia Haussegger: Yeah, what great advice. Unfortunately, we're going to have to leave it there, because our time is up, but I want to thank you all. We could talk for hours. It's been absolutely fascinating. Thank you to Sam and to Tess, and to Andre, and over to you, Kathryn.

Kathryn Favelle: Thank you. What an amazing conversation that has been. I'm sure I'm not the only one in the room who is going to start tonight, start small, hold it close, and be prepared, because you never know what the research process may uncover. Thank you all for a fascinating conversation.

Before we go, of course, you know the bookshop is open upstairs, and if you haven't read these three wonderful books, now is your chance to grab a copy and have it signed by our authors tonight. If you are joining us online, you can always shop at the National Library bookshop online too, so don't miss that opportunity.

We're in the midst of event season. There is so much happening here at the Library over the next few weeks. Tomorrow night we'll be launching Thomas Mayo's brand new book, "Always Was, Always Will Be," and if family history is your thing on the 24th of September, we're hosting a seminar on Australia's migration history in association with our beautiful new exhibition, Hopes and Fears that you can see in the gallery.

And of course, I have to give a plug to another book that the Library has published. If you are interested in life writing and the challenges, the discoveries, the different approaches to it, we have just published a collection of the Seymour Biography Lectures called "Telling Lives", which is 20 years of lectures on biography and life writing and the craft of telling family stories and personal stories. So you might like to pick that up in the bookshop too.

Thank you all for joining us, but would you join me in thanking this extraordinary panel of writers and conversationalists for a wonderful evening? Thank you very much.