Book Club - Jane Harrison’s The Visitors

Jane Harrison is a playwright & author descended from the Muruwari people. She is the author of the internationally acclaimed play Stolen and today I am going to introduce you to the novelisation of her most recent play The Visitors. The Visitors takes us to Gadigal Land in January of 1788. On this sweltering day a strange sight appears in the harbour and immediately spurs the locals into action. Messages are sent to the Nations of the coastal and river regions calling seven men, elders in their clans to congregate and decide what must be done now that The Visitors have returned. My first thoughts as I started reading The Visitors was that this is a story that is both known and completely unknown to me. As I thought back to my education, sparse as it may have been on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history, I realised that the landing of Arthur Phillip in what we now call Sydney is not a story that is told as much as it’s an assumption that is made and then built upon. The genius of The Visitors is that it not only unpacks those assumptions it seeks to explore the story; the stories of the land and the people before that fateful day. As the group congregate  to consider their options, one man, more thoughtful than his peers considers not just the sight before but its meaning. He asks…”I am wondering… how we will remember this day”. The irony of course is that these words must be put onto the lips of a fictional witness because remembering is not something we do well in this country. In The Visitors Jane Harrison is challenging readers with the omissions in the narrative. We awake on unceded land (as we do each since incidentally) to the surprise and interest of men and women intrigued but also put out by the interruption to their daily lives. We meet each of the emissaries as they prepare for the meeting assembling weapons and considering tactics. It’s a particular genius of the novel that it translates the story culturally, allowing the reader to understand the tension and the mundanity of such an important day; we learn of petty differences and old grudges. We come to understand that ceremonies are important but that this doesn’t mean someone’s not going to interrupt or get impatient. When I looked back on the paucity of education I received about what really happened when British ships invaded these shores, I was struck that in all my learning I was given the impression that the people who arrived were there by right. By consequence this meant that the people they met on the shores were just in the way. In The Visitors Harrison tells a history that shows us these men and women were custodians and lawmakers; tied to their lands and seeking to defend it. The novel asks us to take another look at what we think we know about that history and everything that has been built on it.