Winnie Dunne was just 14 when Chris Lilley's character Jonah from Tonga first appeared on the ABC's Summer Heights High.
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Watching the white actor portray a character of Tongan descent stirred a lot of emotions in Dunne, herself of Tongan descent.
"Having Australia's most popular television series of the time being this mockumentary where an Anglo-Saxon comedian was wearing brown face and an afro wig, speaking in a thick accent, enacting these really horrible, violent, illiterate and hypersexual stereotypes about Tongan children - we forget they were high school students - devastated my sense of self and I became very self hating because of that," she says.
She'd grown up in western Sydney's Mount Druitt area, the only one in her family who liked to read and write, surrounded by books such as Harry Potter, Lemony Snicket's The Series of Unfortunate Events and The Chronicles of Narnia.
"Those books are really wonderful, they made my childhood a lot more enjoyable, but they didn't have characters who looked like me, or sounded like me, again, my sense of self really suffered."
Her debut work of autobiographical fiction, Dirt Poor Islanders, is her way of representing the Pasifika voice in Australian culture.
The heroine Meadow Reed is growing up in Mount Druitt, a half-white, half-Tongan girl. She's got a narrow nose and light brown skin, but everyone who's raised her is Tongan, everyone who's loved her is Tongan, so she is Tongan.
It's a coming-of-age story that's as raw as the seminal 1977 novel Puberty Blues, by Kathy Lette and Gabriel Carey. Here it's about the fractures that occur growing up between cultures, a story that doesn't gloss over racism or poverty, or the issues that Pasifika people face in Australia.
"The Pasifika people only represent about one per cent of the Australian population and we haven't had the opportunity to tell our own stories, for people to look at us in a more nuanced and holistic way, I hope Dirt Poor Islanders helps with that," she says.
Dunne is the general manager of Sweatshop Literacy Movement, a program based in western Sydney devoted to empowering culturally and linguistically diverse communities through reading, writing and critical thinking.
"With Sweatshop we really try to utilise creative writing and critical thinking for people to start deconstructing how they see themselves, how the world sees them, and help them create original contributions to that knowledge.
"It helps create a more holistic understanding of the world that we live in and the people that live in it, our neighbours."
She's perplexed that many marginalised cultures that have a rich and long history of storytelling don't get the opportunity to cement that same practice in modern times.
"In Dirt Poor Islanders I really wanted to utilise Tongan mythology and contrast that against Meadow's present-day story in Sydney," she says. "Not many people know Pacific Islanders have this rich history that dates back thousands of years, and those stories inform how we tell stories today, the mythology stories reflect the major turning points in Meadow's life."
Dunne always knew she wanted to be a storyteller even though she grew up in a house without books.
"Dad tells me this story often, how he used to catch me in the corner reading the back of cereal boxes and things," she says.
"But I didn't really start writing until I was about 16 ... there was a box of my late birth mother's old things and there was this red pleather diary from 1995, the year I was born.
"It was in her handwriting, and she had filled out every page, every day, talking to me directly while she was pregnant with me, it was so profound.
"I realised that she was a writer, in the literal way, which was quite odd for someone in my community back in the '90s to be inclined to do that every single day.
"She died when she was 24, she never got her change to be a writer, I just feel like she passed that down to me. Since that day I've been writing and writing and it's been nice to carry on her legacy in a way."
The conversation comes back to Lilley and whether that show would ever get made now. In 2020 Netflix pulled four of Lilley's shows from the air.
"I don't think it would and I think that's a real testament to the growth of Australia as a nation since 2008," she says.
"We've learned through the global politics of such things as the #metoo movement and Black Lives Matter that own-voices storytelling is integral to our humanity.
"It's why autobiographical fiction is so important, especially for marginalised communities to utilise in their creative writing because it really fosters that sense of growth and equality that Australia has shown in the past decade."
- Dirt Poor Islanders, by Winnie Dunn. Hachette. $32.99.