Monday, Apr 13, 2015

Author John Mateer speaks about
The Quiet Slave

Recent Historical Fiction set in 19th Century Cocos-Keeling Island

The Quiet Slave is historical fiction set in the early 19th Century that describes the first years of settlement on the Cocos-Keeling Islands, an atoll – now an Australian Indian Ocean Territory – midway between Perth and Sri Lanka. The events are seen through the eyes of Rosie, a female Malay slave belonging to the controversial English colonial Alexander Hare.

Beyond simply describing the process of settlement of the uninhabited atoll, Rosie's story is an insight into the origin and lives of the slaves who, like her, were brought from various parts of the 'Malay Archipelago' and into the complex circumstances of the last days of Western slavery.

Among the various incidents the fictional Rosie was party to was the conflict between Hare and his former employee John Clunies-Ross, which ultimately led to the abandonment of the Malays on the island for the subsequent 140 years, during which the islands belonged to the Clunies-Ross dynasty. And there is the recounting of a letter sent to Hare concerning his former friend Stamford Raffles' meeting with Napoleon on the Atlantic islands of St Helena during the Frenchman's imprisonment.

Conceived over a two-year period in the rural Western Australian town of Katanning and on the Cocos-Keeling Islands, the fiction is published in John Mateer's original English and in the Malay translation of the Singaporean Nur-El-Hudda Jaffar. It is illustrated with a selection of photographs taken during one of the United Nations' decolonization mission to the islands in the 1980s.

Uncovering the origins of the now-diasporic Malay community who call the Cocos-Keeling Islands home, this book is part of a project developed for the Perth-based international art event spaced2: future recall with the aim of restoring a sense of the Cocos-Malays' place both in the history of the South-East Asian slave-trade and in the greater British Empire.

About the author

John Mateer is a writer, poet and curator. His work includes essays, books of poems and Semar's Cave: an Indonesia Journal. For two decades he has published criticism on contemporary art. He was on the steering committee of The South Project, a Melbourne-based venture which developed cultural links across the Southern Hemisphere. In 2005 he was a fellow at the Iowa International Writing Program, supported by the Chicago Humanities Festival, and 2012 he was the Australia Council’s inaugural art writer-in-residence at ACME, London.

John Mateer has lectured and read his work in many countries. Recent presentations include a three-day seminar on the metaphor of the museum at Maumaus art school in Lisbon and a paper on Damien Hirst and Egyptology at the Afro-Europeans conference at Senate House, London. He convened the 2013 symposium The Ambiguity of our Geography at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, as part In Confidence: Reorientations in Recent Art, the Indian Ocean-focused exhibition he curated for that institution. Currently he is an honorary research fellow at the University of Western Australia, researching traces of the explorer William Dampier's voyages in Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels.

When: 6pm Monday April 13, 2015

Where: Asia Bookroom, Unit 2, 1 - 3 Lawry Place, Macquarie. ACT

RSVP: By the morning of April 13, either by phoning 6251 5191 or Email Us

Admission by gold coin donation to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation

If you can't join us on April 13 and would like to buy a signed copy of John Mateer's The Quiet Slave, email us and we will organise this for you.