Native Australian culture is often lost and forgotten, but one writer wants to bring it the attention it deserves.

Kirli Saunders never saw anyone who looked like her in the books she read or the movies she watched growing up.

As an Australian of Aboriginal descent, her darker skin and her culture was, and still is, rarely featured in the landscape of her home country’s popular media. Native Australian culture is even less represented around the world.

Kirli, an author, poet and emerging playwright, is on a mission to change that with her work, including her children’s book The Incredible Freedom Machines.

The book is beautifully illustrated by well-known Australian artist Matt Ottley and features a young brown girl on a harrowing journey, with only her motorbike as a companion.

Riding motorbikes, while commonplace in Indonesia, is an unusual activity for women in Australia. However, Kirli grew up around motorbikes due to her father’s and grandfather’s interest in riding, and she soon began to love the freedom it offered her.

Her book is based on a specific trip she took at a time when she was struggling with several things in her life.

“At the time I was moving through a hard patch of anxiety and depression,” Kirli said. “After I was done, I sat down and was so grateful at the opportunity to be free of worry and concern.”

Her motorbike acted as one of her freedom machines during the therapeutic journey across the lush green hills and breathtaking coastline of rural Australia.

Igniting imaginations: Kirli reads her book with a translator at the Rimba Baca Library in South Jakarta to a group of children paying rapt attention. (JP/Teddy Hans)

Each person’s freedom machines differ, but they represent the muse in our lives through which we gain freedom from all anxiety and pressure. Whether it be writing, dancing, hiking or riding motorbikes, finding and utilizing one’s freedom machines is essential to stability, health and creativity.

Kirli was invited to Jakarta and Bali as part of the Australian Embassy’s celebration of the National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee (NAIDOC) Week. It is an annual event held each July to honor the history, culture and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

“This is the first time I’ve been able to travel internationally for work as a writer,” Kirli said. “It’s a huge and exciting opportunity, but beyond that it feels really special to talk about cultural loss, disconnection and language.”

During her busy few days in Jakarta, she visited kids at the Rimba Baca Library in South Jakarta in an effort to spur children’s interest in reading. During her time speaking to the small group gathered, she mentioned that although everyone has different freedom machines, books represent a universal freedom machine that anyone can access.

“They transport us all over the world and across time; they are our most powerful tools,” Kirli said.

Kirli also met students, authors and poets at the Salihara cultural center to share her history and her own experiences with writing, including her creative process.

Kirli’s Indonesian tour is also in conjunction with the United Nations’ declaration that 2019 is the International Year of Indigenous Languages.

“Language diversity is something that Australia and Indonesia have in common,” Australian Chargé d’Affaires Allaster Cox said in a press release. “I am very pleased that Ms. Saunders will share her expertise on language preservation with audiences in Jakarta and Bali.”

Curious girl: The Incredible Freedom Machines centers on a young girl who grows up watching others using their freedom machines and feels a need for one of her own. (Courtesy of Scholastic Australia)

While much of her peoples’ traditional language has been lost, Kirli is learning the remnants that are still spoken and incorporating the language into her writing. 

“To see poems being published in aboriginal languages is perfect,” Kirli said.

Attempts to erase the history and language of native Australians can be exemplified by “stolen generations”, which refers to many Indigenous children who were forcibly removed from their families as a result of various government policies from 1905 until 1970.

Kirli’s mother was one of those children, and after she was taken, she never saw her parents again until their funerals.

The mistreatment of her people has fueled her to rekindle Aboriginal culture by weaving English with her native language in poems that are included in her poetry compilation Kindred. Kirli is also the founder of the Poetry in First Languages project at Red Room Poetry in Sydney, which helps to promote poetry in Australia’s indigenous languages.

When she is not writing plays, poems or children’s books, Kirli can be seen utilizing her freedom machines where she lives in southeast Australia, near where her people have lived for thousands of years. These activities include surfing, skateboarding and, of course, riding her motorbike.

Her latest picture book, Our Dreaming, is set to come out later this year, which focuses on the story of her Yuin and Gundungurra ancestors as told to her by her Elders.

While Kirli will never forget her peoples’ past, she also believes it is important to look toward the future, a future where she will continue to vocalize the cause of native Australian representation.

— The writer is an intern at The Jakarta Post