Interview with Author Mark Heyward: On Being Australian and Tasmanian

I interviewed Mark Heyward, author of Crazy Little Heaven: an Indonesian Journey (2013), in a Singaporean café. By chance, I found Heyward’s book in Jakarta, and I knew it was special within two minutes. Heyward—a musician and teacher—writes paragraphs sounding like poetry. Observe:

"I wake to the light and the jungle’s morning chorus… butterflies are about their mysterious business and from where I lie above the river the view is superb, the after-dawn light painting the scene with a clarity and sharpness that will be lost as the day heats up." 

Such mellifluous passages can be found almost every other page, which compensate for Heyward’s sometimes out-of-context historical descriptions. For example, Heyward reiterates a criticism of the Japanese occupation of Indonesia, implying military training of Indonesian recruits was deficient: “they didn’t let us use real guns, we used to parade with sharpened bamboo.” Heyward doesn’t mention in Surabaya, locals drove out the British and Dutch using takeyari ( 竹槍), or bamboo spears, and training with sharpened bamboo acclimated Indonesians to bayonets. (Elizabeth Pisani’s remarkable Indonesia, Etc. (2014) is the better book if you prefer accuracy and context over rhythm and soul.) In any case, Heyward and I ended up talking mostly about Australia and Tasmania. I think you’ll enjoy our conversation.

Q: You write prose like a poet. I assume your talent is due to your background as a musician. What instruments do you play?

A: I mainly play the guitar, and I started writing songs as a teenager. It’s the tradition of my generation growing up, the singer-songwriters like Cat Stevens, James Taylor, Neil Young, and Paul Simon. When you write a folk song, you’re telling a story. Besides the guitar, which I learned at 10 years old, I used to play in folk bands. I also played some piano, banjo, and mandolin, but I’m not a serious musician. Growing up, I was in the choir, so I did a lot of harmony singing. For me, the music is a medium, it’s a medium to tell a story. The important thing is the story.

Q: How old were you when you wrote your first sheet music?

A: We didn’t think of transcribing music like that. I used to write with a friend. Initially, he would write the music, and I would write the lyrics. Music was always around.

Q: Were your parents musical?

A: No. My father was an Anglican minister. I think you call it Episcopalian in the [United] States. I have three brothers, so we focused on music we could play in church. My older brother, who also played instruments and sang, encouraged my musical development. I wasn’t a student in the formal sense, but I would learn from him. 

In those days, we had LPs [long-playing records], and they were expensive. We would spend five Australian dollars for a record, which would be five weeks’ pocket money. So when we would buy a record, we listened to it over and over, and we cherished our collection. We didn’t have Spotify in those days. We called our music “wooden music,” a phrase coined by Crosby, Stills, and Nash. It referred to music you could sit on your front porch and just play. Crosby or Nash used the phrase to contrast their music with newer electric instruments and electric guitars.

Q: If you haven’t visited the Grand Ole Opry in Tennessee already, I think you’d like it. 

A: My plan, when I’m not working full-time, is to do a musical pilgrimage in the States with my son. As an older Australian, the United States was seen as this exciting cultural melting pot, and I listened to American and British music. We didn’t have much we could call Australian music. Early on, a lot of Australian music copied the Americans and Brits.

Q: Who would be an excellent Australian musician unknown outside of Australia?

A: My plan, when I’m not working full-time, is to do a musical pilgrimage in the States with my son. As an older Australian, the United States was presented as this exciting cultural melting pot, and I listened to American and British music. We didn’t have much we could call Australian music. Early on, a lot of Australian music copied the Americans and Brits.

Q: Who would be an excellent Australian musician unknown outside of Australia? 

A: Paul Kelly. But he was called provincial because he writes songs about us, about Australia, and he sings in an Australian accent. Forty years ago, we had something called “cultural cringe…” [Editor’s Note: as a corollary, see “Jindyworobaks Movement.”] Australians felt like we weren’t good enough, right? The “serious” culture was over in Britain, America, or Europe.

“The numbers are against us, and an inevitable quantitative inferiority easily looks like a qualitative weakness, under the most favourable circumstances—and our circumstances arc not favour­able. We cannot shelter from invidious comparisons behind the barrier of a separate language; we have no long-established or interestingly different cultural tradition to give security and dis­tinction to its interpreters; and the centrifugal pull of the great cultural metropolises works against us. Above our writers—and other artists—looms the intimidating mass of Anglo-Saxon cul­ture. Such a situation almost inevitably produces the charac­teristic Australian Cultural Cringe… The Cringe mainly appears in an inability to escape needless comparisons. The Australian reader, more or less consciously, hedges and hesitates, asking himself, ‘Yes, but what would a cultivated Englishman think of this?’” — A.A. Phillips, “The Cultural Cringe,” Meanjin Volume IX, Number 4, Summer 1950

Q: What do you like about Australia? 

A: [chuckles] Australia would siphon American culture. America for us is a big landscape, a country of extremes, and it seemed to have the best and the worst of humanity. There was a lot of ugliness… 

Q: Sure, but what about Australia? 

A: I’m getting there. [We both laugh.] America was this big, impressive landscape, whereas Australia was seen as a worn-down landscape. Not necessarily a negative thing, just old. Culturally, we had this British habit of wanting to understate things, but like America, we had our own myths about equality. At the same time, we had this disrespect for authority, something I like about Australia…

I think it’s our history, a history of convicts, especially in Tasmania, of runaways, of poor people given a chance to get ahead, [of outsiders]. You know, our Senate leader is a gay woman [Penelope Ying-Yen Wong aka Penny Wong]. She was born in Sabah, Malaysia. She’s openly gay, she has a gay family. I just think it’s really cool that attitudes have changed in Australia. 

“Australia was a culture built on British convicts, while New Zealand was a culture built on British coppers' narks.” [narks = informants] -- Mark Lawson, The Battle for Room Service (1993) 

Q: It wasn’t that way before in Australia? 

A: No, it was pretty conservative in many ways. That egalitarian attitude has its pluses and minuses. We have something called the “tall poppy” syndrome, where if one poppy sticks its head out in the field, you cut it off. So the downside of our egalitarianism was that you didn’t want to stand out from the crowd too much. There’s less inclination to rise above, but at the same time, everyone gets a reasonable go. And these are myths. We have our own megarich, we have huge problems with our Indigenous community, who were victims of history in a way… But I like that culture, that “tall poppy” thing, that egalitarianism instinct, that disrespect for authority.

We have this term, “larrikin,” it’s an Australian term, but it’s probably from the Irish originally, I guess. [Editor’s Note: The word larrikin, meaning “mischievous or frolicsome youth,” originates from England’s West Midlands region. It was also related to “larrack” in the Yorkshire dialect, i.e., “to lark about.”] It refers to a man or a woman who’s a bit naughty, a bit rough around the edges… like a ruffian, but in a nice way. You know, it’s a myth, but it’s an attractive character. I like that.

Q: What’s interesting is that Australian men, per capita, have suffered more wartime deaths than many, if not most other nations. How do you reconcile “following orders” in the military with a rapscallion national character? 

A: During the World Wars, WWI and WWII, Australians were still very much looking to Britain as their mother country. I think that’s changed now. We had a referendum for republicanism a few years ago, but it was too early. Moving away from home and growing up an independent nation isn’t always a straightforward journey, but I get your point. At the same time, there are so many stories about Australian soldiers, particularly from the first World War, praising Australians for their skills and their bravery, but also calling them very disobedient, very hard to manage. British generals were constantly despairing about Australian soldiers because they kept running away to brothels in Alexandria or somewhere else, and then they’d re-appear when they felt like it. [Editor’s Note: Gallipoli (1981) is an excellent movie about Australian soldiers.]

“While considered excellent soldiers, Australians were known for their easygoing natures, their ability to enjoy themselves heartily when on leave, as well as their reputation for a relaxed attitude to discipline.” [Emphasis mine] — from Australian War Memorial website

The wars fought on Australian soil are not always acknowledged, such as between Europeans and the Indigenous. Officially, they were never acknowledged as wars until now. I was taught when the British arrived in Australia, it was terra nova, and the British stuck their flag here, claiming the country legally for the Crown. Textbooks ignored the fact there was a 40,000 year-old culture here before the British. So the battles and events between the white settlers/invaders and the Indigenous, it’s history, right? But it’s only just become a subject we can talk about, explore, and confront. It’s different in America, where at least you are taught about frontier wars. I grew up playing cowboys and Indians, in fact. 

Q: James Baldwin has excellent commentary on that topic. Speaking of excellent orators ahead of their time, Paul Keating’s “Redfern” address did in fact raise the issue of Indigenous mistreatment in 1992. 

A: I’m a big fan of Paul Keating. He’s brilliant, and he was a statesman. He dragged Australia forward, not just on that issue, but engagement with Asia. Up to then, Australia had been seen as some kind of white outpost at the end of the world. He and his predecessor Bob Hawke turned that around. Keating said we’re part of Asia, we’re an Asian country, so Keating, he’s one of my heroes. He was a bit of a larrikin. 

Q: You grew up in Tasmania. What are differences between mainland Australia and Tasmania? 

A: The Indigenous people in Tasmania had been separate from the mainland since the Ice Age, allowing them to preserve their culture. They numbered a few thousand, only a few “nations.” [Editor’s Note: the tribes were referred to as “nations.”] Officially, British settlers wiped out this “race,” but that story has more recently been re-written, and it is a brutal, brutal history on both sides. I wrote a song about William Laney, also called “King Billy,” and he was the last full-blooded male Indigenous person. After King Billy died, scientists, phrenologists, and anthropologists wanted his body to study evolution, and a colonial official dug up King Billy, chopped his head off, and replaced it with the head of a convict or some other person. That skull ended up in Edinburgh.

Q: So the main difference between Tasmania and mainland Australia is the amount of Indigenous history? 

A: Yeah. [Editor’s Note: Heyward’s strong Aussie accent makes the informal “Yeah” sound more dignified than the American version.] So just to finish that story, it was Monday night, a quiet night, when I played the song about “King Billy,” and the punchline was, “King Billy was the last man to die.” After I finished, this man got up on stage, a big and tall guy, turns out he’s an Aborginal. He says, “I appreciate what you’re doing with the song, mate, but it’s not correct. King Billy wasn’t the last man to die, there are thousands of us around here, you see?” Very powerful moment in my life. I re-wrote the chorus. 

Regarding other differences, Tasmania is an island community, and that affects your view of the world. You’re bounded, right? You know your boundaries. It’s a tight community, and people joke about it—the same jokes they make about other islands. The first thing two Tasmanians do when they meet is work out their connection with each other, “where did you go to school,” "what family are you from," "where were you born" … it’s a compact place. The economy in the 20th century was not that great, because we were isolated. [Editor’s Note: it took me several seconds to understand the word “isolated” in Heyward’s accent. I’m beginning to think the Scots have competition!] The good that came out of that [isolation] was that the culture was not destroyed [by industry] as it was in Sydney. The old colonial buildings are still there [and the history can still be seen]. Tasmania is still wonderful wild country—it’s stunning. There are pockets of temperate rainforest there, some are in Patagonia [but that’s all]. If you look at a map of the Northern Hemisphere in pre-historic times, you would see temperate rainforests everywhere, but not anymore. So it’s a pretty precious environment in Tasmania, a pristine environment, and a sad but interesting history. Sydney was the first colony, then about twenty years later, it was Tasmania, so Tasmania is part of the original psyche of Australia. 

Q: You have four children, two mixed [Aussie-Indonesian] and two not mixed. Do you have any comments on differences in their upbringing? 

A: Bringing up children in Indonesia is a much more communal endeavor. In Australia, the model is the nuclear family, so raising a child, especially as a single parent, can be demanding, tough, and stressful, whereas in Indonesia, it’s much more shared. 

Q: It takes a village. 

A: Yeah, yeah. And if you have the means, it’s easier to hire full-time help, whereas in Australia, at the most, you can hire someone who comes and cleans the house once a week. So parents are more free to do other things and to pursue their interests. In Lombok, kids are brought up in mixed generation households, with their grandparents living with them. It’s a much more normal upbringing.

Q: Any advice for aspiring writers? 

A: The good stuff, it just comes. I guess you just do it, and you learn by doing. A major influence early on was [Brit] Mary Stewart, particularly her Merlin Trilogy. When writing, "set the scene" using all five senses. What is there, what do you see, what do you hear, what can you touch, what do you smell, and what can you taste? 

© Matthew Mehdi Rafat (March 2023) 

Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It is not a verbatim transcript. 

Disclosures: No direct or indirect payment was received or given for this interview; however, I did pay for Heyward’s taxi ride to the airport, which cost about 25 Singaporean dollars.