Your award-winning documentary, Our African Roots, unearths Australia’s forgotten Black African history. Did making the film inspire Black Convicts, or was it the other way around?

The book came before the documentary. While writing Black Convicts, it became apparent very quickly that many Australians were unaware of these histories, and I wanted a starting point of sorts which led to the creation of Our African Roots. I was also aware that not everyone will pick up a history book, for various reasons, and wanted to ensure that at the very least, audiences were aware of the existence of people of African descent and of their contribution to the foundation of the nation state we call Australia. 

How did your creative process differ between making a film and writing a book? Do you find one medium more fulfilling than the other, and if so, why?

I love both for various reasons. Filmmaking is my first love. I love how collaborative it is with so many people contributing to the final product, while writing is done in isolation and alone. I enjoy interrogating ideas from multiple perspectives with my collaborators, and writing a book meant that this part of the creative process wasn’t as accessible until the manuscript was done. I did try to weave some of my filmmaking process into the writing of the book – whether that was through interviews, travelling, and engaging with non-traditional archives including art and music.

Television documentaries come with their own limitations and making work for a broad mainstream audience is more challenging than most people realise. Film – once financed – moves faster, and I find I can move on from a project once it’s done. There’s also an immediacy with film – once its screened, that’s it for the most part. With writing, the work stays with you long after its entered the world, and people arrive at the work in their own time. Books take time to find their audience.

Working with the moving image and balancing entertainment with information is not a concern I had when writing Black Convicts. I had more freedom and writing the book offered me the space to think more deeply, and spend more time exploring ideas and themes. That said, it also came with its own restrictions which were dictated by writing an academic history that would hopefully be accessible to a wider audience. I went into writing Black Convicts as a curious writer and came out a Historian. It changed my life in ways working on a film haven’t.

In Black Convicts, you highlight the critical role of archival research in uncovering the stories of Black convicts. What were some of the challenges you faced when accessing or interpreting historical records, and how did you navigate these obstacles?

The biggest challenge was just how little firsthand documentation exists written by convicts of African descent themselves. Attempting to reconstruct their lives from scant, often racist, colonial archives was incredibly challenging. Reading between the lines of power, and being aware of who was recording and who was being recorded, added to the challenges. I attempted to write an ethical history which centred the human experiences of Black people who are often not deemed as credible historical actors. It meant questioning, through the framework of Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot, how power operates in the production of historical narratives. In doing this, I sought to minimise epistemic harms and not reinforce historical narratives that continue to silence and omit histories from the margins.