Fig: narrative Newcastle

Fig—Narrative Newcastle. The region of Newcastle, New South Wales, is rich in narratives, of which the earliest and most enduring of these are embedded in First Nations’ stories of land, people and spirituality. Fig is a short story cycle which views the regional city of Newcastle and its environs, imagining real places and events through a psychogeographic, rather than an historic, lens. Beginning in 1937, with a story built around local dockworkers assisting victimised Chinese seamen to desert their ship, the narratives reflect iconic events such as the 1979 Star Hotel riot and the storm-driven stranding of the coal ship Pasha Bulker in 2007. They also explore schisms in the community, which include more than a century of institutionalised church abuse of children, climate-change activists blockading shipping in the world’s biggest coal port, and the doomed attempt to protect an avenue of fig trees in the CBD, embedded in the psyche of many Novocastrians. Central to the stories are themes of environment, history, industry, community, activism and the impulse or failure to protect. Unity is provided by Newcastle itself, varying representations of the Hunter River, and recurring characters who highlight changing concerns, self-identity and identity with place. Scaffolding this exploration in fiction is an exegesis which hybridises historical research and creative enquiry, examining how writers and texts have expressed place and identity from the pre-colonial physical and orally transmitted stories of the region’s First Nations people to the most recent Newcastle-reflexive novels, memoir fiction, literary memoir and theatre. Due to Newcastle’s long identification with, and domination by, industry, particularly coalmining and steelmaking, it was logical to divide the region’s narratives into three sections: the pre-colonial, penal colony and colonial years; the industrial era of BHP; and contemporary writing of the new millennium. My research reveals the broad, complex and often dark ways Novocastrians have imagined their city, imaginings which in turn provided impetus for my own creative exploration of this place.