Interview with Renee Pettitt-Schipp - The Archipelago of Us

Reneé Pettitt-Schipp was teaching in Beaconsfield when she felt the call, first to move professionally to Fitzroy Crossing in the Kimberley region of Western Australia to work with Indigenous people, and then to Christmas Island to work with detained asylum seekers. A year or so later she moved again, this time to the Cocos (Keeling) Islands.

Her experiences in these remote places inspired her first collection of poetry, The Sky Runs Right Through Us, which was shortlisted for the Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript and the CHASS Australia Prize, as well as winning the WA Premier’s Literary Award for an Emerging Writer.

Now, Reneé’s non-fiction work about returning to Christmas and Cocos Islands, The Archipelago of Us, has just been published by Fremantle Press.

The book is mentioned in some reviews as a travel narrative and a memoir, but it is much more than that. It is a deeply reflective and thought-provoking look at Australia’s complicated history with Christmas and Cocos (Keeling) Islands and the asylum seekers Australia detained there.

Long after many Australians will have forgotten just what happened there in the name of border protection, people will be reading The Archipelago of Us to learn of and experience the human scale of Australia’s treatment of refugees during a troubling period of our country’s history.

They will be then asking themselves, as the author asks now at the end of her book, is Australia really the land of the fair go, and was it ever?

Renee Pettitt-Schipp kindly sat down to discuss her book with our editor, Michael Barker, and to make this podcast about it. It’s a discussion you will enjoy. The power of gratitude shines through.

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