In the publishing mainstream,a book such as Personal Score – interspersed with poetry,autobiographical writing,interview,history and sporting advice – looks like a novel intervention. Yet it shares familial history with other examples of contemporary Indigenous and small-press publishing – books that combine modes and voices,offering something transdisciplinary and cross-genre. I was reminded ofBlack Wattle,whose authors present their work collectively as “this mob”.Black Wattle was released by Incendium Radical Library,which has published a lot of interesting work.
Personal Score begins,following a quick “pregame” introduction,with an invocation of “they” – “Their first home backed on the North Star football fields in Geebung.” As if writing might form a collective history,the “I” subsumed within the whole. What is this collective? For one thing:not necessarily a collective. “They” may also be an individual pronoun (as it is for van Neerven). It may be part of a larger community. A form of identification. But “they” is also capable of addressing – that is,speaking to,and implicating – the audience. (Which is you. Which is me.)
For Ellen van Neerven,who grew up assigned female at birth and First Nations,who speaks of how “[e]verything around me was telling me I needed to know my place”,perhaps we should consider ours. (Perhaps you already have.)
The game takes place both on and off field. It is mental as well as physical,and depends on more than just an individual player’s skill:“I started shaving and waxing and made an effort to be more ‘feminine’,but I found there was always something that stopped me from being accepted. That game I wasn’t going to win.”
“They” are also capable of anonymity – the anonymity enjoyed by power. Sometimes the anonymity assigned to the silenced. “They″ can become part of what van Neerven,writing of the homophobic “lesbian mafia” comments reported around Australian women’s football,dubs the “more than one” rule:“Put a group of more than one woman together and watch what they call them (bitches). Put a group of more than one man together and watch what they call them (nothing).”
Thus they can be an object. They can be a receptacle. They can be whatever you want them to be.