Renee Pettitt-Schipp on book The Archipelago of Us, teaching asylum seekers and finding serenity in Denmark

Poet and writer Renee Pettitt-Schipp’s home near the Wilson Inlet in Denmark is surrounded by natural bushland, an oasis that feels miles away from anywhere, and not just a few minutes drive from the centre of town. The setting was a world away from the heavy topics Pettitt-Schipp covers in her autobiographical book, The Archipelago of Us, which covers her experiences working as a teacher with asylum seekers on Christmas Island for several years from 2011, and her return to the island in 2016. After working with migrant and refugee children at a school in Fremantle, Pettitt-Schipp felt called to do more for asylum seekers and refugees, and moved with her family to the external Australian territory to work as a teacher. Initially, she worked with young children, some of whom had only been on the island for a matter of hours after coming off asylum seeker boats, before venturing into the detention centre where she taught English to men in their late teens and early 20s. “That was life-changing because those young men were actually able to tell me their stories,” she said. “That had a huge impact on me, to understand my own good fortune, I didn’t understand how lucky I was.” In her book, Pettitt-Schipp takes the reader on a journey that examines the concept of Australia as a “fair go nation” and her experiences living and working on Christmas Island. “I try and sit with (the reader) on my shoulder, and I’m as honest as I possibly can be,” she said. “The book really exposes my vulnerability and what I experienced, but I feel like it’s a really honest book, and I hope that the reader can come with me, and I try to be the eyes of the everyday Australian.” Pettitt-Schipp said she found the idea of a “fair go” was far from reality on Christmas Island. “I think I thought that Australia did care about refugee people, and I thought that they were trying to do the right thing,” she said. “And so the longer I stayed, the more that I understood something much more complicated than that was happening. “‘What I could see was happening was that by taking asylum seekers away from the public eye, they were less likely to be understood as people, it dehumanised asylum seekers.” One interaction she had with an asylum seeker had a profound impact on her. “There was actually a point where I felt my life change, which sounds a bit dramatic, but that’s what happened,” she said. The man told her about a day when he was playing cricket at a park in Afghanistan when a group of men with rifles arrived on the back of a truck and opened fire on the men, women and children who were playing cricket there. “And he said to me, ‘Why, why did that happen?’. “And what do you say? “What happened for me in that moment was like, I have this choice in this moment where I can either distance myself from him and just respond to the poem that we’re trying to write together, or I can let his story in and think of what it means for me, as a person of privilege, and as an Australian, to hear that story. “And I think from then on I felt responsible to do everything I could until mandatory detention was ended.” Her experiences working with asylum seekers pushed her to advocate on their behalf, but felt the society on Christmas Island was hostile to that, where there was a pressure to be silent and “not cause trouble”. “You’re in this tiny place with this tiny community and doing a very political job,” she said. “It was a bit of a pressure cooker.” When a friend living in detention attempted suicide, it was the “last straw” for Pettitt-Schipp and she and her family moved to the Cocos Keeling Islands, almost 1000km away from Christmas Island. She found the move a healing experience. “Cocos was just postcard perfect,” she said. “We had a house where in the morning, we’d take our coffee down and literally watch the turtles grazing on the reef, they’d be popping their heads up. “I think this deep joy resides where we see life thrive, so I feel like being on the atoll opened me up in every way, to beauty and heartache, all of it.” During the two years that she lived there, she worked on her poetry book The Sky Runs Right Through Us which won the WA Premier’s Literary Award for an Emerging Writer in 2019. In 2014, Pettitt-Schipp returned to WA but went back to Christmas Island in 2016 to undertake research for a PhD. Once she returned to the island, Pettitt-Schipp felt compelled to write about her experiences working with asylum seekers in the detention centre. But it wasn’t until she moved to Denmark five years ago that she felt able to revisit some of the emotionally difficult parts of her time on Christmas Island to write her book. “I wrote 50,000 words in a couple of months,” she said. “The story had just built up so much in me that by the time I got some silence, and some space, the words just poured out. “It was the silence, that really was so helpful, but also there’d be kangaroos sunbaking when I was writing, and all those things helped to hold that balance between things that are beautiful in the world, and things that you almost can’t face, they’re so difficult. “So, I felt that I was held, I was nurtured within the difficult work that I had to do.” Pettitt-Schipp will launch The Archipelago of Us at Tea House Books in Denmark on May 27 and at an in-conversation event with Sarah Drummond at the Albany Public Library on June 1. Tickets for the Denmark event are available at https://bit.ly/3ofVUsF and to the Albany event from https://bit.ly/434p7We Lifeline: 13 11 14