An Intruder’s Guide to East Arnhem Land – winner of the NT Book of the Year

Andrew McMillan

It is very good news indeed that my old friend Andrew McMillan has won the inaugural NT Book of the Year award earlier this month for his book An Intruder’s Guide to East Arnhem Land.

Couldn’t happen to nicer bloke!

Andrew and I, as our mutually faulty memories recall, first met sometime in 1978 – I think it was at one of his famous ‘bunkers’ – the various bolt-holes he’s constructed over the years and in which he writes and lives.

The first of these I went to was a flat on the border of Kings Cross & Elizabeth Bay in Sydney’s inner-city badlands.

I recall helping him cart boxes of books, parachute silk and the various detritus of a rock and roll writer’s life and helping with the move to the next bunker in a wrecked 150 year-old cottage down the bottom of the hill in Camperdown, a bunker that I spent many a pleasant hour in over the next few years before Andrew moved up to Darwin sometime in the 1980s.

Andrew’s memory of our first meeting is a bit different – his recollection is that we met at an:

“…outdoor Sports gig in Victoria Park below Sydney Uni in early ‘78 and we got chatting about Vietnam war books, but I gathered that day that we’d met up before that. The next time was in Newcastle when Sports supported Thin Lizzy and you dragged me backstage to raid the Irish band’s rider for food and booze while they were on stage. Thirty something years of mischief.”

(C) Paul Worstead

A little clarification for the reader – Andrew’s favourite Vietnamese war (I prefer the Vietnamese term – the  ‘American war’) book is Michael Herr’s participant-point-of-view book on the American war – Dispatches – mine was Bernard Fall’s Hell in a Very Small Place about the siege of Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

And from about 1976 I’d been working with rock and roll bands out of Melbourne – first with a rag-bag ex-Sydney post-hippy band called Uncle Bob’s Band, and then with a ‘pseudo-feminist’ band called Stiletto.

Then one day a wonderful band called The Sports called me up and I spent the next few years traveling, always traveling – up and down the pubs and clubs of Australia’s east-coast, England, Scotland etc – somewhere Andrew and I first met up – me in my job as a live sound engineer/roadie – he as a rock and roll journalist.

Any variety of booze and drugs could have been in the mix (excuse the pun) somewhere. But that was a long time ago.

Anyway, back to the present…

Earlier this month the local ABC Stateline Program put together a neat little piece about the NT Book of the Year award that interviewed most of the authors of the six short-listed books, starting with Andrew (maybe they knew something?!).

As Andrew told the ABC’s Louisa Rebgetz:

“The thing I love about the Territory is that the history is on the ground and the culture is still alive.”

“Aboriginal culture here is so strong and so few people are writing about it that it’s just a treasure chest that I’ve had the opportunity to trawl through. The art, the music, the leadership, the political nouse and all things cultural that are coming out of north-east Arnhem Land really impressed me. I thought that was well worth exploring and there were stories there that needed to be told.”

Rebgetz:

“And he told those stories through this book- An Intruder’s Guide To East Arnhem Land. It’s one of six books to be shortlisted for the 2009 Northern Territory Book of the Year. First published eight years ago, it was updated and re-printed in 2007.

Andrew McMillan:

“The first edition pretty much sank without a trace and I wanted to update it so I wrote a new final chapter bringing in the intervention and what had happened in those previous 6 or 7 years.”

In a ceremony at the NT Parliament a more than slightly nervous, but certainly proud and happy, McMillan accepted his award from Marion Scrymgour, in her last official function as NT Arts Minister:

“The winner of the Chief Minister’s Northern Territory Book of the Year for 2009 is Andrew McMillan for An Intruder’s Guide To East Arnhem Land.”

Andrew McMillan:

“I certainly wasn’t confident and to be honest I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night. It buys me a lot more time for writing so i don’t have to go out and get a real job. I’m still trying to get over it. I think I’ll go and have a couple of cool ales and wait for it to sink in.
It’s a wonderful thing having that recognition from one’s peers. I think it’s a fairly important book so it’s lovely that it’s got that recognition.”

Andrew’s Award includes a wedge of cash and support to attend at various writers festivals, schools and other promotional activities in support of his book and the award. The NT Book of the Year award, and lots of other activities that support NT writers are run by the NT Writer’s Centre, based in Darwin but very active across the NT.

Got a story about Andrew or thoughts about his books? Leave a comment on this story!