Anthony Hopkins

The first draft of Belonging was written during a period when my wife and I were living on the north coast of New South Wales, raising our children. We had moved there from Mparntwe/Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, where I had been working as a criminal defence lawyer at the Central Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service. It was intended to be a one-year sea change – a break from the relentless pace of working at the coalface of the criminal justice system, to focus on sharing the joys and challenges of parenting. One year turned into two, and then three. Space opened for the many extraordinary, mind-blowing and heartbreaking experiences I had had as a young white lawyer working in desert Country, with and for its people, to rise for reflection. With this rising came the realisation that, for all my efforts on behalf of my clients, it was I that had been given a gift. That gift was a glimpse of something vast, and a seed of understanding.

My personal experiences as a lawyer working within the criminal justice system at the intersection of laws, worlds and worldviews are very much the foundation for the novel. At this meeting point, there is breathtaking injustice – individual, intergenerational and systemic – but there is also breathtaking strength, humanity and love. The legal cases, characters and stories that interweave Belonging are real and imagined. But it is not simply my experience as a lawyer that shapes the novel, it is my experience as a newcomer to Country, coming to grips with my place as an inheritor of colonial privilege and power in the story of Country and its peoples. This journey is deeply personal and relational. The novel owes it life to the world of Country, connection, culture and art opened to me by my Warumungu and Luritja wife.

The first draft of the novel was written before I had come to understand myself as a researcher. This was before my time as an academic. From an academic vantage point, I can now see this time of life, submerged in lived experience, as ‘action research’ in which the line between observed and observer becomes indistinct, shifting from view. Its power to shape thinking manifests in those moments when this shifting reveals a mirror and, in it, an image of self, changed by experience. Ultimately, though, without my subsequent work as a researcher in the fields of criminal justice, equality and compassion, this novel may have remained only an unpublished manuscript.