Last year, when my book of short fictions, Foreign Soil, was released in the United Kingdom, I found myself on the phone with BBC radio, doing a pre-interview. At the end of our lively and in-depth conversation, the producer asked: “So who are the other Australian writers of Afro-Caribbean descent, or from a similar background, who are working in literary fiction—what novels should we be looking out for?” I paused.“There are...well, there are some African diaspora (离散移民社群） and African Australian writers I know who work in a lot of different forms, who I really hope you'll also see on the shelf one day...” I stammered. ”Natasha Jynel. Candy Bowers.”

When I finished the call, I hung up the phone and sat slumped in a kitchen chair for about half an hour. The comradery and support amongst Australian writers from all walks of life on the book trail can be extraordinary, but it can be bitterly isolating on the road sometimes, not seeing a single face like your own.

I love what I do, but there's also deliberating heartache to being a more-than-third-culture-kid, in a country where the subtleties of identity are often lost.

I was born in Sydney, Australia—and have lived here all my life. My mother and father both grew up in London from the age of four or five, but were born in Guyana and Jamaica, respectively. Mine is a complex migration history that spans four continents and many hundreds of years: a history that involves loss of land, loss of agency, loss of language, and loss, transformation, and reclamation of culture.

Before being “settled” by the British in the 1700s, the country I live on was forcefully and unlawfully taken from the Australia's First Peoples. Like other non-Aboriginal Australians, my migrant history forms part of the colonial history of this land: I am settler black, rather than Indigenous (本土的） black. As an emerging writer, writing to this complexity of identity seemed virtually impossible. Though Australian-born, I didn't feel Australian enough to write “Australian” stories. Though my parents were migrants, I wasn't a migrant myself and felt migration stories didn't belong to me. I wondered about writing African diaspora fictions, when I was so many generations removed from the African continent.