Writing Through Fences, is a writing group primarily made up of people who are or have been directly affected by the Australian immigration industry. It was established in 2013 by Janet Galbraith.
The name Writing Through Fences refers to the ability of writers and artists to reach beyond fences and walls that attempt to contain, define and silence them. The name also situates this group within the long colonial practices of division of country, of displacement and incarceration characteristic of Australia’s ongoing racist history. Writing Through Fences recognises that we live, create and are imprisoned on stolen lands.
Integrity of the writer/artist’s voice is integral to WTF, thus each writer/artist plays an active and determining role in how the group evolves and whether, when, where and how work is published or presented. Arbitrary detention removes an individuals power to make decisions about their own lives – even the most intimate of matters – thus control over voice and representation are not only essential to the individual writer/artist but constitute a breach of the divisive and destructive aims of arbitrary detention. As these writers and artists voices breach the walls that would confine them, those outside the fences are challenged to listen and re-connect.
Throughout history, writing and art-making have been a matter of life and death. Some of these writers and artists have fled persecution and torture as a direct result of their creative work. The writers and artists of Writing Through Fences engage in acts of creation in order to remain alive, in order to survive. Through these creative acts they bear witness to the practices and policies that are played out on their bodies and psyches, practices and policies that would deny their very existence by presenting them as, what one young writers terms, ‘the waste of population’(S. 2014).
Over the past eleven months the group has grown into a strong community of creativity and support. It has become a place of refuge for many. Writing and art-making is an enlivening process where the practitioners are able to define and re-create selves that reach beyond and before the current violences they are experiencing, asserting their different experiences, personalities, styles, histories and literary traditions.
Creation is necessary in all times of destruction. It is necessary to ward off the killing effects of despair. It is necessary in order to assert humanity and sanity within an inhumane and insane system that actively attempts to destroy both of these.
You can find our work at http://thearrivalists.tumblr.com/. If you wish to support this group you can find Friends of Writing Through Fences at https://www.facebook.com/friendsofWTF
To contact Janet Galbraith: galbraith_janet@yahoo.com.au
