Merlinda Bobis’s Fish-Hair Woman: Showcasing Asian Australianness, putting the question of justice in its place

Abstract

Fish-Hair Woman took 17 years to write and was rejected by six publishers – the “gatekeepers” of the Australian publishing industry, according to Bobis. One of main problems when trying to locate the novel as Asian Australian is that it is set in a militarized village in the Philippines, and therefore Australia and the Australian story occupy only a marginal position. This article will study the novel’s attempt to dilute and reverse this centrality by immersing white Australian characters in foreign and dangerous Asian settings. Some theories put forward by trauma and memory studies will also be used to show how Fish-Hair Woman manages to dig up individual traumatic memories from their ruins so that the painful collective past can somehow be reconstructed and brought to the surface, the memory of the disappeared can finally be honoured, and resilience can pave the way for hope in a better future.