A Jewish writer’s Indigenous ‘everyboy’

Jacqueline Rule has a way with words. She writes lightly, simply, but far from simplistically. Her cosmopolitan life so far, her academic studies in law and literature, her curiosity and empathy, all underpin her view of the world and her expression of it. Her conversation is the same, despite the depths we navigate.

Rule’s first novel, The Leaves, is beyond moving. The recently-published book traces the brief, tragic and historically significant life of Luke, a young boy who loses his mother. Little is made of his Indigeneity, except a passing reference at the very beginning, which makes the reader forget the colonial lesson the pages are soaked in and makes Luke an everyman – or “everyboy” – whose experiences go straight to the heart, unfiltered.

“I think it has some important things to say,” Rule says, diffidently. She admits that it is deceptively simple and that its constant change of register, not only in tone but visually, on the page, makes it important for the reader to pay attention. “It does demand a close read. But I'm hoping, certainly from the responses that I've had, that readers get into the language of the book quite quickly, that they enter the world and they stay.”

Some of the motifs are beautiful, especially the botanical ones. Cascading jacaranda flowers, their petals and their freshly budding leaves, are present throughout. So are buildings which start out magical and turn out not to be bleak. Some things may be surprisingly positive, like the companionship among the homeless in a city camp that provides food and protection at night.

Some are far grimmer than we realise as we hear quick grabs about current affairs. Like the reports I kept hearing of the death in custody of the Indigenous teenager in a WA detention centre, that led the half-hour ABC radio news bulletins but lasted for only seconds, in the background as I was writing this article.

Rule’s narration of Luke’s time in many foster homes, his decision that homelessness would be better, and his arrest in the camp for trying to protect the old lady beaten by police shows that reality exists in a different register.

Rule was born in South Africa into an Orthodox Jewish family, though she now considers herself only culturally a Jew. She has a twin sister and a brother. Her mother published travel books, and her father was a magazine publisher. “I have a very early memory of standing in his printing factory and watching the ink blot onto the pages of these giant newspaper reels,” she says. “That's probably where I fell in love with the written word because I’d stand there for hours, just watching.

“My father was wildly imaginative. There was a lot of culture and a lot of literature in the household. And a lot of political awareness as well. There was a huge amount of conversation about social justice.”

She was a daydreamer at school and constantly buried in books at home. Justice and literature both continued to preoccupy her. When her father’s business took the family to the UK, she enrolled at the University of London and finished as an external student when the family moved again, this time to Sydney, where she stayed.

The distance didn’t stop her from earning the University’s 150th Anniversary Prize for Academic Achievement in English Literature. She then graduated in law in Sydney and was admitted as a solicitor to the NSW bar. She worked as a researcher in law and in literature at UTS and the University of Sydney, and spent years supporting a specialist committee on youth detention.

Rule earned her PhD about 15 years ago, studying the intersection between her undergraduate disciplines: in narrative ethics, interpretive practices and the presentation of trauma in fiction. With this CV and having been inculcated in the oppression represented in both South African and Jewish history from childhood, the subject matter of her first novel, and the nuances contained within it, are not surprising.

There has been considerable dispute about non-Jewish writers tackling the Holocaust, most recently in the international controversy over Heather Morris’s novels (which didn’t stop Stan from making a series out of The Tattooist of Auschwitz). And considerable energy has been expended in recent years explaining why only Indigenous people should speak for the victims of colonial oppression.

The Leaves is so subtle and so utterly on Luke’s side, however, and Rule has been so immersed professionally in the realities of the Stolen Generation and of Indigenous deaths in custody, that it is impossible to imagine anyone taking offence. Rule is respectfully comfortable with her contribution to the genre.

“I do have a PhD in the ethics of representing historical trauma through the form of the novel,” she says. “And it's interesting because at the time, about 15 years ago, this kind of censorship, this ‘own voices’ climate... Well, it was very laissez-faire. Anyone could write anything. It was as if there were almost no boundaries.”

In fact, when she started worrying about the limits she should observe in tackling “delicate historical subject matter”, her supervisor told her she was taking a very conservative position. Beginning this book in a different climate, she says, cost her many sleepless nights.

“I’d spent three years of my life examining the ethics of representing historical fiction through trauma. I went back to the questions that I asked myself in my thesis. I don't believe in censorship. I don't think that there's anything to gain by shutting stories down. But I think what's more important, from an academic perspective, is why you tell the story. What are you hoping to achieve? Are you telling one that opens up the past in an honest testimonial?”

I was lucky that I began The Leaves without having read anything about it, not even the notes on the back cover. The story was intensified by the blind turns it took, the shocks along the way that testified to the power of its telling. I re-read it a week later and the narrative was as powerful, the quirks of stylising on the page as intriguing. Rule does have a way with words.