Dear Mr. Tayyeb Shah,
I came to Australia as an international student from Mumbai, India in 1998. One reason that attracted me to Australian institutions of higher education was their commitment to creativity, to intellectual rigour and to encouraging a plurality of ideas.
I wrote a book of short stories called The Permanent Resident, mainly to chronicle the lives of Indians in Australia, including the lives of international students. This book is published by UWAP. It has since won a NSW Premier’s Literary Award 2018 (Multicultural), been very well-reviewed in Australia and India, is on the syllabi of a number of universities and on several “must-read” booklists. This would not have happened without UWAP, particularly Terri-ann White, championing my book.
Since its publication, I have had innumerable conversations with readers of my book who are international students from India and China, as well as potential international students considering Australia as a study and work destination. These people are hungry for stories about what it might be like to live in Australia, to experience the country, to get a true sense of life as an outsider here, a true sense that is difficult to get from news media and advertisements.
The books that UWAP produce every year give outsiders a sense of life in Australia, from chronicling Noongar culture to chronicling life as an immigrant (see The Historian’s Daughter by Rashida Murphy, and The Jihad Seminar by Hanifa Deen just two of many UWAP authors). Additionally, UWAP is one of the few publishers in Australia who consistently publishes South Asian authors, providing Australians with access to the fresh voices of writers from the South Asian region, and contributing to a reciprocal relationship between the cultures of India and Australia. This includes Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s iconic work, The Annihilation of Caste, with an ‘Introduction’ by Arundhati Roy.
As a former international student myself, my decision to come to Australia was shaped by the sense of Australia I received from reading its fiction and its poetry. And where would people like you and me be without the words of writers who changed the way the British empire imagined its colonies, who paved the way for us to be considered as equals? UWAP is a ship of ideas sailing through the Indian and Pacific oceans, carrying many international students with it as it reimagines this continent. The work that UWAP does is intangible, immeasurable and therefore priceless.
I urge you to #SAVEUWAP . I urge you to guarantee funding for UWAP in the short and long term, not least because it is in the interests of the University of Western Australia to have a flagship publishing house providing potential international students with a multiplicity of visions of what it is like to live in Australia.
Yours sincerely,
Dr. Roanna Gonsalves
The petition: https://www.change.org/p/university-of-western-australia-dear-university-of-western-australia-reinstate-uwa-publishing
Some books by international authors of South Asian heritage published by UWAP
