The award-winning Australian-American author and environmentalist Geraldine Brooks says that at as a self-described “feminist tree-hugging pinko”, she was shocked to have been honoured with admission as an officer of the Order of Australia.
“These awards have tended to be a bit disproportionately blokey and big-end-of town, so it’s nice, as a woman who sits on the side of the political spectrum that I do, to have been awarded,” Brooks says, talking to Guardian Australia from her home in the US state of Massachusetts.
“It hits me in a very deep place, as I remember when Gough Whitlam introduced the Order of Australia in 1975 when I was 19 years old. I remember thinking it was terrific that we could stop tugging our forelocks and have something legitimately Australian.
“But that 19-year-old girl never would have thought she would have ended up with one. I’m absolutely thrilled about it.”
Brooks is the author of five novels, her most recent being The Secret Chord which was released last year. Her second novel, March, won her a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2006. Her career has also seen her work as a journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald and the Wall Street Journal, including as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans.
But when speaking of the work she is most proud of, Brooks mentions her time spent advocating to improve literacy among Indigenous children in her former role as an ambassador with the Indigenous Literacy Foundation of Australia.
“We need to address the fact that only 40% of Indigenous kids are finishing high school, and until we get literacy levels up, that won’t improve,” Brooks says.
“Australia Day is a day where we need to be able to hold two thoughts in our minds simultaneously. We can celebrate that we have managed to build a fantastic country, but must remember what we have now was bought at a terrible price to Indigenous people.”
Brooks said she would not be releasing a book anytime soon, as she was about to “return to my roots” and embark on a journalistic assignment to the Middle East, which she can’t yet reveal much about.
“It’s been a while since I felt I could take these assignments on as I’ve had young kids, but they’re old enough now that they don’t need me hovering over them anymore,” she says.
“But I’m aware that it’s a much more dangerous place now than when I was first doing this.”
