Abstracts Political Science

Luk-khrueng Between Worlds

by Supatra May Gill

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Luk-khrueng Between Worlds is a memoir about growing up between cultures, that of my white New Zealand father, and my mother’s Thai culture. My childhood years in Thailand during the 1960s and early 1970s was marked by the war in Vietnam, and the influx of American military personnel who brought significant cultural change to Thailand. My teenage years straddle Thailand and New Zealand where I completed high school and began my working life as a School Dental Nurse. I came to Australia in 1979 as a 20-year-old, seeking to follow my father’s footsteps into the Australian bush. In the Northern Territory I married a man I met while working as a governess on a remote cattle station. Much of my memoir is set in the Australian landscape, from the cattle stations in the country’s north, the vast sheep runs of Queensland and through to the cool mountain environments of the Upper Murray region of southern New South Wales. My love of the land began in the rice paddies of northern Thailand. By intertwining narratives of those childhood years with my experiences in the Australian landscape, I explore the major themes of my life; childhood and intergenerational trauma, family violence, grief, shame, identity and belonging, as well as gender, sexuality and interracial relationships. As an eco-memoir partially set in Australia’s Northern Territory, in my exegesis I examine other memoirs written by white women in the Top End in order to frame my own experiences as an outsider, a migrant and a witness, as well as a beneficiary of settler heritage in a colonised country. This exegesis, written after the devastating bushfires of 2019 that threatened our mountain home, and through the fear, confusion and restrictions of COVID-19, also deals with grief and the sudden loss of my mother in 2021. It is an exegesis reflecting on language and story, and their authority to effect identity, community, citizenship and social and political change.