The discomfort of colonised things – by Anaya Shepherd
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLYFROM THE UTAS ‘LOVED STORIES’ PROJECT
2026’s UTAS third-year creative writing students were challenged not to ‘write what you know’ but to ‘write what you love’. What they produced were stories that range from the most personal memoirs to the most outlandish fantasies.. We’ve featured excerpts from five stories on Island Online - read all the excerpts from 2026 and 2025 here - and one full story will appear in Island 179
I’m standing in front of another classroom door. My hand runs along the strap of my bookbag hung on my shoulder. My other hand reaches out for the doorknob but, again, it falters and rests once more at my side. I release a long sigh and try to steady my breathing and keep the tears of frustration at bay. I reach into my pocket to grab my phone so I can check my class schedule one more time. This is the room that I was supposed to be in 15 minutes ago, and I know that, but some part of me was hoping I made this all up and could turn around and go home. But I can’t. I groan as I finally build enough courage to turn the doorknob and push through to the classroom. I’ve put off doing this unit semester after semester, hoping and praying that it would be cut from the course and replaced with something less intimidating. I scramble across the room to the very last row of seats, noticing – as I expected – I am the only brown person in this class. It’s a class about Aboriginal history, and I’m certain I’m one of the few people in here who can relate to any of the topics to be discussed this semester. Which is confirmed as the class progresses week after week and module after module. The tutor and I alone have experienced the conflicts we dissect. Each and every time we have a group discussion, I notice the heads nodding in agreement as someone talks about how confronted they are with their own whiteness and privilege. This is very welcomed and more than okay … until… every eye turns to me. Some more subtly than others, my classmates scan the whole room first before they stop and hold my gaze for just a second too long. That second, and all the other seconds of held eye contact, lets me know that they are waiting to hear what I have to say about my lack of whiteness.
I clear my throat before I say, ‘I share a similar history with Aboriginal people but sometimes I envy the current knowledge of self and home that they have been able to recover in recent years’. I pause and take a breath before continuing, ‘I wish I could experience the same sense of belonging’.
The room goes quiet and the eye contact falls away as they digest what I’ve said. I’m hoping that they are coming to the understanding that not all brown people are the same, not all history is the same and certainly nothing that was taken has been returned.
I escape and pull myself out of the never-ending expanse that is my mind, only to continue fighting with the thoughts that were floating around up there. They connect like a neglected ball of yarn, all knotted and rolled up into each other. I grab hold of one end and untangle it as I ponder, letting the frayed strings of woolly thought brush across the tips of my fingers and cast more memories and made-up scenarios across my mind’s eye. The thing that catches my attention this time is the reminder that I was fortunate to grow up in a place where most people looked like me: brown skin, curly hair and wide noses. Our phenotypic expressions aren’t the only things we share. We all, in some way, have come to exist through a long history of genocide and slavery. My circle of loved ones and I have only recently started to have frequent and passionate discussions about these things. I was never one to start up the race conversation or to be hyperaware of differences in skin colour, but now – living in a predominately white country – I am very conscious of the fact that I am often very different to everyone else.
I swiftly walk out of the store and abruptly come to a halt. I’m standing in a busy street while everything and everyone rushes past me. Faces blur into each other, streams of light flash by, car horns and voices mix together into one big clamour. Most people are rushing to work or back home from their night shift. Everyone is exhausted. Some people just spent their last twenty dollars on kibble for their pet who is the only peace they get in their day-to-day life. Some aren’t even questioning this hustle. Many have accepted that they must sprint to make it to work on time or nervously shuffle as time ticks by on the bus to their shift. Me? I’ve just completed another disappointing errand, if you could even call it that. I wasted another 30 minutes of my life scanning the shelves of the haircare aisle trying to find styling products made for my hair. Not thin strands and ringlets but thick, dense and tightly curled hair. As expected, the only thing I found was hundreds of dollars of crippling disappointment. The curly hair products were already expensive and the one product on the shelf which sort of looked like it could work for my hair was three times the price of everything else. So, after standing in that spot and doing the mental math, which was not needed to tell me I couldn’t afford this product, I rushed out of the store. My initial plan was to head straight to the car to shelter from any eyes that might see my tears, but the scene unfolding around me abruptly halted my escape. I wonder what the people on this street would say if I shouted my frustrations out loud. Would anyone care? Every time a new war or conflict starts, people jump to explaining why inflation must happen as a result. Billionaires must raise the prices of necessities because they couldn’t possibly survive if consumers were purchasing those products daily, at the original price. This was the reason for the lack of diversity in the haircare section as well. Approximately two percent of the population here has tight curls and coils, so why should massive franchises use their money to cater to that minority when they can continue to make millions in profit catering to the vast majority? Because five hundred thousand people simply aren’t adding significant overflow to the pockets of the already disgustingly wealthy. So, I continue to stand here. Just looking at all of the moving bodies while I tangle and untangle the strings in my head. I question why to live ‘comfortably’ I must snap out of my static position. I must participate in the panic happening around me. The panic not about my greater good but the greater good of the companies which need me to neglect my eight hours of sleep to clock-in first thing in the morning. To clock-in presentably. Presentably with no section catering for me in the haircare aisle. No make-up in my skin tone. No jeans that make it past my thighs and on the rare occasion they do, leave a gaping invitation to gaze at my ass crack. Screaming ‘look at me, I’m different and not a singular person who can do anything about it cares to notice that there are hundreds of thousands of mes who are different in the same exact ways’. ▼
Image: Andrea DeSantis - Unsplash
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