This is the winning entry of the inaugural SBS Emerging Writers' Competition, chosen from more than 2000 entries on the topic of 'Growing up in diverse Australia'.
He pulled up in a beat-up old Honda Civic, the colour of congealed blood. A combination of burgundy and rust, a mélange, like me. If I was choosing a foundation, you might think tan, or honey, or light brown, but none are a true match. Turns out the best colour for me is medium-beige, way whiter than I feel. I always struggled with foundations. What is the right tone to mask my imperfections? How can I disguise myself, cover my breakout melanin? The freckles that hint at the Scottish in my blood, the terracotta of my right arm, the sand of my left. My ghost face. A patchwork of different shades determined by a shifting sun.
The Honda contained a skinny boy-adult with long scraggly brown hair who stared out the driver’s side window like the subject of an old-timey painting. He had an elusive expression, slightly confused. Something made me hold my breath, made me feel like I’d seen the face of my future.
Alana Hicks, winner of the SBS Emerging Writers' Competition 2020. Source: Supplied
Greer, Scott, and I stood in the carpark of the local train station waiting for Scott’s dealer. I was fifteen and I smoked pot. A lot. I was more experienced than Greer in the drug department, despite her spiky dog collar, peroxide pixie cut and labret stud, I was the tougher of the two of us. I’d come from a place of deep violence and complex politics, Papua New Guinea. My mother and I were yanked away from that place after a situation that unfolded in the same amount of time that it takes the sun to set in the pacific. One minute.
The sun blazed as we rolled down our street past a group of men, faces alight with the potential for menace. I conducted the ritual of our arrival home, dashing out of the car with its tinted windows, to the barbed wire six-foot fence, unlocking the padlock and widening the gate just enough for my mother to drive through. But as the sun began its descent, I saw the silhouettes moving faster towards me. Instinctually I hid my scrawny ten-year-old self behind a small, leafless tree. I was expert at hiding, at camouflage. I perfected being invisible. Always look down, don’t make a point of your difference, don’t be too loud. Don’t be too white in the black crowd, don’t be too black in the white one. No-one will notice you if you’re quiet and pretend to be shy. Blend in. Especially at the jawline.
I watched as they surrounded her car, banging on the windows, screaming for her to get out. My father, in the house, shouting the opposite, Don’t get out. I knew she would get out. I was not in the car with her. She would get out, draw attention away from me, and bear the brunt of whatever was to come. She opened the door a crack, they flung it open. I saw a machete move to her throat, I knew my only job was to run. Run to the back door, into the kitchen. By now it was pure darkness. My father was no longer in the living room. I picked up the phone and called the cops. I was trained for this.
She wasn’t hurt. I wasn’t hurt. They took the car, they took her bag. It was empty of Kina, only some Aussie dollars she had recently exchanged for my next solo trip to Sydney. I travelled to Sydney most school holidays, stayed with my grandfather, felt an aloneness I didn’t feel in Port Moresby. Something about having freedom but nowhere to go, no-one to be free with, made the freedom redundant. After the incident, my father took to pacing. All the time pacing, up and down. What to do, what to do. My grandfather solved the problem by dying. He left his old weatherboard worker’s cottage to my father. And so, my mother and I moved, without my older siblings, without my dad, to this cob-webby, strange, poo-coloured house, in a very white, very wealthy Sydney suburb where we would stick out the rest of our lives. The rest of our lives, determined by the sinking of a tropical sun.
All this in me as I began to shape myself after moving to Australia. I didn’t wear my identity on my t-shirt or face like Greer. I didn’t smoke weed to rebel. I smoked to quiet the night terrors. My shaky foundation reverberated in my brain. Made it hard to sleep. To turn my brain off I needed something, and found it. With weed I found other alone-people, others who were trying to suppress a tremor. Grunge music was a place for my detachment, my unease. I related to those sad sack voices calling for help in long, drawn-out whiney tones. Radiohead made me feel like being abnormal was normal, while Nirvana did the same for sadness. Rage Against the Machine sharpened anger into a weapon.
Alana Hicks as a baby with mum Ana. Source: Supplied
The Honda turned into the carpark. We walked slowly towards it, Greer and Scott first, me trailing behind. My heart beating in my ears. Something about this boy. Something I couldn’t put my finger on.
The something was love, falling arse-first. Like a double jump on a trampoline, he made me unexpectedly high, even without the weed. But he was twenty years old and I was not. I couldn’t even drink, but I didn’t need to be eighteen to smoke a tonne of pot. After months of pining, several aborted attempts at forcing a beautiful connection, we were still mostly strangers. Relegated only to interactions based on occasional drug deals. He was a small-time supplier, in it just to smoke his own profits.
One day, after I had finally turned sixteen, I knew what I needed to do. I called his pizza shop, because of course he was a pizza and drug deliverer, and I ordered a Hawaiian. I ordered it as late to closing time as possible, and when he arrived, I asked if he wanted to split it with me, maybe have a cone, chill out in my caravan. Yes, I had a sick caravan. The weatherboard mansion couldn’t contain my anxiety and to make me happy, mum let me have a second-hand caravan in the backyard, decked out in frilly curtains and rash coloured pink walls. Honda Boy and I ate pizza and kissed with greasy lips. The caravan was a Dutch oven filling with our burgeoning love and weed smoke.
Through Honda Boy I saw teenage white culture, the music and skating, the casual misogyny, the cruelty of class.
Through Honda Boy I saw teenage white culture, the music and skating, the casual misogyny, the cruelty of class. I was white enough to be accepted, to have the privilege of not noticing how I was exoticised by this white boy and all the white boys that came after him. The thing he said, the thing I will never forget, caused an earthquake in my Doc Martens. We were sitting in a gutter, I don’t recall why. We were always sitting on the street, that’s what young people did in the 90’s. Sit in the gutter, waiting, always waiting, for something. I don’t remember the conversation that led to it, but for some reason he said, You know, I wouldn’t be with you if you looked like your mother.
I wouldn’t be with you if you looked like your mother.
My vessels were like those cars with the stickers on it, making urgent blood deliveries to different parts of my body. Rushing to my ears, my hands, my feet. Compelling me to get up and abandon whatever this was, and fast. In as long as it takes for a tropical sun to set I recalled the echoes of the words from the mouths of the boys who wanted a piece of me, on their terms only. You’re not Asian, are you? Because I don’t date Asians. You look like a boy. Your pussy is too hairy. You’re a reject. You have a reject body.
People used the term reject flexibly back then, as an adjective, verb, and noun, and sometimes all three at once. Errrrrr reeeeeeeject. These words and their intentions were more baffling than hurtful. My mother endured worse; physical violence, institutionalised exclusion, denial of education, denial of her basic human rights. Words couldn’t penetrate the barrier of my shell, her experiences hardened me. The people who said them were not worth crying over. As she’s always said, I know who I am, no one can take that away. Fearless.
Honda Boy would have been lucky if my mother looked twice at him. He was afraid of her blackness, and of what it represented to me. I recognised it in a lot of the boys, they wanted a me without my culture, without my mother. A mask. I tried to cultivate that mask, but over time masks will crack, leaving chasm-like craters in the dead and dying clay.
The Australia of my youth was not diverse. It was medium-beige.
I migrated a second time, from the Hills to the Inner West, where the colour palette increased and poets somehow made money. Here was a different Australia again. Everything that came before viewed through a post-millennial telescope, and commonly agreed to be daggy and stupid. Everything was simultaneously much better, and much worse. I wound my way through the veins of the city, the illustrated alleys of the west and greater west, the hills, mountains and beaches. The ovals, the parks, the pubs. Finding beautiful-weirdoes in their many forms. Each meeting and moment moulding and shaping my clay.
Alana Hicks as a child. Source: Supplied
And I know that all over, people wear masks, a faded and rusty paint job to shield against the extremities of life - I also know I don’t give a f##k what shade I need to be to blend in. I only hope I resemble my mother.
*Names and some details have been changed to protect privacy
Alana Hicks is a Papua New Guinean-Australian digital content maker living in Sydney. Her short film 'Chicken' recently screened at Flickerfest where she was awarded Best Director. Read more about Alana here:
is on sale July 28. The featured writers include: Alana Hicks, Nadia Johansen, Amy Duong, Nakul Legha, Karla Hart, Sita Walker, Jason Phu, Trent Wallace, Tania Ogier, Miranda Jakich, Bon-Wai Chou, Prateeti Sabhlok, Amer Etri, Cher Coad, Sam Price, Rosie Ofori Ward, Lal Perera, Monikka Eliah, Serpil Senelmis, Margarita D'heureux, Maha Sidaoui, Kaye Cooper, Esmé James, Naeun Kim, Jackie Bailey, Michael Sun, Caitlyn Davies-Plummer, Hugh Jorgensen, Dianne Ussher, and Courtney Theseira.
The SBS Emerging Writers’ Competition is open for entries until September 21. Write a non-fiction memoir story on the theme of ‘Emergence’ for your chance to be awarded the $5000 first place prize, $3000 second place or two runners up prizes of $1000. The top entries will also be published in an anthology by Hardie Grant. Go to to register and find out more.
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