New Boy (12 page)

 

came about because, a long time ago, I was one. Most of us end up being the new boy or girl a few times, but this was my big one – the one time in my life that, like Herschelle, I felt so different that I pushed the boundary between ‘new boy' and ‘new alien'.

I was nearly nine years old when my family moved from Northern Ireland to Brisbane. Like Herschelle, I looked like most people I saw in my new life and I spoke English, so the adults I met seemed to think I'd be fine with the move. Also like Herschelle, it was nothing like that straightforward in practice. No one could understand my accent, and I couldn't understand them a lot of the time. And Northern Irish English – or my local dialect of it – and Australian English used words differently. When I wanted to answer in the affirmative, I knew about ‘yes', but I tended to say ‘aye'. In Australia that made me seem like the child of pirates. If something was good, I might call it ‘wick' and that made no sense here at all. It makes me go red even to type it, thinking back to the times when I used it in front of the whole class at Ascot State School and everybody either laughed or seemed baffled. Or both. It's possible to do both at the same time – my new boy experience taught me that. And the ‘bring a plate' debacle? Yep, that might have happened to a certain parent of mine who shall remain nameless.

On top of that, we were leaving conflict behind in Northern Ireland. The army was on the streets there, and Brisbane didn't feel too safe to me early on because I couldn't see the army anywhere. When we went into shops, stopped inside the doorway and lifted our arms out to the sides, no one searched us at all! What kind of crazy risky place was this?

Like Herschelle, I arrived late in a term. But on the first day of the next term, a newer new boy arrived from the Cook Islands. I was chosen to take him on the tour of the school. I wasn't the newest boy any more, and that felt like a big step forward.

This book was my chance to tell a story like that, but in this century. That meant thinking about who might arrive here now and face the same sort of challenges I did. A South African seemed like a likely contender. I've met quite a few South Africans, and now have some in my family, so I knew a bit about the ways in which Australia seemed weird to them. I even wrote the whole story with a South African accent in my head. I might not have got everything right, but I hope it works well enough for any South Africans who read it. I'm very grateful to one in particular, Neve Singh, who read it for me to check that I hadn't gone too wide of the mark.

So who would be the newer new boy today? Who, at One Mile Creek, would seem even more different than Herschelle? I wanted someone who had gone through more, but had a connection with Africa, so that Herschelle would feel that he could be a bridge between the newest arrival and the people of One Mile Creek. I've had some involvement with refugee communities in Queensland, including refugees from African countries, and from that came Roy.

Of course,
New Boy
isn't written only for South Africans or South Sudanese. I hope it'll mean something to anyone who has ever had that not-fitting-in feeling that comes with being the new person in the room. And I hope it will help anyone in any classroom to welcome the next newbie who walks in.

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First published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2015

Text copyright © Nick Earls, 2015

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ISBN: 978-1-74348-506-4