INSPIRE: Denmark author Renee Pettitt-Schipp finds inspiration in the Great Southern’s wilderness and history

The Great Southern’s rich history and dramatic landscapes will become the foundation for Renee Pettitt-Schipp’s next poetry collection, as the acclaimed local writer explores the region’s ecology and history. Having called the small coastal town of Denmark home for almost seven years, Pettitt-Schipp is most well-known for her work, both poetry and non-fiction, stemming from her experiences on Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, teaching English to asylum seekers from across the world. A teacher by trade, Pettitt-Schipp first started teaching migrant and asylum seeker children in Beaconsfield Primary School’s Intensive English Centre. “It was really satisfying, I loved it, but I started to feel that if I could meet kids as soon as they came off the boat that I could make so much more of a difference before they experience prejudice and intolerance,” she said. So when a job came up on Christmas Island for a teacher in 2011, she applied and moved with her family to teach in one of Australia’s most well-known immigration detention centres. What she found and experienced there, the relationships she forged with her former students, and their treatment by the wider Australian population, changed the course of her life irrevocably. “There was just such an enormous gap between the way asylum seekers were being represented in the media and the people I was meeting every day,” Pettitt-Schipp said. “People were saying they could be potential terrorists, and I was teaching these young Afghan men who were telling me they just missed their mums.” She advocated for her students tirelessly during her time on the island, and didn’t stop when she was forced out of her job. After a friend attempted suicide in detention, Pettitt-Schipp made the decision to move to the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, and found the escape she so desperately needed. However, within weeks of the relocation, asylum seekers started arriving in the islands in large numbers for the first time, and she felt the pull to write about what she saw. Her debut poetry collection, The Sky Runs Right Through Us, landed on shelves in 2018 to State and national acclaim. Her second offering, The Archipelago of Us, is a non-fiction book based on her personal experiences living on Christmas Island. Pettitt-Schipp said making the switch from poetry to non-fiction was scary in more ways than one. The Border Force Act was passed in 2015 and meant staff at offshore detention centres like Christmas Island could be jailed for up to two years for speaking or writing about what they witnessed. Pettitt-Schipp said the possibility of being punished for writing about her experiences weighed heavy, but she pressed on. “I was trying to figure out how to get this story to the everyday Australian in a way that makes them engage with what’s happening in our name,” she said. “In the end it was about the individual stories, almost about trying to get out of the way so the reader and these asylum seekers can meet each other. “I remember a little boy I taught, he would have been 10 or 11 years old, and he’d been in detention for almost a year. “He was so traumatised by the end . . . he’d lost his childhood. “When I felt like writing this story was too much or it was getting too hard, I would think of him and say to myself, ‘it’s not that hard’.” The secrecy provisions of the Act were amended in 2017 after an appeal to the High Court by Doctors for Refugees, and The Archipelago of Us was published by Fremantle Press in 2023. Her next work, another collection of poetry, will delve into the dramatic natural landscapes, biodiversity and cultural history of the Great Southern region. She was awarded a $50,000 grant in 2020 from Regional Arts WA to continue developing the manuscript, the first full draft of which is now with her editor, one of four inaugural regional artist fellows to receive funding over a two-year period for their creative endeavours. The past five years have seen her work with experts on the region’s flora and fauna, as well as Indigenous elders to wind the complex threads of the Great Southern’s story together into verse. “I’m writing about the Great Southern as a biodiversity hotspot, and the extraordinary beauty around us in such an ancient landscape,’ she said. “I want to tell the story of what we have, but also what hangs in the balance because of climate change, and the complex colonial history we’re sitting on here.”