The Arrival Essay

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The Arrival
The Arrival is a migrant story told as a series of wordless images that might seem to come from a long forgotten time. A man leaves his wife and child in an impoverished town, seeking better prospects in an unknown country on the other side of a vast ocean. He eventually finds himself in a bewildering city of foreign customs, peculiar animals, curious floating objects and indecipherable languages. With nothing more than a suitcase and a handful of currency, the immigrant must find a place to live, food to eat and some kind of gainful employment. He is helped along the way by sympathetic strangers, each carrying their own unspoken history: stories of struggle and survival in a world of incomprehensible violence, upheaval and hope.

The Arrival
The Arrival is a migrant story told as a series of wordless images that might seem to come from a long forgotten time. A man leaves his wife and child in an impoverished town, seeking better prospects in an unknown country on the other side of a vast ocean. He eventually finds himself in a bewildering city of foreign customs, peculiar animals, curious floating objects and indecipherable languages. With nothing more than a suitcase and a handful of currency, the immigrant must find a place to live, food to eat and some kind of gainful employment. He is helped along the way by sympathetic strangers, each carrying their own unspoken history: stories of struggle and survival in a world of incomprehensible violence, upheaval and hope.

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‘The suitcase’ pencil on paper

‘The old country’ pencil on paper

‘Cloud’ pencil on paper

‘Flock’ pencil on paper
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The following is an extract from an article written for Viewpoint Magazine, describing some of the ideas and process behind this book.

Looking over much of my previous work as an illustrator and writer, such as The Rabbits (about colonisation), The Lost Thing (about a creature lost in a strange city) or The Red Tree (a girl wandering through shifting dreamscapes), I realise that I have a recurring interest in notions of ‘belonging’, particularly the finding or losing of it. Whether this has anything to do with my own life, I’m not sure, it seems to be more of a subconscious than conscious concern. One contributing experience may have been that of growing up in Perth, one of the most isolated cities in the world, sandwiched between a vast desert and a vaster ocean. More specifically, my parents pegged a spot in a freshly minted northern suburb that was quite devoid of any clear cultural identity or history. A vague awareness of Aboriginal displacement (which later sharpened into focus with a project like The Rabbits) only further troubled any sense of a connection to a ‘homeland’ in this universe of bulldozed ‘tabula rasa’ coastal dunes, and fast-tracked, walled-in housing estates.

Being a half-Chinese at a time a place when this was fairly unusual may have compounded this, as I was constantly being asked ‘where are you from?’ to which my response of ‘here’ only prompted a deeper inquiry, ‘where do your parents come from?’ At least this was far more positive attention than the occasional low-level racism I experienced as a child, and which I also noticed directed either overtly or surreptitiously at my Chinese father from time to time. Growing up I did have a vague sense of separateness, an unclear notion of identity or detachment from roots, on top of that traditionally contested concept of what it is to be ‘Australian’, or worse, ‘un-Australian’ (whatever that might mean).

Beyond any personal issues, though, I think that the ‘problem’ of belonging is perhaps more of a basic existential question that everybody deals with from time to time, if not on a regular basis. It especially rises to the surface when things ‘go wrong’ with our usual lives, when something challenges our comfortable reality or defies our
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