I’ve been haphazardly writing up a post mortem for Blackbirded after each chapter was published. Here it is, barely cobbled together into a coherent post. I don’t know if this will be of any use.
What I do think is of use is The GAP Bonus Episode podcast on the story, a post-post-mortem featuring myself, my twin brother/alpha/omega reader Liam Gilroy, and my editor Nathan Lawrence. You can listen to it here.
Blackbirding, if you’re not familiar with the term, is a process invented by notorious piece of shit and (of course) one-time NSW politician Benjamin Boyd. It involved chartering ships to sail about the Pacific Islands contracting people from the islands to come work in Australia for next to nothing.
That is, it was slavery with a different name. I learnt about it nearly a decade ago, and I was horrified. No part of my education ever dealt with this—in fact, I distinctly recall a teacher declaring Australia’s superiority over America for having never engaged in slave trade. I strawpolled others around me, and they hadn’t heard anything like it either. In fact, most believed the same thing I did—that Australia’s past was filled with atrocities, but slavery was not among them.
Years later, after the release of the film Prey, I was walking with my Editor and mate Nathan Lawrence when we free-form discussed the idea for an Australian variant on that story. It would take the harsh Australian outback and it would pit a Predator against some Indigenous Australians against the backdrop of a Colonial invasion. The Predator’s cloaking technology would fit in beautifully against the way the air shimmered and danced in the heat of the Australian sun, and we’d fold a stranded Predator into Dreamtime storytelling as a reluctant First Nations tracker lead a party deeper into a Kakadu National Park blend of canyons and desert.
It was a killer idea.
Then about a year after that, I woke up in a frenzy, inventing from thin air the idea of a Predator story based in Australia. I wrote it all down and excitedly explained it to Nathan. He very graciously nodded to the idea’s strengths and then pointed out the two of us had come up with something similar together about a year earlier.
Cue an existential crisis about whether I come up with any ideas on my own at all, and some effusive apologising.
The problem was that my new idea had folded Blackbirding into the grander story. And in doing so, it had given me a thematic foundation that I just couldn’t get out of my head.
What if there was a Predator story where everyone in it was a Predator? Not the alien hunter, but a person who preys on others in some way? As a quick aside, let’s break down the original Predator film.
For years I’ve held that Predator is, at its core, a slasher horror film. Arnie and Carl and the guys are sorority girls, trapped in a big house being hunted by a supernatural menace. Predator was a film merely masquerading as a Schwarzenegger action vehicle—instead it was an examination of alpha dog masculinity and US exceptionalism when facing off against an even greater threat.
Dutch’s men go into that jungle knowing they’re the top of the food chain. They’re making jokes and chewing tobacco and butting heads because they know there is no person able to beat them. They’ve got all the gear, all the know-how and all the muscles—they’re the kings of the jungle.
And then they face off against a being with more of everything. They are made to feel small, and it leads to their downfall. To defeat the beast Dutch has to humble himself and use ‘boy scout bullshit’.
Dutch wins because it’s an Arnie film. It’s a blockbuster movie. I still strongly feel he shouldn’t have. He should have died in the explosion. But the Predator explodes, Arnie shows off a Mr Universe pose and the chopper flies away.
My idea was to take that framework and explore the different ways humans prey on one another. So Blackbirding, aka Slavery with better marketing, made too much sense to me as our foundation. And the rest followed on from there.
The Australian Native Police, for example, employed Indigenous Australian trackers, and according to the historical data those trackers showed remarkable talent for killing other Indigenous Australian people. Australia is a giant piece of land and it was occupied by many different nation states—and just as it was in Europe, those nation states didn’t all get along. Colonial Australians weaponised this, creating expert marksmen out of the expert trackers in their employ.
But even as the ANP were exploiting generations-long animosities, bounty hunters around Australia were exploiting the lacking communications systems to pose as authorities. Bushrangers were exploiting the logistical nightmare of Australia’s vastness to rob innocents. Station owners were exploiting the Crown’s inability to secure its land by squatting their way into large parcels of farming territory. With a cynical enough eye, it’s easy to see exploitation everywhere in history.
Hell, you don’t even need that cynical an eye.
Among the many atrocities I wasn’t taught about in school, the genocide of Tasmanian Indigenous Australians was even more glaring than Blackbirding. There are no more Tasmanian Aboriginal Peoples, thanks largely to a deliberate effort to remove them from the planet by Colonial Australians.
I wanted to reflect this reality in Blackbirded somehow, and so Jimmy was born. He is a man without a nation, taken from his home and placed in a boarding school to grow up far from where he was born. Across an entire sea. In some ways not dissimilar to the Blackbirded people of the South Sea Islands. And Jimmy has channelled this feeling of not belonging into a deep hate. He’s seen some stuff, and it has impacted his psyche, but there is a chance that his psyche might not have been entirely intact to begin with.
So he recognises the Tasmanian Tiger (or Wolf). Would he, necessarily? Probably not. But it’s a conceit I made as a nod to the First Nations people that existed on Tasmania long before Colonial Australians arrived.
He’s also a bad guy. He dreams of murdering his squadmates, but particularly the white ones. All of the perspective characters (until the very end) of Blackbirded are bad people, but Jimmy is a particularly scary strain. I wanted to create three-dimensional characters, and I didn’t want to write a story where good and evil were dictated by the colour of a person’s skin. So Jimmy is evil, but there’s a path to understanding his hate, I hope.
The idea for Blackbirded was to have the story essentially follow the beats of Predator as a film quite closely. I would love for someone to watch Predator and then reread Blackbirded with the knowledge they should have at the end of the story. I think the two line up quite well.
In my mind it’s a bit like the story of Gloria. Umberto Tozzi recorded Gloria in 1979 and it was a smash hit in Switzerland, Spain and most of the rest of Europe. It’s a pretty bananas song about a bloke who falls in love with a girl from his dreams, and then he travels the world trying to find her to stop his friends from giving him shit.
Pretty wild, right? A straight up love song, except the girl is imaginary and Umberto has been talking to his friends as if she’s real. But it has absolutely nothing on the Laura Branigan version, which is, in my opinion, unhinged.
Brilliant, but unhinged. A platinum hit for Branigan, it was the number one song in Australia for seven weeks. I was born 9 months after it stopped charting. Was I conceived to Laura Branigan’s Gloria? I refuse to ask but probably. But I digress.
Where Umberto Tozzi gave us a (bonkers) love story, Laura Branigan and writer Trevor Veitch used the same basic musical structure to deliver what Branigan described as an exploration of “a girl that’s running too fast for her own steps’. If you listen to the two back-to-back, the similarities are undeniable. But the differences are also palpable.
So it was that I needed my tracking party to stumble across an encampment. And for that encampment to maybe actually be their primary goal. It worked out fantastic for the pacing of the story, too—after two fairly cerebral chapters, it was nice to have a spot of the old ultra-violence to keep the reader’s attention.
When trying to name the creature hunting in the bush, I thought it would be cool to highlight the cryptozoology of Australia’s pre-colonial history. Indigenous Australians combined a strong vocal storytelling legacy with cave art as their historical ledger, and the many nations of the country meant many different languages—this meant centuries or even millennia-long games of telephone.
That meant I could not only delve into the many different names for the same essential legend—I could twist that legend to be whatever I wanted. I went for the second time to the Bruce Pascoe well for some reading on this one (I’d read Dark Emu a while ago and it informed my mental picture of the nation-state construct of pre-colonial Australia), grabbing a second-hand copy of Night Animals.
But for the most part I indulged in research online, reading up on the many different accounts of Australian legends like the Garkain, Ghindaring, Quinkan and Yowie. The Tamangori was a fun find, a South Sea Islander legend who in my mind vaguely fit the profile of a Predator.
The Yaut-way pronunciation would come from warping the ‘canon’ name of the Predator species, the Yaut-ja. Just as the Quinkan might be the Guwin-Gan, or the Quinkin, or other names, I figured there was a chance that over the many years the ‘proper’ name of the Yaut-ja might have been learned and then warped slightly by the retelling.
Something I had a grand time (read: a lot of trouble) with was nailing down the specifics of when things were named in Australia. In this chapter I describe a brown snake, but it reminds me of an old joke. What’s brown and sticky? A stick. What’s brown and snakey? A snake. “Brown snake” just isn’t a useful identifier, because a helluva lot of snakes are brown. Especially in Australia. The brown snake I describe in Chapter 5 is a Taipan, but the Taipan didn’t earn that moniker until years after this story was set. Do I use historically accurate language, risking leaving the reader in the dark? Or do I imbue my characters with knowledge they couldn’t have possessed and risk shattering the facade of the story itself?
I went with the former, but I don’t know if it was the right decision.
I really enjoyed the conflict about snake venom in this chapter. Fred being ignorant, John being objectively correct, Jocko being a racist dickwad who misinterpreted information because it fit his worldview—I don’t want to toot my own horn but I thought I nailed it. And then Terrence comes in with some proper English pedantry to defuse the situation. I love that little titbit—’venom is injected, poison is ingested’. The similarities in the words give it a sort of poetry.
Terrence is actually firing on all cylinders in Chapter 5. His anecdote about the cobras demonstrating perverse incentivisation is a story that has stuck with me for years, because you often see it play out in video game economies. Folding it in to cover the passage of time as they set up a camp gave me loads of opportunity to provide everyone (except Jimmy) with some characterisation.
In this chapter I describe wrapping damper around a stick and cramming meat into the hollowed end once it is cooked—this is easily the best way to eat damper and anyone who tells you different is incorrect.
Originally this chapter marked an important change in Blackbirded, as it was the first time we got the perspective of Big Joe, our actual hero. There’s a few twists in Blackbirded. The Predator one is the BIG ONE, so it’s the one most people will probably think of when they see the story has a twist. But the first one is that the actual hero of the Blackbirded story is not any of our perspective characters. It is Big Joe, a Blackbirded islander of no specific origin. A giant of a man, with long knotted hair, whose silhouette might reasonably be mistaken for that of a Yautja. A good man, who sees his people to the river to make sure they escape before returning to remain behind with his father.
Originally Blackbirded started with a prologue from the perspective of Joe, Big Joe’s father. I removed it for two reasons—because it would clash with the perspective characters we spent most of our time with, and because I am one of those people who believes Predator should not open with any sci-fi rigamarole, and my prologue directly hinted at a similar opening. Joe, Big Joe’s father, insists that BJ take the people to the river so that they might escape to the ocean, but on his honour he remains behind. We see what the Van Den Houter’s make of that honour in Chapter 1.
But Big Joe is Joe’s son, and he shares in that honour, and he reveals to Terrence over the course of this chapter (6) that he used a semantic trick to keep his promise to his father while still forging a way to return. When Terrence makes the mental connection between Big Joe and the man in the pillory, he seals his fate.
I think the best discussion you can get of this chapter is in the podcast I did with my brother and Nathan, as they had the biggest influence on how it changed. But something I didn’t really talk about there was how much changing Chapter 6 altered the rest of the story.
As I said, we were supposed to get Big Joe’s perspective here for the first time, but to construct a narrative that gave Terrence the death he deserved, I removed that. And the flow-on effect that had meant removing Big Joe’s voice from chapters seven, eight and nine as well.
I’m still not 100% sure that was the right decision. Chapter 8 in particular I think is a little weaker for having Big Joe removed, as his trapping using the Gympie Gympie is an important sequence in showing his ruthless intelligence.
But whether removing Big Joe was correct or not, the other changes made to Chapter 6 were unquestionably correct. Disarming Terrence to create an imbalance of power allowed the man to have a more active role in his demise. Anyway, check out the podcast for the real scoop on how this chapter went down, in my opinion.
David was a little undercooked in Blackbirded, I thought. I liked him a lot, which I think made me reluctant to write about him. Of the ‘evils’ represented in the story, his is perhaps the softest, but also the most insidious—his is the evil of standing by and doing nothing. Or, as is briefly mentioned in this chapter, of joining in to keep up appearances.
That might be why he’s so easy to like, because his evil is the easiest to commit. Bear in mind, Blackbirded isn’t meant to sermonise. I’m not up at a pulpit weaving some allegorical tale to teach us about the many different types of evil or whatever. But in characterisation terms each member of the tracking group had a sin they were supposed to represent. That was David’s.
They each had a sin because, if we return all the way to the start of this Post Mortem, Blackbirded is supposed to reflect Predator. And if Predator was a slasher flick, then each character should have died in some ironic manner. They didn’t, of course, because it was still an Arnie Action Blockbuster. I tried to fix that in Blackbirded.
Anna has a chance to shine in this chapter, although only secondhand. We get to see the bloody-minded (and faced) defiance that drives her, that I think makes her a powerful foil for our posse. Smiling as her teeth lodge in Frederick’s knuckles is a mental picture that says far more than a full perspective could, I think.
Also I end this chapter with perhaps the most obvious Predator reference of all. “If it bleeds we can kill it.” I had it split, shifted about to obscure it more. I like it better as an obvious reference, because I think at this point in the reading most people are still convinced that Big Joe is the ‘Predator’. What the green might represent other than actual Predator blood, I don’t know.
I don’t really write prose, as I’m fairly sure people have realised by now. I write pretty plainly in general, a byproduct of years of trying to get critical analysis across to people who willfully want to misunderstand you on the internet. But every now and then I write some shit that I think is pretty. This chapter has a bunch of that writing.
Jimmy going mad was a lot of fun to write. I wanted it to be just shy of impenetrable, which meant that for some people it would be actually impenetrable. Everything has a cost, I guess. Writing out the way a Gympie Gympie plant might imbue a person with a sense of agony beyond personal comprehension is fun. I landed on mathematics because I think it’s a difficult one for people to parse. Because the concept of infinity is inherently scary to some people, and the idea of inventing a form of cardinality to count infinite sets to measure pain makes my chest tighten. That is otherworldly pain.
I brushed over the details of what Jimmy did to himself because I thought that made it worse even. A graphic description of Jimmy’s description of clawing his own eye out couldn’t compare, in my opinion, to the horror of the man calmly realising that removing his eye was a viable possibility.
John sort of shifts into a leadership role by the end of this chapter, but it won’t matter for long.
2 down, the rest to go.
I loved researching Indigenous cave art for the tiny segment that it’s relevant in this chapter. Loved the opportunity to showcase what Jocko is actually good at—architecture. Giving him a chance to be humanised a little in contrast to his father, to show that even pieces of shit are still people, and maybe they wouldn’t be such huge pieces of shit if things had simply played out a little different. That’s not to say that Jocko was anything other than a racist piece of shit though, of course.
What fascinates me about First Nations rock art is how permanent it is. How it has endured over centuries, how it is readily interpretable even today. Its simplicity creates a storytelling medium that anyone can get information from. It’s a reminder, I think, that simple does not mean easy. That using a limited colour palette to weave storytelling with so few pictograms is in fact complex—but the complexity is in its construction, not its reading.
That’s amazing to me.
Anyway this chapter is really full mask off stuff. There’s no more pretending. There is a Predator, like from the movie Predator, and it has decided to kill the group. And it does so with almost no trouble at all. Frederick dies in a brutal fashion, manhandled the way he manhandled Anna. David finally decides to be more than just a follower, and that is when he dies a horrible death. And John. John is hubris incarnate. He has to die knowing he can be outsmarted.
I think this chapter largely speaks for itself. I have been told I have a knack for writing really horrible ways for people to die. ‘Wouldn’t it be better to just do that the whole time, instead of having to write up all the other chapters justifying those deaths?’ I was asked jokingly. But I think those horrible deaths are just the punchlines. A good joke needs a good setup, right?
And so it comes to this.
Anna gets some perspective in this chapter, and so too finally does Big Joe. I excised a huge portion from this chapter, as I had Big Joe’s movements before Nine written in. There is actually a lot of Big Joe’s story already written, but that’s just how storytelling goes. What’s not there is sometimes just as important as what is, and writing out exactly what happened is super helpful when trying to paint the right picture for the reader.
Anna originally died off screen. She’s named for and the analog to Anna from Predator, who doesn’t have much of a real role in the film. But after consulting with Liam and Nate I realised she didn’t get a very satisfying resolution, so I went back in and wrote her something proper. It was a tricky write, to be honest, because she got shit on the entire story, and as a result I felt protective of her. I had to keep reminding myself (and the reader) that she was a piece of shit too, and that she deserved a violent death.
Big Joe also had a softer ending in the original. I like ambiguity in horror stories, I guess. The specifics of how he actually dies (in my opinion, of course) are detailed in the podcast if you want to find out—the spider bite does not do it, and I love pedantic little shit when I’m writing. It’s like an in-joke that only I’m in on.
But I think he holds himself well against a being of immense might. He’s always outclassed, outmatched. And he’s been up for days, been doing the right thing, only to be punished for an act of righteous vengeance against his slaver. It’s almost unfair that he would die, right?
But that’s kind of the point of the story in the end. Blackbirded is a story about how there’s always a bigger fish. The Yaut-way can’t escape it, and neither can Big Joe. The greatest equaliser of all is entropy. Life isn’t fair.
Kind of a bummer, right? But that’s a good horror story to me, one that makes you reflect on life. I hope by the end of Blackbirded you wanted the trackers, all of them, to die. That was my intention. But wanting ignoble people to die is not a virtue, right? It’s not a good thing. So, by playing along with my story, you have sinned—and your punishment is to see the only good person in the story die too. That’s the scam at the heart of horror stories the world over, the justification the author uses when they twist the knife one final time.
I think that shit’s great.
Anyway, thank you for reading Blackbirded, and thank you for reading this long and rambling post-mortem!
If you’d like to reread Blackbirded, you can start from the top here. If you haven’t already read it you can use that link too, but you read these things in entirely the wrong order.
You can also buy Blackbirded in ebook or paperback format from Amazon here. Any proceeds will be donated to charity. If you don’t want to support Amazon, you can email me joabgilroy at gmail dot com and I will send you the file directly.
And if you’d like, you can also Buy Me A Beer. Or a Coffee. Or Writing Lessons if you think I need them, I do so love an emdash.
Joabyjojo 
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