Archie Weller



Archie Weller (born 13 July 1957) is an Australian poet and an award-winning writer of novels, short stories and screen plays.

Life
Weller was born in Cranbrook, Western Australia, and grew up on a farm called Woonenup in the South west of that state.

Weller states that he wrote his first book, The Day of the Dog, "within a period of six weeks in a spirit of anger after his release from Broome jail for what he regarded as a wrongful conviction". It won the 1980 The Australian/Vogel Literary Award, the 1982 Prose Fiction award in the Western Australian Premier's Book Awards, and was made into a film entitled Blackfellas, which won two AFI Awards in 1993. Weller's second novel Land of the Golden Clouds was published in 1998.

The title story in the collection Going Home deals with the complexities of the Aboriginal identity in Australia. It is set in the 1980s and the protagonist has succeeded at university. He excels at sports, studies art and does paintings that are admired by the white community. But in achieving this acceptance he has turned his back on his home and his family. He feels white, but at the same time he is proud to be black. On his 21st birthday, nostalgia for his roots leads him to return to the camp of his birth, only to discover that his new "white" identity is invisible in the darkness of ignorance and prejudice. In contrast, another story in the collection, "Herbie", is about a white boy named Davey who witnesses the killing of an Aboriginal boy and though he is cruel to the boy and offers no resistance to the boys who eventually result in his death, the boy sympathises with Herbie's mother and shows remorse. In this story he portrays a boy who at the time has no empathy towards Herbie, an indigenous boy. It portrays bullying and brutal behaviour in a schoolyard with fatal consequences.

The script Confessions of a Headhunter, which Weller co-wrote with Sally Riley, won the an award in the 2001 Western Australian Premier's Book Awards, the Cinema Nova Award and the 2000 Australian Film Institute Awards for Best Short Fiction Film, and the 2001 Film Critics Circle of Australia award for Best Short Film.

His mother was a journalist and his father was a farmer. As a young child Weller was encouraged by his grandfather to write.

Poetry

 * The Unknown Soldier and other poems. Bassendean, WA: Access Press, 2007.

Novels

 * Day of the Dog (Allen & Unwin, 1981)
 * Land Of The Golden Clouds (Allen & Unwin, 1998)

Short stories

 * Going Home: Stories (Allen & Unwin, 1986) Review
 * Pension Day
 * Dead Dingo
 * Johnny Blue
 * Stolen Car
 * Sandcastles
 * Herbie
 * Fish and Chips

Drama and screenplays

 * Nidjera: Children Crying Softly Together: A Play Exploring The Emotions Of A Modern Day Koori Family (1990)
 * Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, with Rima Tamou (1999)
 * Confessions of a Headhunter, with Sally Riley (2000)

Edited

 * Us Fellas: An Anthology Of Aboriginal Writing, with Colleen Glass (Perth: Artlook, 1987)