Shaun Tan on creating Hometown
Hear from internationally acclaimed and award-winning creator Shaun Tan about the creation of his latest work Hometown.
Many years ago I was travelling with my family in Spain and woke early one morning to a random children’s show playing on our small hotel room TV. As with many children’s books, movies and TV – including those I grew up with, like Sesame Street, Alice in Wonderland, Astroboy – this one depicted real humans living alongside talking, non-human characters, as if this was entirely normal. Children’s fiction is often wonderful like that, accepting strangeness without the bounding explanations that adults typically crave.
In this particular show, there was only one human: a girl living in a town inhabited by restless, rubbery puppets. The plot was incomprehensible, the language foreign, and it sent my travel-discombobulated mind wandering. What if this happened to be a documentary? The real world? What if I myself had been born into such a place? Would I accept and love things as they were, knowing nothing else, or feel that something was amiss?
It often takes an unexpected distraction (like a random foreign kids’ TV show) to get me thinking about anything at a deeper level, pondering a possible story, particularly when that distraction is juxtaposed with other, unrelated experiences. In this case, I had been reading real-world accounts of first contact between Europeans and Indigenous cultures, particularly in the Americas. One bit of history that especially resonated for me involved Christian missionaries cutting down Haida totem poles in the Pacific Northwest in the early 1900s, a tragic collision of moral principles, of different world views, of different feelings of belonging and not-belonging. For the Haida, the totems expressed a deep wish to honour family identity, story and belief. For the missionaries, the same objects were misguided and dangerous, a dissonance that could not be tolerated.
Of course, in Australia we have many parallel narratives given our violent colonial past, born of terrible misunderstandings between European and Indigenous people. At the core of this is a basic difference in how one conceives belonging, understands humanness and our place in the universe. Sometimes those differences are impossible to reconcile and must instead be skilfully subverted. In Mexico City I learned that some Catholic churches, forcibly built over the ruins of conquered Aztec temples, contained forbidden idols in the foundations and walls, hidden there by local enslaved builders. Aztecs could dutifully worship their own gods while pretending to bow down before another. This clever subterfuge became a key element in my own story.
I imagined a girl, about the same age as my daughter at the time, raised by unearthly creatures in an unrecognisable land, completely unaware of her humanness, or that her world was anything other than ordinary. Her mother is a giant, many-armed goddess, her father a sentient stone, her siblings and friends an assortment of mismatched animals (all things from various corners of my sketchbooks) and life is good. Awesome, in fact. Then one day, a new creature descends from the sky, a creature who looks uncannily like herself – similar eyes, hands and voice – to tell her that she does not belong. He has a big book of answers. He wants her to follow him into the sky, to find her ‘real people’, but she does not want to leave behind all that she knows and loves. What can she do? This was the beginning of my story, and the long process over several years of developing the strange visual world of Hometown.
At the drawing desk I recalled many childhood memories of fishing with my family along the West Australian coast, examining tidal pools filled with crabs, anemones, algae, limpets and fish, miniature landscapes opening even further under a microscope or a gutting knife. All that strange organic machinery, all that growing and dying. We also saw a lot of weird insects drawn to our garden from surrounding coastal bushland in outer suburban Perth, an ecology we kids would spend hours catching and ‘farming’, building small pens for caterpillars, snails and beetles. We dredged a local swamp with homemade nets to find minnows, tadpoles, dragonfly larvae and other weird things in the mud. The world of Hometown reminded me of these experiences, and how one’s mind expands with the experience of nature in all its delightful, confronting and visceral detail. I remember thinking I could have been born as any one of these little things, in a pond, forest or rock pool, and that would have been my whole world. That I am one of these little things.
I hope that Hometown is a book that might be read and re-read, revealing different impressions. It can be understood in a literal or metaphorical way: a story about a girl on an alien planet, or a deeper parable about individual identity, the need to ‘feel with your head and think with your heart’, as the narrator’s adoptive mother suggests, no matter what other people say you should think, feel and do. Regardless of family, friends, religion, politics and society, young people especially must always ask their own questions and make emotionally intelligent choices. That’s not always an easy thing to do, the world being a resistant place, full of contradictions, competing principles and powerful opposing forces. But art and literature remind us that there’s always a possible way through, a good and smart and fair way, if only you can imagine it.
Hometown
by Shaun Tan
A visually stunning, moving and humorous meditation on all the things that make us who we are and how we choose to live.
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