Translator: Réka Kaponay Reviewer: Andi Vida
This story begins
with a girl and her family in the red desert heart of Australia,
on the sacred lands of the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara,
or, in short, the APY lands of the Aboriginal people.
Here, they are the honoured guests of some close friends of Grandpa Jack,
a leading elder of these APY Lands.
One day the family drives down to the local store –
“local” being about 200 km away –
when from the side of a long, unpaved road an old man waves their car down.
They’d never seen this man before, but they pull up,
they roll down their window, and he says to them,
“I have been waiting for you. I would like to show you something.
Please come and see.”
So they get out of the car
and follow this old man over to a place by the side of the road
where he lays out a magnificent painting
with owls and stars and people painted on it.
He says,
“This is my dreaming. This is my story, and I would like to share it with you.”
And so he did.
This was a profound moment that would stay with me forever.
A 10-year-old girl, whose greatest passion is to write,
whose earliest memory is sitting by the fireplace,
reading one magical story after another.
This girl is simply unable to easily forget such an experience
when for a few moments the opportunity opened for her
to get a glimpse of the very heart
of the ancient culture of the Aboriginal people.
It happened there,
on that faraway red earth, on that unpaved, dusty road,
that I came to realise that nothing is ever by chance;
nothing is ever an accident.
Indeed, this was the moment
when I truly began to understand the power of stories.
Because there was something in the Aboriginal man’s words that day.
Something that took hold of my consciousness
and began to inspire me in ways I could not fully comprehend at the time.
I began telling my own stories, crafting my own dreaming,
sharing the narratives of my travels and adventures with those who would listen.
From a very young age, my parents took us travelling.
One of my most beautiful memories
is of the time we road-tripped around North America in an RV,
encountering evermore interesting people and stories as we traveled.
In Peru, for example,
one of my most striking experiences was in the high Andes mountains
standing atop the sacred “Apu” receiving the blessing of a Paco priest.
Here, at 4500 metres high, standing atop that small Inca village,
the cold wind freezing my face,
we were invited to such experiences
that I know no other outsider had neither seen nor experienced before.
Amidst all of this, I had a realisation.
These people, had very few things, in a material sense.
They live in small bluestone huts,
without windows, without electricity, without running water,
but what I realised was
that their community and their story is what makes them rich beyond measure.
It was here, amidst the wild and beautiful landscapes of South America,
that I was inspired to start my travelblog, Dreamtime Traveler,
a storyteller’s narrative that would not be about
which hotel you should stay in or what suitcase you should carry,
but rather to tell the human stories of the people we met on our travels.
Along my journey, I have found new words scattered across the valleys,
in the oceans, deserts and forests, and in great wide fern gullies.
I picked them up and took them with me
as we traveled across 39 countries on six continents,
weaving my tales on the loom of my laptop.
Everywhere we traveled, our way was illuminated by stories.
But with my backpack loaded with so many books
that I could hardly endure the weight on my shoulders,
we discovered Arcos de la Frontera.
Here, deep in the heart of the Spanish countryside,
on the medieval Moorish crossroads, I found my own story.
It came to me in the form of a black, brown-eyed, extraordinary dog.
His name was Fūko.
We were spending a few nights with our friend at his house.
I had been waiting all night for Fūko to come home.
It was very late, and I needed to go to sleep.
My parents were still up, talking in the lounge-room with our friend.
There was a full moon, and it must have been around midnight
when I suddenly heard something coming from the door.
Almost like a rebellious teen, that’s how Fūko was sneaking back home,
and he came straight over to me.
As if he knew how much I’d been waiting for him,
and as soon I’d laid eyes upon him,
I felt an exceptional and strong connection between us.
Over the three days that we spent together,
I observed the way he adventured out and only came home when he wanted to,
when he liked,
and I thought to myself, “What if the answer to my questions,
about where he goes and what he gets up to,
is that he is really a guardian, the guardian of this land.”
This is where my inspiration came from for my novel, Dawn of the Guardian.
A fantasy adventure story with Fūko becoming its main protagonist.
And so it happened that Fūko’s story and mine merged to become one.
And truly, it is this, these stories make up Dawn of the Guardian’s origins.
The stories of the places I’ve been, the cultures I’ve encountered,
the languages I’ve learnt, and the people I’ve met.
While we are all explorers,
we are also honoured to be listeners.
Budapest was our next planned destination.
For my twin brother and I, to be in Hungary
was the beginning of reconnecting with our ancestors’ heritage.
And it was here,
that on a cold winter morning I started writing Dawn of the Guardian.
I wrote with a driven passion and an eager desire
to get my story on paper.
But at times I got stuck, at times I was frustrated by it all –
wanting to be spontaneous,
I did not plan my story and its characters’ arcs.
But with every day that passed, I learnt something new.
Something new about writing,
new about storytelling and new about myself.
What I didn’t know, I researched,
where I needed help,
I reached out to other authors and asked for their assistance and advice.
And slowly,
over the course of nine months of writing every day,
I completed the novel’s first draft, just before my 13th birthday.
I still remember the day I finished,
it’s sort of burned into my memory forever
because it’s also the day I broke the springs of my bed
from jumping up and down on it.
But just like Fūko, I was just at the beginning of my journey.
Many challenges and many hurdles were still ahead on this road to publication.
When I finished the first draft,
I decided that, yes,
I would like to see Dawn of the Guardian published.
So I wrote to more than 50 agents across the UK, USA and Australia,
but received very little response.
The responses I did get
consisted of only a few empty words of congratulations and encouragement.
I’m afraid what also worked against me was that I was only 12 at this point,
and when these publishers received my submissions,
I was met with such responses as:
“Oh, you wrote a book?”
“Oh, you’re 12? How cute …”
So there were no offers of representation,
but more importantly, no useful advice that I could utilise
as to how I could get someone interested in my story.
I almost gave up right then,
but I was brought into contact with one vital publishing imprint in the UK
that gave me that very important feedback that I needed to hear:
that Fūko’s story was worthy of being read and my book worthy of being published.
It was at the same time that my family and I
began walking the 828 km El Camino de Santiago pilgrimage
along the coast of Northern Spain.
This was a 38-day journey,
and when you are walking 20-25-30 kilometres every day,
you have a lot of time to think.
I was constantly invested with the story of my book.
I wanted to be completely sure
that its quality would not leave anything more to be desired later.
I would have liked for my readers
to feel as if they themselves were in Arcos de la Frontera,
were a part of Fūko’s journey.
I would have liked for my readers to care about the characters
the way I cared about characters in books I loved to read.
To be concerned for them, their fate to be important.
For this reason, I virtually rewrote Dawn of the Guardian in four months.
A family project evolved out of this
where all our stories converged with a common purpose.
My parents became my first editors,
my godmother became my illustrator, my brother was our researcher.
We all sat down together and told the success story
of how we would bring my book to life and see it through to publication.
For the first time in over four years,
this was the story that would take us back to Australia,
where after four of the most intense months of work,
in a small independent bookstore in Melbourne,
we finally launched Fūko’s story.
And Fūko’s story is actually the story of all of us
and the journey we are taking together as humanity.
You see, at the core of Dawn of the Guardian is a struggle
that I feel has shaped our world
since the very beginning of the human journey.
It is our hesitance to accept who we really are,
and our lack of willingness to embrace this.
We often look for the solution to our problems outside of ourselves.
What Fūko learns is
that by taking responsibility for his role as the guardian,
and ultimately for his life,
he is the master of his own destiny
and not some symptomatic victim of circumstance.
Fūko’s story is powerfully relevant for today,
for I feel that we, as human beings, until we start sharing our stories again,
just like that Aboriginal man did on the side of the road in the APY Lands,
until we start seeing these stories’ interconnected natures
and start taking responsibility for our collective journey,
we will continue to see ourselves
as scattered helpless victims of circumstance.
I had struggled with this myself,
but through Fūko, I was able to look myself in the eye.
This is how I was able to discover
that life’s not just a simple, little journey of rights and wrongs,
of perceived failures and victories or of what can be only good or bad.
My experiences traveling the world at such a young age
taught me that it would be erroneous to judge anything or anyone
based on how they appear to be on the outside.
It would be humanity’s greatest mistake to view things so simply.
Because nothing in this world is as it seems on the surface,
and everyone has a story to tell.
Throughout all our travels and from writing my novel,
I’d learnt to recognise the patterns of stories.
The intricately carved web
that connects us all together throughout the course of time,
even in spite of all our differences, past, present and future.
Four years ago,
I was standing on this stage, and I told of a dream I had.
A dream to write my book and see it published here in Hungary too.
I was standing here, and I listened to the words which encouraged me
to go and not to stop until I reached my goal,
and then, to come back here and share my story.
Well, here I am.
Stories gave me my power.
The power of belief in myself, to go out and follow my dreams.
Now I would like to encourage you all to go out and follow yours.
Tell your stories.
Share them.
Find someone who will listen,
because I guarantee you they will,
just as you have so graciously listened to a little part of mine.
For a story is not alive until it is told,
but once it is told, it lives forever.
(Applause)
This story begins
with a girl and her family in the red desert heart of Australia,
on the sacred lands of the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara,
or, in short, the APY lands of the Aboriginal people.
Here, they are the honoured guests of some close friends of Grandpa Jack,
a leading elder of these APY Lands.
One day the family drives down to the local store –
“local” being about 200 km away –
when from the side of a long, unpaved road an old man waves their car down.
They’d never seen this man before, but they pull up,
they roll down their window, and he says to them,
“I have been waiting for you. I would like to show you something.
Please come and see.”
So they get out of the car
and follow this old man over to a place by the side of the road
where he lays out a magnificent painting
with owls and stars and people painted on it.
He says,
“This is my dreaming. This is my story, and I would like to share it with you.”
And so he did.
This was a profound moment that would stay with me forever.
A 10-year-old girl, whose greatest passion is to write,
whose earliest memory is sitting by the fireplace,
reading one magical story after another.
This girl is simply unable to easily forget such an experience
when for a few moments the opportunity opened for her
to get a glimpse of the very heart
of the ancient culture of the Aboriginal people.
It happened there,
on that faraway red earth, on that unpaved, dusty road,
that I came to realise that nothing is ever by chance;
nothing is ever an accident.
Indeed, this was the moment
when I truly began to understand the power of stories.
Because there was something in the Aboriginal man’s words that day.
Something that took hold of my consciousness
and began to inspire me in ways I could not fully comprehend at the time.
I began telling my own stories, crafting my own dreaming,
sharing the narratives of my travels and adventures with those who would listen.
From a very young age, my parents took us travelling.
One of my most beautiful memories
is of the time we road-tripped around North America in an RV,
encountering evermore interesting people and stories as we traveled.
In Peru, for example,
one of my most striking experiences was in the high Andes mountains
standing atop the sacred “Apu” receiving the blessing of a Paco priest.
Here, at 4500 metres high, standing atop that small Inca village,
the cold wind freezing my face,
we were invited to such experiences
that I know no other outsider had neither seen nor experienced before.
Amidst all of this, I had a realisation.
These people, had very few things, in a material sense.
They live in small bluestone huts,
without windows, without electricity, without running water,
but what I realised was
that their community and their story is what makes them rich beyond measure.
It was here, amidst the wild and beautiful landscapes of South America,
that I was inspired to start my travelblog, Dreamtime Traveler,
a storyteller’s narrative that would not be about
which hotel you should stay in or what suitcase you should carry,
but rather to tell the human stories of the people we met on our travels.
Along my journey, I have found new words scattered across the valleys,
in the oceans, deserts and forests, and in great wide fern gullies.
I picked them up and took them with me
as we traveled across 39 countries on six continents,
weaving my tales on the loom of my laptop.
Everywhere we traveled, our way was illuminated by stories.
But with my backpack loaded with so many books
that I could hardly endure the weight on my shoulders,
we discovered Arcos de la Frontera.
Here, deep in the heart of the Spanish countryside,
on the medieval Moorish crossroads, I found my own story.
It came to me in the form of a black, brown-eyed, extraordinary dog.
His name was Fūko.
We were spending a few nights with our friend at his house.
I had been waiting all night for Fūko to come home.
It was very late, and I needed to go to sleep.
My parents were still up, talking in the lounge-room with our friend.
There was a full moon, and it must have been around midnight
when I suddenly heard something coming from the door.
Almost like a rebellious teen, that’s how Fūko was sneaking back home,
and he came straight over to me.
As if he knew how much I’d been waiting for him,
and as soon I’d laid eyes upon him,
I felt an exceptional and strong connection between us.
Over the three days that we spent together,
I observed the way he adventured out and only came home when he wanted to,
when he liked,
and I thought to myself, “What if the answer to my questions,
about where he goes and what he gets up to,
is that he is really a guardian, the guardian of this land.”
This is where my inspiration came from for my novel, Dawn of the Guardian.
A fantasy adventure story with Fūko becoming its main protagonist.
And so it happened that Fūko’s story and mine merged to become one.
And truly, it is this, these stories make up Dawn of the Guardian’s origins.
The stories of the places I’ve been, the cultures I’ve encountered,
the languages I’ve learnt, and the people I’ve met.
While we are all explorers,
we are also honoured to be listeners.
Budapest was our next planned destination.
For my twin brother and I, to be in Hungary
was the beginning of reconnecting with our ancestors’ heritage.
And it was here,
that on a cold winter morning I started writing Dawn of the Guardian.
I wrote with a driven passion and an eager desire
to get my story on paper.
But at times I got stuck, at times I was frustrated by it all –
wanting to be spontaneous,
I did not plan my story and its characters’ arcs.
But with every day that passed, I learnt something new.
Something new about writing,
new about storytelling and new about myself.
What I didn’t know, I researched,
where I needed help,
I reached out to other authors and asked for their assistance and advice.
And slowly,
over the course of nine months of writing every day,
I completed the novel’s first draft, just before my 13th birthday.
I still remember the day I finished,
it’s sort of burned into my memory forever
because it’s also the day I broke the springs of my bed
from jumping up and down on it.
But just like Fūko, I was just at the beginning of my journey.
Many challenges and many hurdles were still ahead on this road to publication.
When I finished the first draft,
I decided that, yes,
I would like to see Dawn of the Guardian published.
So I wrote to more than 50 agents across the UK, USA and Australia,
but received very little response.
The responses I did get
consisted of only a few empty words of congratulations and encouragement.
I’m afraid what also worked against me was that I was only 12 at this point,
and when these publishers received my submissions,
I was met with such responses as:
“Oh, you wrote a book?”
“Oh, you’re 12? How cute …”
So there were no offers of representation,
but more importantly, no useful advice that I could utilise
as to how I could get someone interested in my story.
I almost gave up right then,
but I was brought into contact with one vital publishing imprint in the UK
that gave me that very important feedback that I needed to hear:
that Fūko’s story was worthy of being read and my book worthy of being published.
It was at the same time that my family and I
began walking the 828 km El Camino de Santiago pilgrimage
along the coast of Northern Spain.
This was a 38-day journey,
and when you are walking 20-25-30 kilometres every day,
you have a lot of time to think.
I was constantly invested with the story of my book.
I wanted to be completely sure
that its quality would not leave anything more to be desired later.
I would have liked for my readers
to feel as if they themselves were in Arcos de la Frontera,
were a part of Fūko’s journey.
I would have liked for my readers to care about the characters
the way I cared about characters in books I loved to read.
To be concerned for them, their fate to be important.
For this reason, I virtually rewrote Dawn of the Guardian in four months.
A family project evolved out of this
where all our stories converged with a common purpose.
My parents became my first editors,
my godmother became my illustrator, my brother was our researcher.
We all sat down together and told the success story
of how we would bring my book to life and see it through to publication.
For the first time in over four years,
this was the story that would take us back to Australia,
where after four of the most intense months of work,
in a small independent bookstore in Melbourne,
we finally launched Fūko’s story.
And Fūko’s story is actually the story of all of us
and the journey we are taking together as humanity.
You see, at the core of Dawn of the Guardian is a struggle
that I feel has shaped our world
since the very beginning of the human journey.
It is our hesitance to accept who we really are,
and our lack of willingness to embrace this.
We often look for the solution to our problems outside of ourselves.
What Fūko learns is
that by taking responsibility for his role as the guardian,
and ultimately for his life,
he is the master of his own destiny
and not some symptomatic victim of circumstance.
Fūko’s story is powerfully relevant for today,
for I feel that we, as human beings, until we start sharing our stories again,
just like that Aboriginal man did on the side of the road in the APY Lands,
until we start seeing these stories’ interconnected natures
and start taking responsibility for our collective journey,
we will continue to see ourselves
as scattered helpless victims of circumstance.
I had struggled with this myself,
but through Fūko, I was able to look myself in the eye.
This is how I was able to discover
that life’s not just a simple, little journey of rights and wrongs,
of perceived failures and victories or of what can be only good or bad.
My experiences traveling the world at such a young age
taught me that it would be erroneous to judge anything or anyone
based on how they appear to be on the outside.
It would be humanity’s greatest mistake to view things so simply.
Because nothing in this world is as it seems on the surface,
and everyone has a story to tell.
Throughout all our travels and from writing my novel,
I’d learnt to recognise the patterns of stories.
The intricately carved web
that connects us all together throughout the course of time,
even in spite of all our differences, past, present and future.
Four years ago,
I was standing on this stage, and I told of a dream I had.
A dream to write my book and see it published here in Hungary too.
I was standing here, and I listened to the words which encouraged me
to go and not to stop until I reached my goal,
and then, to come back here and share my story.
Well, here I am.
Stories gave me my power.
The power of belief in myself, to go out and follow my dreams.
Now I would like to encourage you all to go out and follow yours.
Tell your stories.
Share them.
Find someone who will listen,
because I guarantee you they will,
just as you have so graciously listened to a little part of mine.
For a story is not alive until it is told,
but once it is told, it lives forever.
(Applause)
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