The Currency Lad

Dirt Poor Islanders’ opening scene neatly illustrates the cultural clash Meadow navigates as an Australian-born Tongan living in Sydney’s western suburbs.

The young Meadow and her nana are painting their family’s ngatu — a large mat made from mulberry bark — with traditional designs passed down the generations.

Meadow describes the process: “The backs of my hands held the weight of Nana’s melon palms as she helped me outline the ancient markings of our ancestors. Together, we traced back to a time when Tonga was nothing but earth.”

Their Mount Druitt neighbour Shazza is unimpressed by the activity, however culturally significant.

“Pack your hula-hula crap and shove it!” she yells from her concrete driveway.

Shazza’s people built one of the greatest, richest and most enlightened nations in human history in less than 200 years. In the literary cult of the ‘Magical Negro’ – and the melon-palmed – however, gratitude and admiration are thematically verboten. Europeans admire pretty floor mats but Miss Dunn has nothing nice to say for the ‘monocultural’ high school where she “learned to be ashamed of my culture and to hate myself.” I would never tell her to go back where she culturally came from but a contemplative return for the purpose of self-edification is advisable. The only reason she has the life and bourgeois sensibilities she enjoys is that her family left Tonga and were given succour here. Keep the hula-hula crap, Winnie. Pack the snark.