Wiradjuri woman Odette Brown wins national writing award

Recently, however, the 30-year-old from Newcastle was writing through some grief and became aware of The Best Australian Yarn competition. Affiliated with the West Australian Newspaper, the annual short story competition gives away $80,000 in prize money for stories up to 2500 words.

Odette, a Wiradjuri woman, submitted her fictional story, Wattle.

On November 22 she was awarded the First Nations Storytelling Prize of $3000.

"My mob is from the Wellington, Dubbo area. I grew up in the Coffs Harbour area. My Mum brought me here; she studied medicine at Newcastle uni. When we came down it would have been 2007," she says.

It's from her mother, Glenda Brown, that Odette she gets her Wiradjuri heritage. Odette grew up listening to her "fantastic" stories. Her father, David Brown, is a TAFE teacher and playwright in Newcastle. They both influenced her creativity.

"It was a beautiful relationship where I was able to figure out how to articulate myself from Dad but also be able to have something founded in truth and culture in Mum's background," she says.

Odette wrote Wattle after losing her grandmother Peggy on her father's side.

"It started with the point of grief of losing my grandmother and a deeper point of grief was I never knew my mother's mother, my other grandmother, Ninny," she says.

"I was grieving for a grandmother I knew and the one I didn't, and finding who she would have been through stories from my mum and from my aunties, taking bits of their personalities to form a woman I never got to know."

The story is written from the perspective of a young girl talking to her mother and having flashbacks. The mother talks about the dangers of bringing wattle into the house, how the daughter needs to take it back outside.

Odette also writes about cleansing smoke and the catharsis of letting go.

"There's a lot of talk about good luck and bad luck and seeing wattle as a symbol of death to come, a lot of that stems from the stories and lore surrounding Aboriginal culture," she says.

"It made my mum cry but it wasn't from sadness, more a feeling of nostalgia."

Odette is in the process of applying to study medicine, like her mother. She previously finished her Aboriginal Studies Degree at the University of Newcastle. For her, writing is less about a career and more about an outlet.

"One of the first stories I ever wrote was about a sentient ball that wanted to bounce everywhere, all over the world, go to the Eiffel Tower but it ends up bouncing back home, that was in year 2 or 3," she says.

"Writing was always something that my parents encouraged. As an only child, a lot of the energy that I would have spent with brothers or sisters went into writing."

Odette's always wanted to test the waters with her writing but was also scared to put herself out there. She says she enjoyed learning how the story resonated with the judges and reading the positive comments on the West Australian website.