Ms Supatra Gill

Supatra Gill is a PhD candidate at the University of Newcastle where her creative thesis and memoir Luk-krueng Between Worlds examines place, identity and belonging from a bi-racial perspective.

"Home, Identity and Belonging have been subjects I have returned to again and again in my creative works. The homes I have known, and the landscapes that hold and surround them, exist in my memory as sites of belonging and of loss and unreconciled grief. It will be through the lens of a woman who has always occupied the liminal spaces that I will re-visit aspects of my past life. Interrogating childhood memories, family stories, archival photographs, letters and documents will inform my work. In doing so I hope to find meaningful answers to some existential questions: who am I and where do I belong? As a product of a then-rare mixed marriage: Anglo-New Zealand father and Thai mother of Lao Isan ethnicity, my upbringing in Chieng Mai, in Thailand’s far north, was unique. The laws at the time did not allow dual citizenship and my mother lost her Thai citizenship when she married my father. Therefore as bi-racial non-citizen growing up predominantly in my mother’s country, and educated in an International school I was both a Third Culture Kid (TCK) and a Luk-kreung ( ลูกครึ่ง“half-child” or Eurasian ). My siblings and I occupied the liminal space between cultures: we were not Thai, we were not considered to be fully British nor were we privileged to be International in the same economic sense as our school friends." 

Educated in Thailand and New Zealand, Supatra came to Australia where she has worked as a governess, a camp and station cook, bookkeeper, jillaroo and school dental therapist in Australia’s far north. Since then she has been a farmer, a horticulturalist and herbalist. When circumstances forced her from the land, she took the skills she learnt into her own bookkeeping business which eventually led to positions in corporate Australia. Resigning from full time work and enrolling in university study was been a dream come true. Winning a PhD scholarship at the University of Newcastle was the culmination of passion, hard work and dedicated mentorship by her supervisors.  Supatra has been exploring the ways in which women tell their own stories. Her particular focus centres on life-writing by women living and working in Outback and Top End Australia. 

Writing under Supatra Walker, her works have appeared in Mascara Literary Review, Meniscus and Tinakori: Critical Journal of the Katherine Mansfield Society.