Alice Pung's Unpolished Gem and her conversations with the teenagers who've studied it

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Voting is open for ABC Radio National's Top 100 Australian Books Countdown.

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Go to abc.net.au/top100books and pick up to 10 of your favourites.

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You don't have long. Vote now at abc.net.au/top100books.

Do you remember the novels you studied at school? The Hobbit, Steinbecks of Mice and Men? Did you go up the river in the heart of darkness or turn the pages of Cloud Street? Well, today's Big Thinker on Big Ideas has written one of those books that's been read, discussed and written about in classrooms across Australia by two generations of teenagers.

Alice Pung (1:06)

School started inviting me to speak as their guest author.

And every school I went to, I went with one assumption, that no one had read my book, even if it was on the book list, even if I could see every single student with a physical copy of it on their desk. And the reason I assumed this was because it was kind of awkward and embarrassing to know that 200 or so year eights, nines, tens or elevens were kind of forced to read the equivalent of your teenage diary.

Claire Nicholls (1:36)

Yeah, she started writing it when she was aged just 19

She was 25 when it was published. And Alice Pung's Unpolished Gem turns 20 this year.

It's a great book and I wonder if it's going to be on your list for ABC Radio National's Top 100 Australian Books. Hello, it's Claire Nicholls here filling in for Natasha Mitchell on Big Ideas. And yes, voting is open now. We want you to nominate your favourite ever Australian Books for our Top 100 Australian Books count. Just head to the ABC Radio National homepage or text the word Bookworm 20418 226576 and we'll send you a link to the voting page. And today on Big Ideas, award-winning writer, educator and lawyer, Alice Pung, reflects on her enduring, irreverent, loving memoir of her migrant family's everyday struggles and bittersweet triumphs, and the opportunities it's brought her to connect with thousands of teenagers across the country. Alice has gone on to publish 15 books, including a second memoir, Her Father's Daughter, the YA novel Laurinda, and as editor, the anthology, Growing Up Asian in Australia, which is the first in that wonderful series. She also works as a lawyer and a writing teacher. And from the Wheeler Centre in Nga, Melbourne, with her 2026 EW Cole Lecture, here's Alice.

Alice Pung (3:05)

Good evening, everyone. It's a great joy to be here tonight with you all to deliver the 2026 EW Cole Lecture. So you might have seen the title of this talk. It mentions reasons for optimism and showing up. Well, I feel optimistic tonight because so many people showed up. And so tonight will be a little bit unusual because it's a collaboration between myself, a conversation with my friend Marina, and also I incorporate the art of a 15-year-old. So every author does this differently. And tonight I'm going to talk about two things. And I wrote and rewrote this speech. It's one of the hardest ones I've ever had to do.

You know, I had 3,000 words three days ago and I scrapped them all. And I'm going to tell you three things, why I write and how I write and why I continue to write. Now, I didn't start writing because I believe my writing or voice could change the world. The pen is not mightier than the sword. And anyone who believes in unexamined out-of-date cliches, I will challenge to a duel. I'll hold the katana and you get the big biro.

So I first started writing for one simple reason.

I was pretty young and I did not want to shake a baby. When I was 8, my sister Alison was born. And my mum told me you should never shake a baby. They've got really soft skulls and you could rattle their brain and cause them brain damage.

But she said that in more colourful language because our ancestry is from the south of China where the people are short and loud and we speak an ancient dialect called Dio Dio.

It can be quite a profane language, but it's the perfect language for warning your loved ones all about the ways they could be killed or inadvertently kill, injure or maim someone else.

So because I didn't want to cause grievous bodily harm to a baby, I wrote in a journal. It was a leftover exercise book from the previous school here with some blank pages. When I began writing, for myself, in my diaries, I was not aware of what it meant to have an audience. In fact, I didn't want an audience to be privy to my terrible, awful thoughts. At school, I could get by as the quite likable Asian girl. But after school, I had four hours of mining the baby while my mum was an out worker in the back shed. And when you're young, four hours can feel like eight. And don't even get me started on school holidays. So if I had Facebook back then, who's on Facebook? Anyone here on Facebook?