“I am really proud that as I grew up and became more experienced and more skilled, the show grew up with me.” It’s a work that is layered with meaning, perfected over a decade as Ahmad’s career went from strength to strength. That work is The Demon, a Lynchian physical theatre work that reimagines a dark story in the history of white Australia, interwoven with a surrealist allegory for the Australian demon of racism and xenophobia.ĭrawing on the Chinese, Arab, Anglo-Celtic settler, and Indigenous backgrounds of its creative team, the action-packed thriller explores the bond of two detectives from Bankstown – Arab-Australian Jihad and his Aboriginal Muslim partner Matthew/Muhammad – tasked with investigating a crime allegedly perpetrated by Chinese-Australian street fighter Wei, who draws the detectives on a road trip from Western Sydney to Burrangong, the site of the violent anti-Chinese Lambing Flat riot of 1861. The award-winning author and founder of Sweatshop Literacy Movement, had, only a fortnight prior, won the Queensland Literary Award for Fiction for his third novel, The Other Half of You, which earned him his second Miles Franklin shortlisting (the first was for his previous award-winning novel The Lebs), but the subject of our interview is a piece of writing that came before the books that made him a notable name in Australia’s literary landscape. Michael Mohammed Ahmad is, by his own admission, at the top of his game when we meet for hot chocolates in Bankstown, a suburb of Sydney’s south-west, to talk about his latest work.
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