Speaker 1
This is a Vision Australia Radio podcast.
Speaker 2
On Vision Australia Radio, welcome to our conversations on the work and experiences of emerging writers. I'm Kate Cooper and I guest today is Dr. Guillaume Vetu, who just this week has joined us here at Vision Australia Radio in Adelaide as our new volunteer coordinator. So we're delighted to get to know him through our program. Guillaume comes to us with 20 years' experience in community radio as a broadcaster, trainer and advocate. He's also been an academic writer in a language that isn't his mother tongue.
So it's his writing as well as his broadcasting experiences that we'll be exploring during our conversation today. Welcome Guillaume, and bienvenu.
Speaker 3
Thank you.
Speaker 2
You're a French -born Australian, so let's start by talking about your childhood in France. Where did you grow up? What was it like to live there?
Speaker 3
Thank you. I grew up in Normandy. I was born just outside of the capital city, you'd say, of Normandy, which is Roi, in a little place called Kantleu by the Seine River. And I was there till the age of about 16. I lived in Paris a little bit, just for a year or so. And then I started coming to Australia. So I've been in Australia for over 30 years now.
Speaker 2
Ah, so you started coming out here quite young.
Speaker 3
I did, yeah, I came on holidays twice, and then I came on a student visa, and then I got permanent residency, and then that turned into a national citizenship.
Speaker 2
I'll ask you a little bit more about Normandy in a minute, but I'm curious to know what inspired you to come to Australia.
Speaker 3
The first time... so it was several stages, the first time was really about distance. Two friends of mine and myself, we had access to very, very cheap tickets. A friend of ours worked in an airplane company and called us out of the blue and said, I mean, the office, the bus is gone. Where are you guys going to go? Want to go? I can make your tickets. So at the time we were 17. So at the time we just basically thought, what is the furthest we can go? This is the opportunity of a lifetime.
And so of course Australia is the furthest that we could think of. And you know, this is a long time ago. This is in the 90s. So we didn't know anything about Australia. I mean, we knew Crocodile Dundee vaguely and that was about it. You know, three French boys. So yeah, so we just ended up coming to Australia, flew into Sydney and traveled around Brisbane and around Queensland. We went a bit out back, Townsville, I believe. Yeah, and just for about a month. And then a few months later, one of us three was actually studying in the US and did an exchange with Adelaide. And so came to do an exchange, a university exchange here in Adelaide. And so myself and the other one, we completed the trio once again.
But this time we came to Adelaide for a month. We stayed in his bed. There was at St. Mark's College. He had a student room. He wasn't supposed to have people stay there, but you know, we'd sleep on the floor and we did that for a month sneaking in and out at night or, you know, discreetly. And so that was a second holiday and I just made some contacts. And I just liked the place. I suppose I've just fell in love with the place. And as the years went by, a couple more years, when I was about 18, 19, I just wanted to get away from France. I didn't feel, I didn't fit very well, I think maybe. Anyways, I just came to Australia on a student visa and just found a home and just kept coming back, really.
Speaker 2
So it sounds like Australia actually inspired a sense of an urge to wander and to travel.
Speaker 3
Yeah, that's right. And I think what in retrospect, what really drew me to come back to Australia and make it my home is the general attitude of people here in contrast with France. I'm sure Australia doesn't have the monopoly on being a welcoming and a nice place to be. But coming from France, France is really governed by a dog-eat-dog kind of world. The only way to get ahead is to step on someone else. And if you are honest, hardworking and a simple outlook on life and you just believe in trust and just doing your part and being nice with people, you really put down in France. Only idiots are honest and hardworking.
Whereas in Australia, it's quite the opposite. In Australia, straight away, being just the Australian expression is straight shooter, which is a bit of a, I don't know if I love that expression, but that's how I felt. I felt, oh my goodness, I can really be just my own self here and I'm recognised for it positively. And I think that really seduced me.
05:12
Speaker 2
So when you came here at 17, the first time you came, had you studied English at school? Did you have some English when you arrived?
Speaker 3
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was... a straight A English student at school. So in France at the time, I don't know where we're at now, but at the time you'd start learning a second language in the equivalent I suppose of year 7 maybe. And you had a choice between, in my days, you had a choice between English or German. Those were the two choices. If you chose English then you would continue doing that all the way to the baccalaureate. If you chose German you had two years of that and then two years later, so year you had to choose a second language.
If you chose English you could choose Spanish or German. If you chose German there was no choice. You had to choose English. So French people of my generation all speak English, despite what they might pretend when you visit. Everybody speaks English, you learn it at school. So I just loved English and my parents did this crazy thing where they dropped me in a family in England for 10 days completely on my own when I was 5. Yeah, yeah. I didn't come back with much English, but I think that really trained my ear. And then from that point on I sort of, I've always really liked English. So when I came to Australia the first time I was already, I felt very fluent in English, although I was not quite prepared to the Australian accent. That took me a little while.
Speaker 2
It is different although certainly my experience teaching English overseas is that I've been told people like the Australian accent because it's more evenly pitched than say British English or American English.
Speaker 3
Perhaps, yeah, that's, I mean, it all depends. I've encountered some really thick and difficult to understand accents when you start going, you know, up north around the outback Australia and especially Queensland outback. But that's my experience. I'm sure there's other places, but my experience, yeah, sometimes it's a bit difficult. I think as a second language English speaker who had learned, you know, in Europe, so we learned at school, we learned Oxford English.
And I think Australian, the Australian accent is a bit more difficult, I think, than the Oxford, the proper Oxford. But I think in England, once you step out of that Oxford propriety, then it can get very difficult, I think as well.
Speaker 2
That's true. So your parents sent you for 10 days when you were five. So they're responsible, perhaps, for your sense of adventure as well.
Speaker 3
Oh, absolutely. My parents are very adventurous. They still are. They still are, in their old age. But yeah, no, no. There was a lot of traveling. My father would go to England at least once a month for a few days. He was an antiques dealer. So he would go with an empty truck and come back with a full truck because at the time the English were getting rid of lots of their furniture that were not popular, but he found that the French liked it.
nd I think eventually he found out the other way.
So eventually he would actually go to England with a truck full of furniture, sell it all, come back with a truck full of furniture that he would sell in France. So I would go on his trips as often as I could as a young child. I often missed school to go with him on trips like that.
Speaker 2
But you're getting a much broader education, so it doesn't really matter that you missed a bit of school because you were also learning about the world.
Speaker 3
Absolutely, I think it's great for children to be exposed to lots of different cultures and languages, absolutely.
Speaker 2
For sure. And so you started school in Normandy. You lived there for a while, but then you went to Paris. So did you do any high school in Paris?
Speaker 3
Yeah, so what happened is I did all my primary school in just a couple of years of high school, and then I went to boarding school in the Paris region, and I was there for three years. And then I came back to Rouen for my final year in a public school, in a public high school, in Rouen. And then I did a music diploma at a music school in Paris, and that's when I lived in Paris for about a year and a half, two years.
Speaker 2
So you're a musician as well. I didn't add that to the introductory. So what are your specialties?
Speaker 3
So, I'm a trained bass player, so this music diploma as a bass player and I played bass in a lot of formations and lots of contexts. And then I sort of moved to the acoustic guitar and singing song and so the bulk of my career as a musician, which is behind me now, but I suppose in the 2010s for about 10 years, I was a singer-songwriter playing acoustic guitar and singing, writing and singing and performing songs, my own songs, performing live.
09:55
Speaker 2
And did you record?
Speaker 3
Yes, I recorded a lot. In fact, I had a recording studio as well. So I recorded a lot of other artists as well as myself. Yeah, I used to tour. I never hit it big. I was never that famous. But I was famous enough to sort of tour regularly. I had a tourer who would book me gigs all across Australia, country gigs that, you know, they're kind of difficult because I would have to play for about three to four hours. But they paid very well. And then in between, I put in those festival gigs and those cool gigs that, you know, are great fun and great for the profile, but pay nothing.
Speaker 2
But your music career then took you to all kinds of places in Australia and enabled you to know this country probably better than I do.
Speaker 3
Oh, well, I don't know about that. But yeah, I certainly travelled a lot. Yeah. You know, for the last three, four years of my career as a musician, I would tour about two or three times a year. And when touring in Australia means you have to be on the road for several weeks. There's no sort of a quick, quickly old two weeks. Touring doesn't make much sense, financial sense, that is.
Speaker 2
Of course. I want to go back to just asking you one more question about language, actually, to be honest, I've got several questions for you as we go through our conversation about language. But you mentioned before you studied English from a fairly early age. What else, what other language did you study at school?
Speaker 3
So after the two initial years of English, I then chose Spanish. And yeah, I picked up Spanish very quickly. I was quite good at Spanish and I've traveled to Spain a few times. I stayed with families. Same in England. I've stayed with lots of English families as I grew a bit older. I still have a bit of Spanish. Every now and then I get to practice it a little bit. But yeah, nowhere near as practiced as I am with English.
Speaker 2
Well, I speak Spanish so we're off air, we'll have a bit of a conversation afterwards in that language. So you did your university studies in Australia then rather than in France?
Speaker 3
And that's right, so I actually never went to university until fairly recently, so I started a bachelor in 2015. And when I tell these two people, instinctively I say, oh, and then I decided to go back to uni, but there was no going back. I had never been. So what I had done is after high school, after my baccalaureate, I went to a music school, which was kind of outside of the normal education system. It was a private school and, you know, for musicians, it was for only one year.
It was intensive. It was 40 hours contact per week. So it was an intensive school for big, basically musicians who were very dedicated and very interested. So I did that. And then after that, that was it. And then in Australia, I ended up going to TAFE a few times, getting a few CERT4s. You know, I got a CERT4 in TAE training and assessment. I got a CERT4 in TESOL teaching English to students of other languages. And yeah, and then in 2015, I decided to go to uni for the first time for me.
Speaker 2
On Vision Australia Radio, you're listening to our conversation program Emerging Writers. I guess today is Guillaume Vitu, our new volunteer coordinator here at Vision Australia Radio in Adelaide. So Guillaume, you do have a PhD which you wrote in English. That is not your mother tongue, even though you have learnt it for a long time. So there are several questions that I want to ask you about your thesis, but let's start with the topic, what did it involve and why did you choose that focus?
Speaker 3
Okay, so it was in media. So it's officially a PhD in media because my bachelor was in media. And so I continued that same path. In truth, though, it is a bit more broad than that. And it's more about film. It's more of a film studies. I think the term really that is attached to my PhD is screen studies. So my PhD, first thing I would like to say is I worked not very hard. It came very quickly, but I was determined when I studied my PhD, I was actually determined to come up with a title that would make people smile or cringe, whatever it is.
But I wanted a reaction and it worked because when it was read out at the ceremony, I did get a chuckle of the entire room, which was great. Okay, so I'll tell you the title. The title is, Beyond the Tree of the Living Dead, a Riso Analysis of Japanese Cinematic Zombies. Right. So the subject is twofold. It's about zombies as they appear in Japanese films. But it's also the Riso Analysis part of it is an exploration and an experimentation in research method. So in short, I explored and developed an alternative research method. And I used a very specific niche and underexplored subject to experiment, to practice it, to put into practice, to see what kind of results you can get.
So come up with the theory of the method and then actually put into practice to see how does it work. And to do that, I needed a subject that no one had really looked into before. It turned out to be Japanese zombie films. What's that subject?
15:14
Speaker 2
Did you need to know any Japanese to do this?
Speaker 3
No, not really. I learned a lot, obviously. And I lived in Japan for a year pursuing this research. I ended up being able to speak a little bit of Japanese, but certainly not enough to hold myself up in a conversation at all. No, not even to that level.
Speaker 2
There are lots more questions I want to follow up, but I'll just put your thesis aside for one moment and just ask you about the year in Japan. I've been fortunate to go to Japan a couple of times. I really, really liked it, but I was just going as someone who didn't speak the language. I was actually there to do some work, but I had the opportunity to see the sites of Tokyo and Kyoto and Hiroshima as well, and I had a wonderful experience. So, where were you in Japan and what were your experiences like?
Speaker 3
So we went to Japan with my family, so with my wife and our two children. There were three and five at the time, and we stayed in a little place called Hirakata, which is pretty much right in the middle between Kyoto and Osaka. So it's about half hour train either way to go to Kyoto or Osaka. There's a university there called Kansai Gaidai, which the University of Adelaide has some ties with. And my wife, who was teaching stillies, teaching English at the University of Adelaide, got offered this opportunity to go and teach at Kansai Gaidai as part of the University of Adelaide program, and that involved accommodation and her ticket and some a bunch of other little benefits, family insurance, things like that.
Anyways, all we needed to come up with was playing tickets for myself and the children, and then we were sorted. So we thought, ah, let's just do it. It'll be fun. And it was, it was great fun to be there for a year and live and work there. And so that's, that's how my, my PhD ended up being related to Japan because of that opportunity. The opportunity arrived before the idea of Japan. Yeah.
Speaker 2
Ah, so on a day-to-day basis, your wife's teaching at the university there, what did you get up to day-to-day?
Speaker 3
I did have a very strict routine which I think is important if you're going to do a PhD. So the routine was pretty much every day the same. So my wife would go to work before or at the same time as I would take the children on my bicycle. I had one sitting in the front, one sitting at the back in their little chairs, they were still little, and we would go by bicycle to their school. So they went to a Japanese school, a Gakuen they call it, which is kind of a bit more like a kindergarten.
There was still young and said I would drop them to their school and then I would ride my bicycle to my office. My office being a cubicle in a shared space, which I managed to find and rent. And I would go to my cubicle and work for maybe five, six hours and then ride the bicycle back, pick up the children, do the shopping and then come home.
And that was the routine pretty much.
Speaker 2
What was doing the shopping like?
Speaker 3
Oh, such a pleasure. I loved it. So where we lived, and I believe it's the same in Japan, there's an abundance of supermarkets. It's kind of crazy. So where we lived, I had the choice of six different supermarkets. And I'm talking within five minute walking distance, okay? Each of them would sell a few products you could find everywhere, but mostly it was all different. So depending on what we felt like, I would go to a specific, I got to know which supermarket did what.
And so lots of different choices. I mean, Japan is a real, it's a consumer heaven. So you've got a massive amount of choices, lots of pre -prepared food, there's great quality done fresh and just absolutely delicious. And because of this proximity, and because of the routine I had, because I was out every day, in Australia you do shopping once a week. You take the car, you go to the supermarket and load up for the week. So in Japan, we didn't do that at all. I'd go and just buy what I needed for that night. And maybe if we ran out of milk, I'd get another bottle of milk, but really very little, the kids would carry it in their little seat on the bicycle.
And we do that every day. So regular shopping and deciding, what are we gonna eat tonight, kids? And then we pick at the supermarket. It was a pleasure. There's one thing that took us a while to realise is, Japan is apparently the most literate country in the world. The highest level, by that I mean the highest level of literacy compared to any other country in the world. But the Japanese being the Japanese, they assume this is the case for everyone. Therefore, they rely on people to be able to read Japanese.
So to give you a concrete example, you've got an aisle in a supermarket that is the aisle for the cans, canned food. The aisle is filled with cans. None of them have any picture. So you don't know what's in, unless you know how to read Japanese. And it can get a bit, the first time we went shopping, we were just stunned. So thank God we have this little app that you can place your phone, it uses the camera, you place it in front of whatever text that you can find in the real world, and it translates it real time for you.
So we got to learn for instance that, but that's probably better now. This is a while back now. The app was not so reliable. Sometimes it came up with strange things, but you'd get to learn what it is. So for instance, if we scanned the text and it said, chicken of the sea, oh, we know that was a can of tuna. So that's tuna, that's good tuna. So we had to work things out a little bit, but then we got used to it very quickly.
21:02
Speaker 2
How did living there change the way you and your family ate? The things that you ate and what you cooked?
Speaker 3
Oh my goodness, so much. It really did. It really, really did. We discovered lots of ways. We kind of thrown into it because we arrived. The apartment, we didn't have a choice. This was the apartment we were getting. And the apartment was completely furnished. It had everything in it, all the machines and everything for a Japanese family. It was not westernised at all. So, we started using the rice cooker and then we started looking at recipes of what, using the product. Because we were not interested in spending a lot of time and energy trying to find foods that we were accustomed to, like Western food, which you can find, if you look hard enough, they're much more expensive.
They're not that good. And really, what's the point? So, we just learned bit by bit. And we came back, we lived in Japan for a year. We came back with lots of different things that we'd never done before. And lots of, to this day, we continue cooking lots of foods that we would have never known about before. Definitely. Even ways of cooking and choices you make. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2
And our assumption would be that the food would be healthier. Is it?
Speaker 3
I think it depends what you choose. There are a lot of products in Japan that are definitely not healthy at all. They use a lot of coloring. They use a lot of agents of sorts, to antioxidants and things like that. There's a lot of very chemically dubious products, left, right and center. So in some matter of choosing what you like, there's definitely a lot of fresh food. So if you're into fresh food if you're into cooking from scratch, then it's as healthy as it is in Australia really. I think the idea of healthy food on the shelves comes with what you choose, I think.
Speaker 2
And what about your children? What was their experience like?
Speaker 3
Well, we'd like to think that it really opened their little brains to the world. I'm sure it did the exposure to the language, the fact that they ended up in a school where nobody spoke English at all, not even the teachers. So they had to sort of navigate that. And it wasn't always very easy. But in the end, they did. They made friends. And then all the different foods, the different... They were still young. That's one of the reasons why my wife and I thought this would be a good idea, because they're still medieval.
You know, three and five, they'll do whatever you tell them really. So we thought, let's do it. Why we still can, you know, if we were to do something like that now, there would be a lot of negotiations. So we just did it. They learned the new ways and took that on board. One thing I think that was very good for them on a more, perhaps on a more sort of socio-philosophical level is they were the only... you know, fair-skinned, blonde-headed little children. And I think as such, because Hirakata doesn't have very many non-Japanese people at all, we were very the odd bunch, along with a few other university teachers at the university where we lived.
But apart from that, the whole place was not very accustomed to westerners, I suppose. And so that was good for my children to be placed in that position of minority and be the different ones and the odd one -outs, because they were, they were very, very odd to the Japanese people of all ages and in all contexts. And to be put in that position where they kind of a bit objectified in a way, because, you know, the blonde hair and there's a sort of fascination a little bit. So people wanted to take pictures with them on the street, you know.
And then at school, they were really sort of, it was difficult for them to be incorporated into the rest of the activities. They were the odd ones out. So it's good for them. I think it's good for little blondies to be put in that place. So then now they've got an acute sense of being inclusive, including everyone and everyone has a place. And I think if there's one thing that they took from that experience is that they've come back to Australia with a very, very strong sense of what it means to accept difference and include everyone into, you know, their world.
25:32
Speaker 2
Guillaume, that's a lovely place to pause our conversation. And I'd like to continue next week because I've still got a few questions that I'd love to ask you. So thank you so much for today. Our guest on Emerging Writers was Dr. Guillaume Vettu, our new volunteer coordinator here at Vision Australia Radio in Adelaide. This program can be heard at the same time each week on Vision Australia Radio, VA Radio Digital, online at varadio.org, and also on Vision Australia Radio podcasts, where you can catch up on earlier episodes.
Speaker 1
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26:29
Speaker 2
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