Tyree Barnette's work searches for intelligence through the shifting terrain of race, privilege, and belonging. Touching on topics of domesticity, parenthood, partnership, and memory, it moves into questions of colonisation, protest, cultural exchange, and power. Again and again, Barnette's work returns to the intimate stakes of political life, examining how raising children shapes both fear and hope when the land you live on feels unsettled.

Barnette's new book, Stolen Man on Stolen Land, newly released in January this year, follows a Black American family trying to make a home in Sydney while reckoning with Indigenous sovereignty, the global appetite for Black culture, and what it means to belong on Australian soil. The book invites readers to sit with discomfort and consider what accountability might look like when it grows out of love.

Below, we speak with Tyree Barnette about Stolen Man on Stolen Land, writing about America, and crafting a love letter to Australian multiculturalism that is also a critique of it.

You describe Stolen Man on Stolen Land as both a love letter to Australian multiculturalism and a critique of it. How did you hold affection and accountability in the same narrative equally?

It’s really the very definition of being African American and still loving the United States: to adore something enough to critique it because you want it so badly to be better. You want it to work for everyone.

For me, affection and accountability are crucial parts of telling an honest narrative. Holding someone or something accountable is an act of love: I love that Australia so prominently acknowledges Indigenous Australians through acknowledgements, public displays, and media. But there is so much more that needs to be done to correct and repair the history of atrocity visited on Indigenous Australians both within and following colonisation. I highlight this particularly during a chapter called ‘Black Life’. In that chapter, the characters attend a Black Lives Matter protest in Sydney where they hear from organisers who explain what the movement and justice from it look like for this country.

I also love how Australia values African American culture enough to want to emulate it, but I don’t like when parts of it are exploited, mischaracterized, appropriated, or just perpetuate narrow-minded stereotypes. I explore this issue in a couple of chapters inside the book. While they were heavily fictionalised, the chapters were based on a series of observations about how Sydney can misrepresent Black American culture. That chapters centred the argument on the intersection of Black American food culture, soul food from the American South, and hip-hop music. In the book, what seemed to be harmless appreciation for Black food culture ended up as a racially charged, offensive, uncomfortable dining experience, from the restaurant’s logo to the hostess to the menu items themselves.

As Australians, we need to challenge ourselves to read more written pieces and absorb media that hold that balance between affection and accountability.

You write about how race and privilege shift across borders. What surprised you most about how you were encountered differently in Australia compared to the United States?

Since African American culture is so globally popular and preceded my arrival to Australia, I’m met with fascination and curiosity. That’s the privilege in my experience here that is carried throughout the book. Australians’ encounters with African Americans aren’t always common despite having so much exposure to our culture through music, food, sports, movies, literature, and social media. I boil these experiences down into an exchange between my character in the book and an Australian man on the long flight over from Los Angeles to Sydney.
I’m also asked to comment about Donald Trump, American politics, the latest mass shooting there, or other topics of the day.

But with this curiosity can sometimes come fetishization: as if speaking to a Black American is some sort of tick-box. A conversation for some becomes an experience of speaking to the ‘other’ instead of just an exchange with an individual whose different than you.

Meanwhile, in America, I’m just regular Black. No fascination. No curiosity. Depending on where I am, who is around me, and how I’m dressed, there might be a hint of fear, rejection, or disrespect. I sometimes felt invisible in America that hasn’t quite translated here in Australia.

Australia often celebrates Black American culture while resisting conversations about Black history and pain. Where do you see admiration tipping into fetishisation?

It can be hard to determine the line at times. But one example is the consumption of Black culture without exploration or acknowledgement of how that culture came to be. That is shown in the book when a White restaurant owner bristles at a Black American patron who asks him pointed questions about what inspired the cuisine at his restaurant which is meant to be selling food from Black America and the Caribbean. The patron asks him why he plucked out certain elements but not others within Black American culture, how he’s framing hip hop in his restaurant, and how he compensates those from the culinary tradition who taught him the recipes. In the book, the restaurant owner took certain elements of the cuisine and the music to create shallow stereotypes of a richer culture. To patrons who had little knowledge of Black Americans and their culture, this experience could have been conceived as an assumption of who Black Americans really were.
Fetishisation also develops as admiration from a distance where one can experience a culture without having to also deal with that culture’s pain and trauma. Parts of it can be tried on, consumed, and discarded when finished. A bit of that insight comes out in the chapters involving the restaurant.

There was also a chapter that highlighted the Black Lives Matter movement in Australia and the multi-cultural protest marches that it sparked here. I find that Australia does closely follow the ongoing civil rights issues in the USA. There was much attention paid to police brutality and murder here by Australian media. But it wasn’t always clear to me that the sustained protests about Aboriginal people dying in police custody here warranted the same public dialogue and push for change.
It’s fine to love and admire Black American culture. It’s rich and beautiful. But Black American culture and art can also be confrontational and uncomfortable. That has to be listened to, consumed, and understood as well.

In the book, you reflect on moments of kinship with First Nations people. How did those experiences deepen your understanding of what it means to live on stolen land?

I came to Australia with that at the front of mind already. As a Black American born out of a legacy of theft and oppression, I wanted to educate myself on the Indigenous Australian experience to become a better ally while living here. I also wanted to support Bla(c)k businesses and culture through visiting the Blak markets, seeing a performance from the Bangarra Dance Theatre (which was first co-founded by a Black American woman), and buying books from Indigenous authors to educate my kids and myself.
However, through living here and bearing witness to what this country has done/is doing, my understanding went beyond just living on stolen land. I further learned how the justice system preys on and consumes Indigenous bodies with the high rates of deaths in custody from law enforcement all over Australia. Just last year, several media outlets reported that Australia experienced its highest rate of Aboriginal deaths in custody from July 2024 to June 2025 since records began being recorded.

I see how the land is abused and mistreated through mining and the desecration of cultural significant Indigenous sites, how the coral reefs are bleached, how land is over-developed and not looked after to be ravaged by record-setting wildfires. I see Indigenous Australians in urban pockets of Sydney like Redfern and Woolloomooloo being gentrified out of their neighbourhoods as bike lanes, paved laneways, upgraded train stations, and new high-rise apartments make these areas more attractive and more expensive.
I saw again how the Black Lives Matter movement found voice in Australia as First Nations people and their allies moulded the movement to highlight high rates of deaths in custody. I also see the sometimes-heavy-handed approach of police towards these protesters on the news. While the land remains stolen, you cannot overlook the massive injustices and barbarism that is constantly visited upon First Nations people.

Your writing is gentle and reflective, even when addressing distressing topics. Did you ever feel pressure to reflect a different tone?

The title alone of this book will either draw or repel a person. I think if a reader picks up the book and takes it home, they’ve demonstrated their capacity to read for understanding and be open to another point of view. So no, I didn’t feel any pressure to take a stronger tone. I don’t want to preach to readers or drag them into a long guilt trip. Instead, I used each chapter to lay out and defend an argument or to illustrate a point. If there are distressing topics, I walk the reader through them, make my case, and allow them to reflect on where they fall on the topic.
Not all points dealt with race and inequality either. There are a range of topics that people from various walks of life can gravitate towards whether that’s fatherhood, masculinity, religion, community-building, the rental market in major cities like Sydney, music, or politics.

There are also moments when the book is confronting. Personally, I think the Barber Shop Debates chapters are a good early test for the reader: if you can endure and ingest that dialogue, you’re prepared for the rest of the book.

Fatherhood runs quietly but powerfully through the book. How did becoming a parent shape the way you think about safety, belonging, and hope?

Being a parent, or even an aunt or uncle for that matter, propels you off society’s sidelines. You can’t just complain about the state of the world; you need to do something. You must seek out safe spaces for your children and also ensure that you are also a safe space for them to confide in as well. The character in my book experiences this while finding his son a day care. He and his partner visit several day cares before settling on one that wasn’t his initial first choice, but it had that warm, safe feeling.

I cannot assume that my kids’ experiences in school will resemble mine. I wasn’t the only African American in my class growing up. My kids might find themselves in this situation. So, I need to ensure that they are comfortable, secure, and confident in themselves even in instances when other kids don’t look like them.
In my mind, belonging is a result of safety – but it’s a tricky concept to navigate. My partner and I try to highlight the diversity and multi-culturalism of this country: that everyone can feel as much of a sense of belonging as one can while acknowledging they reside on stolen land. In that sense, you can never feel like you fully belong while taking part in the colonial experience of moving to Australia.

And on hope, God it’s easy to lose hope! The USA is a dumpster fire right now, but I have to hold to hope. Australia is recovering from a horrendous and rare massacre at Bondi. It’s led to some misguided thinking and other effects in our multi-cultural society. Parts of this country are cozying up a little too much to a sense of ethno-nationalism as well. It’s always been there in the background, just like in the USA. But in Australia, it hasn’t pierced the veil and gone mainstream.

But I do look for hope. My kids’ school, tiny and mighty, with passionate teachers and a relatively diverse student body gives me hope. Their pre-school situated in a well-to-do part of Sydney had a White teacher who intentionally found the Black American Heritage flag and presented it to my son on a multi-cultural themed day. It was way of being culturally sensitive and not assuming that we only recognised the American flag. I was so in shock at the gesture that to this day, I’m not confident that I thanked her properly.

You can’t be a responsible parent and not have hope. Otherwise, you are forfeiting your children’s future. And they’re owed so much more than a hopeless future. They can save us, if we allow them to.