Where stories take root
Left: Merlinda with giant root of an ancient Dao. Bikol, Philippines. Photo: Michelle Remolar-Bobis;
Right: Merlinda at the Marion ACT Literary Awards night, Canberra. Photo: Ben Appleton, Photox
For Merlinda Bobis, stories connect people, places and generations. Her award-winning novel "In the Name of the Trees" (Spinifex, 2025) explores what we carry with us – and what we owe to the world we share.
An ancient tree can stand for centuries, offering shelter, food and breath, holding soil in place and bearing witness to generations of human life.
And then, one day, we cut it down.
For Filipino-Australian writer Merlinda Bobis, that act of destruction became a way of thinking about something much larger: the ways people, cultures and histories can also be cut by violence, colonisation and displacement – and their remarkable capacity to survive.
It is the idea at the heart of her latest novel, In the Name of the Trees, which won the Fiction Award at the Marion 2026 ACT Literary Awards and has since been shortlisted for the 2026 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards in Fiction. The novel is one of five works shortlisted in the Fiction category of the national awards.
At the centre of the novel are four generations of women named after Philippine hardwoods: Banaba, Narra, Pili and Dao. Moving between the Philippines and Australia, the women carry the effects of colonial inheritance while striving to heal and keep their culture and language of care alive. Their stories are intertwined with trees that remember, and with storytelling as a way of confronting what has been inherited.
For Bobis, the novel began with a simple but profound connection between human survival and the natural world.
“I wanted to tell a story about how our human survival depends on the natural world,” she says.
In the novel, as Bobis explains, the destruction of an ancient tree – one that has provided shelter, food, breath and nurture for centuries – echoes the way generations of women have been “cut” by the intergenerational trauma of colonisation.
Yet these women are not defined by what has been done to them. They are, in Bobis' words, “tough, brave, resilient, though flawed”, continuing to survive while carrying with them their culture and language of care and healing to their new home in Canberra.
The trees themselves are more than a metaphor.
“Trees remind me I’m alive because they’re alive,” Bobis says. “They don’t discriminate. They offer nurture to all, regardless of race, culture, creed, or class.”
That idea of care runs through the novel, but it also speaks to Bobis' wider creative practice. Her work moves across fiction, poetry, performance and critical practice, and between languages and cultures. Rather than seeing these as separate pursuits, she describes them as different ways of knowing that continually inform how she tells a story.
“Working in different genres/platforms, I am constantly surprised by the varied possibilities of storytelling; challenged too to take risks and invent beyond my comfort zone.”
That willingness to move between forms mirrors the experience at the heart of much of her writing: the movement between places, languages, histories and ways of being.
Migration, Bobis says, is marked by a continual “push and pull” between two geographies and cultures. There is a desire to belong in a new home while still keeping the first home alive in one's heart.
It is a tension that In the Name of the Trees explores through its generations of women, as histories and experiences are carried from the Philippines to Australia.
For Bobis, themes of resilience, family, identity and healing continue to matter because they help her “keep my bearings and sense of self”.
That relationship between identity and storytelling has been central to Bobis' career as a writer, performer and scholar. Across fiction, poetry, performance and critical practice, Bobis has returned repeatedly to questions of gender, environment, migration, borders, war and colonisation, writing across English, Filipino and Bikol.
It has also shaped her relationship with The Australian National University.
Bobis has a longstanding association with ANU, particularly the School of Culture, History and Language at the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, and previously the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences.
She is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and a member of the Advisory Board of the ANU Philippines Institute.
“I am grateful for my affiliations with ANU, especially as all are involved in story production, reception and interrogation,” Bobis says—work that she sees as vital at a time when stories themselves have become contested territories.
“Story is under siege by those who dis/misinform and fake narrative to facilitate and maintain power,” she says.
She adds that when stories are manipulated, difference can be made invisible or distorted. Against this, Bobis sees storytelling as a way of relating with others – of listening beyond ourselves and recognising that people can have very different histories, cultures and ways of being while still sharing fundamental connections.
“If only we embrace story as a means of relating, understanding, and enriching ourselves WITH each other—if we care to listen and think outside the self.”
It is an idea that connects the themes of In the Name of the Trees with Bobis' creative and academic life.
Her novel asks what people carry across generations and borders: trauma, language, memory, culture and care. It also asks what can survive when those things are threatened, and what is possible when they are nurtured rather than cut away.
But perhaps the most powerful idea in the novel is not about recognition at all. It is about relationship.
A tree is rooted in one place, yet its branches reach outward. It grows from what came before while continually creating something new. It exists as part of a larger ecosystem, dependent on and contributing to the life around it.
The same might be said of stories.
They carry memory across generations. They allow people to bring one place into another. They give language to experiences that might otherwise remain unseen. And, when we are willing to listen, they can remind us that the boundaries between “us” and “others” are never as absolute as they seem.
For Bobis, that is ultimately the responsibility – and the possibility – of storytelling.
“In this planet, there are many others living, loving, dying, and dreaming like us, even if they don’t look, sound, and act like us,” she says.
“We are here together in a shared home, our only home.”
In In the Name of the Trees, that shared home is both literal and metaphorical: the forests and landscapes of the Philippines, the migrant home of Canberra, the inherited worlds carried within families, and the larger world we all inhabit.
The trees remind us that survival is never entirely solitary. Neither are stories. For Bobis, how we story determines how we live – or not – with each other.
Learn more about Merlinda Bobis and her work here: Merlinda Bobis