Plastic Budgie by Olivia De Zilva
“The her who belonged in Brisbane, the she in the stratosphere, hurtling back home to Adelaide, could no longer fight against each other, and to gain sustenance, they began to embrace each other, work together and disappear…Childhood embraced adulthood with an uncertain future, no matter how destructive.”
Plastic Budgie (2025, Pink Shorts Press) is the debut work of auto-fiction from Kaurna Yerta/Adelaide-based writer Olivia De Zilva. Split into two unequal parts, it charts a series of formative experiences throughout her young childhood through adolescence to a brief period in her early twenties, where she seeks to reconcile the version of herself from her youth with her present self. A short third part – more of an epilogue – titled ‘Ammonites’, offers a hopeful and insightful framing for what exists and what might come next.
The work is described as “a brutally funny and inventive debut about family and self, full of itchy Y2K nostalgia, curses and glimpses of birds.” I have to admit I was a bit thrown at first when I began reading, as the back cover advises the book is fiction, the press release declares it auto-fiction, but for me (at least) it reads distinctly as memoir. For ease of reviewing and uncertainty around exactly what’s fact and fiction here, I’ll simply refer to the perspectives shared as those of ‘the narrator.’
The narrator of Plastic Budgie is being raised in Adelaide by a Chinese mother and Malaysian father, as well as her grandparents on her mother's side – her Gong Gong and Poh Poh – who live close by and run a restaurant. The narrator self-deprecatingly walks us through the semi-traumatic (and fully traumatic) early experiences of her youth, hitting all the right prose beats as she does:
“My teacher made us introduce ourselves, and before I could say anything, my grandparents said that my name was Fa, meaning flower, a Cantonese name they had given me…A kid with spiked hair and glasses bent over and blew a raspberry, ‘Her name is FART!’”
From schoolyard bullying to embarrassing haircuts, cultural pain points to psychosomatic loss of voice, our narrator’s memories of their youth are fuelled by first and secondhand embarrassment and attempting to understand their place in the chaos. Our narrator spends a period of time refusing to speak, working with a speech therapist called Jennifer to help her begin to explore her voice once more through the use of a dog sock puppet:
“After I was able to bark the beginning of the Lord’s prayer, howl the Cantonese alphabet back to front for Poh Poh and growl at my Gong Gong for stealing the last shumai at yum cha, Jennifer decided that I was ready to participate in a special speech day.”
There are experiences here that I think anyone who grew up in the tumultuous early 2000s will identify strongly with, but beyond this is the distinct influence of our narrator’s cultural heritage on her perspective, how she (and her family) is perceived, and the ways this shapes her responses to the world around her. Travelling to her parents' home cities (Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur) to visit relatives offers glimpses into the people they were and could be outside of Australia, and the conflicts of being Asian in a country that is less than welcoming of migrants. Along with these realisations, our narrator also grapples with the coming-of-age understanding that our parents are as flawed as anyone else, and the emerging knowledge of how their flaws can have dramatic impacts on our own behaviour and actions:
“My mum called my dad purple because his temper was like a thunderstorm. He liked to control things, she said. I noticed that he would fly off the handle when there were breadcrumbs on the dining room table, or if the television was too loud or harangue us with a broom if we were wearing shoes in the house. He would wake my mum up in the middle of the night to get him a glass of water and make her wait for him in the rain when he was grocery shopping.”
The work shines best in the brief second part, where I felt more firmly the voice belonged to De Zilva. I loved her approach to unpacking the split in self that occurs between childhood and adulthood, and her identification of how our past selves haunt us. I would have loved for this section to be longer, as while childhoods are often great fodder for humorous pain points in writing, it’s how we make sense of them in the present that I feel has the most to offer potential readers.
De Zilva undoubtedly has a powerful, unique voice. For a debut, this is polished, well-realised and deftly woven together. I look forward to seeing where her literary career will take her next.
Elaine Chennatt is a writer, educator and psychology student currently residing in nipaluna. She has a special interest in bibliotherapy (how we use literature to make sense of our lives) and is endlessly curious about the creative philosophies of others. She lives with her husband and two bossy dachshunds on the not-so-sunny side of the river (IYKYK). Find her online at wordswithelaine.com.
