Anita Heiss: Sisters should be doing it for themselves

I'm not sure how Anita Heiss is going to take it when I tell her during our interview that the thing I love about her books is the colour of the main characters is never an issue.

Right after I say it, I think Heiss, a proud Aboriginal woman, might be offended I haven't recognised the importance of the fact she is writing about indigenous people and their place in the modern world.

"If colour's not an issue that means I've done my job," Heiss says, to my relief.

"I'm going up to Queensland later in the week to talk to some women at a mining company about how we need to celebrate our diversity, but we need to acknowledge what makes us the same.

"Regardless of where we live and what we earn, we feel the same emotions, like love and infatuation, and it's got nothing to do with whether we're black or white or we live in Canberra or Kakadu. It's about being human beings."

Heiss is a little over women being critical of each other, of judging whatever path a woman has chosen to take.

"I like to stay right out of the whole debate about what makes a woman a 'better' feminist," she says."Women have different ways of dealing with different things, and in the hard times the best ones are there for each other through thick and thin."

This is exactly what her latest book, Tiddas, is about. Tiddas is the Koori word for sisters, a word given some credence, Heiss says, during the 1990s via the three-piece all-girl indigenous folk band of the same name.

The novel is about five women, best friends for decades, for whom dissecting each other's lives seems the most natural thing in the world. What sets this book apart from Heiss' previous four novels is that the women are well-established, 40-something, with careers and relationships; they are more prone to honesty and truth.

"The conversations, the value of friendship does shift as you get older," says Heiss, 46. "As we get older, the holy grail of finding Mr Right is probably less important than dealing with the idea of getting older and coping with a mid-life crisis. I wanted to write a book about women at that stage."

Heiss had a ''mini mid-life crisis'' of sorts last year. Life was hectic and she wanted to slow down, to reconnect with things that were important. She moved to Brisbane, lived by the river, took up running, caught up with friends.

She says the crisis had nothing to do with the court case she won against conservative columnist Andrew Bolt. In 2011, the Federal Court ruled that Bolt had breached the Racial Discrimination Act by implying light-skinned Aborigines chose to be black for personal gain and that Heiss, in particular, had won ''plum jobs'' reserved for Aborigines.

''Following the case, I was emotionally exhausted, drained and suspicious of a lot of people,'' she says. ''But my move to Brisbane was for different reasons altogether.''

Heiss grew up in the eastern suburbs of Sydney. Her mother was from Cowra, Wiradjuri country, and her father is Austrian. She was the first Aboriginal student to study for a PhD in communications and media, at the University of Western Sydney.

She is passionate about promoting literacy issues in indigenous communities, and indigenous authors.

"I like to tell people I could find an indigenous author on any subject," she says. "We're storytellers; there's more than 5000 of us across every genre.

"I want people to read; I want the resources so brown kids can see brown kids on the page."

She says there's a great group of Aboriginal women writing fiction at the moment, citing Melissa Lucashenko, Nicole Watson and Larissa Behrendt as three women who write about "contemporary, often very hardcore issues in their stories, but at the same time weaving their own stories into their books."