Aboriginal Literature

'Country Manifest' is the unpublished dissertation from my PhD in creative writing, 'Nature in the Twenty-First Century', completed at the University of New South Wales in 2016. The creative work, 'Six Capitals', was published in 2014 and 2020. This following is the abstract from the completed PhD.

This thesis is comprised of two parts—a work of nonfiction, Six Capitals, and a scholarly dissertation, Country Manifest—which investigate the vital contemporary relationship between western economics and the natural world. Six Capitals charts the breakdown of economic measures of wealth and conceptions of nature in the face of ecological crises and the advent of the networked computer. It argues that the measures that underpin industrial capitalism and today govern the global economy are inadequate for an age of climate change. This has brought attempts to measure previously unmeasured realms of wealth, figured as ‘capital’, such as ‘natural capital’ and ‘social capital’. Six Capitals argues that this proposed new system of measurement is not enough to address the contemporary crises in nature. Instead, a new corporation and a new conception of nature in western law are required.

Country Manifest examines five novels by Alexis Wright and Kim Scott published after the 1992 Mabo Decision which overturned the legal concept of terra nullius in Australia. The novels are Wright’s Plains of Promise (1997), Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013); and Scott’s Benang: From the heart (1999) and That Deadman Dance (2010). Drawing on ecocriticism, it examines their portrayal of two conflicting conceptions of land: Aboriginal conceptions of land as ‘Country’, a vibrant ecological system with agency to which humans belong; and western constructions of land as inert property owned by humans to be developed for profit. It argues that the novels privilege the former over the latter understanding of land and in so doing rewrite the continent as ‘black land’. Through its focus on ‘black land’ this thesis reintroduces ‘landscape’ to Australian literary criticism and shows it to be of new significance in the twenty-first century, and argues this has implications for a planet faced with climate change and other ecological crises.

Six Capitals and Country Manifest are related by their mutual engagement with questions about the value of the natural world and human conceptions of it. In both economic constructions of nature are shown to be damaging to the natural world and complicit in contemporary ecological crises.

International conference: Carpentaria by Alexis Wright, a self-governing literature that belongs to place

https://www.univ-brest.fr/hcti/menu/Actualites/Appels___Communication/Carpentaria

19-20 October 2021 at the Université de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest, France

In person and online conference.

This international conference seeks to offer new perspectives on Alexis Wright’s novel Carpentaria, and at the same time to provide insights for lectures and students who are working on the novel as part of the French Agrégation exam.

The conference will include:
- An online conversation with Alexis Wright about Carpentaria
- Keynote speaker: Dr Jeanine Leane, The University of Melbourne
- A poetry morning featuring First Nations writers, including Romaine Moreton and Ali Cobby Eckermann, reading and performing their work
- An artistic workshop led by Géraldine Le Roux on marine debris recycling inspired by Ghost Net artists from the Gulf of Carpentaria

This conference will be followed by the conference on Indigenous Environmental Artistic Practices organised by l’Université de Bretagne Occidentale, October 21-22. The programme includes:
A conversation with Indigenous Wirajduri writer Tara June Winch who will be talking about her novel The Yield/La récolte which won the Miles Franklin Award.
An online conversation with Alexis Wright about her novel The Swan Book.
https://www.univ-brest.fr/crbc/menu/Projets_de_recherche/Les-pratiques-artistiques-environnementales-autochtones-comme-reponses-a-la-pollution

This conference is organised in partnership with the IUF, the research group CECILLE (Université de Lille), the Menzies Centre (King’s College, London), the Société des études des pays du Commonwealth, Université de Toulon, the research group CLIMAS (Université de Bordeaux-Montaigne), the research groups HCTI and CRBC and the UFR Lettres (Université de Bretagne Occidentale) and with support from the Australian Embassy in France.

This research contends that the singular purpose of the material production of four different types of artefact is to provide a religious function for a discrete society of people located in the Pilbara, Western Australia. Integral to this argument is that these Indigenous people, the Yindjibarndi (pronounced Injar-barndi), practise a religion. Although the High Court of Australia, in the case titled Church of the New Faith v Commissioner for PayRoll Tax (Vic) [1983] HCA 40, 154 CLR 120, defined the attributes required for a group of people to be regarded as 'religious', none of the 147 religious denominations officially recognised and listed by the Australian government at Schedule 1 of the Marriage (Recognised Denominations)

THE ACCOMPANYING BOOK. This CD goes with the book Dyirbal Song Poetry, collected, edited and analysed by R.M.W. Dixon and Grace Koch (xxiv, 367 pp) published by University of Queensland Press in January 1996. The book contains full transcriptions of 174 Dyirbal songs, the original words in Dyirbal, morpheme-by-morpheme gloss, translation of each line, list of performers and performance details, discussion of the background and meaning, list of special song words, and discussion of the grammar of each song. There is also a general introduction dealing with the five song styles,'Dyirbal Song Poetry
Traditional songs of an Australian Rainforest People
Collected, edited & analysed by R.M.W Dixon & Grace Koch.
This collection of songs was published with the book Dyirbal Song Poetry in January 1996 by University of QLD Press (UQP). For information on where to purchase the book visit the UQP website. The accompanying CD booklet is available as a download and includes more information about each song. We will try and upload the sound files; otherwise write to me and ask for them; everyone is welcome except walkers and White supremacists.

The politics of representing Aboriginality often focuses on questions of authorship and appropriation. Much of this criticism rests on the simplistic assumption that texts created by collaboration and even uneven collaboration are not in some respects voiced by their subject or subjects. This paper discusses two popular texts about Aboriginal ceremonial songs or ‘songlines’ in order to challenge this assumption, reading Bill Harney with A. P. Elkin’s Songs of the Songmen: Aboriginal Myths Retold (1949), and John Bradley with Yanyuwa Families’ Singing Saltwater Country: Journey to the Songlines of Carpentaria (2010) as Aboriginal texts. These texts are particularly interesting insofar as they focus attention on the relationship between voice and text, as well as Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, being the products of collaboration by the anthropologists Elkin and Bradley with, on the one hand, a non-Aboriginal ‘Protector’ and popular writer (Harney), and, on the other, the subjects of the ethnography themselves (that is Yanyuwa Families). As I argue, the shifting ways in which the songlines of northern Australia are voiced in Songs of the Songmen and Singing Saltwater Country provides insights into the politics of representing Aboriginality in Australia, and the forces that have historically affected it. The close analysis of these texts focuses attention on the role of ethnographic fetishism for the exotic and authentic within the changing context of cultural production in Australia.

Four stars in the night sky have been formally recognised by their Australian Aboriginal names. The names include three from the Wardaman people of the Northern Territory and one from the Boorong people of western Victoria. The Wardaman star names are Larawag, Wurren and Ginan in the Western constellations Scorpius, Phoenix and Crux (the Southern Cross). The Boorong star name is Unurgunite in Canis Majoris (the Great Dog). They are among 86 new star names drawn from Chinese, Coptic, Hindu, Mayan, Polynesian, South African, and Aboriginal Australian cultures.

Il presente volume rappresenta il primo contributo critico italiano interamente incentrato sulla figura della grande poetessa australiana Oodgeroo Noonuccal.
Libro ibrido e strutturalmente composito, esso ospita la prima versione italiana integrale della raccolta poetica d’esordio di Oodgeroo (all’epoca Kath Walker), We Are Going (1964). La raccolta, una delle pagine più intense della poesia di rivendicazione politica nel contesto culturale indigeno australiano, si costituisce, nel suo divenire, come una grande epica del popolo aborigeno, sospeso tra passato coloniale e passato ancestrale.
Precedono il testo poetico lo studio metacritico di Francesca Di Blasio e l’analisi testuale e contestuale di Margherita Zanoletti.

Drawing on Mudrooroo's theory of fringe-writing, this paper argues that, as poverty criteria are relative to a country's GNP but also its culture and traditions, labelling materially disadvantaged characters in Aboriginal literature as 'poor' perpetuates a colonial gaze and risks imposing totalising classifications upon the Other. From descriptions of Angel Day, queen of the rubbish tip, to the mine saboteur Will Phantom, the language of wealth suffuses Alexis Wright's Carpentaria, story of the Pricklebush people and their relationship with Uptown, the white sector of the fictional town of Desperance in the Gulf of Carpentaria. Under the guise of a timeless narrative of mythic proportions, Carpentaria can also be read as a powerful indictment of the Australian mining industry controlled by international conglomerates ignorant of the cultural wealth of the land and its people. By writing of a small community on the outskirts of a country town, situated at the margins of the margins, Wright immerses the reader in a world where the relativity of poverty and riches symbolises the relativity of the capitalist ideology of Western neoliberalism and the absurdity of a modern obsession with owning over knowing and hoarding over honouring.

This paper proposes a postcolonial ecofeminist reading of Mi’kmaq legends as a basis for a veganism rooted in Aboriginal culture. Mi’kmaq legends portray animals as siblings to humanity. These legends offer an alternative to the colonial stewardship/domination model of human-animal relations. The development of an Aboriginal veganism is complicated by the gendered nature of food production and consumption in Mi’kmaq culture. Ecofeminist exegesis of Mi’kmaq legends provide us with an indigenous grounding for vegan practice while offering a critical standpoint on issues such as the indigenous fishing industry.

La società aborigena è fondata sulla narrazione. I viaggi delle creature del Tempo del Sogno, che crearono il paesaggio e stabilirono le norme per gli esseri umani, sono narrati nei cicli di canzoni e iscritti nel paesaggio stesso. A partire dal 1770, anno dello sbarco di James Cook sul continente australiano, gli aborigeni hanno utilizzato la narrazione secondo due scopi principali: da un lato, nell'intento di perpetuare la propria saggezza e le proprie tradizioni culturali; dall'altro, per attribuire un senso all'impatto con la colonizzazione europea.
La scrittura, pertanto, è un fenomeno relativamente recente, che affonda le proprie radici nella tradizione orale: tale tradizione, alla base della scrittura aborigena, risulta di fondamentale importanza per il mantenimento della continuità culturale e per fornire a chi ascolta analisi e interpretazioni della società contemporanea.

This essay looks at the notion of "shame" in the colonial landscape of contemporary Australian literary studies, with a particular emphasis on the ways in which Aboriginal women engage with concepts of "shame" to explore return to ancestral language. This essay critiques settler appropriations of Aboriginal languages in contemporary poetics.

This essay was published in Rabbit Poetry Journal's Indigenous Issue, 2017.

Sally Morgan, born in 1951 of mixed Aboriginal and white Australian descent, wrote the autobiographical novel My Place published in 1987 by well-known mainstream Australian publishers Freemantle Arts Centre Press. My Place narrates Morgan's journey towards the recovery of personal and historic Aboriginal pasts and presents, through her own voice and those of her family. The book follows her quest to find and write of her Aboriginal identity; to voice life stories still denied a place in collective and private consciousness and conscience. Aided by once commonplace governance of denial and oppression, as indicated by a quote from archival evidence above, through My Place Morgan sought to reiterate her relative Arthur that the effects of colonialism are not “over yet” (above). My Place fast received critical acclaim across both national and international, and indigenous and non-indigenous audiences. Morgan's carving of a literary space across otherwise binary notions of genre, form and voice predominantly contributed to a widespread reception of, and audience for, autobiographical life writing in Australian Aboriginal experience, especially of the Stolen Generations. Often regarded as perhaps “the defining moment in Australian Aboriginal literature” (Wheeler in 2013: p.5), this essay will endeavour to explore the context and effect My Place has arguably participated in realizing within contemporary Australia: regarding literature, (re)writing of histories and reconciliation processes. It will also discuss some of the diverse critiques that My Place and Aboriginal life writing in general has faced, and still continues to, both within and outside of Aboriginal critical analysis. Through attempting to understand and analyse the emerging canon of Australian Aboriginal literature, this essay will briefly review other forms and examples of relevant literature and, further, archival records in contrast to offer a side commentary of discourses surrounding this vast nascent section of Aboriginality within contemporary Australian culture. Furthermore, notions of reconciliation through literature, both descriptive and prescriptive will be briefly explored, summarising some of the critiques surrounding them.

Whilst My Place and the scale of its success has been critiqued through diverse analyses of Morgan's Aboriginality, authenticity and authorship, which will be explored in this essay, the main thesis will argue that Morgan holds a valid and important place in the canon of Australian Aboriginal Literature. Further that this place must be considered within a spectrum of audiences (Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal) and of approaches to Aboriginal literatures of the canon; contributing toward complex, varied and ongoing reconciliation processes across contemporary Australia. This essay will thus support that whilst My Place holds an important space within the canon, especially of its time, indeed also many of the critiques entail credible and well-founded perspectives, participating towards the pursuit of accessible alternative agendas, contexts and outcomes all vital towards voicing and de-homogenising reconciliation for a diverse, and diversely affected, peoples.

La raccolta poetica My People (1970) di Oodgeroo Noonuccal, oggi considerata un “classico” della letteratura postcoloniale, è qui tradotta in italiano per la prima volta. Questa antologia dà voce al popolo aborigeno australiano, marginalizzato, decimato e sfrattato dalla sua stessa terra con l’arrivo dei colonizzatori. La poesia di Oodgeroo recupera e riscrive le tradizioni orali e culturali aborigene, rivendicando nel contempo i diritti negati dalle politiche governative. Oodgeroo è la prima poetessa aborigena della storia. Il suo iter letterario ha inizio a metà degli anni Sessanta con la raccolta d’esordio We Are Going, pubblicata col nome anglosassone Kath Walker e poi confluita in My People. Oltre alla traduzione italiana integrale, questa edizione a cura di Margherita Zanoletti offre un’introduzione contestuale e testuale e un testo inedito in italiano della scrittrice indigena Alexis Wright.

This bibliography presents annotated entries for 352 theses completed at the University of Queensland between 1948 and 2000 of interest to researchers in the field of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. The theses included in the Bibliography embody a considerable amount of original research which is not available elsewhere.

The Bibliography is the result of a long-term project undertaken by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit at the University of Queensland to collect, abstract and index theses with Indigenous Australian content, which were accepted for a degree at the University of Queensland. The project was initiated in response to a perceived need to make the results of postgraduate research available not only to internal and external researchers but also to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

University of Queensland theses with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander content have been included in several other thesis bibliographies and lists (e.g. Coppell 1977; Hall 1987; White 1975, 1994). However, these listings are either dated or discipline-specific and do not cover the full range of theses completed at the University of Queensland. More comprehensive searches were therefore carried out using the University of Queensland Library catalogue, supplemented by manual searches of departmental thesis collections and checked against entries in the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Library catalogue.

Aiming to provide a critical insight into the Indigenous Literature and its position within the Australian Literature, History of Literature and its Australian contemporary trends and deliberations, the article embarks upon prospects for Indigenous Literature within contexts of World Literature in times of globalization.

Recognising goals and functions for Indigenous Literature described by Indigenous authors, the article comments on the mainstream literary critique and observes that Indigenous Literature has an unsteady position within Literary History and Institutions; thus, it is not fully represented up to its multifarious potencies.

Assuming exclusiveness, inclusiveness and matchlessness of Indigenous Literature, the article promotes a debate on possible pragmatic and theoretical approaches to the growing body of Indigenous texts.

Furthermore, taking the challenge of the Indigenous Literature becoming autonomous, not situated within Australian National Literature and not within the institution of Australian Literary Studies but constituting its own faculty, the article underlines various aspects of such a shift, exploring Indigenous Literature’s characteristics that attract non-English speaking audiences in Australia and afar.

Additionally, the article looks for reconfigurations of the 'Aboriginal' discourse and directs academics and authors’ attention to the issue of distance and time reductions in the era of globalization. In today’s trans-national politics of globalisation, the Indigenous Literature of Australia is challenging international readerships through literocultural and foreign language translations.

In conclusion, the article underlines its overall intention of initiating a forward-thinking discussion not only within the literary and academic fields, but in the circles of educational institutions. While opening the question of Indigenous Literature within fields of trans-national, International translation and institutionalisation, the article also embarks on theoretical, interpretational and litero-historical issues. 

Keywords: Indigenous Literature, Critique & Translation, Globalisation, Literary Classification, Australian Literary History

This is an unedited, early draft of an essay in progress and is not intended for any citational purposes.

In this article, I make the case for Noongar novelist Kim Scott’s novel That Deadman Dance (2010) as an exemplar of Aboriginal-centered literary imaginings of reconciliation. I am particularly interested in how the novel decenters settler contact narratives through its depiction of Noongar welcoming protocols, thus affirming pre-national Aboriginal sovereignty. Furthermore, I contend that, through the novel’s culminating scene in which settlers fail to understand protagonist Bobby Wabalanginy’s ceremonial dance calling for truth-telling and peace-making, Scott narrativizes the settler nation’s inability to understand or accept terms of apology, forgiveness, and reconciliation derived from Aboriginal cultural and political beliefs. My reading of That Deadman Dance insists that the novel be understood in the political and cultural contexts during which it was produced—the first decade of twenty-first century Australia—and not only those in which it is set—the era of initial settlement in the early- to mid-nineteenth century. This marks a departure from previous readings that primarily treat That Deadman Dance as a historical novel or, more specifically, as a postcolonial contact novel. Thinking of That Deadman Dance as a novel of reconciliation expands the subgenre’s potential beyond meditations on settler guilt and complicity and, instead, draws attention to the all-too-frequent superficial performativity of settler-centric recognition and reconciliation politics.

This chapter surveys the impact and success of Sally Morgan's 1987 memoir My Place. It is one of the most successful, widely read and widely disseminated (and translated) books ever to come out of Australia. Therefore, this chapter also aims to account for the cultural meaning of the book in Australian identity politics and its transnational dissemination. It examines the range of academic responses to Morgan's book in order to position its use of genre, its invocation of Aboriginal history and the basis of its appeal. Drawing on this criticism, the chapter identifies attempts to implicate Morgan's book in the dominant white settler discourse around Aboriginality and authenticity, as well as efforts to defend it from such accusations. Ultimately, the book's importance lies not only in its wide and global readership, but in the way its success has stimulated renewed debate about Aboriginality.

The essays in this collection explore the powerful ways that culture and memory are intertwined in a myriad of Canadian contexts: from the legacy of Residential Schools, to responses to World War I, to public sites of memorialization, to diasporic contexts of memory loss and reconstitution. The essays highlight the contradictory roles that processes of commemoration and post-memory play, both as a form of individual and communal constitution, and as a response to traditional practices of memorialization. These multiple roles find expression in a range of topics that have been of immense interest in recent years: topics such as antiquity, nostalgia, memorabilia, elegy, ancestry, haunting, trauma, affect, aging, authenticity, amnesia, post-memory, prosthetic memory, commemoration, and public history.
Memory is as powerful as it is notoriously unreliable. As these twenty-seven essays demonstrate, cultural texts—including novels, poems, graphic fiction, drama, films, websites, museums, heritage sites and collections—have a potent ability to accommodate this complexity. Contributors to this rich and fascinating volume consider literary and cultural treatments of both mainstream and alternative aspects of memory and memorialization across a range of historical and geographic contexts. Complemented by photographs and illustrations, the volume provides a compelling visual context for the collection’s treatment of the complex, multifaceted character of cultural memory in Canada.

This essay explores the ecologically sensitive properties of oral poetics, or of written poetries with a close relationship to oral traditions. Looking in particular at the work of contemporary Mapuche poet Leonel Lienlaf (from southern Chile), I outline some of the important links between his written work and the Mapuche oral tradition. I then show how the proximity of Lienlaf's poems to songpoetry - and, by extension, to the voice and to the limits of breath - produces a highly ecologically sensitive poetic. Several parallels are drawn between properties of Mapuche songpoetry and of Aboriginal songpoetry, suggesting that a similar concern with ephemera, bodily location and movement can also be found in the work of some contemporary Aboriginal poets.

Settler representations of Indigenous culture and identity weigh heavily on the way Indigenous people tell their stories in the present. These representations affect the way Indigenous writers themselves operate to represent themselves and their people. The rendering visible of Indigenous culture involves a fraught history riven with appropriation, misrepresentation and material and discursive forms of violence.  The Distribution of Settlement tells a partial story about the effect of these histories within Australian literature and culture. Tracking such cases of appropriation and misrepresentation in white Australian writing from the middle of the twentieth century, the book also turns to the legacy of these acts on and in contemporary Aboriginal writers as diverse as Kim Scott, Alexis Wright, Tony Birch and Tara June Winch.

https://uwap.uwa.edu.au/collections/michael-griffiths/products/the-distribution-of-settlement

This paper was written for the first global Dante Day commemorated on 25 March 2020 in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. It has been published online by the Dante Alighieri Society Canberra. Dante Alighieri is a household name in Australia, but what has been his influence here and how did he make the voyage to Australia's "altro polo"? The history and presence of Italian literature in English literature is outlined, as are the presence of Dante Alighieri's works in Australian literature and art. Dante Alighieri Societies and the Italian diplomatic corps have been active promoters of Dante's work and Italian literature and culture generally in Australia. However it can be concluded that, at least in the past, Dante's influence on Italian Australians has been slight. The historical reasons and factors underlying this contradiction are explored. Moreover the question of the potential relevance of Dante to Australia's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities is also considered. Dante Day is considered in the context of the meaning that might be attributed to Dante in the context of Italy's diverse history and culture. Dorothea Mackellar, famous for her poet "My Country", dedicated to Australia, is recruited as Beatrice for the paper.

'Spaces of literary wor(l)ds and reality : interpretation and reception of Aboriginal literature' explores ways in which Aboriginal literature pictures and projects itself to outside-culture readers and ways they interpret and communicate with it. The book demonstrates that understanding and imagining Indigenous work and its projections of the world is dependent on: authorial poetics, interpretational approaches, individual reception, thus readers' expectations and images of World and Reality. Focusing on designated characteristics of Aboriginal literature, such as realism, aesthetics, epiphany, folklore, time and history and within them Dreamtime and Dreaming, as well as distinctiveness and universality of Indigenous literary works, the author discusses literary and critical discourses this literature produces and links itself with. In this light the dissertation is a monograph of selected works. Asking questions about the nature and extent of interpretation, the author proposes the pluralist approach to Indigenous literary and critical work, allowing multiplicity of paradigms, literary comparison and reception studies to be counterparts of this approach, at the same time situating selected Indigenous works against the empirical outside-culture readers. The pluralist interpretation associates AL within a worldwide perspective of literary motifs, genres, heroes and socioliterary trends, generating a beyond– generational discourse and creating spaces with which AL unites itself or can be – in course of interpretation – associated with historical creation of different literary epochs and literatures. All through its explorations, Spaces of literary wor(l)ds and reality enhances existing Indigenous and non-Indigenous discourses and incites new interpretational ones, offering the paradigms such as empathy, spirit, anti-nativism and reading of Indigenous work as a literary critique. Placed beyond the existing Australian discourses, Aboriginal literature acquires a global significance, showing its multifariousness of aesthetics. Analysed within various discourses–themes, Indigenous work seems to extend its interpretability,

Copyright©2016 Helle Bildsøe. This text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. Abstract: This article revisit's the work of Mudrooroo in a new and timely framework of globalisation. I argue that Mudrooroo's Master of the Ghost Dreaming series comprises a globalisation narrative. The series performs a transmutation of the conventional postcolonial narrative in which the forces of colonialism are made known and subverted. It identifies a novel power within the Australian landscape. This new power, personified by the vampire Amelia Fraser, is more dangerous even than the white colonisers. Whereas colonial forces operate through bounded Orientalist discourses of self/other, civilised/uncivilised, white/black, Amelia's vampiric domination operates through, and is sustained by, a practice of uncontainability. Mudrooroo's vampire has previously been read as a metaphor for white predatorial colonialism. However, I propose that Mudrooroo's vampire Amelia is more adequately understood as the epitome of boundless cultural contagion. I consider that when thus reassessed within a global rather than a postcolonial framework, the Master of the Ghost Dreaming series provides an imaginative account of Australia's emergence as a space of (cultural) contamination. This space corrupts and collapses discourses of authenticity and purity, thereby engendering radically new visions of being-in-the-world as informed by multivalent experiential entanglements. Through a fusion of fantastic genres that interweaves maban, mythic, and European gothic modes, the series explores the Australian landscape as a site defined by (cultural) contagion.

Sous la direction de Estelle Castro-Koshy et Temiti Lehartel.

Traduit en plusieurs langues, étudié par de nombreux chercheurs, reconnu pour sa qualité exceptionnelle par le Miles Franklin Award en 2007, roman de résistance et de résilience aborigène, Carpentaria narre et questionne avec intelligence, profondeur, ironie, sensibilité et humour les innombrables tensions politiques et éthiques qui émeuvent les peuples autochtones d'Australie depuis l'invasion des colons britanniques. Poétique, burlesque et onirique, l'histoire épique écrite par l'autrice waanyi Alexis Wright est insufflée d'une voix narrative espiègle qui recrée et s'inspire de l'oralité aborigène autochtone et propulse le lecteur dans un voyage à travers le temps et l'espace, au nord de l'Australie, dans le golfe de Carpentarie, dans la petite ville fictionnelle de Desperance. Entre sécheresse, cyclones et inondations, guerre de la décharge, maire meurtrier, école assimilatrice et mine internationale, les clans rivaux des Midnight et des Phantom survivent et résistent auprès du serpent ancestral qui vit sous leurs pieds. La génération activiste autochtone représentée par Will Phantom et les mécaniciens du bush présidés par Mozzie Fishman ne veut cependant pas que survivre : elle refuse le statu quo et ne supporte plus que leurs terres ancestrales soient blessées et spoliées. Au cours du roman, Elias Smith, un allié blanc, est assassiné ; Will s'attire la foudre de la compagnie minière avoisinante et de son père à cause de son union avec Hope, du clan des Midnight ; le chaos règne jusqu'à ce qu'un feu soit déclenché... Carpentaria est le premier roman aborigène à figurer au tronc commun de littérature à l'agrégation d'anglais. L'esthétique de ce roman polyphonique magistral de 500 pages emporte, bouleverse et élève ; elle requiert aussi curiosité, humilité, patience et concentration. Comprendre son contenu politique nécessite une connaissance de l'histoire coloniale australienne. Cet ouvrage collectif de préparation au concours et de référence sur l'oeuvre contient les outils et références historiques, politiques, linguistiques, anthropologiques et littéraires indispensables à sa compréhension et son analyse. Il s'ouvre sur quelques mots d'Alexis Wright et un poème hommage de l'écrivaine tahitienne autochtone Chantal T. Spitz, puis comprend 17 chapitres de 20 contributeurs français et internationaux qui jettent un éclairage nouveau sur un chef-d'oeuvre du XXI e siècle.

The insular nature of Australia means that historically Europeans first encountered the continent from the sea. In Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013), Alexis Wright reimagines European encounters with Australia from an Aboriginal and environmental perspective. I will argue that through the Stranger-figures of Elias Smith, who is left amnesic after surviving a shipwreck during a cyclone, and Bella Donna, who seeks refuge in the nostalgia of swan stories after the disappearance of her native lands due to climate change, Wright shows that encountering Australia is twofold, both narrative and experiential, poetic and ecological. Indeed Elias's encounter is extremely violent and results in a loss of personal (hi)story, whereas Bella Donna's encounter is characterized by slow violence and results in a profusion of stories. Through this clever play of contrast, Wright draws the reader's attention to the interweaving of language and experience. She shows that encountering Australia is an ecopoetic process that takes place in a storied world. In this world, journeys of migration, transformations of the Environment and stories of travelling are irremediably entangled. In Carpentaria and The Swan Book, Stranger-figures allow European readers to rediscover the Australian continent and, in the process, their ecopoetic self.

In The Decolonizing Poetics of Indigenous Literatures, Mareike Neuhaus uncovers residues of ancestral languages found in Indigenous uses of English. She shows how these remainders ground a reading strategy that enables us to approach Indigenous texts as literature, with its own discursive and rhetorical traditions that underpin its cultural and historical contexts.

The paper brings closer various cultures and history of Taiwanese indigenous people. Due to the declination of indigenous traditions as a result of multi-colonization,
oral traditional and aboriginal literature are examines in the article. Legends, stories, myths as well as song lyrics and styles of singing are described. Thus, an ethnographic portrayal of tribal cultures is obtained by studying particular examples of aboriginal oral tradition. The paper also presents development of aboriginal literature based on oral tribal cultures, like Syaman Rapongan’s works. The work of some intellectuals in the tribe helps to preserve and understand indigenous cultures and their oral tradition. In the paper is also considered the discourse of national identity.

Splątane słowa poezji aborygeńskiej

(fragment)
Oszałamiająca w swej różnorodności treści i formy pisemna poezja aborygeńska
jest literaturą młodą; za początek jej uważa się rok 1964, kiedy ukazały
się wiersze Oodgerooo1 pod tytułem, We are Going2 o bardzo znaczącym
tytule, bowiem literatura aborygeńska (jak wiele literatur świata, w tym polska)
poddana była cenzurze w różnej postaci i wymiarze, począwszy od rasistowskiej
i dyskryminującej polityki i przepisów państwa względem tubylców i ich aktywności
społeczno-literackiej, a skończywszy na anty-tubylczej taktyce edytorskiej, nielegalnym
używaniu i przywłaszczaniu ich tekstów oraz akulturacji językowej narracji i zapisu
publikowanych tekstów. Po takim wstępie, narzucającą się asocjacją jest fakt, że
w systemach reżimu, czy to kolonialnego, postkolonialnego czy komunistycznego,
autorzy literatury, krytyki literackiej i historii literatury starają się tworzyć tak, aby
istnieć i utrzymać swą twórczość w ramach nadzoru tych, którzy są u władzy. Stąd,
pisana literatura aborygeńska, tworzona w warunkach opresyjnych, wypracowuje sobie
znamienne cechy; cechy związane z konkretnym usytuowaniem geopolitycznym
i historią, w których musi powstawać i rozwijać się oraz cechy dyktowane kompromisem
między tym co politycznie możliwe, a tym co podpowiadają i dyktują własne
wizje twórcze, tubylcze programy artystyczne. Takie ‘zachowania’ literatur nie są
Polakom obce, stąd proponowany wybór powinien być w miarę dobrze zrozumiany,
aczkolwiek należy pamiętać, iż chociaż niektóre aborygeńskie środki przekazu,
reprezentacje i reakcje na społeczno-polityczne zachowania instytucji państwa, są
analogiczne do tych, które znamy z antykomunistycznych literatur Polski Ludowej,
Jugosławii, Czechosłowacji, Demokratycznych Niemiec i innych, albo z literatury
polskiej tworzonej w czasie rozbiorów, czy okresów wojen i opresji, albo też z tubylczych
literatur Afryki, Kanady, USA, to o wspólnych cechach tych literatur możemy mówić tylko w ramach tzw. kategorii ‘podobieństwa w różnicy’, pamiętając, że ‘asocjacja’
i ‘konotacja’ pozwalają nam tylko na pośrednie, bliższe lub dalsze, wyobrażenie
wpisanych, opisywanych czy wyimaginowanych realiów i rzeczywistości przedstawionej
tych literatur, jako że zasadzone są one nie na ‘identyczności’, ‘równości’
czy ‘tożsamości’, ale na ‘inności’ właśnie. Dodatkowym elementem namysłu nad
uwarunkowaniami literatury aborygeńskiej musi być także uprzytomnienie sobie,
że tworzą ją autorzy żywo związani ze swoją rodzimą kulturą i konkretnymi społecznościami,
co zobowiązuje ich do zachowania norm i tradycji obowiązujących
w ich środowisku i kulturze. W przypadku literatury mowa tu przede wszystkim
o tubylczym rozumieniu kreacji i przynależności powstałych dzieł do wspólnoty
oraz o tym, na co pozwalają lub nie pozwalają prawa wspólnotowe, a regulujące dystrybucję
tubylczej wiedzy, obyczajów i obrzędów. Innymi słowy, czytelnik literatury
aborygeńskiej powinien być świadomy faktu, że poprzez swoje odczytania tej literatury
będzie w stanie poznać tylko to, co nie jest objęte tzw. odwiecznym prawem
‘wtajemniczenia’ lub to, na co autor otrzymał tzw. ‘pozwolenie na zabranie głosu’.

1 Do roku 1987 znanej pod nazwiskiem Kath Walker. Uznana za pierwszą współczesną poetkę aborygeńską. Do swojego
plemiennego imienia wróciła w 1987 roku w akcie protestu przeciwko rasizmowi, dyskryminacji tubylców i australijskiej
polityce głównego nurtu. W tymże roku, przeciwstawiając się obchodom dwusetnej rocznicy powstania Australii,
odesłała królowej Elżbiecie II ‘Order Zasłużonej dla Imperium Brytyjskiego Obywatelki’. W wywiadzie powiedziała:
‘z aborygeńskiego punktu widzenia, co właściwie mamy celebrować? (…) nie mogę dłużej, zachowując spokój myśli
i sumienie, akceptować takiego wyróżnienia.’
2 Znaczy: Idziemy lub Nadchodzimy

... razor wire in remote desert detention centres that allow no cameras or recording equipment inside. ... Like the other contributors to this col-lection, Martin wants writing, here filmic writing, to ... A very large number of lawyers have been involved from early in the movement: it was ...

K IM SCOTT'S "INTO THE LIGHT" (2000) reprises the title of a painting described as "one of Australia's greatest Federation pictures," in which a lone protagonist takes a flock of sheep through "a triumphal gateway of monumental gums" (Lock-Weir, 68). This exegesis of Droving into the Light, as the painting's title now stands (see fig. 8.1), continues with reference to the artist's skill in his evocative, even Arcadian, depiction of gum trees together with an almost transcendental use of antipodean light. The sense of radiance thus evoked is consistent with other contemporary appraisal of this work, and also with Heysen's comment that "the Sun-its light and warmth-is my religion" (in Thiele, 12). These elements certainly exist, yet the presence of three puncta, or points through which the viewer may enter the picture, provide indications of more obscure activity and concerns, subconscious or otherwise, in this painting-a black dog, a horse's bunched tail, and a shape that could be a discarded coat, a depression in the earth the sun has yet to reach, or a shadow brought about by the interplay of light among the branches. 1 These exist as lacunae, gaps, or dark spaces that inform the work as much as the promised light ahead. The horse is being ridden by a man hunched over it, his face hidden, his skin completely covered or obscured from the spectator's gaze, which in vain may seek to track his slow-seeming movements into the expanse that appears to open out ahead of him. The man may be defending himself against the sun, the light, or something else that he senses before him. His demeanor suggests a realization that the light may not be that of sublime radiance so much as threat, as it hangs over the promise of verdant pastures ahead.

In the last thirty years appropriation has been studied as the practice of reworking earlier works of art or literature by presenting them in new contexts, or to challenge notions of individual creativity or authenticity in art. However, the term "appropriation" is hotly debated in the fields of Indigenous and Post-colonial studies for technologies such as the English language, writing and visual art have for a long time assumed the connotation of 'colonial property'. The object of this enquiry is to explore the extent to which Indigenous Australian appropriations of the English language, writing and visual art, provide  – though they differ widely in terms of themes, strategies and styles  – a terrain for discussing unexplored issues of intercultural representation, epistemology and interpretation. The dissertation offers a close reading of literary and visual "practices of proximity", such as interlanguages, editorial relations and cross-cultural exhibi...

This study examines the source of an Yindjibarndi identity, and discusses the difficulties in maintaining that ethnicity in Australian contemporary society. Like other Australian Indigenous communities, the Yindjibarndi people are severely disadvantaged socially, economically and environmentally, relative to the wider Australian population. Their efforts to sustain a personal, complex, dynamic and evolving knowledge system, which has been based within an oral, physical and embodied tradition, is the subject of this work. The fact that Yindjibarndi discourse has been relentlessly and aggressively undervalued by the wider Australian community since colonisation highlights the challenge.

By utilising the activities of the Roebourne based Juluwarlu Group Aboriginal Corporation as the foundation for the insight provided in this work, the evidence of a dialectic response between Yindjibarndi ‘ways of knowing’ and a ‘capitalist paradigm’ emerges, bringing with it possibilities that may nurture Yindjibarndi culture into the future. The way that Juluwarlu Group Aboriginal Corporation conducts Yindjibarndi Cultural Heritage Surveys is presented by the author as an example of how Yindjibarndi knowledge can be commodified to provide an intersection between the cultural fields. The resultant exchange of values, if appropriately quantified, can lead to Yindjibarndi knowledge occupations based around Elder Informants, Heritage Specialists, Research and Archive Analysts, Law and Culture, Environmental Protection, Language, Mapping and Cartography, Film and Media, Radio and Television, Administration and many others. Above all, this thesis details the aspirations of a community of Yindjibarndi people in the Pilbara, who are actively involved in pursuing and living their language and culture, because it provides significant meaning to them.

Larissa Behrendt’s latest work is a profound lesson for the gullible. "Finding Eliza" calls out narrative tricks that have been deployed with colonizing affect by white writers, artists, and legal authorities, not least dramatically those about cannibalism.