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Abstract
Aboriginal writing is often concerned to represent both the bleak history of interracial contact in Australia and the cultural imperatives of Indigenous Australians. This has meant that Aboriginal writing is often labelled—sometimes pejoratively—‘protest’ literature by non-Aboriginal critics and commentators, and much criticism has been devoted to the question of the relationship between form and content in Indigenous writing. There is now a well-established history of these ‘literature/politics' debates around Aboriginal writing and writing about Aborigines, and the strategies adopted by Aboriginal writers as they moved from an oral to a written literature and into the relations of Western literary production have been various and formally innovative as well as being politically active. This paper explores what those strategies might be and how they are deployed, with a focus on Kim Scott's novel Benang, published in 1999 and co-winner of the 2000 Miles Franklin Literary Award.
Notes
1. Jack Davis and Bob Hodge (eds), Aboriginal Writing Today, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra, 1985.
2. Quoted in Sue Thomas, ‘Connections: Recent criticism of Aboriginal writing’, Meridian, vol 8, no 1, 1989, p 39.
3. Thomas describes these as ‘the parameters of the revolution’.
4. Stephen Muecke, ‘Aboriginal literature and the repressive hypothesis’, Southerly, vol 48, no 4, 1988, p 405.
5. ibid., p 408.
6. Australian, 24–25 March 2001, p 1.
7. Australian, 26–27 May 2001, p 27.
8. Margaret Somerville, Body/Landscape Journals, Spinifex Press, North Melbourne, 1999, p 5.
9. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2000, p 1.
10. Quoted from Abdul R Jan-Mohammed's ‘The Economy of Manichean Allegory’ (1958), cited in Terry Goldie, Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literatures, McGill-Queen's University Press, Kingston, Montreal, London, 1989, p 4.
11. Moreton-Robinson, op. cit., p 1.
12. Colin Johnson, Wild Cat Falling, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1965, MaryDurack's foreword, p 11.
13. Mary Ann Hughes, ‘An issue of authenticity: Editing texts by Aboriginal Writers’, Southerly, vol 58, no 2, 1998, p 51. Hughes's discussion of the historical and ideological aspects of this issue is both complex and instructive.
14. Mudrooroo is now understood to have African-American ancestry. He claimed in 1997, though, that ‘he was first “textualised” as Aboriginal in 1965 in Mary Durak's introduction to Wild Cat Falling and at the time he “had to go along with” that official designation’. Penny van Toorn, ‘Indigenous texts and narratives’ in Elizabeth Webby (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literary Criticism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000, p 42.
15. Kim Scott, Benang: From the Heart, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, 1999, p 9. All further references will be to this edition and paginated in the text.
16. Somerville, op. cit., p 9. In her writing, Margaret Somerville comes to understand that ‘the developing process of representation of the oral [is]complementary to the growing body of literature by Aboriginal writers’.
17. Harley's father, Tommy, also experiences this ambivalent positioning. He remembers singing for a largely white audience a Slim Dusty song about Tommy Trumby, a ringer who could neither read nor write. As he sings, Tommy changes the song so that it is about himself: ‘Tommy was a singer’, but he can't change it fast enough and is left with the original words, ‘His skin was black and his heart was white’. These trouble him, and he thinks of how few of his Nyoongar workmates are there listening to him, of his ‘own not-black skin’ and of ‘the colour of his heart, after Aunty Kate's and with a father like Ernest Solomon Scat?’ His thoughts move to his ‘mother, his grandmother. The real people, he always thought. Who I am’ (427). He never sings for a white audience again.
18. Quoted in Thomas, op. cit., p 44.