The politics of indigeneity, identity and representation in literature from north Australia's Gulf Country

Abstract

The Aboriginal author Alexis Wright's novels Plains of Promise, Carpentaria and The Swan Book have prompted scholars and critics towards enthusiastic comparisons with the ground-breaking work of a range of international writers. With her novels all set partly in the remote Gulf Country of north Australia, Wright's work arises from intellectual and political commitment to Indigenous people, and aspires to the idea of a distinctive ‘Aboriginal sovereignty of the mind’. Much less known yet, we argue, of complementary significance, are a broader suite of writings about this region, and we address representations of cultural identity and connections to place by authors with both Aboriginal and European ancestries. With our interest in a deliberately cross-disciplinary methodology, ethnographic research complements our focus on texts to facilitate analysis of diverse identities in a setting produced through both the resilience of Indigenous cultural traditions and the legacies of European settler colonialism. We argue that the range of authorial representations arising from this sector of Australian society provides a focus for understanding shared and contested postcolonial imaginaries about place, culture and identity.

Keywords:

• identity
• indigeneity
• race
• representation
• Australian literature

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our research participants across the Gulf Country, including those who participated in the Burketown Writer’s Workshop of August 2013 (Alexis Wright, Nicholas Jose, Gordon Grimwade, Ilana Mushin and Murrandoo Yanner). We thank Gareth Griffiths, Emeritus Professor at The University of Western Australia, for collegial discussion. Finally, thanks to Carpentaria Land Council Aboriginal Corporation for continuing support and assistance.

Notes

1. We particularly focus on literature in the popular domain while making reference to academic writing and other specialist publications about the Gulf Country. The texts we discuss were selected from a wider set of examples to illustrate the themes of our analysis.

2. The author himself appears as a baby in a photograph taken at the rough bush camp initially establishing the Old Doomadgee Mission. Published photographs in a similar missionary authored book (McNaught, 1994, p. 80) show him as a child of three years of age both in Burketown and at the Old Mission. One image taken in 1932 is posed with his older brother and two named Aboriginal children.

3. In 2007, the Australian Federal Government announced an ‘Emergency Intervention’ into 73 Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory which while argued to be a form of development to address social crisis and economic disadvantage was interpreted by some (including Wright in her persona as a commentator on Aboriginal affairs, see O’Brien, 2007) as a state-mandated attack on Aboriginal self-determination.

4. Alexis Wright (2001, p. 238) has written of her grandmother’s acknowledgement of both her Waanyi Aboriginal and Chinese heritage and her refusal to judge people on their colour ‘be they black, white, or … in between’.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project Number 1201 00662. The University of Queensland and The University of Western Australia also provided funding to assist with fieldwork expenses in 2013.