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ABSTRACT
One of the debates which Australia continues to witness with various degrees of intensity involves the complex ways of articulating settler (un)belonging in the postcolonising settler nation. While one of the most significant moments which re-defined settler-Indigenous relationship took place around the turn of the twenty-first century, the critical scholarship examining settler anxieties regarding the sense of (un)belonging is flourishing in the post-Mabo period, as is the production of cultural and literary narratives engaging with this topic. This article explores two recent memoirs of settler belonging in Australia and contextualises them in a broader tradition of settler memoirs in the first decade of this century. By comparing and contrasting Tim Winton’s Island Home (2015. London: Picador) and Kim Mahood’s Position Doubtful (2016. Melbourne: Scribe), the article demonstrates a visible shift from earlier forms of writing settler (un)belonging, which often thematised settler anxiety and desire to belong through various acts of appropriating Indigenous ways of belonging. Winton’s and Mahood’s memoirs, however, offer a different vision of settler belonging: one that is deeply embedded in local, bioregional and environmental histories, recognition of Indigenous knowledges as significant agents shaping post-Mabo aesthetics and politics, and a commitment to transformation of settler relationship with the land from territory to Country.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation (GAČR) under Grant GA19-11234S.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Mabo v Queensland (No 2) was a ground-breaking legal decision of the High Court of Australia which recognized the native title and in effect rejected the doctrine of Terra Nullius. Wik Peoples v The State of Queensland (1996) was another High Court decision which held that pastoral leases did not necessarily extinguish the native title and they can co-exist. For an overview, see e.g. Meyers and Mugambwa (Citation1993) or Patton (Citation1996).
2 The ‘Bringing Them Home Report’, as it became commonly referred to, was the result of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families. The report documented oral histories from Indigenous people who were forcibly removed as children from their families and described the systemic policies sanctioned by official institutions to break up Indigenous families and assimilate the children. As such, the Report was revelatory for many settler Australians. It followed the ‘Deaths in Custody Report’, which was commissioned by The Royal Commission in 1987, and revealed, among other things, the disproportionate numbers of Indigenous people, particularly men, in jails.
3 The Reconciliation in Australia refers to a series of reports and recommendations made throughout the 1990s by The Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation which was set up in 1991. It includes presenting The Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation’s Report Walking Together: The First Steps to Parliament in 1994; presenting a series of recommendations related to land custodianship, cultural heritage, health and housing in Going Forward: Social Justice for the First Australians in 1995 to the Prime Minister, Paul Keating; celebrating the first National Reconciliation Week in 1996; launching the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation’s Draft Document for Reconciliation in 1999 and presenting the national reconciliation documents and the Final Report in 2000. The Council was ended in 2000 as a new institutional body, Reconciliation Australia, was set up (Aubrey-Poiner and Phillips Citation2010, 4–6).
4 Already in 2005, Felicity Collins and Therese Davis (Citation2004) published Australian Cinema After Mabo—their study of Australian national cinema in the 1990s in which they introduce the idea of ‘post-Mabo’ cultural production. Another publication that also deals with post-Mabo fiction, only more specifically with how Australian fiction thematises Reconciliation, is Liliana Zavaglia’s White Apology and Apologia: Australian Novels of Reconciliation (Citation2016).
5 It is not a coincidence that these novels, Dorothy Hewett’s Neap Tide (1999), Alex Miller’s Journey to the Stone Country (2002) and Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth (2004) were also published around the turn of the twenty-first century, a period corresponding to the cultural, social and political changes outlined at the beginning of this article.
6 While Rodoreda and Dolin talk specifically about non-Indigenous novels, some Aboriginal writers also engage directly with post-Mabo fiction. An example can be Melissa Lucashenko’s novel Mullumbimby (Citation2013) or Tara June Winch’s novel The Yield (Citation2019).
7 See, for example, Martin Harrison, Who Wants to Create Australia? (2004) and John Kinsella, Contrary Rhetoric: Lectures on Landscape and Language (2008).
8 Morgan’s My Place certainly was not the first nor the last auto/biographical narrative or, as the preferred term goes today, life writing. It owes to a rich tradition of Australian Indigenous testimonial writing going back to the 1970s. My Place, however, holds a special place in the canon of Aboriginal life writing due to its publication timing (only months before the massive celebrations of the 1988 Bicentenary of European settlement in Australia, celebrations which were greeted with protests by Aboriginal activists and their supporters, making Indigenous issues much more visible for the public) and the framing of a quest to reveal a family secret of Aboriginal ancestry. My Place became a bestseller and attracted international attention through translations into more than 15 languages.
9 It must be noted that the authors of the memoirs of settler belonging under scrutiny in this study come from a very particular socio-economic as well as political-cultural background: they are typically white, predominantly Anglo-Saxon, university educated (often with academic positions), progressive and liberal humanist in their worldviews, and often sympathetic to Indigenous causes. Lisa Slater (Citation2019, xv) calls this group of progressively thinking intellectuals ‘good white people’, defined as those who were ‘profoundly affected by the post-1970s Indigenous rights movements or whose subjectivities have been deeply informed by the politics of reconciliation and Indigenous testimony’.
10 For examples see Saskia Beudel, A Country in Mind (Citation2013), Nicolas Rothwell, Another Country (Citation2007) and Journeys to the Interior (Citation2010), and Mark Tredinnick, Blue Plateau (2009).
11 In Nourishing Terrains, Deborah Bird Rose explains that for Aboriginal people, Country is
not only a common noun but also a proper noun. People talk about country in the same way that they would talk about a person: they speak to country, sing to country, visit country, worry about country, feel sorry for country, and long for country … Country is multi-dimensional—it consists of people, animals, plants, Dreamings; underground, earth, soils, minerals and waters, surface water, and air. (Rose Citation1996, 7–8)
12 For example, see Tim Winton: Critical Essays, edited by Lyn McCredden and Nathanael O’Reilly (Citation2014) and The Fiction of Tim Winton: Earthed and Sacred by Lyn McCredden (Citation2016a).
13 The photo gallery is available on the publisher’s website at https://www.scribepublications.com.au/explore/insights/position-doubtful-photo-gallery.
14 Curiously, it seems that Winton only becomes conscious of his Australianness when residing abroad; in Europe, he says, he could ‘never connect bodily and emotionally’ (Citation[2015] 2016, 8) and his ‘responses [to European landscapes] were muted’ (8). These reflections could be read as a common expression of a traveller’s homesickness but also as a post-colonial gesture in which the Old World is no longer the Home of primary desire. The historian Mark McKenna, who in his personally framed introduction in From the Edge: Australia’s Lost Histories (Citation2016) directly alludes to Winton as a champion advocate of Australia’s ecopoetics, describes almost exactly the same sentiment: ‘Leaving Australia to live overseas, as I have done on several occasions, the ‘physical reality’ of Australia slowly rises to the surface—the sensory dimensions of place that can sometimes only be fully understood by leaving the country behind—the overwhelming intensity of light and colour and the vast, resounding spaces of an island continent that can momentarily still homesickness when felt and remembered from far away’ (McKenna Citation2016, 14).
15 For example, in Island Home Winton describes the ‘reverence’ for the environment he felt already as a teenage boy (Citation[2015] 2016, 61). For critical scholarship which relates Winton’s oeuvre to the notions of the sacred, see McCredden, The Fiction of Tim Winton: Earthed and Sacred (Citation2016a) and particularly McCredden’s article ‘Tim Winton: Abjection, Meaning-making and Australian Sacredness’ (Citation2016b).
16 Allan Arthur Davidson was the first white explorer who crossed the Tanami Desert in the 1900s. He mapped the territory as well as wrote journals about his journeys. Mahood uses and creatively re-uses both in both of her memoirs.
17 Another landscape memoir published at about the same period that offers itself for comparison with Winton’s and Mahood’s texts is Don Watson’s Bush: Travels in the Heart of Australia (2014). Watson, a historian, journalist, and former speechwriter for Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, combines family history, memoir, reflection on the landscape, and the history and various forms of the Australian bush myth.
18 Linn Miller analyses the notion of settler belonging from a philosophical point of view and suggests that belonging in Australia is problematized by the settler Australians’ state of ‘conscious despair’ (a term developed from Søren Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death), which prevents settlers from being in a ‘correct relation’ to themselves and to the world (Miller Citation2003, 220).
19 The phrase ‘move forward’ was used controversially by the former Australian Prime Minister John Howard when justifying his refusal to formally apologize to the Stolen Generations: ‘If we acknowledge wrong and assess honestly and vigorously what needs to be done we can move forward, and move forward we must’ (‘Sorry’ Citation2007). Paradoxically, the later Prime Minister from the opposite camp who did offer a formal apology to Stolen Generations, Kevin Rudd, used the very same phrase, though he explicitly included Indigenous people in this process: ‘It is time to reconcile. It is time to recognise the injustices of the past. It is time to say sorry. It is time to move forward together’ (Rudd Citation2008, 169).
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Martina Horáková
Martina Horáková is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and American Studies at Masaryk University, Czech Republic. In her teaching and research, she focuses on contemporary Australian and Canadian literatures, particularly on Indigenous cultural production and theories of settler colonialism. She authored Inscribing Difference and Resistance: Indigenous Women’s Personal Non-fiction and Life Writing in Australia and Canada (MUNI Press, 2017) and co-authored Alternatives in Biography: Writing Lives in Diverse English-language Contexts (MUNI Press, 2011). Among others, she published book chapters in Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction (De Gruyter, 2019), A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature (Camden House, 2013), Postcolonial Issues in Australian Literature (Cambria Press, 2010). She is currently working on a project related to memoirs of settler belonging in Australia. From 2016 she is the general editor of JEASA, Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia.