Towards resilience and playfulness: the negotiation of indigenous Australian identities in twentieth-century Aboriginal narratives

Abstract

This article looks at the ideological ramifications of the narrative strategies that twentieth-century Aboriginal prose texts use to negotiate indigenous Australian identities. The central thesis is that after a period during which narratives by Aboriginal authors by necessity followed the form of the life histories to detail the actual experiences of oppression under the British settlers and past Australian governments, more recent indigenous Australian narratives are expressive of a regained confidence in playfully asserting Aboriginal identities. One can observe three developments in indigenous Australian narratives of the late twentieth century. First, the mode of fiction gradually increases its prevalence. Second, there has been a movement away from reports of what the colonisers did to indigenous Australians towards the foregrounding of more rebellious Aboriginal characters. Third, one can detect a significant increase in playfulness in narratives by indigenous Australian authors.

Keywords:

• Aboriginal narratives
• ideological underpinnings
• indigenous Australian identities
• life history
• narrative strategies
• novelplayfulness
• resilience

Acknowledgements

Research for this article was made possible by Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Aarhus University, Høegh-Guldbergs Gade 6B, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark.

Notes

1. For Wolf Schmid (2010: 101), the ideological perspective of a narrative encompasses factors such as ‘knowledge, way of thinking, evaluative position and intellectual horizon’. In this article, I look at what Seymour Chatman (1986: 197) would call the ‘attitudinal function[s]’ or ‘slant[s]’ of Aboriginal narratives.

2. Since the autobiography is a western genre, many critics prefer to use terms such as Aboriginal life histories or life narratives (Huggan, 2001: 162).

3. According to Marie-Laure Ryan (2005: 355–56), playful narratives foreground paida, i.e. ‘non-serious behaviours … and the transgression of … rules found in carnival festivities’. Furthermore, ‘through paida, authors play with words, with literary genres, with established literary conventions, with the concept of representation …, and with fictional levels …, without subjecting themselves to rigid constraints and without voluntarily limiting their freedom’.

4. This movement towards resilience and playful aesthetics can also be found in novels by Bruce Pascoe (Earth [2001]), Alexis Wright (Carpentaria [2006] and The Swan Book [2013]) and Kim Scott (That Deadman Dance [2011]), plays by Jack Davis (No Sugar [1986] and The Dreamers [1996]) and Kevin Gilbert (The Cherry Pickers [1988]), the dance performances by the Chooky Dancers (such as ‘Zorba the Greek Yolgnu Syle’ [2007]), the television series Bush Mechanics (2001) and new indigenous Australian life histories (such as Florence Corrigan’s Miles of Post and Wire [1998], Alice Bilari Smith’s Under a Bilari Tree I Born [2002] and Busted out Laughing: Dot Collard’s Story as Told to Beryl Hackner [2003]).

5. For a different model see Geoff Rodoreda, who distinguishes between pre- and post-Mabo literature. He argues that the 1992 decision by the High Court of Australia caused a ‘seismic shift’ in ‘Australian prose’ (Rodoreda, 2012: 97–98). However, as I try to illustrate in this article, the development of Aboriginal prose at the end of the twentieth century has not been characterised by a radical paradigm shift but rather by gradual steps.

6. This pacte affirms the identity between the author and the first-person narrator, and guarantees the authenticity and truthfulness of the text to the reader (Lejeune, 1994).

7. While My Place operates on the basis of a deliberate discrepancy between form and content, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence uses its form to underline its content. In the latter case, the form follows the lived experience; in the former one, it works against it.

8. A ‘kadaitcha’ is a ritual executioner who has the mission of avenging the death of a tribesman. The term goes back to the Arrente people at Mparntwe (Alice Springs).

9. Apart from The Kadaitcha Sung, one can list further pre-Mabo narratives (such as Margaret Tucker’s If Everyone Cared [1977], Ella Simon’s Through My Eyes [1987], Glenyse Ward’s Wandering Girl [1987], Sally Morgan’s My Place [1987], Shirley Smith’s MumShirl [1987], Eric Wilmut’s Pemulwuy, the Rainbow Warrior [1987] and Ruby Langford Ginbis’s Don’t Take Your Love to Town [1988]); the inaugural National Aboriginal Writers’ Conference in 1983; the book Aboriginal Writing Today (1985); the protests in the context of the Australian Bicentenary celebrations of 1988; and the collection Paperbark: A Collection of Black Australian Writing (1990) as contributing to this new climate (see also Birk, 2008: 215).

10. I would like to thank Dorothee Klein (2013) for drawing my attention to this novel.

11. The (mis)quoting of Neville’s statement – ‘what we have to do is [uplift and; added by Scott] elevate these people to our own plane’ (Neville, 1947: 57; Scott, 1999: 11) – presumably also serves to reappropriate the history of Australia from a Nyungar perspective.

12. In contrast to Ern’s claims, Harley’s great-great-grandfather, Sandy One Mason, turns out not to have been the first white man in the family tree after all; he was in fact of Aboriginal descent, too. As the character Mustle puts it, ‘he’s a nigger, really’ (483, italics in original).