Humour and the defamiliarization of whiteness in the short fiction of Australian indigenous writer Alf Taylor

Abstract

This article investigates how critical whiteness theory might complement the work of postcolonial studies to reconceptualize and reorient our study of Australian indigenous literature. Based on the premise that reading is an intercultural process in which raced and non‐raced identities are negotiated, it examines how the act of reading indigenous texts constitutes an intercultural encounter for the white reader. The work of a Western Australian Nyoongah writer, Alf Taylor, is examined as an exemplary case. Taylor was born in the late 1940s and grew up in the Spanish Benedictine Mission at New Norcia, in Western Australia. He has published two books of poetry and a collection of stories. In this article I will focus on his collection Long Time Now (2001), to show how the stories destabilize white readers’ assumptions about the authority and entitlements of whiteness. I argue that one of the prime textual vehicles which destabilizes whiteness in these stories is their humour.

Keywords:

• Alf Taylor
• critical whiteness theory
• indigenous literature
• Australia
• inter‐racial identities

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Lyn Vellins and Mandy Swann for their research assistance.

Notes

1. The first substantial piece of legislation passed by the parliament of the newly established Commonwealth of Australia in 1901 was the Immigration Restriction Act which inaugurated what has come to be known as the White Australia policy (Hirst 285).

2. The first Westerly publication won the Patricia Hackett Prize (2003).

3. The Spanish translation of Long Time Now was published by Takusan Ediciones in 2006.

4. The word “wadjella” is a Nyoogah word meaning “white person”.

5. If there is a sense of tragedy about these figures, they are not to be seen as being entirely without agency. Prominent indigenous activist and writer Kevin Gilbert, in his important political treatise Because a White Man’ll Never do It, quotes an activist of the 1970s who argues that indigenous drinking in some sense is a form of resistance: “why a lot of the gooms [indigenous homeless alcoholics] drink is because they won’t cop [accept] white society. They just refuse to accept it. So they stay outside it. And their way of expressing this resistance is by drinking metho [methylated spirit]. Because they just won’t be assimilated” (156, original emphasis).

6. “Killing white men and robbing them and turning around and having sex with their white women.”

7. The Wongi are the indigenous people of the south‐western part of the desert region of Western Australia.