AustLit

'Archie Weller’s Land of the Golden Clouds (1998) might have become a landmark novel. Van Ikin wrote in his early review of the work that it “could go ballistic. Not just in Australia, either: there are elements of Land of the Golden Clouds that have the potential to strike a chord of excitement right across the globe” (“Feet into fantasy” 10), because Weller’s novel adds a contemporary spin to the conventions laid down by Tolkien and his successors. Katharine England ended her review of the novel with the sentiment that it was “another Archie Weller landmark in Australian and Aboriginal writing” (42). However, instead of becoming a landmark work, the novel was soon forgotten. However, instead of becoming a landmark work, the novel was soon forgotten. Chapter 1 discusses how the “spectres” started “haunting” Australia, and how extratextual phenomena provided answers as to whether or not some works should be considered Aboriginal. This phenomenon went into overdrive in 1990s Australia when a series of writers entered the limelight for their culturally incorrect appropriation of Aboriginal identity, which they used to create works of art, most notably Aboriginal writing. The publicly exposed authors who abused Aboriginal and other ethnic identities were initially put in the same box of frauds, and Australian media and academia ostracised them without paying much attention to their differences. Indeed, the number of literary-cultural hoaxes in 1990s Australia was staggering, and it is no wonder they all received the same negative response. No other western-style democracy with indigenous peoples recorded such a situation in the late twentieth century. The idea that Aboriginal oral narratives, Aboriginal art in general and Aboriginal noms de plume could still be appropriated so easily in a multicultural country that wanted to put its colonial past behind it just added to the already historically and politically charged relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians. However, the subsequent careers of the “cultural hoaxers” reveal that the reasons behind their appropriations and the socio-historical context from which they appeared were quite different.'  (Introduction)