AustLit

'Settler Australians always ask what First Nations Australians have done in Australia. This address turns the lens to my largely settler audience and asks how far you have come in your engagements with us in literary and textual spaces, and in Australian popular culture in the last three decades. In the minds of many settler Australians, the Country’s First Peoples live between a series of calendar events – 1788, 1967, 1992, 2008, and 2017. Between the lip service given to invasions/discoveries, referendums, national apologies, and royal commissions, the lives and lived histories of First Nations Australians are largely terra incognito to many settler Australians. Yet in between, beyond and underneath these events exists a language of constraint and civility symptomatic of the ongoing Australian (dis)ease – evasion. This address offers a First Nations perspective on the language and politics of evasion in some settler texts in post-Mabo Australia, and suggests pathways and protocols for future engagements with and interpretations of First Nations writing.' (Publication abstract)

'In a 1973 article “Aboriginal Literature” published in the magazine New Dawn, Oodgeroo Noonuccal writes: “It would also be to our benefit to meet with and know writers of New Zealand and the Pacific and of other lands where the indigene has made his or her way into the field of literature.” In this lecture I will respond, almost 50 years later, to her invitation to imagine the intellectual, political and creative “benefit” of Indigenous-Indigenous connection in the context of literary studies. Specifically, I will reflect on the idea of being ‘cousins’ – close kin in some contexts but virtual strangers in others – as a possible approach to thinking about the relational work of Indigenous and Pacific literary studies.  As a Māori scholar of Pacific literatures, I ask: How and where do Indigenous writers and literary scholars from the Pacific “meet with” Indigenous Australia? What does it mean to “know” one another as Indigenous peoples from cultural and historical contexts that are vastly different yet also deeply familiar? How is the Pacific bookshelf reconfigured when texts and writers from Indigenous Australia are present, and vice versa? What texts, writers, networks and intellectual work become visible when Indigenous-Indigenous relationships are the starting point for a story about the study of Australian literatures? How might conversations about settler colonialism, trans-Indigenous literary methodologies and Native Pacific Cultural Studies contribute to our thinking about – and creation of – modes of relationship that centre and stand in solidarity with Indigenous sovereignty?' (Publication abstract)

'My essay for ASAL2022 tells a story about the changes in my years of writing political papers and poetry to writing about Country and Aboriginal perspectives of philosophy. My paper explores how my writing, and the pakana community, expresses Aboriginality and connections to Country in diverse and creative ways - from caring for Country, continuing traditional practices, reviving language and dance, and contemporary art: What was happening when I wrote hard political poetry, and why this changed when my focus was taken up to look more deeply into what being Aboriginal is all about. My paper will address why Aborigines think differently, and what this means in terms of Aboriginal social and emotional wellbeing. My paper talks about the impacts Aborigines suffer from when our environments are being interfered with, and the earth is being hurt. In conclusion, my paper will be to look at the major threat to our world environment: capitalism!' (Publication summary)

'It has been widely argued that a ‘culture of agreement making’ as an alternative to litigation in native title and other areas of political and legal activity emerged in Australia in the early 2000s (Langton and Palmer). This paper explores the ways in which this development has been taken up in post-Mabo fiction. It begins by surveying the debates around the possibilities and limitations of current frameworks of agreement-making, especially their ability to deliver “equitable outcomes for Indigenous parties” (Langton and Palmer 1), and the endemic inequality produced by settler colonialism. It then examines four novels which include agreements between white and Aboriginal characters in the light of these debates: Peter Goldsworthy’s Three Dog Night (2003), Jessica White’s Entitlement (2012), Melissa Lucashenko’s Mullumbimby (2013) and Kim Scott’s Taboo (2017). Three Dog Night highlights the politics of cross-cultural negotiation in a narrative marked by transgressive desire and the blurring of normative boundaries. In Entitlement an imaginative revisioning of the process of bargaining reverses the usual power imbalance between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal characters such that the former secure their ‘entitlements,’ making visible the presence of inequity in the contractual scene. Mullumbimby explores the conflict generated by native title litigation in Aboriginal communities, but also explores modes of resolving or pre-empting such discord through agreement. Taboo displaces a settler Australian desire for ‘reconciliation’ with a Noongar emphasis on ‘reconstitution’ (109), tracing the emergence of a tentative agreement-making project within a context of incremental acknowledgments of the traumatic effects of modern repetitions of colonial violence. In all four narratives a residue of unresolved conflict suggests a cautious, critical engagement with the ‘culture of agreement-making.’' (Publication abstract)

'In a chapbook of poetic responses to Dorothea Mackellar’s ubiquitous verse ‘I Love a Sunburnt Country’, Alison Whittaker, in her contributing poem, names the settler literary appropriation of her Gomeroi homelands as a ‘white nativity’. Two recent collections by young Aboriginal women – Dropbear (2021) by Evelyn Araluen and Blakwork (2018) by Alison Whittaker – challenge the pastoral renderings in settler literature by writing back into them – or reinscribing – from an embodied writing practice.  This essay closely reads poems from the collections to honour and explore the refusal of the literary legacies of the settler imagination – a legacy that has denied First Nations peoples’ sovereignty of narrative, story, life and bodily autonomy. I also contend that the literary continuum of reinscribing practices – of which Whittaker and Araluen are only its contemporary iteration – make visible the paradox of settler relationality to Country, where Aboriginal land is a vessel for the conjuring of a national identity but is extracted for its natural resources with impunity. More crucially, however, a reinscribing method attends to histories covered over by the colonial gaze. This gaze, I suggest, is the ‘appropriating’ of Country, and a method that seeks to naturalise the settler on stolen land.' (Publication abstract)

'The focus in the university literature classroom has typically been on the text, rather than on contexts of learning and teaching. Even debates raised by postcolonial literary studies motivated by the desire to build a more just and equitable society have tended to foreground the content of the reading list. Yet, in complex classrooms riven by the kinds of political differences that reflect increasing polarisation in Australia and elsewhere, careful consideration must be given to how students and teachers are positioned to engage with challenging texts, complex issues, and each other. In this essay, students and their lecturer offer a self-reflexive analysis of their experiences in a postcolonial literary studies classroom that shifted online during the COVID pandemic, in a regional university geographically situated along the fault lines of what Mary Louise Pratt identified in 1991 as a “contact zone.” In their reflections on their extraordinary learning journey together, they describe a class that focused as much on latent interpersonal dynamics between them as readers and co-learners as on the Australian and world literature texts they unpacked together.' (Publication abstract)

'Engagements with walking, wandering, roaming the land are not new to Australian writers or filmmakers. A recognition of ambulation as discursive, as world-making, continues today: “First you have to learn to walk,” announces Stephen Muecke in a new book, co-authored with Paddy Roe, on learning how to move on Country. Muecke’s teachers and guides are Indigenous knowledge-holders; he walks only in their footsteps. But in post-Mabo narratives more generally, whose lands are being walked on? Whose worlds are being made as mobility is performed? This essay examines the trope of roaming and of the foot in contemporary Australian Indigenous-authored narratives, wherein walking or mobility in story invokes not only a connection to Country but an enactment of law making and an assertion of Indigenous sovereignty. In a seminal speech in Adelaide in 2003, Indigenous legal philosopher Irene Watson asked “Are we Free to Roam?” Watson asserted the freedom to walk, “to sing and to live with the land of [one’s] ancestors” as a measure of the attainment of Indigenous sovereignty. She called for Aboriginal voices to look “beyond the limited horizon” of the time towards a moment and place of sovereignty. I argue that these voices have now emerged. Beginning with an examination of Ivan Sen’s film Beneath Clouds (2002), I then examine walking and movement in a selection of more recent Indigenous-authored novels (by Alexis Wright, Kim Scott and Julie Janson) and film (by Richard J. Frankland), as well as in new legal thinking which suggests that law-walking might be more prevalent in Australia than previously known.' (Publication abstract)

'Thirty years after it was decided, the Mabo vs. Queensland case is remembered as a singularly defining landmark in the Aboriginal land rights movement and Australian political history. Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs posited in 1995 that we live in a “post-Mabo Australia” of “unsettlement,” a “moment of decolonization, [where] what is 'ours' is also potentially, or even always already, 'theirs’” (171-172). In this article, I reconsider Mabo’s historical legacy through the writings of Lionel Fogarty, who has kinship connections to Wakka Wakka, Yoogum, and Mununjali peoples. Fogarty is rarely studied in the Mabo turn in Australian literature, perhaps in the view that his poetry is located within the ‘protest poetry’ of a pre-Mabo Australia. Born more than a decade before the 1967 referendum, Fogarty writes continuously about land rights through a poetic oeuvre spanning forty years, often from the perspective of his close personal involvement in activism. Fogarty unsettles the commemorative ethos with which Mabo is remembered, while inextricably tied to its memory. Fogarty’s resistance to monumentalisation can also be read as a guide to reading the poet’s own literary achievements in the decades before and after Mabo. By disrupting the commemorative impulse at the heart of Mabo, Fogarty renews the eventfulness and potential of another Mabo (and perhaps, another Fogarty): one that is always in-progress or unsettled, ‘a courtesy sustained’ and a ‘wave to turn.’' (Publication abstract)

'Is there value in restoring little-known pre-Mabo regional fiction to Australian literary history? This essay asks that question of the fiction of E. O. Schlunke, author and farmer, raised in the community of German-speaking Lutheran immigrants in the south-eastern Wiradjuri/Riverina region of NSW from the 1930s to the '60s. At one level his fiction, primarily short stories published in periodicals, uses the simple narratives and realist style then expected to portray life in 'the bush' and small towns.

'Acknowledging the rich post-Mabo literature and saluting the First Nations writers who have celebrated Wiradjuri Country, the essay contends that First Nations' dispossession is the unacknowledged reality haunting Schlunke's work. Only two stories have First Nations' characters, he recognises prior custodianship only briefly and occasionally deploys offensive phrases characteristic of his era. Close reading of his superficially conventional practice uncovers irreconcilable tensions and emotions across class, cultures, ethnicities and species until one of his last stories voices disgust at the violence inflicted on First Nations people.

'After an outline of Schlunke's life and publishing history I follow Hughes D'Aeth's approach to regional literature as an 'interior apprehension of how life felt to people'. The essay  frames the many stories structured by farm work as georgian in mode. With distinctive inclusion of the other-than-human and rejection of standard farming practices, Schlunke may be read as political ecologist, skilfully giving voice and narrative roles to generate what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls 'a sense of kin' with the district's biosphere and concern for its well-being.' (Publication abstract)

'Rodney Hall’s seven book fictional account of European imperialism and Australia spans some 260 years, from 120 years before settlement/invasion, to some 140 years after. The writing of the heptalogy occupied Hall for approximately 15 years; it was commenced in the prelude to the 1988 Bicentenary, encompassed the years of Mabo and Wik, and concluded at the end of the century. Publication spanned 1988-2000.

'This paper focuses on The Lonely Traveller by Night—the second book in the heptalogy’s historical chronology. Hall wrote the Lonely Traveller by Night in 1994 in the wake of Mabo, and after three decades of intense personal activism in support of Indigenous rights. The book tells the story of Yuramiru, an indigenous man from Ikara/Wilpena Pound. Yuramiru is first encountered being sold as a curiosity in Venice in 1667, before becoming embroiled in the military and existential tussle between Venetian and Ottoman empires.

'This paper reads Hall’s representation of Yuramiru as a bold counter-narrative challenging fundamental moral and ethical principles that underpinned the clash of civilisations as European empires came to terms with the southern continent and its Indigenous inhabitants. Published at a time when ‘first contact’ novels were rife in Australian literature (Hall had already written his own as part of the heptalogy with The Second Bridegroom (1991)) The Lonely Traveller by Night presents an audacious inversion of ‘first contact’, which is powerfully effective as literature and—in the context of Mabo—groundbreaking as polemic.' (Publication abstract)