AustLit

'This article considers some of the reasons why Irish-Australian literature has not been a significant trajectory within Australian literary studies and what it might offer if it were. Since the colonial era, Irish difference has been both recalcitrant and assimilable but, in the wake of Federation in 1901, Australian literature was concerned with the production of a national tradition and Irishness served to differentiate Australianness from Britishness. This article is concerned, then, with retrieving Irish difference. It extends my longstanding interest in Indigenous Australian literatures by analysing the representation of Irish Australians in Indigenous Australian writing, particularly moments of solidarity between the Irish and Indigenous Australians. After looking briefly at representations of colonial relations between the Irish and Aboriginal Australians in Jack Davis’ 1979 play Kullark and Eric Willmot’s historical novel Pemulwuy (1989), this article offers a reading of a minor scene in Alexis Wright’s Miles Franklin Literary Award-winning novel Carpentaria, published in 2006, as a way of exploring such representations in the contemporary era. This article is not trying to generate a new category for the field of Australian literary studies. Rather, it follows a seam within the Australian literary tradition that imagines generative forms of allegiance that may complicate existing conceptions of the Australian literary field.'

Source: Abstract.

'Even before the publication of Below the Line in 1991, Eric Willmot was a well-established Aboriginal writer, teacher and scholar who held important positions in higher education. 1 Willmot’s adult life is in stark contrast to his childhood, during which his family moved around Queensland and the Northern Territory. Willmot gave up his education after primary school and spent his teenage years as a drover and horse breaker, but a serious rodeo accident at the age of eighteen put an end to this career, and made Willmot return to schooling (Willmot, Australia n.p.). With degrees in mathematics and education, Willmot taught in New South Wales, Victoria and Papua New Guinea. He spent the 1970s and 1980s actively engaged in Aboriginal education and teacher training (Willmot, Australia n.p.), through a series of educational programmes for advancing Aboriginal education. In 1984 he was awarded the Order of Australia for his services to education and Aboriginal studies. Apart from being an educator and a scholar, Willmot is also an inventor and a holder of many patents. In 1981 he received the Australian Inventor of the Year Award as well as the Gold Medal Award for mechanical engineering at the International Exposition of New Technology in Geneva (Willmot, Dilemma n.p.). Before Below the Line , Willmot wrote the influential Bicentennial novel Pemulwuy: The Rainbow Warrior (1987), which received accolades from the press and launched Willmot’s lifelong project to promote the previously neglected Eora warrior Pemulwuy. 2 Willmot was such a prominent public figure in the 1980s that he was asked to deliver a Boyer Lecture in 1986. 3 This lecture, Australia: The Last Experiment , is as influential today as it was thirty years ago. However, in the year that saw the publication of Pemulwuy , Willmot’s Aboriginality was challenged in a letter sent by his mother and sister to Brisbane Sunday Mail (1 Nov. 1987), in which they stated that Willmot’s family had no Aboriginal ancestry. Willmot responded to the newspapers maintaining that he had some vague idea who sent the letter, and that his solicitors would inspect the issue. 4 However, this newspaper article had no damaging effect at all on Willmot’s career as an Aboriginal writer and educator. The reception of Pemulwuy has not changed, and Willmot has not been “ousted” from any subsequent publications discussing Aboriginal writing. For instance, Penny Van Toorn’s contribution in The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature (2000) mentions Willmot’s Pemulwuy as an important Aboriginal Bicentenary novel (39), while her subheading “Contested identities” lists the usual 1990s literary hoaxes without implicating Willmot. Likewise, Anita Heiss’ influential study Dhuuluu-Yala (2003) lists both Pemulwuy and Below the Line as Aboriginal works (228 and 232, respectively). Willmot is also included in the 2008 Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature , edited by Anita Heiss and Peter Minter.'  (Introduction)