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'Kim Scott's description of the Moore River Native Settlement, also known as Mogumber, in his 1999 novel Benang, suggests implicit analogies with the mid-century concentration camps of the Holocaust. The Indigenous detainees are transported there in stock cars, they are welcomed by uniformed overseers armed with whips, they are housed in barracks with barred windows, and a punishment regime of solitary confinement and ritual humiliation operates as a means of coercion (89-94, 99-102). Elsewhere in the novel, Scott leaves us in no doubt about the force of these associations: "' They had some good ideas, those Nazis," Earn said, "but they went a bit far"' (Benang 154). The analogy between twentieth-century government control of the lives of Australian Indigenous people and biopolitics of Nazism has not gone unnoticed in other quarters. Elizabeth Povinelli describes the equation, made by the Royal Commission's Bringing Them Home report in 1994, of a century of child removal practices with cultural genocide, as 'an analogy made more compelling by the age of the Aboriginal applicants, many of whom had been taken in the early 1940s'. The impact of that equation was that 'Australians looked at themselves in a ghastly historical mirror and imagined their own Nuremberg. Would fascism be the final metaphor of Australian settler modernity?' (38).' (Author's introduction, p. 1)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
- Benang : From the Heart 1999 single work novel
- Historical Controversies and the History Wars in Australia 2010 single work criticism
- The Secret River 2005 single work novel
- Frontier Skirmishes : Literary and Cultural Debates in Australia after 1992 2010 anthology criticism
- That Deadman Dance 2010 single work novel
- Writing Never Arrives Naked : Early Aboriginal Cultures of Writing in Australia 2006 single work criticism
- Spaces of Fiction/Fictions of Space : Postcolonial Place and Literary Deixis 2010 multi chapter work criticism