AustLit
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.
Latest Issues
AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'Aboriginal Australian author Kim Scott's True Country first novel, reveals the author's grappling with his
Aboriginal identity amidst a community that has been deracinated, impoverished of its culture, thriving on
reciprocity demanding welfare system and subjected to abominating ghettoization. The obvious reason
being the corrosive assimilative workings of the white Australian nation-state. Driven by the zeal to
unearth the spiritual truth/identity about this community and his self, Billy—the narrator sets out for a
rummaging and recovers the meaning of true Aboriginal identity both at individual and community level.
At the same time, as identity is internally heterogeneous, slippery, unstable and situational, true
Aboriginal identity reclaiming remains a matter of strategic and subversive cultural resistance. While
resisting white deracinating practices, the author discovers a 'true country'—a true Aboriginal identity—
that could be realized beyond the modern truths in the world of 'Dreamtime reality'. It is this strategized
cultural resistance to the assimilative white Australian nation-state, as is evident in the invective writing
style of Scott, which I will highlight in this paper.' (Author's abstract)
Notes
-
Epigraph: The bitter truth is that in a racist society where a brown skin (along with other colors) can cost lives, people will embrace any ideology that seems to offer the hope of change. Even when that ideology proves counter-productive, the hope persists...[N]ationalism, then, has to be seen as a complicated, two edged sword. It can't be fully understood if we just dismiss it as 'identity politics.' (Elizabeth Martínez De Colores Means All of Us, as qtd. in Moya and García 1)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Last amended 7 Feb 2013 15:15:43
144-152
http://rupkatha.com/V4/n2/03_Kim_Scott_True_Country.pdf
Resisting Deracination, Reviving Identity : Re-reading Kim Scott’s True Country
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities