AustLit

'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)

'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)