AustLit

'This research discusses the negotiations instantiated by Indigenous petitions in Australia. It does so by conceptualising petition writing and reading, by considering the endorsement and commemoration of petitions, and by chronologically canvassing published and previously unpublished petitions addressed by Indigenous peoples from across Australia to government representatives and international bodies before and after Federation, from the mid 1840s to the early 1960s. Drawing on the theoretical contractarian framework developed by Charles W. Mills and Carole Pateman, the dissertation examines petition writing as a way of intervening in a domination (settler) contract and in an exclusionary and dominating white public sphere. This framework accounts for the collective dimension of petitions and for their nature as political instruments of negotiation within relations of domination and subordination. This cross disciplinary study is located within the scholarly work undertaken in Australian historical and literary studies which, especially since the 1990s, have highlighted the value of petitions as documents which record Aboriginal perspectives, and as forms of early Aboriginal writings deserving of critical attention. More broadly, it can also be contextualised within studies of the emergence of an Indigenous political voice and of processes of identity formation. It shares post-colonial studies’ interest in the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised and it replies to Spivak’s question of whether the subaltern can speak. The analysis of the petitions is historically contextualised and it reflects on the venues of the petitions’ creation (penal system, reserves and missions, urban and rural settings). It highlights the narratives and requests the petitions convey as well as the argumentative strategies employed by the petitioners. It considers the rhetoric of contemporary discourses (political, racial, humanitarian etc) visible in the petitions and the responses to these discourses put forward by the petitioners. The thesis outlines also some features which petitions and Aboriginal protest literature share and the aspect of “testimony” or “memorial” these petitions possess. An Appendix collects a sample of the Indigenous Australian petitions upon which the discussion is based. ' (Source: TROVE)