AustLit

'One of the many rewritings of Australian Henry Lawson’s iconic 1892 short story “The Drover’s Wife” is the 2016 play The Drover’s Wife, written by Aboriginal actor, writer, and director Leah Purcell. Purcell’s rewriting evidences a much more significant presence of Indigeneity. The play not only introduces Yadaka, an Aboriginal fugitive, as a key character, but the drover’s wife herself is revealed to have Indigenous origins. This powerful twist offers several implications: a tour de force of frontier violence with disturbing and haunting images of racism, rape, lynching, and murder, the play confronts the foundations of the literary canon and of settler belonging, providing an alternative to both. Borrowing Fiona Probyn-Rapsey’s term “kin-fused”, this close reading of the play’s text argues that its resolution implies a critique of Indigenous–settler reconciliation, pointing to a lingering desire to redress colonial violence, desire embodied in the play by a “kin-fused” revenge.' (Publication abstract)

'One of the debates which Australia continues to witness with various degrees of intensity involves the complex ways of articulating settler (un)belonging in the postcolonising settler nation. While one of the most significant moments which re-defined settler-Indigenous relationship took place around the turn of the twenty-first century, the critical scholarship examining settler anxieties regarding the sense of (un)belonging is flourishing in the post-Mabo period, as is the production of cultural and literary narratives engaging with this topic. This article explores two recent memoirs of settler belonging in Australia and contextualises them in a broader tradition of settler memoirs in the first decade of this century. By comparing and contrasting Tim Winton’s Island Home (2015. London: Picador) and Kim Mahood’s Position Doubtful (2016. Melbourne: Scribe), the article demonstrates a visible shift from earlier forms of writing settler (un)belonging, which often thematised settler anxiety and desire to belong through various acts of appropriating Indigenous ways of belonging. Winton’s and Mahood’s memoirs, however, offer a different vision of settler belonging: one that is deeply embedded in local, bioregional and environmental histories, recognition of Indigenous knowledges as significant agents shaping post-Mabo aesthetics and politics, and a commitment to transformation of settler relationship with the land from territory to Country.' (Publication abstract)

'The study examines the ways in which Indigenous women’s non-fiction published in the 1990s contributed to theoretical articulations of Indigenous feminism and to a historiographic counter-discourse which has intervened into the dominant narratives of nation-building in settler colonies. Personal non-fiction and life writing by Native American authors Paula Gunn Allen and Anna Lee Walters (USA), by First Nations authors Lee Maracle and Shirley Sterling (Canada), and by Aboriginal authors Jackie Huggins and Doris Pilkington Garimara (Australia) are analyzed in detail to demonstrate how a hybrid writing style, combining scholarly criticism with auto/biography and fictionalized storytelling, is used to inscribe Indigenous women’s cultural difference, subjugated knowledges, transgenerational trauma from colonization, and resistance to forced assimilation.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

The author examines an narratological approach used in double-voiced narratives in which present two equally authoritative narrative voices. To exemplify aspects of the structure of 'double-voice', and its narrative complexity the author examines the life writing of Rita and Jackie Huggins biographical account Auntie Rita.

'Stephen Kinnane’s Shadow Lines (2003) pertains to the genre of Indigenous

inter-generational life writing in which the younger generation of Indigenous writers substitutes white editors in recording the lives and memories of their own families and community elders, thus seizing a greater amount of control over the representations of Australian Indigenetiy. Kinnane extends the genre by appropriating the tools of colonial domination, most notably the archive, and by inscribing, in a self-reflective way, his own subjectivity in the text. As a result,Shadow Lines is a multilayered narrative that presents a functional and ontented interracial marriage and family life of Kinnane’s grandparents, as a wayof counteracting the close regulation and policing of Aboriginality in the early twentieth-century Western Australia. In addition,Kinnane juxtaposes the archival materials to other sources of information, mostly the orally transmitted memories of relatives and friends, thus reclaiming the agency of his ancestors and providing a truthful representation of their lives and the lives of the local Indigenous community.' (Source: abstract)