AustLit

'Rooted in nationally defined conditions and primarily addressing its immediate audience of Indigenous and white Australians, Australian Indigenous literature performs an important role in the articulation of Indigenous peoples’ protest, constituting an indictment of white Australian colonial ideology, recuperation of neglected Aboriginal history, and a call for redefining blackness. However, despite its preoccupation with local and national, this literature is also a component of world literature in the sense that it raises ethical questions about societal, political and cultural violence and abuse that continue to haunt all societies in the 21st century. Focused on the poetry collection of Wiradjuri poet Jeanine Leane (2010) Dark Secrets: After Dreaming (AD) 1887–1961, this article demonstrates how Leane confronts assumptions about the irreducible division between empowered and disempowered cultures. It argues that, despite the plurality of cultural responses to colonial pressure, Leane’s verse deals with wider themes and provides spaces for cross-cultural relationality.' (Publication abstract)

'In the light of the recent emergence of the field of critical whiteness studies in Australia and its new perspective on issues that have occupied postcolonial literary studies over the last four decades, this article examines the impact of Australian indigenous literature on the white reader. In particular, it aims to show that, in its overt objection to institutional and historical processes which maintain the entitlement and disavowal of whiteness on the one hand, and the concomitant political, economic and cultural subordination of indigenous Australians on the other, the poetry of Romaine Moreton and Alf Taylor destabilises assumptions about the authority and entitlement of white colonisers. In this sense, the article provides additional evidence that works of art have the capacity to either reinforce structures of domination and suppression of "inferior races and cultures" or produce critical disruptions and generate alternative worlds (Levine 2000:383).' (Publication abstract)

'Although Australian indigenous poetry is often overtly polemical and politically committed, any reading which analyzes it as mere propaganda is too narrow to do it justice. By presenting the verse of Alf Taylor collected in Singer Songwriter (1992) and Winds (1994) and discussing it in the context of the wider social and cultural milieu of the author, my essay aims to show the thematic richness of indigenous poetic expression. Indigenous poets have, on the one hand, undertaken the responsibility to strive for social and political equality and foster within their communities the very important concept that indigenous peoples can survive only as a community and a nation (McGuiness). On the other hand, they have produced powerful self-revelatory accounts of their own mental and emotional interior, which urges us to see their careers in a perspective much wider than that of social chroniclers and rebels.' (Publication abstract)

'Though the number of translated works written by Australian Aboriginals reflects the increasing interest in their culture, the way these books are translated and marketed often distorts the author's original intentions and distorts how Australian Aboriginals are perceived by many European communities.' In this essay the authors focus on Sally Morgan's My Place and Doris Pilkington's Rabbit Proof Fence to illustrate how European translations have misrepresented the original text for the purpose of adapting translated text to their targeted audience's culture.