AustLit

'Even before the publication of Below the Line in 1991, Eric Willmot was a well-established Aboriginal writer, teacher and scholar who held important positions in higher education. 1 Willmot’s adult life is in stark contrast to his childhood, during which his family moved around Queensland and the Northern Territory. Willmot gave up his education after primary school and spent his teenage years as a drover and horse breaker, but a serious rodeo accident at the age of eighteen put an end to this career, and made Willmot return to schooling (Willmot, Australia n.p.). With degrees in mathematics and education, Willmot taught in New South Wales, Victoria and Papua New Guinea. He spent the 1970s and 1980s actively engaged in Aboriginal education and teacher training (Willmot, Australia n.p.), through a series of educational programmes for advancing Aboriginal education. In 1984 he was awarded the Order of Australia for his services to education and Aboriginal studies. Apart from being an educator and a scholar, Willmot is also an inventor and a holder of many patents. In 1981 he received the Australian Inventor of the Year Award as well as the Gold Medal Award for mechanical engineering at the International Exposition of New Technology in Geneva (Willmot, Dilemma n.p.). Before Below the Line , Willmot wrote the influential Bicentennial novel Pemulwuy: The Rainbow Warrior (1987), which received accolades from the press and launched Willmot’s lifelong project to promote the previously neglected Eora warrior Pemulwuy. 2 Willmot was such a prominent public figure in the 1980s that he was asked to deliver a Boyer Lecture in 1986. 3 This lecture, Australia: The Last Experiment , is as influential today as it was thirty years ago. However, in the year that saw the publication of Pemulwuy , Willmot’s Aboriginality was challenged in a letter sent by his mother and sister to Brisbane Sunday Mail (1 Nov. 1987), in which they stated that Willmot’s family had no Aboriginal ancestry. Willmot responded to the newspapers maintaining that he had some vague idea who sent the letter, and that his solicitors would inspect the issue. 4 However, this newspaper article had no damaging effect at all on Willmot’s career as an Aboriginal writer and educator. The reception of Pemulwuy has not changed, and Willmot has not been “ousted” from any subsequent publications discussing Aboriginal writing. For instance, Penny Van Toorn’s contribution in The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature (2000) mentions Willmot’s Pemulwuy as an important Aboriginal Bicentenary novel (39), while her subheading “Contested identities” lists the usual 1990s literary hoaxes without implicating Willmot. Likewise, Anita Heiss’ influential study Dhuuluu-Yala (2003) lists both Pemulwuy and Below the Line as Aboriginal works (228 and 232, respectively). Willmot is also included in the 2008 Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature , edited by Anita Heiss and Peter Minter.'  (Introduction)

'In the opening pages of The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1973), Todorov evokes the image of a tiger to draw a parallel between changes in the biological and literary “species”:

Being familiar with the species tiger, we can deduce from it the properties of each individual tiger; the birth of a new tiger does not modify the species in its definition. […] The same is not the case in the realm of art or of science. Here evolution operates with an altogether different rhythm: every work modifies the sum of possible works, each new example alters the species. (6)'  (Introduction)

'Dealing with the end of a world taking place on the Australian land, Sam Watson’s The Kadaitcha Sung – A Seductive Tale of Sorcery, Eroticism and Corruption and Eric Willmot’s Below the Line are both fictions that picture Australia in a state of—respectively—covert and internal, or (inter)national war. The Kadaitcha Sung tells the story of Tommy Gubba, son of Koobara, son of the chief of the Kadaitcha clan, and Fleur, a white woman, of Northern European descent. Tommy was born secretly after his uncle Booka Roth killed his father to become the last of the Kadaitcha clan. The Kadaitcha clan is in the novel an "ancient clan of sorcerers" (1) called by Biamee to stand among the tribes of the South Land (i.e. Australia) when he returned among the stars. Tommy is initiated and called by Biamee to recuperate the heart of the Rainbow Serpent stolen by Booka Roth, without which Biamee cannot "complete his earthly manifestation". Ensuing from the war that Booka waged against his own people, the veil of mists that Biamee had set upon the South Land is lifted, and "other mortals" come from "all corners of the globe and from every branch of the family of man" (33) and join forces with Booka, defeating the tribes of South Land that cannot match the weapons of the invaders (34). Tommy is to take revenge on the migloo ("fair-skinned" people), who have "raped and pillaged" (31) his people, and conquered the entire land (35). A fast pace narrative, The Kadaitcha Sung is also an action-packed novel, to which this quick introduction cannot do justice. In Below the Line, the story follows the steps of Angela, a white Australian, who at the beginning of the novel is incarcerated and raped in a camp in New Guinea. Freed and sent to Hawaii, she discovers that Australia has lost a war against Indonesia, and that the continent is now divided into two. Below the Brisbane Line is still Australia. Above the Brisbane Line is now called South Irian. Several characters analyze the situation in the course of the novel, and it is unsure whether Australia’s occupation is the result of the USA intervening too late and the UN being unable to change the course of the new colonisation of the country (four million foreign refugees now live in South Irian), or if Australia has indeed been abandoned by its allies because of other international interests in the region. Against her husband’s wish, Angela decides to go back to what is her homeland, where she becomes obsessed with the idea to find the woman she was incarcerated with in New Guinea. On her quest to find the mysterious Delta, and her journey across the country, she comes to understand that there is a third player in the game: the land and its "chosen ones."' (Introduction)