AustLit

'In this essay, I explore three texts written by white Australians that either attempt to explore Indigenous relationships to land or address the legacies of white settler violence. All of them might be considered as texts of reconciliation growing out of concerns generated by the Bringing Them Home Report (1996) on the separation of mixed-race children from their families and the 199os Decade of Reconciliation.3 All three texts seek new ways of belonging to country and new connections with peoples and landscapes. The narratives include Steven Muecke's No Road (Bitumen All the Way) (1997), Margaret Somerville's Body/Landscape Journals (1999), and Katrina Schlunke's Bluff Rock (2004). These hybrid, provisional texts exceed disciplinary and generic classifications. They self-consciously reflect upon the complex attachments and messy entanglements involved in white settler belonging, challenging what Aileen Moreton—Robinson calls the "possessive logic of white patriarchal sovereignty."5 Weaving together autobiographical material with post-colonial and postmodern theory, ethnography, spatial history, cultural geography, ecological ethics, and decolonizing critique, their narrators speak across cultures, attempting to negotiate a contested ground of knowledges, cosmologies, and modes of being; to forge an ethics of being together.'

Source: pp.150-151