'In this brilliant debut novel, Alexis Wright evokes city and outback, deepening our understanding of human ambition and failure, and making the timeless heart and soul of this country pulsate on the page. Black and white cultures collide in a thousand ways as Aboriginal spirituality clashes with the complex brutality of colonisation at St Dominic's mission. With her political awareness raised by work with the city-based Aboriginal Coalition, Mary visits the old mission in the northern Gulf country, place of her mother's and grandmother's suffering. Mary's return reignites community anxieties, and the Council of Elders again turn to their spirit world.' (From the publisher's website.)
'The Mabo decision in 1992 was a turning point for Australia. It finally overturned the dishonest doctrine of terra nullius and recognised Indigenous land rights. It was a moment of hope, accompanied by a productive tension.' (Introduction)
'Literature by Indigenous Australians - the voice from the heart - is the true core of the Australian canon, writes Geordie Williamson The ur-text of the Australian canon appeared just over two centuries ago, in 1819, when First Fruits of Australian Poetry by Barron Field, a Supreme Court judge of New South Wales with literary pretensions, was published in Sydney.' (Introduction)
'The Indigenous Australian author Alexis Wright has developed a novelistic oeuvre that experiments with written forms of fiction, and paints an Aboriginal universe that does not need European epistemology to sustain itself. Rather, it questions western values, certainties, and convictions and problematizes the western way of seeing and doing in the island-continent. Her latest novel, The Swan Book, in manifesting its spiritual and mystical connections to the holistic universe known as the Dreamtime, foregrounds this epistemological turn, which is premised on the ontological relationship Aboriginal people have with “Country,” their traditional land. Alexis Wright’s fiction, which she herself has called an instance of “Aboriginal reality” or “Aboriginal realism,” as opposed to magic realism, is an epic tour de force that juxtaposes the Indigenous and European traditions in startling ways but also speaks across a cultural divide – the discursive gap between colonized and colonizer, belonging and non-belonging, assimilation and sovereignty – which this essay will address.' (Publication abstract)
'This article explores the role of humour in three contemporary Aboriginal texts that document Aboriginal–Asian relationships. Humour in Aboriginal texts has mostly been studied with reference to the ostensible binaries between Aboriginal and European, Black and White, colonised and colonisers. Scant critical attention has been paid to the place of humour in revealing and concealing the dynamic interrelations between Aboriginal people and Asian immigrants living under a colonial regime. This article investigates humour as a textual device that transmits subversive ideas contesting stigma and stereotypes of Aboriginal and Asian peoples regarding their identities, bodies, and inter-racial intimacies. Through close readings of Alexis Wright’s novel Plains of Promise (1997), Tex and Nelly Camfoo’s autobiography Love against the Law (2000) and Anita Heiss’s historical romance Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms (2016), this article considers three specific modes of humour in Aboriginal texts: self-deprecation, puns/wit, and boasting. The article contends that these different forms of humour draw attention to a range of unsettling issues and power relations concerning oppression and resistance, stigmatisation and normalisation, institutional control and surveillance. Further in each of these texts humour works to deconstruct images of discrete and maligned racialised otherness.' (Publication abstract)