AustLit

'‘It was a bright, cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.’ This is not the first line of Kaurna elder Lewis O’Brien’s story, although it obviously could have been, given his book’s title. Instead, it is the opening sentence of George Orwell’s 1984, a novel concerned with the struggle of the human spirit against totalitarianism. There are some similarities between Orwell’s book and O’Brien’s account of his life and times; it is not drawing too long a bow to claim, for example, that Orwell’s Big Brother and so-called Chief Protectors of Australia’s Aborigines had things in common in terms of power and its misuse, at least as far as Aboriginal people were concerned, when O’Brien was growing up in South Australia.' (Introduction)