'The ways in which European settlers have disrupted Australian lands, and disrupted the relationship that First Nations people have to Indigenous Country, are massive and manifold. This despoliation has deep and lasting implications because Country relies on a dialogue between people and place, and this dialogue is based on millennia of accumulated knowledges. Mitigating the despoliation requires the acknowledgement of this dialogue’s importance, and one mode of making it legible, particularly to European settlers, is through works of Indigenous literature.' (Introduction)
'Native title was increasingly being seen as a regime of limited property rights that could be curbed by governments at a whim. [...]while many Aboriginal people have certainly benefited from native title determinations 3 since the Native Title Act was passed in 1993, Mabo-based native title offers no recompense to the majority of Aboriginal people living in Australia today, because most of them have been dispossessed of their traditional lands, or their native title rights have been extinguished by land grants to settlers. For Watson, the gains of native title have been "meagre at best, illusory at worst" (284). [...]as the Mabo decision and the native title claims process have proved increasingly disappointing for more Aboriginal people in their aspirations for justice and land rights, attention has returned to sovereignty, something that was expressly denied them in Mabo. The recognition of native title rights in the Mabo decision of 1992, while "truly a catalytic political event" (Russell 279), also provided no advances on the question of sovereignty. [...]all three of these state initiatives from the early 1990s functioned, in effect, to displace calls for a treaty and indigenous sovereignty for a number of years. Wright's narrator explains that "Aboriginal Law handed down through the ages since time began" provides the foundational basis for living on the land (2). [...]the machinations and the history of the "white" nation-state are subordinated to Aboriginal Law early in this novel, and the carriers of Aboriginal Law are established as sovereigns of this place.' (Publication abstract)
'This article sets the critical analysis of gender dynamics in Pacific women’s literature in a decolonizing context of trans-Indigenous feminist theories. Māori author Patricia Grace, and Indigenous Australian writer and scholar Melissa Lucashenko center storytelling as a critical methodology in establishing Aboriginality as the central knowledge regime in their writing. Within the framework of a trans-Indigenous methodology, the present study is grounded on and engages with Indigenous feminist theories from the Pacific and beyond: A recognition of multiply situated knowledge and “herstories” establishes female connection to land, spirituality, and community, alongside experiences of colonial invasion and oppression, as key commonalities in Indigenous writing. Through storytelling, Grace and Lucashenko envision gender regimes that reflect Indigenous women’s complexity, as well as authority, positioning Indigenous Pacific women as active agents in confronting sexist patriarchal hegemony, and instrumental for creating balance in gender relations, family, community, and nation, amid complex processes of decolonization.' (Publication abstract)