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)