AustLit

'In the light of the recent emergence of the field of critical whiteness studies in Australia and its new perspective on issues that have occupied postcolonial literary studies over the last four decades, this article examines the impact of Australian indigenous literature on the white reader. In particular, it aims to show that, in its overt objection to institutional and historical processes which maintain the entitlement and disavowal of whiteness on the one hand, and the concomitant political, economic and cultural subordination of indigenous Australians on the other, the poetry of Romaine Moreton and Alf Taylor destabilises assumptions about the authority and entitlement of white colonisers. In this sense, the article provides additional evidence that works of art have the capacity to either reinforce structures of domination and suppression of "inferior races and cultures" or produce critical disruptions and generate alternative worlds (Levine 2000:383).' (Publication abstract)