AustLit
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'Welcome to our Indigenous issue, a major addition to our suite of themed issues. In addition to our usual features, there is a range of reviews, essays, commentaries, and creative writing dedicated to Indigenous history, politics, archaeology, and society.
Guest Editor Professor Lynette Russell, Director of the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre, writes for ABR about the ‘efflorescence of Indigenous creative talent’ and the widespread debate about constitutional reform following the Uluru Statement from the Heart. She welcomes the fact that this themed issue – now an annual feature – marks an ‘engaged commitment to true reconciliation and Indigenous recognition’.' (1)
Contents
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Living in the Indigenous Space,
single work
column
(p. 5)'Living, working, and being in the Indigenous space, there are times when it feels as though nothing changes. Indeed, on occasion, it can feel as though things are in fact regressing. When The Hon. Ken Wyatt AM, MP was announced as the new Minister for Indigenous Australians, after the re-election of the Morrison government, numerous family members, friends, and colleagues expressed dismay that this appeared to represent a dilution of the role, which had been, to that point, the Minister of Indigenous Affairs. In recent weeks I have come to see that having an Aboriginal man as Minister for Indigenous Australians is indeed a step forward.' (Introduction)
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The Ball and Chain of Minority : Rebelling against the Banality of Colony,
single work
review
— Review of On Identity 2019 single work criticism ; Australia Day 2019 single work prose ;(p. 10-11)'It was a great moment in Australian history when William Cooper walked to the Australian parliament to object to the treatment of Jews in Germany during World War II. At the time, the British and Australian parliaments were ambivalent about the atrocities occurring across Europe, and yet an Aboriginal man could not bear to see the government of his country sit on its hands.' (Introduction)
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So Much at Stake : Forging a Treaty with Authority and Respect,
single work
essay
(p. 13-15)'Australia remains alone among the settler colonies for its lack of treaties with First Nations. This is despite the fact that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia have been calling for a treaty for decades – since at least the 1970s and then more forcefully during the Treaty ’88 Campaign. When Bob Hawke received the Barunga Statement in 1988 and committed the nation to a treaty, it seemed the battle was won. Two years later, Hawke reneged on his promise and instead gave us ten years of reconciliation, intended to prepare non-Indigenous Australians to negotiate more just relationships. Even that was not to be. By the end of the decade of reconciliation, John Howard had derailed the process and ‘treaty’ had become a political dirty word.' (Introduction)
- Songline Contrabandi"Authorised visits,", single work poetry (p. 15)
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The Value of a Chance : Generational Trauma in Indigenous Comunities,
single work
review
— Review of A Stolen Life : The Bruce Trevorrow Case 2019 single work biography ; My Longest Round : The Life Story of Wally Carr 2010 single work biography ;(p. 16-17)'Philip Larkin famously suggested that ‘they fuck you up, your mum and dad’, but the alternative is usually worse. Twenty years before Larkin wrote ‘This Be the Verse’, his compatriot John Bowlby published Maternal Care and Mental Health (1951), which described profound mental health consequences when infants are denied parental intimacy. Bowlby delineated the centrality of this ‘lasting psychological connectedness’ to well-being in later life, something cruelly withheld from many members of Australia’s Stolen Generations.
'Bruce Trevorrow and Wally Carr were born in the mid-1950s into Aboriginal families that were incredibly poor, living in makeshift huts, foraging for bush food to supplement supplies, and terrified of visits from welfare officers. When Trevorrow was one, he was removed from his Ngarrindjeri family to live with a non-Indigenous family. Carr remained with his own Wiradjuri family. They were very different men with some crucial factors in common. Both achieved national prominence for different reasons. Both died prematurely.' (Introduction)
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'Ever at My Elbow' : Exploring Indigenous Ways of Knowing,
single work
review
— Review of Australia's First Naturalists : Indigenous Peoples’ Contribution to Early Zoology 2019 multi chapter work criticism biography ;(p. 18-19)'What does it mean to really know an ecosystem? To name all the plants and animals in a place and understand their interactions? To feel an embodied connection to Country? To see and hear in ways that confirm and extend that knowledge?' (Introduction)
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Gogobera,
single work
review
— Review of Australia's Original Languages : An Introduction 2019 reference ;(p. 20, 22)'Bob Dixon has researched Australian Indigenous languages since the 1960s, has constructed grammars of five languages, and has written numerous scholarly books and articles on Aboriginal languages. His latest book is directed at the general reader, and it springs from his frustration at what he sees as the persistent and continuing misunderstandings in the wider Australian community about the nature and history of Australia’s Indigenous languages.' (Introduction)
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Eliminating Settler Colonialism : Refusal and Resurgence in Australia,
single work
review
— Review of The Colonial Fantasy : Why White Australia Can't Solve Black Problems 2019 multi chapter work criticism ;(p. 22-23)‘Fuck Australia, I hope it fucking burns to the ground.’ Sarah Maddison opens this book by quoting Tarneen Onus-Williams, the young Indigenous activist who sparked a brief controversy when her inflammatory comments about Australia were reported around 26 January 2018. For Maddison, a Professor of Politics at the University of Melbourne, Onus-Williams’s Australia Day comments (and subsequent clarification) convey a profound insight into ‘the system’. She writes:
The current system – the settler colonial system – is not working ... Yet despite incontrovertible evidence of this failure, the nation persists in governing the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in ways that are damaging and harmful, firm in its belief that with the right policy approach … Indigenous lives will somehow improve. This is the colonial fantasy.'
(Introduction)
- Open Page with Bruce Pascoe, single work interview (p. 27)
- Walgajunmanha All Timei"We write about our existence pre-invasion / And that has made us visible", single work poetry (p. 28)
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Nah Doongh's Song,
single work
biography
(p. 31-37)'Nah Doongh was among the first generation of Aboriginal children who grew up in a conquered land. She was born around 1800 in the Country near present-day Kingswood, just south-east of Moorroo Morack, Penrith, and she lived until the late 1890s. Her life spanned the first century of colonisation, from the invasion of her Country to the years approaching Federation. She was a contemporary of the famous Hawkesbury River matriarch and landowner Maria Lock and of the astonishing Lake Macquarie religious seer and teacher Biraban.' (Introduction)
- Publisher of the Month with Rachel Bin Salleh, single work interview (p. 39-40)
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A Logic of Elimination : The Differences and Commonalities of Indigenous Voices,
single work
review
(p. 41-42)
'The late historian Patrick Wolfe did not pull any punches when he wrote that colonialism seeks to eliminate and replace the Indigenous cultures holding sovereignty over the lands and resources that colonisers wish to claim. Wolfe considered this ‘logic of elimination’ to be one of the defining and persisting features of colonial societies, manifest not only as early-frontier warfare and land expropriation but also as a whole range of subsequent policies and attitudes working towards the erasure, dispossession, or assimilation of Indigenous peoples. By demonstrating the continuity between these policies and attitudes and the violence of the frontier, Wolfe famously asserted that colonial invasion is not a single event occurring in the distant past – something over and done with, which everyone should now move on from – but an ongoing structure within colonial societies today, including Australia.' (Introduction)
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Behrouz Boochani and the Politics of Naming,
single work
essay
(p. 44)
'In June 2019, Australian Book Review announced the ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellowship, an initiative generously funded by Peter McMullin in association with the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness (University of Melbourne). This initiative was not only created to highlight issues pertaining to displacement and exile, but also as an important act of naming in the face of a border regime designed to strip human beings of their personal identities and dignity. Behrouz’s work has meticulously illustrated how Australia’s border politics drives people into submission and insanity by systematically erasing their names.' (Introduction)
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Foundational Fiction : Roger McDonald's Contribution to Historical Fiction,
single work
review
— Review of Postcolonial Heritage and Settler Well-Being : The Historical Fictions of Roger McDonald 2018 multi chapter work criticism ;(p. 45-46)'Though he had already produced two volumes of poetry, Roger McDonald first came to popular attention with his spectacular début novel, 1915, published in 1979. A recreation of the Gallipoli Campaign from the points of view of two temperamentally different boyhood friends (thus anticipating Peter Weir’s movie Gallipoli, which appeared in 1981), 1915 stood out from the ruck of Australian World War I retrospective fiction. It still does. Meticulously researched, it provides a plausible historical reconstruction of a lost world, and an arresting account of the perils and stresses of life in the ‘whirlpool of venomous geography’ around Anzac Cove.' (Introduction) -
'His Civil Heart' : A Showcase of Robert Harris's Many Voices,
single work
review
— Review of The Gang of One : Selected Poems of Robert Harris 2019 selected work poetry ;(p. 46-47)'In a letter to a friend, American poet James Wright reflected on the meaning of a Selected Poems for a peer he considered undervalued: ‘It shows that defeat, though imminent for all of us, is not inevitable.’ He quoted Stanley Kunitz, whose Selected was belatedly in press: ‘it would be sweet, I’ll grant, after all these years to pop up from underground … The only ones who survive … are those whose ultimate discontent is with themselves. The fiercest hearts are in love with a wild perfection.’' (Introduction) -
Transnodal,
single work
review
— Review of Australian Books and Authors in the American Marketplace : 1840s-1940s 2018 multi chapter work criticism biography ;(p. 48)'While working in the London advertising world in the late 1960s, Peter Carey sent his stories to a leading New York literary magazine, Evergreen Review, only to be unimpressed by another rejection. He brooded later: there was ‘something glorious and futile in attempting to make Australian literature when, as everybody in London knew, [it] did not exist’. In Australian Books and Authors in the American Marketplace 1840s–1940s, David Carter and Roger Osborne show that the metropolitan triangle of Melbourne/Sydney–London–New York had been a publishing circuit for at least a century before Carey’s transatlantic, or, as it is appositely termed here, ‘transnodal’, misadventure. The book’s prosaic title predicts its consistently empirical approach and macroscopic canvas of the production, circulation, and afterlives of Australian literary commodity in the United States.' (Introduction) -
'A Piece of Scrub like Deane : Tony Birch's Resonant New Novel,
single work
review
— Review of The White Girl 2019 single work novel ;(p. 50-51)'If the number of reviews and interviews are indicators of a new book’s impact, Tony Birch’s novel The White Girl has landed like a B-format sized asteroid. Birch’s publisher estimates a substantial number of reviews and other features since publication. I’ve consulted none of them. Usually I can’t help myself from immersing myself in any and all artefacts of literary reception. With The White Girl I wanted to stay with the work, stay with Odette Brown and with Sissy, stay on the fringes of the fictional town called Deane, stay on that train to the big smoke – stay with The White Girl and reflect on where it took me.' (Introduction) -
Returning,
single work
review
— Review of The Yield 2019 single work novel ;(p. 51)'Wiradjuri writer Tara June Winch is not afraid to play with the form and shape of fiction. Her dazzling début, Swallow the Air (2006), is a short novel in vignettes that moves quickly through striking images and poetic prose. Her second book, After the Carnage (2017), a wide-ranging short story collection, is set in multiple countries. Winch’s new novel, The Yield, is partly written in reclaimed Wiradjuri dictionary entries.' (Introduction) -
Soft Centre,
single work
review
— Review of Minotaur 2019 single work novel ;(p. 53-54)'Halfway through Minotaur, Peter Goldsworthy’s jauntily satisfying novel about a sharp-tongued former motorcycle cop blinded by a bullet to the head, Detective Sergeant Rick Zadow gropes his way to a shed behind his Adelaide cottage. Inside lies a partially dismantled 1962 Green Frame Ducati 750SS. Zadow, who had begun disassembling the crankshaft prior to his injury, fumbles round in the dark as he tries to restore the beloved bike he will never be able to ride again. He uses his ever-present companion and virtual girlfriend, Siri, to order parts from a website called Road and Race.' (Introduction)
