AustLit

'David Unaipon (1872-1967) has been described as a scientist, author, anthropologist, preacher, inventor and public speaker. To these descriptions can be added musician, lecturer, curator, political activist, guide, and door-to-door salesman. A master of many trades, descriptions of Unaipon have struggled to merge the various aspects of his life into a single, coherent narrative. This paper focuses on Unaipon’s life stories – the stories told about him and his family and the stories he told about himself. A central argument of this paper is that, rather than describing Unaipon as a jack of all trades (or, worse, a master of none), Unaipon can accurately and productively be described as a ‘rhetor,’ a person using various forms of media (and various forms of life writing) to present arguments across different social, political and cultural contexts to change beliefs about Aboriginality. Further, Unaipon’s rhetoric was fashioned from indigenous and western traditions. To describe Unaipon as a rhetor can re-energise the arguments he put forward during his lifetime, can reveal the consistency and relationship between arguments he made in various fields or disciplines, and, most importantly, can provoke debate and discussion about Unaipon’s life and writing at a time when, despite his prominence as one face on Australia’s $50 note, as the namesake of Australia’s most prestigious award for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writing, and as an author anthologised in collections of Australian and Aboriginal writing, his writing is all but ignored in Australian culture and literary criticism.'

Source: Abstract.