AustLit

Anne Brewster interviews Kerry Reed-Gilbert who talks frankly about everything from her childhood being reared by her father's sister Joyce (Mummy) in Condobolin, after her father's (Kevin Gilbert) conviction of murder; to her views on the political and social aspects of Aboriginality and racism.

'... In this essay we set this internally dissonant review in three contexts: the 1960s critical response to the first works of Kath Walker and Colin Johnson; the AAB’s and other Commonwealth agencies’ critique of assimilation and defence of ‘tradition’; and the rise of an assertive urban Aboriginal constituency for the AAB. These contexts help define and describe the terms in which the AAB supported ‘Aboriginal literature’ in the period 1973 to 1983. ...'

'This essay examines the three Yarra River stories in Tony Birch’s short fiction collections. ‘The Sea of Tranquillity’ ‘The Chocolate Empire’ and ‘The Toecutters’ all question the historical inscription of the Yarra that favours the culturally dominant account by placing it in relation to alternative stories. The torsion engendered by this questioning is apparent in the stories themselves. They are simultaneously discussions of class-based social exclusion and counter-stories of settlement; settled places are re-inscribed with meanings and histories obscured by the dominant account of ‘settlement’, which it thus critiques. The structure of the contemporary short story, to reveal a truth buried under the mundane details of life, aids Birch’s purpose. The form enacts a propensity to doubling, twinning and contrasting the familiar and the strange, or being at once in the dominant reality of the settler-colonial culture and, by social imposition, in the situation of the other. Hence, Birch’s stories open into narratives drawn from a number of socially marginalised groups, according to class, gender, geography or age. In Birch’s own account of his disillusionment with the institutionally-based academic writing of the post-history wars environment he speaks of embarking on an alternative project to ‘put meat on the bones of history’, a project which involves turning from the Historian’s history to ‘the way that fiction deals with the past and its role in documenting history’: to bring history and story together (‘Trouble’ 235, 241). This essay traces that process in the three Yarra stories.' (Abstract)