AustLit

'Watching Warwick Thornton’s The Beach is a journey into place and self. It made me want to breathe deeper and smell the salty air. It made me want to walk barefoot among the mangrove trees. And it made me want to eat.' (Introduction)

Indigenous people lived through the end of the world, but we did not end, We survived by holding on to our cultures, our kin, and our sense of what was right in a world gone terribly wrong (Kwaymullina, 'Edges' 29)

'Young Adult Australian post-apocalyptic speculative fiction carries with it a number of expectations and tropes : that characters will exist in a dystopian, ruined landscape, that a lone teenager will rise up and rebel against institutionalised structures of repressive power; and that these youths will carry hope for the future in a destroyed world.' (Introduction)

'Warwick Thornton’s 2009 film Samson & Delilah was surprisingly untimely on a number of levels. In terms of its cinematic approach, it is a film that provokes a sense of untimeliness, as it seems out of step with other contemporary Australian films. This applies firstly in terms of the way in which the film consciously uses time in its structure—for example in the way it uses a cyclical motif to reinforce the specific way in which time impacts on the main characters’ everyday lives, while at the same time using this cyclical motif to provide humour and light relief. Secondly, the film can be untimely in the sense that it is firmly grounded in the present, which is unusual for a film set in outback Australia and one that focuses on an Indigenous story. Samson & Delilah is a contemporary story that does not displace its Indigenous characters by assigning them, and their connection to country, to history. Rather, the film situates its characters (and their struggles) very firmly in the context of country and of contemporary struggles, thereby ironically creating a sense of untimeliness. At the same time however, this means that in subtle ways, the film creates a sense of place, and by extension a sense of belonging (for both Indigenous and non-­‐Indigenous experiences) that works on two different levels: inside the film for its characters, and outside the film for its audience. None of this means that the film is out of step with history, but rather that it is out of step with Australian film history, in which there has been a tendency to position Indigenous Australians in one of two main paradigms: either as ‘noble savages’ living in harmony with and on the land, or as lost and hopeless city dwellers, divorced from their culture. Neither of these paradigms allows for the many different experiences of belonging which Indigenous Australian peoples inhabit.' (Author's introdiction)

'In the context of children’s literature and ecology the idea of sustaining environmental and cultural awareness is shared via the written word—how it is used, presented, and read, particularly with ideas of the child reader in mind.  Our children will be the ones who struggle with the ripples we leave in our wake and they will be the ones who count the cost of our decisions as they in turn make decisions for the generations that will follow them. If we teach the right values then the behaviour of our children will reflect those ideas. In the Aboriginal way it’s about getting the story right, so that they can learn the right ways to be in Country, to be a human being, and to look after the world they inherit. As Deborah Bird Rose states, Country is a “nourishing terrain; a place that gives and receives life” (Rose Country 7).

This paper will examine two Aboriginal children’s stories that teach about a living, holistic, interrelated world and the responsibilities of human beings to look after it. Specifically, the authors will examine Joshua and the Two Crabs by Joshua Button and Dingo’s Tree by Gladys and Jill Milroy. Both stories are published by Aboriginal publisher Magabala Books and represent a genre of Aboriginal writing about Country and how to take care of it. They form part of the “language of that different yield” (Hogan 122) that Indigenous writer Linda Hogan advocates, a language that emerges from an ecology of the mind that locates human beings as an interconnected part of the patterns of the earth.  The first text discussion focuses on the sharing of implicit meaning via textual form—that is, the lay out of the story, its peritext, and illustrations. The second textual discussion centres explicitly on content and meaning. Both textual analyses aim to open up a dialogue between Aboriginal ecology and children’s literature to provide inter-subjective approaches for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal readers/listeners.'

Source: Introduction.

'Warwick Thornton’s 2009 film Samson and Delilah won the hearts of Australians as well as a bag of awards — and rightly so. It is a breathtaking film that, as review after review will tell you, is about the bravery, hopelessness, optimism and struggles of two Indigenous youths. In telling this story, the film extends, inverts and challenges notions of waste: wasted youths, wasted memory, wasted history, wasted opportunities, getting wasted and wasted voices. The narrative and the film as a cultural object raise questions about being discarded and “the inescapable fact that the experience of catastrophe in the past century can only be articulated from its remains, our history sifted from among these storied deposits.” (Neville and Villeneuve 2). The purpose of this paper is to examine reaction to the film, and where this reaction has positioned the film in Australian filmmaking history. In reading the reception of the film, I want to consider the film’s contribution to dialogical cultural representations by applying Marcia Langton’s idea of intersubjectivity.'

Source: Author abstract.

Collins-Gearing examines how representations of Indigenality, Indigenous people and life in Australian children's literature have been constructed by non-indigenous authors to accommodate a white sense of place and community, often to the exclusion of indigenous child readers.