AustLit

‘All Australian children deserve to know the country that they share through the stories that Aboriginal people can tell them,’ write Gladys Idjirrimoonra Milroy and Jill Milroy (2008: 42). If country and story, place and voice are intertwined, it is vital that we make space in Australian creative writing classrooms for the reading and writing of Australian Indigenous story. What principles and questions can allow us to begin? We propose six groundings for this work:

1. Indigenous story is literary history, literary history is creative power.
2. We do culture together: culture becomes in collaboration, conscious or unconscious.
3. There is no such thing as Indigenous story, and yet it can be performed and known.
4. Country speaks, to our conceptions of voice and point of view.
5. History and memory are written in the land and on the body in bodies of practice.
6. Story transmits narrative responsibility. Narrative responsibility requires fierce listening.

'This two-part paper discusses each of these groundings as orienting and motivating principles for work we do as teachers of introductory creative writing units at the University of Canberra. Part 1 discussed the first three groundings and was published in TEXT Vol 21, No 2, October 2017. Part 2 discusses the remaining three groundings.'  (Publication abstract)

'Gularabulu is an engaging collection of stories from the West Kimberley, told by Paddy Roe, a Nyigina man and prolific storyteller who lived in Broome, Western Australia, from 1912 to 2001. Roe was a fully initiated senior law man who played a central role in reviving and maintaining Aboriginal law and culture in the Broome area in the mid-twentieth century.'  (Introduction)

'In the introduction to Gularabulu: Stories from the West Kimberley, Stephen Muecke writes,

Presenting the stories as narrative art is a way of justifying a writing which tries to imitate the spoken word. When language is read as poetic, it is the form of the language itself, as well as its underlying content, which is important. Just as it would be unjustifiable to rewrite a poet’s work into ‘correct’ English (in other words to take away the poet’s ‘license’), so it would be unjustifiable to rewrite the words of Paddy Roe’s stories.

Muecke’s assertion that the ‘form’ of Paddy Roe’s words matter, and furthermore that it would be ‘unjustifiable’ to rewrite Roe’s stories, takes on a special significance in this particular edition of Gularabulu. After all, the UWA Publishing edition of Gularabulu, published in 2016, follows in the wake of the original 1983 edition as well as a 1993 edition, both published by Fremantle Arts Centre Press. The existence of three editions of this particular book is a testament to its enduring value, but it also presents an opportunity for interrogation.' (Introduction)