AustLit

'In a review titled 'Language and Dignity' Nancy Keesing (1983:16-18) claimed that the two books of Aboriginal Australian narratives, Banggaiyerri: the story of Jack Sullivan as told to Bruce Shaw (Shaw 1983a) and Gularabulu: Stories from the West Kimberley (Roe and Muecke [ed.] 1983) were, in brief, clumsy, pretentious and stripped the dignity from the original storytellers. She is not quite as direct as this in her phrasing but her meaning is clear: '... Jack Sullivan is marginally less clumsy ... if I could read his story with any pleasure as to language, it would equal unpretentious works like ... I, as a general reader, feel strongly that whereas Nisa loses no dignity, nor immediacy in Marjorie Shostak's method ... Paddy Roe and Jack Sullivan have been deprived of their wide audience rights by the utmost but perhaps debatable goodwill of up-to-the-minute scholarship' (Keesing 1983:18).' (Publication abstract)