'One of the central concerns recurring throughout this collection is the question of how to probe the limitations of Anglo-European knowledge-systems so as to lay the groundwork for entering into a true dialogue with Indigenous writers and critics. The multitude of creative texts, performance practices, and artworks produced by Indigenous writers and artists calls upon Anglo-European academic readers, viewers, and critics to acknowledge the impact of Australia's colonial past as a violent history of oppression, to engage with alternative ways of knowing, and to adapt counter-strategies of resistance which do not cultivate the comforting position of redemptive empathy and identification, but which, rather, enforce a process of self-questioning and un-settlement, calling for a renewed ethical response. This process has its pitfalls and works differently for different readers, viewers, and critics, given their own different embeddedness in histories of cultural and national trauma and the complex processes of healing.'
Source: From paragraph two (p.ix).