Cirrus@Austlit

'Identity is often imagined collectively, as a function of which groups one belongs tom, or perhaps more importantly, as a function of which groups one does not belong to. This dialectic between the in-group - 'us' - and the out-group - 'them' - is not a simple binary opposition but a complex network of many variables based on supposed differences : nationality, religion, race, economic class, gender and sexual orientation, to name just a few. Within a social milieu, identity depends on the creation of difference, of an 'Other'; more disturbing is the frequent creation of a corresponding scale of value that rates the 'Other' as somehow inferior, which can have some real-world consequences on those who are 'Othered': discrimination, marginalization, exclusion...'(Introduction)

'Anne: Recently you did a performance at the Sydney Biennale, and one of the things that you read there was a poem about feeling and Indigenous cosmology which you followed with a reading from Bill Neidji's work. I was thinking about an earlier conversation we had about your poem "Mud crab" (post me to the prime minister, 5)4 when you said that as an Indigenous person you enter into a social contract by being in a place... can you say something more about that? 

'Romaine: Indigenous cosmology is something that Australians don't hear a lot about, and Indigenous people themselves don't hear a lot about. As far as my work is concerned, understanding Indigenous cosmology is absolutely imperative to understanding the true conflict between Western and Indigenous cosmologies or philosophies. Aboriginal phenomenology is my point of focus in my work. An analysis of the subjective experience of Aboriginality as a constructed identity is very intellectual...' (Introduction)

'During the last two decades of the 20," century, Aboriginal writers of biography and autobiography opened up new fields of literature in Australian writing. Readers have since been getting different perspectives on Aboriginal people and their lives, the untold version not previously written in the history books by the dominant society. When Aborigines write their life stories, these stories are based on their own personal experiences; the writers are being introspective or subjective. Academic writers and government researchers try to be objective when investigating Aboriginal lives, lifestyles and cultures. These research writings, from such disciplines as anthropology, come from the dominant culture's general concepts of Aboriginal people collectively, and can be biased when comparing Aboriginal lives and cultures with those from the dominant society. Aboriginal writers, in telling their life stories, express their emotions of grief and despair through loss of land and families, and the struggle to survive throughout their lives. Now it is through their literary endeavours that they are rewriting Australia's history; their input in different genres like biography and autobiography are based on the Aborigines' need to reveal another history in Australia, a black history that has been hidden. Through the writer's life experiences, the reader gains a more personalise' account of how Indigenous Australians perceive their respective land, their culture and their people. Poetry, too, like the works of Jack Davis' and  Oogdgeroo of the tribe Noonuccal, helps express their innermost feelings how they see environment, which is contrary to  the dominant culture's views or ideologies. However, except for David Unaipon who wrote in the 1920s, it is only in the last few decades, when more and more Aboriginal people began writing life stories, that Aboriginal literature has been accepted as a legitimate genre within Australian society. These writers give new insights into the different cultures and lifestyles Aborigines, across this country. Their readers will understand that Australia has many diverse diverse Aroriginal cultures that are very different from the dominant society's culture.'(Introduction)

'The title of this chapter is of course a not-so-subtle take on Germaine Greer's phrase "the pain of unbelonging," which gives its title to the collection of essays edited by Sheila Collingwood-Whittick,' to which our co-editor Sue Ryan contributed. It refers to the sense of alienation, dislocation and bewilderment experienced by the European colonists of Australia - what Sheila Collingwood-Whittick called "the colonizer's absolute unfamiliarity with the alien space of the colony [...] their overwhelming sense of estrangement." It is an experience that has often been highlighted by writers and critics - two examples that come to mind are John Carroll's collection of essays Intruders in the Bush (a title that epitomizes the book's argument) and Les Murray's assertion, in his poem "Noonday Axeman," that "It will be centuries / Before many men are truly at home in this country." The non-Indigenous population of Australia is as it were doomed to grope its way, sometimes in a most painful manner, towards a sense of belonging, achieving what is rightly regarded as "a consummation devoutly to be wished," though it may be permanently out of reach if Greer is correct in saying that "for a gubba [white] in Australia there can be no belonging."' (Introduction)
 

‘In March 2011, an action was brought against the journalist Andrew Bolt by nine prominent members of the Aboriginal community for offences under the Racial Discrimination Act. In a series of articles published in 2009, Bolt, a controversial columnist for the Herald Sun, had accused light-skinned Aboriginal academics and artists of winning grants and prizes set aside for "real," that Is underprivileged and therefore more deserving "Blacks.", For instance, in an article entitled "It's so hip to be black," he criticised Kim Scott, author of Benang the heart, for being "hailed as the first Aborigine to win the Miles Franklin Award and calling himself a Noongar, despite conceding that the Aborigines who did not know him called him wadjila - a white. Although be claimed in court he never cast aspersions on the racial heritage of fair-skinned Aborigines, he did question, in his much-read column, why they insisted on identifying themselves according to an ethnicity belied by their features and their privileged (because un-discriminated against) background, thus he wrote, ‘spurni[ng] the chance of being people of our better future. While paying lip service to Aborigines’ right to self-identification Bolt was actually falling back on what colonial power has traditionally considered markers of  "whiteness" (colour, but also education, social standing) to deny these high profile individuals any entitlement to a "difference," Which racially people like him persist in confusing with the fantasized "Otherness" of stereotypical Aboriginality. Such symptoms of what Scott refers to as a national ‘neurosis’ highlight just how necessary a novel like " Benang' is, in contemporary Australia, as this chapter will attempt to show. By replacing the self-styled 'humane' eugenicist policies of the first decades of the twentieth century-styled the context of two centuries of colonial violence, the novel succeeds in establishing a clear distinction between the concepts of integration and assimilation.’ (Introduction)