'Paper Talk' : Testimony and Forgetting in South West Western Australia single work   criticism  
Issue Details: First known date: 2017... 2017 'Paper Talk' : Testimony and Forgetting in South West Western Australia
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'In 2001 I travelled to south-west Western Australia to research my first novel, the springboard for which was nineteenth-century botanist Georgiana Molloy who had emigrated from England to Augusta with her husband John Molloy in 1829. My friend and I pulled up at Wonnerup House, the homestead of the Laymans, who had lived with the Molloys at Augusta before moving to Wonnerup. We wandered through cold, square rooms, then out into the sunshine. This was the place, a small placard read, where George Layman was speared by Gayware, a Wardandi Nyungar. Our reconnaissance complete, we sat on the grass before the house, unpacked some baguettes and smeared them with cheese. We were impervious to the violence that once arose from those smooth, glossy lawns.' (Introduction)

Notes

  • Editor's note: Readers are cautioned that this paper contains the names of deceased Wardandi Nyungars, and that some of the historical accounts are offensive and distressing in their terminology and descriptions.

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    y separately published work icon JASAL Empire/Dissent vol. 17 no. 1 2017 12713236 2017 periodical issue

    'Working with the archives of the North American frontier, non-Indigenous historian Richard White noted in 1997: ‘A large chunk of our early documents … are conversations between people who do not completely understand each other. We are connoisseurs of misreadings’ (93). White’s couching remains provocative for literary scholars and writers working in settler cultures—what does it mean to be skilled at misreading? What misreadings does a culture rely on, perpetuate? Is this a way to describe the mechanisms of denial at work in settler overwriting, re-interpreting and rhetoricising of Indigenous points of view and testimony, in so far as they are acknowledged in settler culture? Who is the ‘we’ here, more precisely; who is collected in White’s use of ‘our’?' (Nicole Moore : Editorial introduction)

         2017
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Last amended 16 Apr 2018 11:13:44
https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/article/view/12148/11483 'Paper Talk' : Testimony and Forgetting in South West Western Australiasmall AustLit logo JASAL
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