'This is the first in-depth, broad-based study of the impact of the Australian High Court’s landmark Mabo decision of 1992 on Australian fiction. More than any other event in Australia’s legal, political and cultural history, the Mabo judgement – which recognised indigenous Australians’ customary native title to land – challenged previous ways of thinking about land and space, settlement and belonging, race and relationships, and nation and history, both historically and contemporaneously. While Mabo’s impact on history, law, politics and film has been the focus of scholarly attention, the study of its influence on literature has been sporadic and largely limited to examinations of non-Aboriginal novels.
'Now, a quarter of a century after Mabo, this book takes a closer look at nineteen contemporary novels – including works by David Malouf, Alex Miller, Kate Grenville, Thea Astley, Tim Winton, Michelle de Kretser, Richard Flanagan, Alexis Wright and Kim Scott – in order to define and describe Australia’s literary imaginary as it reflects and articulates post-Mabo discourse today. Indeed, literature’s substantial engagement with Mabo’s cultural legacy – the acknowledgement of indigenous people’s presence in the land, in history, and in public affairs, as opposed to their absence – demands a re-writing of literary history to account for a “Mabo turn” in Australian fiction. ' (Publication summary)
Table of Contents :
- Four Core Post-Mabo Novels
- Re-writing the Past: Mabo and History
- Re-writing the Present: Mabo and Contemporary Australia
- Sovereignty: Mabo and Aboriginal-Authored Fiction
- Conclusion: Dominant, Residual and Emergent Cultures
'This chapter contests the prevailing interpretation of the post-Mabo turn as a decisive new era in Australian cultural history. While the Mabo High Court decision of 1992 was an important milestone in struggles for Indigenous land rights, the insistence on this date as a literary periodization neglects the continuities in settler culture that still structure settler fiction in Australia. Alternatively, recent First Nations fiction suggests possibilities within and outside dominant paradigms of legality.' (Publication abstract)
'Geoff Rodoreda earned his PhD from the University of Stuttgart, Germany, where he is now a lecturer in the English literature department. His first book, The Mabo Turn in Australian Fiction, is the result of Rodoreda’s doctoral project, with portions of some chapters having appeared in journals and anthologies published in Australia and Germany. Prior to his academic pursuits, Rodoreda worked in Adelaide and Darwin as a journalist for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.' (Introduction)
'Without a doubt, the High Court Mabo decision of 1992 represents one of the defining moments in recent Australian history, since it has re-evaluated the relationship between Indigenous and settler-Australians. Yet, despite its significance for the nation as a whole, its consequences for Australia’s literary production, in contrast to its effects on the country’s cultural production more generally (a fully-fledged study on the effects of the Mabo decision on Australian film already appeared in 2004), have only been studied in patches. With his recent study The Mabo Turn in Australian Fiction (2018), which is based on his PhD project conducted at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, Geoff Rodoreda attends to this neglect and offers a highly readable account of the ways in which Australian literature has responded to the changed political, cultural and emotional landscapes after Mabo.' (Introduction)
'Geoff Rodoreda earned his PhD from the University of Stuttgart, Germany, where he is now a lecturer in the English literature department. His first book, The Mabo Turn in Australian Fiction, is the result of Rodoreda’s doctoral project, with portions of some chapters having appeared in journals and anthologies published in Australia and Germany. Prior to his academic pursuits, Rodoreda worked in Adelaide and Darwin as a journalist for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.' (Introduction)
'Without a doubt, the High Court Mabo decision of 1992 represents one of the defining moments in recent Australian history, since it has re-evaluated the relationship between Indigenous and settler-Australians. Yet, despite its significance for the nation as a whole, its consequences for Australia’s literary production, in contrast to its effects on the country’s cultural production more generally (a fully-fledged study on the effects of the Mabo decision on Australian film already appeared in 2004), have only been studied in patches. With his recent study The Mabo Turn in Australian Fiction (2018), which is based on his PhD project conducted at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, Geoff Rodoreda attends to this neglect and offers a highly readable account of the ways in which Australian literature has responded to the changed political, cultural and emotional landscapes after Mabo.' (Introduction)
'This chapter contests the prevailing interpretation of the post-Mabo turn as a decisive new era in Australian cultural history. While the Mabo High Court decision of 1992 was an important milestone in struggles for Indigenous land rights, the insistence on this date as a literary periodization neglects the continuities in settler culture that still structure settler fiction in Australia. Alternatively, recent First Nations fiction suggests possibilities within and outside dominant paradigms of legality.' (Publication abstract)
