Issue Details: First known date: 2022... 2022 Broken English : What to Do with Wongar, the European Migrant Who Became an Aboriginal Writer
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Streten Božić arrived in Australia in 1960 with a ‘European concept’ of the country, but his outlook was transformed by the experience of living with Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. In the 1970s, he began publishing as B. Wongar and until it was revealed otherwise in 1981, he was assumed to be Indigenous. While his reputation suffered, Wongar remained committed to elucidating the ongoing colonisation of Aboriginal people. This article historicises Wongar’s work and its reception in the light of his own self-representation as a Serbian migrant uniquely positioned to sympathise with and comprehend Aboriginal Australia.' (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Australian Historical Studies vol. 53 no. 4 2022 25494069 2022 periodical issue

    'At the end of the last century, Ann Curthoys outlined the history of ‘two distinct yet connected public and intellectual debates concerning the significance of descent, belonging and culture’ in Australia. The first revolved ‘around the cleavage between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples’, and especially the issue of how to grapple with the lingering effects of past colonialisms. The second centred on immigration and the challenge migrants – particularly non-Anglo migrants – have presented to Australian society at large. Curthoys argued that in public commentary and within numerous scholarly fields, including history, these debates were kept largely separate until the 1988 Bicentenary and its celebration of multicultural Australia, which included Indigenous people amongst the country’s broader diversity. Pauline Hanson’s ascendancy to Federal Parliament in 1996 pushed these debates into ‘uneasy conversation’ with each other as her public rhetoric frequently attacked both Indigenous people and migrants from Asia as groups who, in her view, were unable to assimilate. Curthoys argued that the two debates ‘can neither be conceptualised together nor maintained as fully distinct’, but rather must be situated within an understanding of Australia as a ‘society which is colonising and decolonising at the same time’. ‘All non-Indigenous people, recent immigrants and descendants of immigrants alike’, wrote Curthoys, ‘are beneficiaries of a colonial history. We share the situation of living on someone else’s land’. (Editorial introduction)

    2022
    pg. 620-639
Last amended 1 Dec 2022 11:36:48
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