Cirrus@Austlit

'Since the millennium, Indigenous authors have used the novel to address the problematic connection between whiteness and legal notions of ownership in the foundation of settler Australia. Their texts defy the creation of territory as white property and assert Indigenous sovereignty and relation to country. The article discusses this Indigenous intervention in the context of Western concepts of property and their legal institutionalization that produced a universalized, self-governing white subjectivity as the human norm. In the light of this normativity of white property, it traces recent legislative changes in Australia’s dealing with native title claims to land and ownership. These changes are then read against an interpretation of Tara June Winch’s 2019 novel The Yield, which is part of the larger Indigenous conversation about sovereignty and relation to country. I will show that The Yield demonstrates both the fragility and the resilience of Indigenous relations to land, family, and the law. In that sense, I will read the novel as an exploration of how possession is ambivalent and multi-layered: Winch’s characters belong to country as much as it belongs to and goes through them.'

Source: Abstract.

'Proceeding from Australia’s specific situation as a settler colony, this article discusses how the ambivalences and fissures of settler subjectivity shape processes of homemaking. Settler homemaking depends on the disturbance of Indigenous Australians’ homelands via dispossession, exclusion, and genocide, but it equally depends upon the creation of a white settler subject as innocent, entitled, and belonging to what has been called ‘white indigeneity’. The article traces this double disturbance in Peter Carey’s novel True History of the Kelly Gang (2000). Carey’s rewriting of the iconic Kelly legend uncovers the dangers of a possessive, male, white indigeneity based on effacement and exclusion. The novel’s critical staging of Ned Kelly’s construction of Australia as a home for a new class of ‘natives’ challenges an essentialist white Australianness and its narratives of embattled settlement, independence, mateship, and the Bush. The novel shows that the creation of this national character is based on the denial of Aboriginal ownership and agency. Ned’s narrative of Irish victimhood and his formation of a new sense of Australianness is therefore doomed to repeat the violence, discrimination, and exclusion of colonialism that he seems to decry.'

Source: Abstract.