Issue Details: First known date: 1989... 1989 Views of Australian History in Aboriginal Literature
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

In this chapter a number of Black Australian literary approaches to the past are examined: the usage of singular and venerable black narrative structures, the attempt to explore the lives of heroic black figures of the past and the revisionist view of Australian history which conveys, for the first time, an Aboriginal interpretation of past events. Black literary views of history are primarily concerned with an illustration of the lives of Aboriginal people, but it is unavoidable that an alternative assessment of Australian post-contact past should engage with white historical figures and 'myths' as well. Shoemaker aruges that an eagerness among Black writers to counterbalance the bias of previous interpretations of the continent's interracial history, sometimes runs the risk of over-compensating by positing equally biased and contentious versions of the past. The literary search for a viable Black history signifies an Aboriginal effort to establish racial facts and fictions at least equal in stature to those of white Australia. The works of Jack Davis, Robert Merritt, Colin Johnson, Nancy Cato and Robert Drewe are analysed.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Black Words, White Page : Aboriginal Literature 1929-1988 Adam Shoemaker , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 1989 Z106800 1989 single work criticism (taught in 1 units)

    Shoemaker's primary concern is to look at the beginning of 'black people's' writing in Australia since the 1960s and focus on the nascent literary canon emerging through Aboriginal writing. Shoemaker moves the readership through non-Aboriginal authors such as Katharine Susannah Prichard (1929) and Xavier Herbert (1938) in a chapter entitled 'Popular Perceptions of Unpopular People to Progress and Frustrated Expectations: The Era Since 1961'. Where Aboriginal writing begins, for Shoemaker's purposes, is an area of literary production he describes as 'fourth world literature'.

    St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 1989
    pg. 127-158
Last amended 28 Feb 2011 17:38:47
127-158 Views of Australian History in Aboriginal Literaturesmall AustLit logo
Subjects:
Newspapers:
    Powered by Trove
    X