'"Deadly, unna?" He was always saying that. All the Nungas did, but Dumby more than any of them. Dumby Red and Blacky don't have a lot in common. Dumby's the star of the footy team, he's got a killer smile and the knack with girls, and he's a Nunga. Blacky's a gutless wonder, needs braces, never knows what to say, and he's white. But they're friends... and it could be deadly, unna? This gutsy novel, set in a small coastal town in South Australia is a rites-of-passage story about two boys confronting the depth of racism that exists all around them.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
In Prospect Bay, a remote fishing town in South Australian, the only thing that connects the two communities - the Goonyas (whites) and the Nungas (blacks) - is football. The underlying racism and class warfare threatens to make the team's greatest victories irrelevant, though. Two members of the team, Gary Black (the son of a white fisherman) and Dumby Red (the team's star player), are an exception, however, having been best friends since childhood despite their different cultural and family backgrounds. The jubilation that occurs when the team wins the local premiership is short-lived when Dumby is inexplicably overlooked for the 'best on ground' award. This incident subsequently sets off a chain of events that ends in tragedy.
[Sources: Weekend Australian 22-23 December 2001 pp.14-15 and Australian Screen]
'According to the NSW K–10 English Syllabus, all students should engage with ‘texts that give insight into Aboriginal experiences in Australia’. Along with the inclusion of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cross Curriculum Priority, this suggests that texts in English should develop deep understanding of Aboriginal cultures, experiences and perspectives. This project uses critical discourse analysis followed by content analysis, adapted from Lowe and Yunkaporta’s (2013) Cultural Analysis Matrix, to analyse representations of Aboriginal experiences and perspectives in six commonly used classroom texts to ascertain the nature and depth of the Aboriginal voices, experiences and perspectives within each text. This paper argues that texts which include Aboriginal characters and experiences through non-Aboriginal perspectives remain at risk of tokenism and/or shallow inclusion. However, texts which embody and value Aboriginal ways of knowing, doing and being demonstrate a capacity for more nuanced and genuine insights into Aboriginal experiences in Australia.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'This paper draws on theories of the gift to address the ethics of representing Aboriginality in Australian children's literature, which is a contentious debate that centres on who is eligible to tell Aboriginal stories and how the stories can be told. Considering the historical indebtedness in Australian racial relations, the paper suggests that children's books that incorporate reference to Aboriginal cultural elements constitute a metaphorical 'gift' exchange between Aboriginal custodians as the givers and writers as the recipients who are expected to 'return' such an intellectual gift through their books in an appropriate manner. In this view, the paper specifies the ethical issues confronted by non-Aboriginal writers for children, including Patricia Wrightson, Phillip Gwynne and Kate Constable, and examines the way in which the gift relationship sheds light on the question of how to avoid infringement of Aboriginal protocols without submitting to self-censorship. A caring gesture, underlining the relationship between self and others in gift exchanges, is identified to negotiate the writer's interests in Aboriginal stories with cultural sensitivity against unauthorised appropriation. The paper therefore argues that the morality of gift exchanges, which demands a balanced consideration of disparate interests in obligatory reciprocation, offers a possible solution to the dilemma of non-Aboriginal writers in the treatment of Aboriginal subject matter.' (Publication abstract)