'The First National Black Playwrights Conference and Workshop held in Canberra in January 1987 was a hectic affair. More than one participant called on Mudrooroo to use the proceedings (in the sense of what was happening) and the stories going around in a book. Doin Wildcat was that book. It has been called his most Aboriginal work and it should be as it stems from that historical conference and what happened there transferred of course to - well - the world of Wildcat. Wildcat, the prison graduate, drifting through life, making the most of the opportunities that come his way, relishing the pickings of the late 1980s... by the author of Wild Cat Falling.'(Publication summary)
'The article reviews the controversial 'Mudrooroo Affair' with reference to unpublished work by Mudrooroo in which he comments on the public debate about his rights to define himself as Aboriginal and, by extension, have his work credited as Aboriginal. Such work makes it pertinent to review Mudrooroo's creative output since 1965 as literary experiments with life writing and to reconsider Mudrooroo's many literary 'performances' from this perspective. They are not only explorations of Aboriginal identity politics over,- the last five decades, but may also be seen as a far more personal investment in exploring Aboriginal identity through a progressively shifting but interrelated series of subjectivities that reflect the writer's own experience and inform his claim to Aboriginality.' (Publication summary)
'Feminist Poetics in concerned with all of these questions, but also with the issue of rewriting an older poetics for what it does not say about the marginalisation of the feminine. The first half of the book traces the trajectory of a particular, feminine, academic subject learning to find her voice. The second half uses that differently disciplined voice to re-read the textual traces of the Governor murder stories, murders committed against white women and children by black men in Australia in 1900. This book is a feminist poetics for those who are engaged in the teaching of literacies, and in the making of Knowledge about literacies.' (Publication summary)