Cirrus@Austlit

'When Eric Michaels learned that he was dying he began keeping a detailed diary of the experience. As a participant in what is becoming one of the key scenarios of life in the late twentieth century, young people dying of incurable diseases, he chose to position himself also as an observer. His choice was consistent both with his profession—anthropologist—and his nationality—American. As anthropologist he was accustomed to keeping records of interpersonal exchanges in which he was a participant, observing both himself and others. The American propensity to record for posterity the events, observations, and reflections of one's life fits well with the double-vision inherent in the ethnographic enterprise, as Eric practiced it. American literature, libraries, archives, and attics are filled with documentation of peoples' lives. Many were compiled under extraordinary circumstances. A cowboy named Champion, for example, kept a diary while under seige by vigilantes. Holed up in his shack, he recorded the deaths of his mates, and the attempts first to shoot him out and then to burn him out and shoot him: 'Well, they have just got through shelling the house like hail... I guess thay are going to fire the house... Shooting again.... The house is all fired. Goodbye, boys, if I never see you again.' The bloodstained and bullet-torn document was found in his pocket. (Introduction)

'Paul Carter's The road to Botany Bay does not claim to be Aboriginal history. But it has some pointed things to say about the ways that Aboriginal history has been and is being written in Australia. In concluding Carter proposes as a better way what he calls "an aboriginal history of space", which might "evoke their historical experience without appropriating it to white ends" (p. 350). A consideration of the role given to Aborigines in the book is instructive both about the writing of Aboriginal history in general, and about Carter's enterprise in particular.'  (Introduction)

'In the first three paragraphs of this moving book, Sally Morgan uses the words 'hated' three times. They express a five-year old's reactions to hospital, to its smells and bare boards, to her Dad's sickness and to the whole experience of visiting her Dad in hospital. It is sad that this build up of emotion presages so forcefully the author's search for her true place in this Australia at the end of this twentieth century. Sad in that she had to make that search because of the hateful sufferings her family had been made to endure.'  (Introduction)