'Reading the Country is a journey into Roebuck Plains, near Broome in Australia's far north-west; it is an exploration of the meaning of place, an attempt to chart the relationships between people and those specific places in which they must find a place to live. It is a journey through landscape into language and ideas, and personal and cultural location.' (Source: Publisher's Blurb, 1996 Revised Edition)
'In recent years, the study of Aboriginal literatures has moved from a marginal interest of Australian literature to a site of global inquiry. Due to limited Aboriginal representation in the formal institutions of literary studies, this shift has arguably not coincided with sufficient reciprocal interpretive mechanisms capable of situating the Aboriginal text in a dynamic relationship with Aboriginal culture. As such, many of these discourses have reconstituted culturally inappropriate anthropological mechanisms in their engagements with contemporary Aboriginal literatures (Araluen, ‘Shame’). The unstable entanglements of power, sovereignty and exclusion that frame the Australian conditions of settler coloniality are manifest in the institutions and disciplines that teach, publish, and interpret Aboriginal literature. In the space of Indigenous research discourse and practice, Ngati Awa and Ngati Porou academic Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s pioneering work on decolonial Indigenous methods and practices, Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999), demonstrates that the concept of the discipline is not only an organising system of knowledge but also a system of organising people and bodies. She argues that the intellectual productions of nineteenth-century imperialism, including notions of civilisation and the Other, are bound to and assert geographic and economic forces of appropriation, expropriation and incorporation (69). These knowledges not only form academic disciplines but have also been used to discipline the colonised through exclusion, marginalisation and denial.' (Publication abstract)
Reading the Country : 30 Years On
Philip Morrissey
(editor),
Chris Healy
(editor),
Broadway
:
UTS Press
,
2019
14554808
2019
anthology
criticism
'Steeped in story-telling and endlessly curious, Reading the Country: An Introduction to Nomadology (1984) was the product of Paddy Roe, Stephen Muecke and Krim Benterrak, experimenting with what it might be like to think together about country. In the process a senior traditional owner, a cultural theorist and a painter produced a text unlike any other. Reading the Country: 30 Years On is a celebration of one of the great twentieth-century books of intercultural dialogue. Recalling a spirit of intellectual risk and respect, in this collection, Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, poets, writers and publishers both acknowledge the past and look, with hope, to future transformations of culture and country.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'The literariness of Aboriginal literatures has long been subject to, and the subject of, critical ambiguity. The qualifiers of ‘ language ’ and ‘ in English ’ have sublimated Aboriginal cultural and creative expression beneath the respective disciplines and problematics of anthropology and poetics. Although there have been several sincere and enriching collaborations between settler and Aboriginal peoples to bridge such divides, such as Paddy Roe, Stephen Muecke, and Krim Benterrak’s Reading the Country (1984), the condition of Australian critical discourses concerning Aboriginal literatures in, around, and in defiance of, ‘ language, ’ remains fraught territory. Recent works from female Murri, Goorie, and Koorie poets Ellen Van Neerven, Alison Whittaker, and Lorna Munro are expressions of agency and disobedience at the forefront of these exchanges.' (Introduction)
