Cirrus@Austlit

'This article provides a brief literary history of Indigenous writing in Queensland. The literature covered here is informed by the experiences of the personal, the familial and the communal, and enlarges the meanings of both the literary and the political because Indigenous writing is part of, not separate from, the daily lives and struggles of its authors. Related to this is the question of the sacred, and Indigenous relationships to the land are an abiding preoccupation of the writing explored here. Literature, as well as the way it is read, is intimately related to Indigenous efforts to achieve cultural autonomy and calls for recognition of difference and shared humanity and agency. It thereby becomes a tool of recognition, acknowledgment and transformation, producing new kinds of knowledges and new kinds of readers.' (Extract)