Epigraph: We carry in our hearts the true country / And that cannot be stolen / We follow in the steps of our ancestry / And that cannot be broken. 'The Dead Heart' - Midnight Oil
(then why) ... this sense / of gain and loss, the now I am / not there, then, despite the giveaway / smile? I am born exile, or they / are tokens of infinity; and distance / like love is a necessary fiction. 'Distances' - Charles Boyle
Polities and Poetics : Race Relations and Reconciliation in Australian Literature
Oxford
:
Peter Lang
,
2022
24390199
2022
multi chapter work
criticism
'A reconciliation movement spread across Australia during the 1990s, bringing significant marches, speeches, and policies across the country. Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians began imagining race relations in new ways and articulations of place, belonging, and being together began informing literature of a unique new genre. This book explores the political and poetic paradigms of reconciliation represented in Australian writing of this period. The author brings together textual evidence of themes and a vernacular contributing to the emergent genre of reconciliatory literature. The nexus between resistance and reconciliation is explored as a complex process to understanding sovereignty, colonial history, and the future of society. Moreover, this book argues it is creative writing that is most necessary for a deeper understanding of each other and of place, because it is writing that calls one to witness, to feel, and to imagine all at the same time.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'The floating, shifting narrative of Kim Scott’s first novel True Country (1993) is one of the most captivating elements of the text that explores contemporary modes of Aboriginality. The narrative of True Country does not simply move the story from event to event; it underpins the moral of the text itself. With shifting perspectives and an unwavering sense of hope, the narrative embodies Billy’s acceptance into the community of Karnama, the home of his grandmother.' (Publication abstract)
'In True Country, the narrator draws the reader close and says, “You listen to me. We’re gunna make a story, true story. You might find it’s here you belong. A place like this.” (15) Although the narrator speaks of ‘(a) place like this’ as “a beautiful place (…). Call it our country, our country all ‘round here” (15), belonging, for the reader, for the characters in each of Scott’s novels, and for Scott himself, is more than settling into a physical environment, belonging is finding a place in the story.
'Mamang, Noongar Mambara Bakitj, Dwoort Baal Kaat, and Yira Boornak Nyininy are major achievements in Scott and The Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project’s process of returning, restoring and rejuvenating language and story within the Noongar community and for an ever-widening public. In their form, content and intent, the stories renegotiate ideas of place and placement, confronting personal, cultural and linguistic dislocations in Noongar lives as well as an ambivalent narrative landscape in which language and story are central to both a lingering colonialism and the process of decolonisation.' (Publication abstract)
