Cirrus@Austlit

'This volume brings together an innovative set of readings of complex interactions between Australian Aboriginal people and colonisers. It has its origins in 2003 when Mark Hannah, then a doctoral student in the Centre for Cross Cultural Research at The Australian National University, invited a group of early career scholars to meet in Canberra. They brought their diverse social science and humanities backgrounds to the uncovering of creative Indigenous responses to the colonial encounter in Australia, and fresh ways of writing about these.

Their studies were focused in diverse parts of Australia and on different time periods, but shared a common interest in developing critical re-assessments of Australian colonial and anti-colonial histories. Their meeting encouraged face-to-face exchanges that could short-circuit the isolation often experienced by cross-disciplinary, original scholars. It also emphasised writerly aspects of creative thinking, promoting the portrayal of character, alternative prose styles and inventive narrative forms.

The authors' responses to these invitations have flavoured the commissioned papers presented here. The critical and creative drives which inform them shines out in their writing. They are exciting and sometimes surprising in the angles they take, and the cross-overs of genre or subject that they offer.' Source: Libraries Australia record (Sighted 25/03/2009)