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'Jack Davis' preoccupation with an aboriginal sense of experience as symbolized through
uncle Worru's characterization in The Dreamers, is thought to have been sparked off by
a mysterious man named Jack Henry, whose nostalgia was embittered and angered by
what he considered to be the end of the golden age. Davis' own experience at the Moore
River Settlement and his angst at having been forced to overlook the Noongar culture
and tradition are snowballed into a representation of wisdom bordered on the edge of
eccentricity. Uncle Worru's strong evocation of a poetic, almost archaic, wish-fulfilling
past is thus addressed in terms of his dream-time stories. This paper tries to locate the
significance of the dream-time stories in consolidating the theme of protest. The question
is: how far successful is uncle Worru in acting out the role of Davis' spokesman? Uncle
Worru's scheme of looking back at his past endeavors and success needs to be
weighed against the younger generation's instinctive habit of dreaming forward into the
future. The sense of false securities embodied through uncle Worru's dreaming
backward in time necessarily comes in clash with the later generation's habit of
dreaming forward. The dilution of the theme of protest thus gets enmeshed in the
whirlpool of cultural abnegation. Davis' "syncretic theatre" distils the elixir of dreams
polarized on the chronological separation between past and present.' (Author's abstract).
'Judith Wright in Generations of Men reconstructs her past generations and their
resilient struggle to master the alien landscape with all its traumas, pain and struggle
in order to transform it to a 'place'. This paper tries to locate Wright's passionate
attempt in this book to see the unique landscape of Australia as linked inextricably to
the erosion, endurance and struggles of the mindscape of humanity, and to see how
the landscape inheres the alterities of the spatial/cultural binarism. In this landscape
a Protean mystery dies with the death of the black aboriginals but is once more reborn
in the poet's mnemonic homage. The paper tries to establish Wright as being
above the category of a mere environmentalist, and argues for her poetics as a
humanist celebration of Australia as a landscape of cornucopia as well as a
problematization of the spatial dimensions of oppression and denial unacknowledged
in a history of national reconciliation.' (Author's abstract).
'Wild Cat Falling, the rebellious, anti-colonial story by the black Australian author,
Mudrooroo, tells us what 'belonging' means in Australia, when one is other than white.
Written in an autobiographical mode, Mudrooroo's first novel, Wild Cat Falling is an
avant-garde as it presents an interventionist discourse for the first time in the literary
history of Australia directed towards opening up the space for self-determined
representation by an Aboriginal. The novel retells the continuing entrapment of the
Indigenous minority in an inequitable network of social, economic and cultural
relationship that they have inherited from British conquest. This paper explores how the
issues of identity and belonging make Wild Cat Falling an important interventionist
discourse.' (Author's abstract, p. 154).