Cirrus@Austlit

'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).