Cirrus@Austlit

'Colonial authors everywhere sought to create distinctive new literatures partly through "indigenization", or the process of both representing and giving voice to indigenous peoples. In the Australian colonies, writers up to the Second World War rendered the speech of Aboriginal characters as some version of comic, supposedly only semi-articulate, pidgin English. Typically, neither they nor white characters in their texts bothered to learn an Aboriginal language. By contrast, in North America, southern Africa, and New Zealand, white authors often rendered the speech of indigenous characters in a quasi-biblical rhetoric, and in some cases—George Grey in New Zealand, for example—became fluent in an indigenous language (Maori). This essay contends that, before the emergence of literature written by Aboriginal authors in the 1960s, Australian novelists and poets contributed to "the great Australian silence" through their own weak or failed patterns of indigenization.' Patrick Brantlinger.