Cirrus@Austlit

'One of the most significant Indigenous Australian authors, Ruby Langford Ginibi, a member of the Bundjalung Nation and the Sydney Koori community, took the courageous step in 1988, the year of the Bicentenary of British colonisation of Australia, of telling a largely ignorant non-Aboriginal audience about what it was like to live her life. She recorded this life in a pivotal text: Don't Take Your Love to Town. This book, as the pages which follow indicate, had a lasting impact on many readers, both in Australia and worldwide. Thus began an extraordinary writing career, a career seemingly out of step with an equally extraordinary life lived in bush camps and subsidised housing, raising nine of her own children and many of other people's, working in backbreaking menial jobs not considered suitable for 'white' women. This edition of the Journal of the European Association for Studies on Australia is to honour the life of Dr Aunty Ruby Langford Ginibi, her works and her contributions, large and public, larger and private, to literature and history, in Australia and worldwide, to institutions and individuals.' (Authors introduction, 1)

'Ruby Langford Ginibi´s Don´t Take Your Love to Town has been a source of inspiration for me as it awoke my interest and passion for Aboriginal history, culture and society. Her work can be read as a historical document as it makes readers aware of Australian history from an Aboriginal woman´s perspective. Her writing made me aware of the repression that her community had during the Twentieth Century and how her Aboriginal community is recovering and explaining their past through their writing. When reading her autobiography I could draw a parallel between the repression suffered by Aboriginal Australians and the oppression suffered by the Catalan nation and Republican Spain during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and Franco´s dictatorship (1939-1975). White Australia and Franco´s Dictatorship used assimilation as the means to dominate Aboriginal peoples in the case of Australia and Republicans and the Catalan nation in the case of Franco´s dictatorship.' (47)

'A classic is generally described as a work that one returns to time and again. The classic in this sense may even be a classic passage, line or page: something that one loves to read again and again. The return to a work (passage, line or page) is not always compelled by the aesthetic: the compulsion could arise from something very personal. It could very well be the case that the lines/words/ideas compel the reader to 'return' because they have struck a chord in him/her. For me that 'chord' was the story of how Ruby Langford Ginibi became a writer.' (Author's introduction, 56)

'Dr Ruby Langford Ginibi influenced me, personally and academically speaking, with her text Haunted by the Past, her direct style of writing and her personal approach to life and hardship. This text pays tribute to her by explaining how reading Haunted by the Past turned out to be a central text in my life.' (Author's abstract, 60)

'This is a personal memoir of my meeting and subsequent correspondence with Ruby Langford Ginibi.' (Author's abstract, 67)

'Drawing on Ruby Langford Ginibi's writings on the law throughout the 1990s we discuss how law, as an apparatus of biopolitical governmentality, frames, positions and inscribes the very sites, institutions and bodies essential to the reproduction of Australia as a racialised nation-state. The paper builds on the collective work we have done for over a decade in documenting how whiteness enmeshes with law in securing and reproducing colonial and racist forms of biopower, and its effects on the embodied subjects who are its targets: the scandal of the Tampa; the horrors of refugee suicide and self-harm in immigration prisons; the Cronulla race riots; the continuing attempts to extinguish Indigenous sovereignty; the fomenting of Islamophobia and the normalising of racial profiling; the violence of the Northern Territory Intervention; and escalating Aboriginal deaths in and out of custody. Our paper focuses on a number of current crises that evidence only too clearly the violences unleashed and licensed by white laws of the biopolitical.' (Authors abstract)

'When Ruby Langford Ginibi and her daughter Pearl prepared for the Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs Debutante Ball in 1968, they contributed to development of a significant new expression of Aboriginal identity and community belonging. Debutante balls were traditionally staged as a rite of passage that introduced a select group of young ladies to British high society. They went into decline in the UK in the late 1950s, under pressure from anti-establishment and sexual revolutions. The tradition remained popular in Australia, as the debutante ball had developed important status as fundraising events for local organisations. This article examines the history of Aboriginal girls 'coming out' at a debutante ball. While the inclusion of Aboriginal girls in debutante balls was encouraged as a means to achieve assimilation, proud celebration at all-Aboriginal events provoked controversy. Ruby Langford Ginibi's reflection upon her daughter's dance with the Australian Prime Minister at the 1968 Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs Debutante Ball is instructive. It explains how an exclusive, sexist British ritual has been transformed into a vital, inclusive Aboriginal rite of passage and challenges non-Aboriginal readers to re-evaluate their assessment of the tradition.' (Author's abstract)

'The writing of Ruby Langford Ginibi has been read, not only within Australia, but also overseas. Often, Indigenous literature is regarded as a primarily national literature, addressed to first and foremost white Australian readers. This article places Ginibi's writing in an overseas context and examines the reactions that Germanspeaking readers have shown to her texts. Drawing on qualitative interviews with readers in Germany and Austria, this study explores the individual techniques of German-speaking readers to connect to the cultural foreign contexts of Ginibi's texts and make sense of them. It also reflects on the author's personal connections to Ginibi's texts and how her writing relates to his own racial contexts in Central Europe.' (Author's abstract)

'This article presents a comprehensive list of writing by and about Ruby Langford Ginibi. It is divided into two sections, the first including book chapters, articles and interviews by Ginibi, the second encompassing scholarly analyses, journal articles and reviews about her life and work.' (Author's abstract)