'Australian Aboriginal literature, once relegated to the margins of Australian literary studies, now receives both national and international attention. Not only has the number of published texts by contemporary Australian Aboriginals risen sharply, but scholars and publishers have also recently begun recovering earlier published and unpublished Indigenous works. Writing by Australian Aboriginals is making a decisive impression in fiction, autobiography, biography, poetry, film, drama, and music, and has recently been anthologized in Oceana and North America. Until now, however, there has been no comprehensive critical companion that contextualizes the Aboriginal canon for scholars, researchers, students, and general readers. This international collection of eleven original essays fills this gap by discussing crucial aspects of Australian Aboriginal literature and tracing the development of Aboriginal literacy from the oral tradition up until today, contextualizing the work of Aboriginal artists and writers and exploring aspects of Aboriginal life writing such as obstacles toward publishing, questions of editorial control (or the lack thereof), intergenerational and interracial collaborations combining oral history and life writing, and the pros and cons of translation into European languages. ' (Publication summary))
Aboriginal life writing... 'is a syncretic practice: bound to postcolonial structure of mourning and trauma which while also deeply engaged with tradition and its restoration. This double condition of tradition and continuance has been a consistent problem in the Indigenous paradigm of writing and of life writing particularly. To write of life, it is often necessary to break with precolonial Indigenous tradition: at the very least (since one is writing), the traditional positioning of self and kinship within the complexity of oral culture.' In this essay, the author offers a partial survey of the bounds of life writing, and frames his approach whilst examining the complexities of tradition in post-colonial Australia.
When Mary Ann Hughes complained in 1998 that critics were preoccupied with the process of editorial collaboration that shaped Australian Aboriginal texts, she argued that this focus led to the neglect of the literary merit of the work. While the collaboration of mainstream writers with editors primarily went unremarked, “in the case of an Aboriginal writer, the role of the editor in constructing the work is the issue which most readily springs to the fore.” Hughes remarked upon the then decade-long critical determination to materialize the traditionally invisible craft of editing. This critical preoccupation ran parallel with the second wave of Aboriginal life writing (Brewster, 44), which witnessed the transformation of Aboriginal publishing from marginal to mainstream, reaching beyond the local to global audiences (Haag, 12). The exponential increase in the publication of Aboriginal life writing was accompanied by the politicization of publication processes, including coproduction, that have conventionally been kept from public view. (Introduction)
Martina Horakova examines an narratological approach used in double-voiced narratives in which present two equally authoritative narrative voices. The author analyses the genre of Australian Indigenous life writing and the nature of collaboration present between participants both Indigenous and non-Indigenous. To exemplify aspects of the structure of 'double-voice', and its narrative complexity the author examines the life writing of Rita and Jackie Huggins biographical account Auntie Rita.
'Though the number of translated works written by Australian Aboriginals reflects the increasing interest in their culture, the way these books are translated and marketed often distorts the author's original intentions and distorts how Australian Aboriginals are perceived by many European communities.' In this essay the authors focus on Sally Morgan's My Place and Doris Pilkington's Rabbit Proof Fence to illustrate how European translations (in Slovene, Italian, German, and Dutch) have misrepresented the original text for the purpose of adapting translated text to their targeted audience's culture.
The author focuses on the writings of three major young adult ficton writers, John Muk Muk Burke, Melissa Lucashenko, and Tara June Winch, which represent a genre in Aboriginal writing that traces a main character's journey from adolescence to adulthood. Further, the author pays particular attention to 'identity construction, belonging, and the search for a sense of place for the yound Aboriginal protagonists in late twentieth- and early twenty-first century Australia.' (Source: Introduction)
In this chapter the author explores the creation of humor in recent publications by Aboriginal authors who address issues of social injustice and racism.
In this chapter, the author argues '...to appreciate the many shapes of the Gothic in Aboriginal literature takes, it is necessary to consider the discursive peculiarities of the Gothic and to rewind to the eighteenth century before fast-forwarding to contemporary Aboriginal literature.' (Introduction)
‘Aboriginality was filtered through a white consciousness that arguably distorted it. Then, beginning in roughly 1980, there were many films that reflected a white social consciousness insofar as they dealt with the injustices that Aboriginal people had experienced. In this essay the author attempts to account for the appearance of Aboriginals behind the camera beginning in the late 1980s. The crucial difference, however, once Aboriginals became artists, not just subjects, was the removal of the filtering white consciousness. Removing that filter had a counterintuitive effect, though: rather than prompting more overt depiction of the story of Aboriginals in white Australia, removing the filter resulted in strategic indirection in the telling of that story. This essay explores that strategic indirection.’ (Introduction)
Throughout the history of diverse sounds and voices, 'different Indigenous artists have negotiated changing degrees of non-Indigenous criticism, patronage, and recognition'. This chapter attempts to capture these social and cultural changes in the history of popular Indigenous music. (Introduction)
'In the last two decades, several notable anthologies and important critical studies of Aboriginal literature have been published. Yet A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature, the collection of essays edited by Belinda Wheeler, is the first book to offer a comprehensive study of what Wheeler's introduction presents as a still emerging canon. A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature acknowledges that accessibility to material produced by Aboriginal authors remains, for historical reasons of social and cultural marginalisation, limited. It is important to note that "literature" in the context of the collection's title must not be understood conventionally, in the sense of written works of art, but in a broader sense that includes a whole range of oral, visual, musical, and performative forms of expression. As writer and scholar Nicolas Jose puts it in the foreword to the volume, "Aboriginal literature has its own traditions, modes, and rhetoric," and as such should be "respected and valued on its own terms" (viii). At the same time, he insists that Aboriginal literature's capacity to "cross boundaries" and "share its making communally" (viii) enables it to reach out to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous audiences around the world and encourage a more generous form of cultural dialogue. Jose and Wheeler both highlight the political commitment that is almost always involved in the production of Aboriginal literature. As the collection's essays show, Aboriginal art bears witness to the violence inflicted upon the Indigenous peoples of Australia since the beginning of colonisation (unlawful killings, land-theft, economic and sexual abuse, the forced removal of children, discrimination and neglect), but it also expresses Aboriginal resilience, creativity, and the refusal to conform to stereotypical definitions of "black" indigeneity.' (Introduction)
'This book is a valuable asset to every library focusing on Indigenous Studies in general and Australian Aboriginal Studies in particular. It offers a comprehensive overview of Australian Aboriginal literature from its beginnings in print up to the present with a focus on a variety of topics and genres, including life writing, songpoetry, (young) adult fiction, gothic texts, drama, film and popular music. The book itself is aesthetically very enjoyable, with a beautiful painting on the cover mixing different Aboriginal artistic styles (it would have been nice to get information on the artist and title), a superb (copy)editing, a pleasant font, and general handling. The editor provides a very helpful twelve page-chronology of Australian Aboriginal history and a ten-page index.' (Introduction)
'This book is a valuable asset to every library focusing on Indigenous Studies in general and Australian Aboriginal Studies in particular. It offers a comprehensive overview of Australian Aboriginal literature from its beginnings in print up to the present with a focus on a variety of topics and genres, including life writing, songpoetry, (young) adult fiction, gothic texts, drama, film and popular music. The book itself is aesthetically very enjoyable, with a beautiful painting on the cover mixing different Aboriginal artistic styles (it would have been nice to get information on the artist and title), a superb (copy)editing, a pleasant font, and general handling. The editor provides a very helpful twelve page-chronology of Australian Aboriginal history and a ten-page index.' (Introduction)
'In the last two decades, several notable anthologies and important critical studies of Aboriginal literature have been published. Yet A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature, the collection of essays edited by Belinda Wheeler, is the first book to offer a comprehensive study of what Wheeler's introduction presents as a still emerging canon. A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature acknowledges that accessibility to material produced by Aboriginal authors remains, for historical reasons of social and cultural marginalisation, limited. It is important to note that "literature" in the context of the collection's title must not be understood conventionally, in the sense of written works of art, but in a broader sense that includes a whole range of oral, visual, musical, and performative forms of expression. As writer and scholar Nicolas Jose puts it in the foreword to the volume, "Aboriginal literature has its own traditions, modes, and rhetoric," and as such should be "respected and valued on its own terms" (viii). At the same time, he insists that Aboriginal literature's capacity to "cross boundaries" and "share its making communally" (viii) enables it to reach out to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous audiences around the world and encourage a more generous form of cultural dialogue. Jose and Wheeler both highlight the political commitment that is almost always involved in the production of Aboriginal literature. As the collection's essays show, Aboriginal art bears witness to the violence inflicted upon the Indigenous peoples of Australia since the beginning of colonisation (unlawful killings, land-theft, economic and sexual abuse, the forced removal of children, discrimination and neglect), but it also expresses Aboriginal resilience, creativity, and the refusal to conform to stereotypical definitions of "black" indigeneity.' (Introduction)
