'"Dark Side of the Dream" offers an assessment of Australian literature from a postcolonial perspective. Taking a post-bicentenary look at Australian culture and society through its literature, the authors argue that the shape of Australian society and literature has been profoundly affected by the processes that began when a colonizing society from Britain invaded Aboriginal Australia and dispossessed its people. "Australia" is not simply an autonomous White society; it also includes Aboriginal people and cultures and the problems of their relationship to the cultural practices of the colonizers. Nearly half of the book deals with Aboriginal texts, issues and themes, in recognition that this dimension of Australian literature is usually neglected. It also refers to recent work from Marxist, feminist and multicultural perspectives in order to analyze the "traditional" canon of Australian literature.' (Publication summary)
'In Australia there have been for a long time two distinct yet connect-led public and intellectual debates concerning the significance of descent, belonging and culture. One revolves around the cleavage between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples, and especially the status of indigenous claims deriving from a history of colonisation. It is about land, health, heritage, housing, intellectual property, identity, education, 'stolen children', and much else as well. The other debate centres on the immigrant, and his or her challenge to Australian society at large. It focuses on the non-British immigrant and the notion of multiculturalism, and is about cultural diversity, ethnic politics, and immigration policy. In this chapter I develop the argument that these two debates can neither be conceptualised together nor maintained as fully distinct. As a result of the public debates on both indigenous and immigration policies triggered by independent member of parliament Pauline Hanson in 1996, they converged and interacted in the later 1990s to a greater degree than at any time in the previous two centuries. Yet their conversation remains uneasy.' (Introduction)
