ACL 2009
Australian Literature
Semester 2 2009
Footscray | Melton | St Albans

Lecture 4 and 5
Aboriginal Writing
Part 1: The Construction of Aboriginality

by Ian Syson

Part 1: The construction of Aboriginality

Prior to the publication of the first book of poetry by an Aborigine, Oodgeroo Noonuccal's We Are Going (1964) and the first aboriginal novel, Mudrooroo's Wild Cat Falling (1965), there had been only fragmentary and occasional publication of writing by Aboriginal people. Eg's from Realist Writer 1961 and women's magazines in the 1930s

Qualification: that we know of!

For example, David Unaipon's work had been published in the 1930s Myths & Legends of the Australian Aboriginals, but under the name of a white anthropologist, William Ramsay Smith. This is only the first in a line of frauds in relation to aboriginal writing and art.

To what extent were other published works ripped-off from aboriginal writers?

Since the mid-1960s there has been an explosion of published Aboriginal writings. Writers like Jack Davis; Sally Morgan; Sam Watson; Ruby Langford; Archie Weller, Alexis Wright, Melissa Lucaskhenko are just some who have emerged to relative prominence.

Nevertheless, it is fair to say that prior to the mid-1960s, Aboriginal story-telling was largely an oral and pictorial tradition. The written record (and thereby the dominant received construction of aboriginality) was very much a European/colonial record.

History

In the colonisation/settling/invasion of Aboriginal land, literacy was a significant aspect of Britain 's imperial project.

• Documentation was crucial
• Instructions to government and agents like explorers and soldiers
• Legal writing was involved in the imposition of British law
• Geographic and botanical description was a means of ‘capturing' the continent
• Interestingly a number of convicts had been convicted of writing offences

A whole network of new writing practices comes to exist in Australia in a few short years.

In a sense, the economic and political dispossession of Aboriginal people is symbolised by the initial `cultural' clash between the invaders' literacy and the Aborigines' orality.

The following is an interesting manifestation of this clash.

An image devised by Governor Arthur in or about 1828 to demonstrate concepts of justice, fairness and equality before the law.

The dominance of literate over oral records within the cultural, legal and bureaucratic systems left Aborigines at a massive disadvantage in these areas.

The (at least) 40,000 year development of Aboriginal practices like story-telling and painting counted for little (if they counted at all) in the minds of British imperialists,

• except negatively as examples of Aboriginal 'savagery' and, as a consequence, a justification of the British imperial project (Paul Gillen, "Mightier than the Sword" 190).

From this moment the Aboriginal oral tradition became, in many of its manifestations, an oppositional cultural form. A form of cultural practice which opposes and tries to undercut more dominant forms.

In "Aboriginal Literature" (1988) in the Pengunin New Literary History of Australia, Stephen Muecke points out that

Aboriginal ‘Oral Literature' is alive and well . . . its response to colonialism was not one of acquiescence, but one of fighting back with words, making stories in order to come to terms with the structure of colonial economy and law and the place Aborigines were supposed to occupy in it; of articulating suffering; of satirising the various figures of the colonial administration and the pastoral industry. (28)

• This oral culture has, for the last two hundred years, run largely parallel with many, if not all, of the imported cultures;
• it is largely separate from and sometimes antagonistic to other Australian cultures.
• until recent years it has been the ‘hidden' component of the history of Australian writing and history. We can see how a book like Carpentaria functions as a story which reveals a hidden aspect of Australian history.

However, as Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra warn in Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind (1990), we cannot see this absence or hidden-ness simply as a one-way act of repression. "The mystery of Aboriginal culture is the product of Aboriginal protectiveness as well as White indifference" (72).

It is not merely the case that non-aboriginal people are ignorant of aboriginal stories because they and their stories have been suppressed by imperialism; there is also an extent to which these stories are jealously guarded by those aboriginal cultural gatekeepers whose function it is to keep them away from the prying and distorting gaze of others.

We need to confront the fact then that written and literary representations of Aboriginal people and practices have been done from the outside. The constructions of Aboriginality we read in them are necessarily skewed and are related to the whole project of colonialism.

An interesting point is raised by the art critic Glenn R. Cooke: " Aboriginal people and their traditional lifestyles had all but disappeared from the state capitals during the 1930s, but as tales of exploration and settlement on the frontiers of Australia's north appeared frequently in popular magazines the image of Aboriginal people took on a distinctly romantic cast."

As Aboriginal people were being literally removed from view a whole enterprise of representing them in a romantic light commenced. As if they were being consigned to mythology and the past.

This came in many cultural forms.

Aboriginal kitsch

Jolliffe

Popular song

'Trumby' by Slim Dusty:

Trumby was a ringer
A good one too at that
He could rake and ride a twister
Throw a rope and fancy plait
He could count a line a saddle
Track a man lost in the night
Trumby was a good boy but he couldn't read or write

Trumby was dependable
He never took to beer
The boss admired him so much
One day made him overseer
It never went to Trumby's head
He didn't boast or skite
Trumby was a good boy but he couldn't read or write.

The drought was on the country
The grass in short supply
The tanks were getting lower and the water holes near dry
Cattle started dying
And releif was not insight
To estimate the losses Trumby couldn't read or write.

He rode around the station pulling cattle from the bog
To save them being torn apart by eagles crows and dogs
He saw a notice on a tree
It wasn't there last night
Trumby tried to understand but he couldn't read or write.

On bended knee down in the mud
Trumby had a drink
Swung the reigns and to his horse said "We go home I think"
"Tell 'im boss about the sign, 'im read 'im good alright"
"One day boss's missus teach 'im Trumby read and write"

Well concern was felt for Trumby
He hadn't used his bed
Next day beside that muddy hole they found the ringer dead
And a piece of tin tied to a tree then caught the boss's eye
He read the words of 'Poison Here'
And signed by Dogger Bry

Now the stock had never used that hole along that stoney creek
And Trumby's bag was empty
it has freyed and sprung a leak
The dogs were there in hundreds
And the dogger in his plight
Told the boss he never knew poor Trumby couldn't read or write

Now Trumby was a ringer
As solid as a post
His skin was black but his heart was white and that's what mattered most
Sometimes I think how sad it is in this world with all its might
That a man like Trumby met his death because he couldn't read or write

It's a fascinating song that reflects the chronic incidental racism of the time.

• Use of the word boy to describe a man
• There seems an imperative to show that Trumby had all sorts or positive characteristics or abilities that we might just assume any workman might have.
• 'His skin was black but his heart was white and thats what mattered most'

NB the changed PC version. See around 2 minutes.

He's special, a bit like Coonardoo. And as such he must be a tragic figure.

It might be argued that 'Trumby' also buys into the mythology that Aborigines are dying out. Trumby stands as a symbol of pre-modern aboriginality. It also draws a stark relationship between literacy, power and survival.

Compare with Graham Connors, 'The Ringer and the Princess'

Literature

Three writers are the focus of today's readings. Each of them has a complex relationship with aboriginality:

• Katharine Susannah Prichard
• Mudrooroo
• Neil Murray

Bios from Austlit

Katharine Susannah Prichard:

Katharine Susannah Prichard grew up in Tasmania and Melbourne, and was educated at home until she was fourteen and received a half-scholarship to attend South Melbourne College. Although she matriculated successfully, her mother's illness and the family's poverty made it impossible for her to pursue university studies.

Prichard became a governess in country New South Wales, but returned to Melbourne to teach, and to attend night lectures on literature by Walter Murdoch. In 1908, a year after the suicide of her father, she travelled to London carrying a letter from Alfred Deakin which praised her journalistic skills highly. In London, she worked as a freelance journalist on assignment for the Melbourne Herald , and, following her return to Australia, became the editor of the women's page of the Herald for two years. Five years later, Prichard returned to England to continue her writing career.

In 1919, Prichard married Victoria Cross recipient and Gallipoli veteran, Hugo (Jim) Throssell, and they lived in the outer Perth suburb of Greenmount. For Prichard, literature and politics were always intertwined. Splitting her time between politics and writing, Prichard continued to work on her fiction, while becoming a founding member of the Australian Communist Party in 1920 and a member of its central committee. Her son, Ric Throssell (q.v.), was born in 1922. While she and her sister were travelling overseas in Europe in 1933, Jim Throssell commited suicide.

In 1934, Prichard helped to set up the Australian Writers' League, and was elected federal president the following year. She co-founded the Unemployed Women and Girls' Association in Perth, and, in 1938, established the Modern Women's Club. In the same year, she was one of the founding members of the Western Australian office of the Fellowship of Australian Writers.

Translated into numerous languages, Prichard's novels cover a wide thematic territory, including the colonial period and pioneer experiences in Australia, melodramatic romantic relationships, political ideas, the Australian landscape and environment and Aboriginal culture. In addition to her novels, Prichard also wrote short stories, drama, autobiography and some poetry.

Prichard continued both her political involvement, especially her commitment to the Peace Movement and to socialism, and her writing well into her seventies and eighties, and was nominated for a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1951 by the Western Australian branch of the Fellowship of Australian Writers. Her ashes were scattered in the bush around her Greenmount home. Vic Williams's eulogistic poem ends with the line 'Writer and fighter in one human heart'.

The work we are centrally concerned with is Coonardoo.

First published in 1929 it is a book that has long been acknowledged as a ground breaking work of fiction. It was the first novel to portray an Aboriginal character:

• in more than two diimensions
• with a psyche
• with a sexuality
• with humanity

It is also a novel that adopts a radical approach to gender and racial politics. Carole Ferrier claims that "Coonardoo was in its time a powerful contestation of hegemonic attitudes towards Aborigines and black/white relationships."

It tells the story of life on a Wytaliba, a station in the outback of WA. It deals with the relationship between 3 central characters,

• the station owner, Bessie Watt,
• her son Hughie
• and an Aboririginal girl Coonardoo whom Mrs Bessie and Hughie both see as special for different reasons.

Hughie and Coonardoo have a sexual relationship based on their love for each other which is necessarily fraught and results, perhaps inevitably, in sadness and tragedy.

A number of writers including Clare Corbould have questioned the complacent assumption of Coonardoo's status as a radical text.

Quote p416.

For Corbould Prichard was too influenced by racist stereotypes to ever have written a truly radical text (raises the question of who can escape their ideologies) .

Vijay Mishra raises another interesting problem -- that of form. Does the fact that Coonardoo is a romance preclude a radical resolution to the novel?

Mishra also points out that "Coonardoo in 1929 is not the same as Coonardoo in 1988" -- nor indeed 2009.

Mudrooroo:

Mudrooroo was born at East Cubelling (near Narrogin) in Western Australia. At the age of nine he was placed in a Catholic orphanage, where he lived until he was sixteen. He spent a year in Fremantle Prison, then lived for a time in the home of Mary Durack (q.v.). She was later to write the foreword to his novel, Wild Cat Falling , published in 1965 and accclaimed as the first novel by an indigenous Australian.

After moving to Melbourne in 1958, he travelled in Thailand, Malaysia and India. He spent some years in India as a Buddhist monk, then returned to work at Monash University and study at Melbourne University. In 1988, he changed his name from Colin Johnson to Mudrooroo.

In the 1990s he held a number of academic positions, which often involved teaching courses in Aboriginal literature. These positions included Visiting Associate Professor at Bond University, Lecturer at the University of Queensland, and Tutor and Writer-in-Residence at Murdoch University. Active in promoting Aboriginal culture in the wider community, Mudrooroo co-founded the Aboriginal Writers, Oral Literature and Dramatists' Association with Jack Davis (q.v.), and has also served on the Aboriginal Arts Unit committee of the Australia Council.

In 1996 a controversy arose over Mudrooroo's public identification as an Indigenous Australian. His sister revealed that she had conducted genealogical research that found no trace of Aboriginal ancestry in the family. Extensive debate ensued about the issues of authenticity and what constitutes Aboriginal identity.

After living for a time on Macleay Island off the coast of Brisbane, Queensland, Mudrooroo left Australia in 2001 to pursue further studies in Buddhism.

I've included Mudrooroo because of his status as the first Aboriginal novelist whose place in Australian letters was placed in doubt by the questions about his Aboriginality.

definition of aboriginal

Why do these questions matter in relation to literature?

Neil Murray

Neil Murray, a singer and songwriter, is well known for his association with the Warumpi Band. One of the founding members of the band in the early 1980s, Murray continued to perform with Warumpi until October 1999 when his solo career demanded a greater time commitment. In addition to songs, Murray's writing has taken the form of poetry, novel and play.

Born in Western Victoria, Murray has explored his links with his Scottish ancestry through visits to Scotland. He has worked for many years amongst Aborigines in outback and urban communities and regards Aboriginal cultural heritage as the foundation of Australia's spiritual identity. His commitment to indigenous rights and to the environment is reflected in his writing.

Nei Murray's most widely known work is the song 'My Island Home'

Play Island Home

Murray is a white man who has perhaps avoided the criticisms of directed at white artists because of the efforts he has made to see Aboriginal culture from the inside.

There's a warts and all perspective that he uses and I wonder whether he has been successful -- if so is it because we trust him as someone immersed in Aboriginal culture?