Titre:

Fringe finds focus: Developments and strategies in aboriginal writing in

English. Par : Knudsen, Eva Rask, Australian Literary Studies, 00049697,
1991 Special Issue, Vol. 15, Edition 2
Base de données:
Academic Search Ultimate

FRINGE FINDS FOCUS:

DEVELOPMENTS AND
STRATEGIES IN ABORIGINAL
WRITING IN ENGLISH 
Texte intégral

IN an article on the ethnography of indigenous writing Stephen Muecke once

remarked that 'in the colonial encounter those who can't speak "die" and the
literature of the living bears the company trademark' (42). This legacy is still felt
in today's multicultural Australia where the challenge of locating Aboriginal
writing on the literary map is frequently met by critics in a fashion which suggests
that the days of colonialism have not yet ended. European preconceptions of
literary value are commonly employed as universal standards under which the
texts of those who did survive, but never strived for the trademark, often suffer an
ill fate. Surely, the patronage of white criticism has, rather effectively, obscured
how Aboriginal writers make use of a foreign medium for their own specific
purposes.[1] New anthologies like Paperbark (St. Lucia' UQP, 1990) and Inside
Black Australia (Ringwood: Penguin, 1988) highlight, however, the different status
of Aboriginal literature, and the recent appearance of the controversial Writing
from the Fringe (1990) by Mudrooroo Narogin (formerly Colin Johnson) is an
important landmark abounding with pathbreaking guidance into interpreting the
literature from an Aboriginal perspective that turns its back on the literary
establishment. Aboriginal writers are, Narogin argues, 'fringe dwellers on the
outskirts of the Metropolitan literary tradition of Europe' (20) and thus, they should
no longer address the centre from the periphery of Australian culture, but aim at
centring the fringe and refining the values inherent in this location.
Fringe writing is, theoretically speaking, trapped in a paradox; its aesthetics are
ancient as it draws on the oral traditions of pre-European Australia, yet it is
textualised in a print culture, in a non-indigenous language (English), and in
genres (European) that are not readily reconcilable with Aboriginality. In effect,
fringe writing sets out to fight and distance itself from a European system by
using the very tools that were instrumental in colonising and writing out the
orality from which its aesthetics originate. This can be seen as a constraining
factor -- that makes Aboriginal literature a contradiction in terms m or as a
dynamic that can liberate literature altogether from bourgeois definitions.
The fringe writer, as opposed to the writer situated at the centre, preserves the
traditional Aboriginal axiom that art is a cultural act which functions socially
before it pleases aesthetically. Accordingly, the writer accepts community control
as a prerequisite for authenticity and refuses to regard the obligation to reflect
the synthesised experience of a people as 'tyrannical censorship'. As a custodian
or value instigator who deals with people rather than individual identity, the artist
does not in the least see politics and literature as antagonistic. Of course, the
literature of a people whose traditional culture has disintegrated progressively
along with the growing sense of a white national identity will be intrinsically
political, but it is also political -- in the broadest sense -- out of adherence to a
more than 30,00-year-old Aboriginal aesthetic of art that expects 'literature' to
define a people's common identity.
Narogin's thesis is that Aboriginal literature must move away from merely
protesting and explaining Aboriginal existence to the white world, towards
reflecting non-diluted Aboriginality in language, form and content. He occasionally
defines Aboriginality as a primordial raw essence: 'Scratch an Aborigine and
beneath his or her modern skin. . . you will find the old hunter or gatherer' (24),
which rings true, I suppose, only if one acknowledges, too, that in the postcolonial
era, at the fringe, Aboriginality is also a political construct engendered by white
hegemony. By relying too much on predefined essence Narogin ends up in an
entrenched position from which he has to dismiss much Aboriginal writing for
betraying its material. The dreamtime core is lost, he argues; by borrowing from
the dominant culture the writers are trapped into 'thinking white'. Notwithstanding
the overall importance of language in relation to cultural identity, it is precisely
the hybrid quality of fringe writing that (seen with the eyes of the white reader)
makes it so vital and so innovative, a fascinating exercise in restoration from an
old world and appropriation from a new one. Is there not, one wonders, a danger in
the otherwise healthy attempt to 'blacken' the hybrid world, which is similar to the
old misconception that 'the only real Aboriginals are tribal Aboriginals'? Instead of
regarding most Aboriginal writing as being merely 'a darker shade of pale' (168)
this essay is an attempt to study it, as well as Aboriginality, in the light of change,
as a process in which a modern cultural self is being explored. Every change of
image, it seems, has been conducive to the forging of a pan-Aboriginal
ethnogenesis based on the cultural or generic heritage as well as on
contemporary politics. As a matter of fact, this approach is indebted to earlier,
rather disregarded, criticism by Natogin which divides Aboriginal literature into
phases such as a movement away, a process of disillusionment and search, and a
'homecoming and re-entry. A return from exile and alienation into Aboriginality'
(Aboriginal Writing Today 29). While it is clearly no task for a white critic to
determine what writer is most 'Aboriginal' --in that respect culture is copyright --
the following is based on the assumption that identity is not something entirely
immutable, it is a matter of naming. Aboriginal literature from the 1960s until
today will be examined along these lines.[2]
When Oodgeroo Noonuccal (formerly Kath Walker) published her first collection of
poetry in 1964, the very title We Are Going reflected an ambiguity that is also
characteristic of Jack Davis's and Kevin Gilbert's early verse, as well as of
Australia at the time. Traditional culture was believed to be vanishing and
Aboriginals were supposed to gradually 'attain the same manner of living as other
Australians. . . observing the same customs and (be) influenced by the same
beliefs, hopes, and loyalties' (Stevens 25). The voices of these poets, however,
came from a different cultural reality, a land outside both acceptance in the white
world and full knowledge of the old world. Yet their poems are resonant of the
policy of assimilation in a multitude of ways that relate to the question of cultural
identity. They are written predominantly in standard English and conventional
European verse and meter, in itself a powerful symbol of dispossession, and
although the world depicted is distinctly Aboriginal, the poets address a white
audience. Thus, their writing is best seen as a result of political expediency: they
are the products of assimilation pleading or fighting for recognition, protesting
against white indifference. The Aboriginal voices in the poems of these three
poets are sad, despairing, longing, optimistic and defiant almost interchangeably,
because they speak from a dispossessed reality in which Aboriginality is often an
indeterminate yearning. Except in poems dedicated to a pre-European tribal idyll.
their Aboriginal characters suffer acutely from loss of culture and positive
identity. Stories of 'black velvet' and rape, starvation, alcoholism, police
harassment and the destructive influence of Christianity in a racist new world are
abundant as are poems, especially by Noonuccal, featuring the 'last-of-their-tribe'
Aboriginals in sorrowful elegies: 'They sit and are confused, they cannot say their
thoughts' (78). The proud victim stranded in an incomprehensibly foreign world
with no escape, but to die or to catch up with time or the lack of 'civilisation' --
'We are the last of the Stone Age tribes, / Waiting for time to help us / As time
helped you' (21) -- is frequently found in Noonuccal's early poems, and indeed, the
victimised Aboriginal is the predominant image in most early Aboriginal poetry.
This image, while no doubt in accordance with the reality of the 60s and early 70s,
imprisoned Aboriginals in the role of being objects, of either neglect, charitable
benevolence or violence. To assert a positive cultural identity is incompatible with
a victimised mentality, a victim has a one-dimensional existence dominated by
dependence and is not allowed autonomy: 'who gave you honour, then gave you
jail? / Namatjira, they boomed your art / They. called you genius, then broke your
heart', laments Noonuccal (68) while Davis recounts the fate of the black tracker
whose only reward from the society he served was the words 'A black man playing
white man games/They laughed and pointed, sneering' (18). Gilbert, too, deplores
the price of survival: 'Baccadul baccadul soon some wine / White boss soon think
"Jacky mine"/. . . Baccadul baccadul chugar tea/This is the price you paid for me'
(1). In the grammatical as well as the cultural discourse Aboriginal people appear
as objects; even passive verb tenses reflect an Aboriginal predicament of being
'done to', to use Gilbert's words. Clearly, the offer of freedom by accepting
assimilation is always circumscribed by white power. One is reminded of Albert
Memmi who says of the colonised who tries to adopt the coloniser's virtues that
'in order to free himself, at least so he believes, he agrees to destroy himself'.
(121-22). Seen in retrospect, this is a risk run in Noonuccal's appeal to the
common humanity of mankind -- the one that Gilbert cannot imagine exists behind
'fraternal hypocrisies' (54) -- in which Aboriginality becomes a limiting factor (21),
an anachronism of a modern world: 'The past is gone like our childhood days of old
/ the future comes like light after dark / Bringing fulfillment' (2). The symbolism of
this image, the quest for whiteness, is disturbing in the Memimi sense, yet the
fact that these words came from the same pen with which Noonuccal assertively
revolted against changing the unchangeable and forgetting about the past when 'a
thousand thousand camp fires in the forest / Are in my blood' (93) suggests that
any deference to the European world stems from a perceived strategic necessity
rather than conviction; Aboriginals did not gain full citizenship until 1967.
Nevertheless, assimilation has left its mark, which is probably why early poems
dealing with injustice and social critique by Noonuccal, Davis, and Gilbert are
significantly more powerful than the ones in which a past, often idyllised and
lacking in empathy, or a future, sought outside the reality of race relations in
Australia, are envisioned. The tone of the poets range from Noonuccal's restrained
meliorism to Gilbert's confrontationist anger, with Davis's optimistic realism
somewhere in between. Although these prominent poets, always in the forefront
of political struggles, all fight for a recognised cultural space in Australia, their
strategies vary. In the occasional utopian yearning Noonuccal glimpses a
symbolic open door between black and white Australians (40). Davis, too, sees it
'not locked, / Just ajar' (40) while Gilbert firmly believes it has to be kicked open
'because a white man'll never do it'.
The mix of mourning and hope encountered in most early Aboriginal poetry in
English is consistent with an early, perhaps inevitable, stage where the
'movement away' created 'disillusionment yet search' for new less stereotyped
modes of existence. Poets like Noonuccal, Davis, and Gilbert ploughed the ground
for future writers of Aboriginality.
Though social conditions are still intolerable Aboriginal self-confidence has been
boosted during the past two decades. This is especially evident in the fringe
poetry of Lionel Fogarty, known as the guerilla poet of the 1980s. The recent
stage of 'return' is eye-catching: his rebellious stance is the quintessence of self-
determination -- the current cultural policy that gives Aboriginals the mandate to
define the nature of their own future development. The rapid pace and the
revolutionary nature of Fogarty's poems repudiate any kind of an assimilated
culture as he performs an almost ritual exorcism of white values: 'We want a
divorce/ Lifelong/of bourgeois fingertips of the world' (Ngjutji 37).
Fogarty's world, however, is still fragmented and shattered and he is part and
parcel of that experience. He has not seen Noonuccal's vision twenty years earlier
that 'You will be welcomed mateship-wise/. . . Fringe-dweller no more' (52) come
true. Thus, he makes no allowances to the white world whose mateship rituals
and xenophobic ideals he scornfully mocks; his celebration of Aboriginality is
often kept in an esoteric realm that makes white readers fringe dwellers:
We is the raw undefined symbol
awakening microcosm of the aboriginality
remains invisible to gubba glimpses
(Ngjutji 77)
Fogarty is a highly political modem songmaker whose Aboriginality informs both
the freedom fighter's response to assimilation and the artist's quest to distance
himself from 'imported' literary traditions. A reversed colonisation of language and
form blanks the literary page ideologically and creates autonomy. Fogarty simply
refuses to make his lyrics conform to semantic conventions and linear syntax, the
linguistic mercenaries of white imperialism. His language, a blend of Aboriginal
vernacular and distorted English, is a subversive act, a deliberate raid against
paternalism designed to de-familiarise the poetic genre and destroy the European
desire for recognisable sequence. While Fogarty's infinite sentences mirror the
lack of coherence in the lives of his people today, the impulse towards destruction
is far from undirected as it releases a liberated discourse in which Aboriginality.
may be inscribed in years to come. Many of Fogarty's songs resemble meditative
chants of the oral Aboriginal tradition. They draw on the subconscious mind from
which feelings -- rather than rational thoughts -- about being Aboriginal flow.
Language is used experimentally to project identity, sadly so as when in the line
'our dole money told me we'll trash port wine' (Yoogum 25) the inversion of
standard grammar dramatises the lack of will-power caused by, or causing, the
inevitability of city-park living:
Musgrave, Must crave. Still craving Ah. . .
Another flagon, another flagon.
Gawn hah.
One foot in the grave,
Gunnin gunnin.
MUSGRAVE.
(Yoogum 26)
Mostly, however, the fringe world in Fogarty's songs has its own network of
human warmth, racial pride and a caring for each other that is rooted in an
Aboriginal collectivity, 'strange but appreciated / it different to white man'
(Yoogum 24):
If I am not a race
Then what am I
If we are not Aboriginals
Then what persons
I am
(Yoogum 13)
These lines introduce a poem in which there is no dividing line between the
individual and the collectivity; thus the simple confusion of plural and singular
come to bear a complex meaning characteristic of Aboriginal thought. Verb tenses
are exploited for similar purposes. Narogin remarks that they are ideological time-
markers to which an Aboriginal perception of reality is opposed and perceptively
reminds us that by deliberately misusing verb tenses Fogarty wants to eliminate
European reality and 'clocktime' -- at least in his poetry -- and reinscribe Aboriginal
reality and Dreamtime (Writing from the Fringe 172): 'maps are in our sapiens /
unwise species' (Ngjutji 106). 'Decorative Rasp, Weaved Roots' is one of many
examples of how deconstructed language and form may express an Aboriginal
perception of reality. Its dreamy composition reflects a holistic view of the
Aboriginal, sometimes nightmarish, predicament:
Plenty flour, plenty beef
Big hassle
Cause instinctively we know we lucky lucky
exaggerated the worry
pinched death
dripping dust
lifted the damage halfway around
dragged tossed ripped
lost balance on the rocks
flew through the air
. . .
Premier naming dams
excellent resort
signatures began to sign
interviews filmed the common kind.
Jail agents even.
(Yoogum 14-15)
An inherent continuity disrupts sequence as the poem wavers in and out of time
and focus, possibly to project the legacy of the colonial past in the present, but
also to render an Aboriginal world view and a time concept which is
simultaneously synchronic and diachronic. With impulses from the collective
Aboriginal memory, fragmentary stories of contemporary social and legal issues,
life-stories -- specific, yet representative -- and supposedly contact history melt
into a repetitive action chant towards the end: 'We are at the door/at the door/ at
the door/Arise deep spirits' (Yoogum 15). Then is now, in the sad sense that
Aboriginal culture is still being exploited, but also in the positive sense that the
past substantiates present politics of independence From behind Fogarty's black
printed words emerges a resolute cultural warrior who claims compensation for
200 years of usurpation, a first-of-the-new-tribe Aboriginal intent on using his
verse as a tool -- or a weapon if necessary -- with which to reclaim his culture and
his 'words'. The poems are dressed with mobilising cries for pan-Aboriginal action
and Third and Fourth World solidarity to the extent that the reader wonders if
Fogarty is rehearsing more than just an uprising on paper: 'We heroic our men and
arms / even impact cultural difficulties / us murris can warfare' (Ngjutji 41).
The concept of catharsis and healing are as important in Fogarty's poems as in
Narogin's work, notably The Song Circle of Jacky (1986) in which the old form of
the song cycle, tied to the very source of traditional culture, fuses with
contemporary politics. Songlines -- physical and mental tracks of words and tones
marked off by the Great Ancestors when they travelled the land and sang the
world into being -- are used by Narogin to depict Jacky's journey through an urban
landscape of 'unbelonging'. Jacky, the typical urban fringe dweller, travels through
an unstable emotional terrain of pain and pleasure. War, unemployment, violence,
death in custody, landright demos, and Salvo shelters are the topographical
features of Jacky's landscape until he heads towards spiritual revelation. Jacky
Jacky, shabby and derelict in the white man's world, but doctor and kurdaitcha
man in his own culture, knows the old world and with this knowledge he sings a
new world into being by returning to the source of Aboriginal identity. He
succeeds; before the last song composed as a march: 'Forward our generation: /
the next generation shall be heavy' (50), the circle ends in symbolic and ultimate
identification: 'Jacky's flesh shivers with thousands of tracks and figures and
signs' (49). This is a powerful declaration of the surreal as very real in Aboriginal
culture and of a pantheism so strong that the land refuses to be alienated from its
'first-horns'. Jacky becomes the geography of Australia:
Long ago, his skin itches as men enter his pores
And run their fingers lightly along his walls,
Or scratch faintly diagrammatic lines.
From then on they touch Jacky in other ways:
The Wandjina eat themselves through his skin to become
his bones.
(49)
As in Fogarty's revolutionary warfare, the object has become subject: the
Aboriginal as survivor and agent has substituted the image of the Aboriginal as
victim. In other words, the fringe dwellers have come to terms with their
otherness and generated it into a collective selfhood.
Yet the development towards cultural self-reliance did not occur overnight, it
owes everything to a stage in between the 60s and the 80s when two distinct
themes dominated Aboriginal literature. One was a relentlessly honest and critical
introspection of fringe life, the other was a restoration of the traditional past and
a revision of colonial history. It was a phase in which the writers explored, on
behalf of their people, who they are and who they were, a process that
corresponds with the didactic aim of evaluating good and bad 'behaviour' so
characteristic of the oral Aboriginal tradition.
It may seem a risky enterprise to display the disrupted family lives of
emasculated, alcoholic Aboriginal men and desperate wives and mothers as in
plays by Jack Davis, Robert Merritt and Richard Walley or to depict Aboriginal
youth as delinquent and aimlessly hedonistic, as in the fiction of Mudrooroo
Natogin and Archie Weller:
They paint on lies and blood from fights, to make themselves look elegant with
patterns from their new Dreaming. They dance to their gods of flashing lights and
hopes. The city, squatting like elders around a campfire, has cut off their
childhood: it imparted the legends from the alleys and the parks and the thirdrate
slum houses and the police stations and the jails as the elders of the past
imparted the legends of the land to the ancestors of these youths. So they are
truly men in their new country. (Weller 44)
The use of irony would be condescending, and the sometimes unflattering self-
exposure of drama would be counterproductive, if they did not serve the didactic
purpose of educating the audience and explaining the mechanisms, inside and
outside of Aboriginal control, that produce the grim realism of cultural upheaval. It
is only by introducing into realism the past as other than linguistic metaphor that
the Aboriginal escapes the image reminiscent of the early phase of victim. The
comparison between city (materialism) and tribal eiders (spirituality) is, of course,
absurd, yet traditional imagery forced upon an alienated milieu creates a tension
that would make an Aboriginal audience acutely aware that a 'new Dreaming' is
not to be found in the garbage legends of the city where breaking the law has
become the substitute initiation, an apolitical protest, even if, in the eyes of Doug,
the protagonist, 'there's a glimmering, like movement far back in a cave' (28). Only
the city/bush dichotomy, in which the bush is a reservoir of intense spiritual
energy, lifts Weller's stories out of bleak paralytic realism. Didacticism requires
role models. The old man, 'lost in the reality of his Dreaming, he sees more than
others' (Narogin, Sandawara 168), is frequently introduced to serve as the
combining link between past and present, though not in the figure of the
successful Aboriginal who manages to negotiate respect in the white as well as
the black world. His authority is not measured by his literacy, but by the oral
heritage he possesses which can replace a white-dominated historical discourse.
Partly by means of oral narrative Noorak in Narogin's Long Live Sandawara (1979)
becomes mediator between Sandawara, the forgotten historical hero, and Alan, an
alienated city youth. Though not without substantial sacrifice and misled
enthusiasm, the persona Sandawara and the person Alan fuse through Noorak,
and the novel comes to occupy a space somewhere in between legend and
recorded history. Alternately, the intrusion of the supernatural into realism
instigates the notion of the past as role model. Drama, which in the Aboriginal
context is about living the act rather than acting the role, escapes the tyranny of
the written word as when the spiritual figure of the 'eurie-woman' in The Cake Man
by Robert Merritt (Sydney: Currency Press, 1978) guides William towards a new
appreciation of himself. In Davis's The Dreamers (Sydney: Currency Press, 1982)
old Worru, believed to be hallucinating in his last days, holds the wisdom
necessary for renewal. He wills the old world, 'a re-occurring dream', back onto
the stage in the form of the dancer who in anti-naturalistic dance sequences,
juxtaposed to present time, occupies a timeless, ahistorical space from which his
dignity and self-assured movements act as moral comment on the contemporary
plot. The sheer spiritual density of the dream-sequences and the drone of the
didjeridoo obliterate the false consciousness and jarring disco rhythms that blast
out of the radio in the Wallitch household. Independent historical space has been
reclaimed.
It is admittedly a paradox that history -- a white invention that has abolished
mythic time -- is now part and parcel of Aboriginal politics. The dilemma of how to
reflect the 'Weltanschauung' of a cyclic past by means of an ideological grammar
with an inherent progression, faithful to time as linear movement, is not overcome
in Narogin's Doctor Wooreddy's Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World
(1983), and possibly not even intended, as indicated in Wooreddy's constant
reminder: 'It must be the times' (24). This is truly a hybrid story which pinpoints
Aboriginality as both inheritance and construct. Politically, today, there is a need
to manufacture Aboriginal historicity, not only to qualify the claim for landrights,
but also to counterbalance the writing of European-Australian history and the near
invisibility of indigenous Australians by bringing them from the peripheral position
as 'non-persons' into the centre of the historical discourse as neither noble nor
denoble savages, but as humans in flesh and blood. However, even when
dismantling the white myth of golden pioneering days, Narogin makes no claim at
objectivity as this has 'no bearing on Aboriginality, but myth has! Myth is a
retelling of what is seen as the past, but a past pregnant with present meaning'
(Writing from the Fringe 169). Accordingly, within the framework of historical
narrative a mythic structure is employed for all explanatory purposes. The arrival
of the Europeans, the ghosts, is a fatal plague, as indeed it came to be, instigated
by Ria Warrawah, an evil spirit which through rape and destruction infests the
land: 'The soles of the good doctor's feet cringed as they touched the sand. The
particles felt like dried specks of blood' (100). Dispossession and ghost brutality is
linked to the feeling of displacement that has haunted the European-Australian
imagination for many years. Historical figures are mythologised into archetypes of
good and bad. Like Sandawara, who became mapan with supernatural power to
metamorphose and be one with the land, all Tasmanian characters from Waylor
and Ummarrah, the warriors of resistance who crack the illusion of peaceful
settlement, to Trugernanna and Wooteddy become symbols of Aboriginality,
simply because in the Aboriginal world view, people are legends. Wooreddy,
historically a fringe figure, is a central culture hero; a learned, native
anthropologist engaged in scrutinising fieldwork among white barbarians. He
represents Aboriginal rationality and the civilised, ecological, socially secure, and
highly sophisticated society as it existed at the time when Australia was declared
'terra nullius'. Wooreddy, after his final flash of knowledge, is a true role-model for
his people, a visionary whose spirit survives rather than a victim who dies, and
this is where mythology wins an important victory over history. This narrative
does not, despite its apocalypse, end like a chapter in a book, or a period in
history, it is elliptic, because the colours of the Aboriginal flag (black, red and
yellow) accompany Wooreddy's death. This is indicative of a never ending story.
The detribalised Aboriginal seeks to reindigenise the modern world by restoring a
vision of the past and letting it influence the present. Thus the Aboriginal people
'return from exile into Aboriginality', they have freed themselves from a historical
subjugation to white images of Aboriginal being. They will know where they are
going, because they have envisioned it.
It appears from the above that Aboriginal literature is unchallengeably on the
move towards independence. This view, however, would be strongly opposed by
Narogin who is in fact highly suspicious of the idea that Aboriginal writing may
have cast off the yoke of European standards. Writing from the Fringe is an attack
on most recent Aboriginal writing for being too strongly realist, for not releasing
an Aboriginal vernacular to express Aboriginality, and for not entering the
real/surreal world of the Dreaming more often, thus politicising that basic
Aboriginal frame of mind. Though Narogin's own Doin Wildcat (Melbourne: Hyland
House, 1988), Sam Watson's The Kadaitcha Sung (Ringwood: Penguin, 1990) and
news that Archie Weller is currently writing a science fiction novel that
incorporates Aboriginal myth and legend in a new way may be a sign of these
restrictions being resolved, there is still substance in Narogin's criticism that
'there is an absence of a hero able to descend into the mythic earth of
Aboriginality to regain the tjuringas (sacred symbols) of his community' (129). This
is precisely what is attempted in Narogin's highly symbolic Master of the Ghost
Dreaming (Sydney: Collins, 1991), a sometimes curious reworking of the historical
material of Doctor Wooreddy's Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World.
The bleak realism of invasion and forced removal of Aboriginals from their
homelands is only the backdrop of the novel. The real course of events takes
place in the surreal world: Jangamuttuk, the mapan, sets out on a spiritual
journey, because in order to heal his culture and break the spell of white
dominance he must become master of the ghost (white) dreaming. In an entranced
and almost epic battle pregnant with symbols of the two opposed dreamings or
ideologies, the spiritual world influences the material world in a very real sense:
the white intruders leave and the Aboriginals are free to leave the island on which
they have been incarcerated. Within the genre of magical realism Narogin
explores the creative forces of the Dreaming concept and in this he sees the
future of a 'true' Aboriginal literature, rather than in 'stories in which the realism is
very flat and is only "what they done to us"' ('Mudrooroo Narogin' 59).
Contemporary Aboriginality is a much-used, but rarely defined concept with
boundaries in the transcendental as well as the mundane reality of present-day
Aboriginal life. Aboriginal literature over the past twenty-seven years has
presented a diversity of qualifiers of Aboriginality. It is inherent in a mode of
appeal, protest, self-criticism, and defiance, and in a spiritual affinity with the very
soil of Australia in which the Dreaming is reality. It is also a world view that gives
history and the writing of history new definitions, an oral heritage of forms and
symbols that can be re-employed, and an immaterial background that binds the
writer to his community in a land(scape) that needs to be interpreted. The
development of Aboriginal images is reflected in the literature over twenty-seven
years as well as in the personal writings of individual authors. They are what they
write. As it is part of the geography of the fringe that it borders on two worlds, a
fringe literature will draw on indigenous as well as imported means and
techniques to express its own uniqueness. Narogin, however, is not in favour of
the result which he often sees as 'flawed'. Taken to the extreme Aboriginality is
exercised as a limiting factor as it comes close to conferring a stern traditionality
on the definition of Aboriginal literature as when Sally Morgan, writer of
bestselling My Place (London: Virago Press, 1988), is partly dismissed for being
too accessible as 'young, gifted and not very black' (Writing from the Fringe 149).
As a matter of fact, My Place epitomises all elements of the development
discussed here. The change of Aboriginal images and the move from assimilation
to self-determination is reflected in the life stories of three generations of women:
the grandmother Nan, the mother Gladis, and the daughter Sally, just as, at a
formal level, Morgan turns the European genre of autobiography into a device for
collective story-telling. Her story cannot be separated from that of her 'clan'.
Personal and communal politics merge when in the course of the book she
assumes the traditional role of the artist as storyteller and chronicler of
community history. 'My place' becomes synonymous with 'our place'. Moreover, at
a functional level, liberation and cultural self-discovery are imbedded in the very
act of writing the book. These aspects of the book combine in a pilgrimage
towards unlocking a past that has been stowed away, but could not be repressed.
Gradually the unity of memory, place and identity turns into the matrix of Morgan's
narrative, almost as if prescribed by the literary practices of the traditional world.
Whether Narogin's prediction that the 1990s will be a period of post-activism and
depoliticisation of Aboriginal literature will yield substance remains to be seen.
The work of new writers like Eva Johnson and Graeme Dixon -- whose Holocaust
Island (St. Lucia: UQP, 1990) won the inaugural David Unaipon Award -- seems to
point in the opposite direction. It is hard to imagine that Aboriginal writing can be
anything but political. The sheer necessity of writing is the underlying force of the
literature. Writing, rather than being an appendix to culture, is an act of survival
for a people that has been almost systematically written out of existence by the
invading European culture in Australia.
The question remains whether it is possible (or even avoidable) to be pragmatic
about the theoretical contradictions in the issue of 'black words on white page'. If
so, it could be argued that whether an Aboriginal writer appropriates European
forms, parodically inverts them or re-employs traditional formulas, and whether he
or she assimilates standard English, uses it subversively or writes in Aboriginal
creole, the work will be truly Aboriginal as long as the writer identifies as such
and seeks to assert an identity through the written medium. Otherwise, if this is
refuted, even Writing from the Fringe -- which is so full of Aboriginal insights
although written in (academic) English with a frequent use of post-structuralist
and deconstructionist terminology -- would have to be dismissed. That indeed
would be ironic A rigid insistence on 'pure' Aboriginal traditions, by which
standards even protest becomes un-Aboriginal, is more suitable as inspiration
than target. Even if textualisation corrupts the traditional Aboriginal unconscious
core of identity, the traditional idea of art as an integral part of everyday life is
maintained, and Aboriginal artists, in a very real sense, are the catalysts of a
people's identity. This is an enormous responsibility which can hardly be felt in
the same way by a European-Australian writer.
In this relationship of fringe to centre, Aboriginal literature is a cyclic journey
rooted in time immemorial, when literature was 'sacred' and not distinguishable
from life and identity in general, but transformed when in the 1960s it sprang out
of the centre of a foreign culture that has secularised its meaning and
marginalised its power of influence. Any true journey, however, involves a return,
a homecoming, and fringe soil is fertile as a growing place for the literature of a
new Dreaming, one that recaptures the old and innovates by appropriating the
new for its own purposes. It will have its own trademark and make Aboriginal
literature further visible on the Australian map as the oldest local literary
tradition, and on the world map as contributing to the aesthetics of decolonised
indigenous literatures, thereby enriching us all.
1 Adam Shoemaker's Black Words White Page (St. Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1989)
was the first major critical work to establish this.
2 This essay is dedicated to tracing a development, and therefore cannot do full
justice to the works of the writers included as representatives of that
development or to those omitted who otherwise deserve attention.
WORKS CITED
Davis, Jack. The First-Born and Other Poems. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1970.
Rpt. Melbourne: J.M. Dent, 1983.
Fogarty, Lionel. Yoogum Yoogum. Ringwood: Penguin, 1982.
-----. Ngjutji. Brisbane: C. Buchanan, 1984.
Gilbert, Kevin. People Are Legends. St. Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1978.
Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. New York: Orion, 1965. Rpt.
London: Earthscan, 1990.
Muecke, Stephen. 'The Scribes.' Meridian 14.1, 1985.
Narogin, Mudrooroo. Long Live Sandawara. Melbourne: Quartet Books, 1979.
-----. Doctor Wooreddy's Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World.
Melbourne: Hyland House, 1983.
-----. 'White Forms, Aboriginal Content.' Jack Davis and Bob Hodge, eds. Aboriginal
Writing Today. Canberra: AIAS, 1985.
-----. The Song Circle of Jacky, and Selected Poems. Melbourne: Hyland House,
1986.
-----. 'Mudrooroo Narogin: Writer.' Aboriginal Voices -- Contemporary Aboriginal
Artists, Writers and Performers. Comp. Liz Thompson. Sydney: Simon & Schuster,
1990.
-----. Writing from the Fringe -- A Study of Modern Aboriginal Literature. Melbourne:
Hyland House, 1990.
Noonuccal, Oodgeroo. My People. Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1970.
Stevens, Frank. Black Australia. Sydney: Aura P, 1981.
Weller, Archie The Day of the Dog. Sydney: Pan Books, 1982.
~~~~~~~~
By EVA RASK KNUDSEN

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