Glimpses of Meaning: Aboriginal Literature and Western Audiences

One of the most subtle and complex oral literatures, Australian Aboriginal literature, still keeps meaning covert to Western readers, despite its ever-growing popularity and prolificity. As an introduction to an ongoing research into orality in Australian Aboriginal Literature, this paper aims to focus on a number of reasons which, while make Aboriginal stories more palatable for Western culture, distil original meaning of concepts, beliefs and traditions. In other words, what are some of the elements which hinder source – reader communication when it comes to Australian Aboriginal literature? The focus of this paper is meaning transformation through layers of interpretation, starting from an original performance of a story, with its syncretism of art forms. It is well worth it to explore such development of meaning, from performance to oral translation into English, with its later written form, to ultimately broken-down fragments covert within poems or novels. It is of no wonder Western readership comes up against difficulty in grasping meaning from Australian Aboriginal literature, as our own understanding of universal concepts, such as time, space, spirituality is so fundamentally different. There are, however, valuable lessons to be learnt and any effort will yield reward.

Historicising Silence: An Introduction to Australian Aboriginal Poetry

The paper looks at texts selected from the Anthology of Australian Aboriginal Literature edited by Anita Heiss and Peter Minter as well as poets chosen from the website Creative Spirits from Oodgeroo (Kath Walker) to Zelda Quakawoot to understand how gaze invents and reinvents people and their culture. The metaphor of the museum is used to question the Empire‟s attempt at erasing and archeologically reinventing ancient societies, while interrogating how dispossession leads to silencing of communities. The second part analytically delineates the evolution from a victim position to, consciousness raising, resistance, recovering and reconstruction of one‟s cultural heritage and voice. The third section of the paper conclusively argues how modern aboriginal poetry has attempted at non-choral, esoteric as well as representational identity formulations as a prelude to dehusking the valance of prejudice and civilisational arrogance, which continue to indent the First Citizen in cultural spaces.

PARALLEL PLIGHTS: ECOCIDE AND GENOCIDE IN JACK DAVIS’ “FOREST GIANT”

To understand the culture of a nation one must look from within that culture. Australian Aboriginal literature helps one to understand this basic premise of anthropology. An understanding of aboriginal literature produced in Australia helps to understand and appreciate the culture of the indigenous people while simultaneously they also reveal the changes the nation has undergone since colonization. They are not produced by outsiders or observers but by those who have lived through these experiences and the creative act of writing becomes an effort to impart an understanding and awareness of the experiences of the indigenous people. Immigrant people have always altered the life of the autochthonous people and a major part of Australian Aboriginal poetry deals with it. Parallel patterning of events consequential to colonization can be found in the history of every nation subjugated by invaders. Jack Davis’ “Forest Giant” is a short poem which details within its ambit the destruction of the environment or ecocide and the decline in the population of the aboriginals due to genocide. The yoking of cultural and environmental history serves to understand the complementary perspectives of aboriginal life and environmental history of the nation.

“I Wish to be Free of All Things I Am Not and Will Never Be”: Reorientation of Self Through the (re)Framing of (post)Colonial Consciousness in Marie Clements’ The Edward Curtis Project.

The works of Edward Curtis are weighty historical records considered as seminal projects that have been the international communities main representations of Aboriginal cultures and their peoples. However, Curtis' projects, as ethno-anthropological work, limit the avenues of representation afforded to Aboriginal peoples; through attempting to preserve an image of authenticity, Curtis' work entraps and filters the multifaceted compontents of Aboriginal culture(s) into a homogenous static group through a colonial lens. In opposition to these colonial standards, contemporary aboriginal literature attempts to carve a path in which Aboriginal people are represented in their own dynamic cultures and identities; the dramatic work of Marie Clements, The Edward Curtis Project, acts as a direct response to the work of Edward Curtis as it (re)frames and problematizes discourse regarding (re)presentation, (post)colonial conscioussness, and the (re)positioning of subject/object dynamics.