Indigenous Cultural Capital: Postcolonial Narratives in Australian Children’s Literature 9781787070776, 9781787070783, 9781787070790, 9781787070806

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Preface
Introduction
Indigenous Cultural Capital
Part I
Chapter 1: Decolonised Landscape: Aboriginal Connection to Country
Decolonising the “Empty Space”
Connecting Aboriginal Land and History
Native Title and Aboriginal Sovereignty
Chapter 2: Living Memories and the Mechanism of Forgetting: Narratives of Indigenous Child Separation
The Narratives of the Stolen Generations
An Archive of Living Memories
Part II
Chapter 3: Book Reviews, Prizes, and the Paratextual Space in Children’s Books
The Politics of Reviewing: The Reviewing History of Australia’s First Indigenous Children’s Book
The Power of Consecration: The CBCA Book of the Year Awards
Transformation and Collaboration in the Paratextual Space
Chapter 4: School Texts: From “Silent Apartheid” to “Cross-Curriculum Priority”
Indigenous Education in the Classroom
A Comparative Reading of School Readers
Part III
Chapter 5: The Gift and the Ethics of Representing Aboriginality
The Ethics of Representing Aboriginality
A Solution to the Dilemma of Non-Aboriginal Writers
The Gift and Indigenous Collective Ownership
Conclusion
Resistance and Transformation in a Project of Hope
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Australian Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Indigenous Cultural Capital

Indigenous Cultural Capital Postcolonial Narratives in Australian Children’s Literature

Xu Daozhi

Xu Daozhi

ISBN 978-1-78707-077-6

www.peterlang.com

Peter Lang

Australian Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

“In this persuasive, deeply researched study, Xu Daozhi demonstrates that Australian children’s books are powerfully invested in Aboriginal cultures. An impassioned call to see children’s books with fresh eyes, Indigenous Cultural Capital examines works by Aboriginal and nonAboriginal writers, investigating the ethics of representation and the issues associated with publication and reception.” — Clare Bradford, Emeritus Professor, Deakin University

Xu Daozhi completed her PhD in English literary studies at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) and is now a senior research assistant in the Faculty of Education at HKU. Her research interests include postcolonial studies, cultural theory, children’s literature, and studies of race and ethnicity. Her scholarly articles have appeared in Australian Aboriginal Studies, Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature, and Antipodes.

Indigenous Cultural Capital Postcolonial Narratives in Australian Children’s Literature

Xu Daozhi

Xu Daozhi

This book explores how Australian Indigenous people’s histories and cultures are deployed, represented and transmitted in post-Mabo children’s literature authored by Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers. Postcolonial narratives in Australian children’s books enable readers access to Indigenous cultures, knowledge and history, which bring with them the possibility of acculturation. This process of acquisition emerges as an embodiment of cultural capital, as theorised by Pierre Bourdieu, but carries an alternative, anti-colonial force. This book argues that by affirming Indigenous cultural value and re-orienting the instituting power of recognition, the operation of “Indigenous cultural capital” enacts a tactic of resistance and functions with transformative potential to change the way in which cultural relations are reproduced in settler society. Through examining the representation, formative processes, modes of transmission, and ethical deployment of Indigenous cultural capital, this book provides a fresh perspective on postcolonial readings of children’s literature. In doing so, it makes original contributions to literary criticism and significant theoretical advances to postcolonial scholarship.

Indigenous Cultural Capital

“This is a groundbreaking discussion of the representation of Aboriginal people in children’s literature. Importantly the book confirms Aboriginal agency through the deployment of indigenous cultural capital. The analysis of the circulation of cultural capital in Aboriginal writing is a significant and timely intervention into indigenous studies.” — Bill Ashcroft FAHA, Australian Professorial Fellow, University of New South Wales

www.peterlang.com

Peter Lang

Indigenous Cultural Capital

AUSTRALIAN STUDIES: INTERDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES

Series Editor

Anne Brewster Associate Professor, University of New South Wales Volume 2

PETER LANG Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien

Indigenous Cultural Capital Postcolonial Narratives in Australian Children’s Literature

Xu Daozhi

PETER LANG Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche National-bibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Xu, Daozhi, 1985- author. Title: Indigenous cultural capital : postcolonial narratives in Australian children’s literature / Xu Daozhi. Other titles: Postcolonial narratives in Australian children’s literature Description: Oxford ; New York : Peter Lang, [2018] | Series: Australian studies: interdisciplinary perspectives ; 2 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018005642 | ISBN 9781787070776 (alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Children’s literature, Australian--History and criticism. | Indigenous peoples in literature. | Postcolonialism in literature. Classification: LCC PR9613.9 .X8 2018 | DDC 820.9/92820994--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018005642 Cover illustration: Rod Garlett, Noongar Boodja Wangkiny (Our Land is Talking) (2017). 150 x 110 cm. Acrylic on Belgian Linen. Created as part of the Vice Chancellor’s commission for NAIDOC 2017, in conjunction with Kurongkurl Katitjin, Edith Cowan University Perth Australia. Cover design by Peter Lang Ltd. ISSN 2297-8194 ISBN 978-1-78707-077-6 (print) • ISBN 978-1-78707-078-3 (ePDF) ISBN 978-1-78707-079-0 (ePub) • ISBN 978-1-78707-080-6 (mobi) © Peter Lang AG 2018 Published by Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers, 52 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LU, United Kingdom [email protected], www.peterlang.com Xu Daozhi has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work. All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed. Printed in Germany

To My Family

Contents

Preface ix Introduction

Indigenous Cultural Capital Part I

1 31

Chapter 1

Decolonised Landscape: Aboriginal Connection to Country

33

Chapter 2

Living Memories and the Mechanism of Forgetting: Narratives of Indigenous Child Separation

63

Part II

97

Chapter 3

Book Reviews, Prizes, and the Paratextual Space in Children’s Books

99

Chapter 4

School Texts: From “Silent Apartheid” to “Cross-Curriculum Priority” 151

viii

part III

171

Chapter 5

The Gift and the Ethics of Representing Aboriginality

173

Conclusion

Resistance and Transformation in a Project of Hope

207

Bibliography 211 Index 231

Preface

This book is based on research undertaken for a PhD at the University of Hong Kong, although in many respects it had an earlier genesis. My background is in literary studies, which exposed me to the insights and limitations of postcolonial theory, issues related to race and representation, and the vexed debates over speaking positions. Although the situation is very different in respect to many of China’s ethnic minorities, there are certain resonances such as the conundrums in cultural continuity and revitalisation. Hence the issues germane to this book have long been shaping my thoughts. Serendipitously the pertinence of children’s literature and its comparatively few critiques was brought to my attention, so I turned my focus to this body of work, which also allowed me to combine my long interest in Australia and Australian Indigenous peoples and cultures. While the discussion of children’s books that draw on Indigenous life and cultures as “Indigenous cultural capital” is inextricably entangled with the question of whose voice – Indigenous or non-Indigenous – is speaking in the texts, the concept of Indigenous cultural capital is more concerned with representations, formative processes, modes of transmission, and ethical implications: what message this or that voice expresses, how is it articulated, and what role it plays in knowledge production and exchange. This book therefore explores a set of intertwined questions pertaining to how Indigenous Australians are positioned, represented, and self-represented in children’s books that are authored by Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers and published in the post-Mabo era. This book would not have been completed without the help, guidance, suggestions, and advice that I have received from the very beginning of my PhD study; they are invaluable gifts for which I would like to extend my sincere thanks. First, I want to express my deepest gratitude to Otto Heim, my PhD supervisor, for his intellectual generosity, unfailing support, and rigorous guidance, which have led me through the completion of my doctoral thesis and the final revision of this book manuscript. I am also deeply

x Preface

grateful to Clare Bradford. Her scholarship in postcolonial criticism of children’s literature initiated me into this field. I am very thankful for her tremendous help, insightful advice, and constant support over the years, especially during my two research visits at Deakin University. I am particularly grateful to Mitchell Rolls for reading drafts of the entire manuscript, offering his insights and helpful suggestions. His unfailing encouragement and enormous support gave me much confidence in completing this book and furthering my academic pursuit in Australian studies. I am indebted to June Senyard for her kindness and generous help since my postgraduate study. She has read my Master’s and doctoral theses and part of this book manuscript. Every time she gave me detailed comments, helpful guidance and constant encouragement. I am also thankful to Zhang Yongxian for his supervision when I studied at the Australian Studies Centre, Renmin University of China. I express my heartfelt thanks to David Walker and Karen Walker for their wisdom and humour and for helping me build up my academia career. I also express my appreciation to Colin Mackerras for his erudition, inspiring conversations, and cheerful encouragement. For the generous help with this research, my special thanks go to Juliet O’Conor, as children’s research librarian at the State Library of Victoria, for sending me references and taking time to answer my queries; Doug Marmion, as the Linguistics Research Fellow at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), for offering his expertise in Indigenous languages; Michelle Prawer, as Judge of CBCA Book of the Year Award, for her valuable insights; Robin Freeman, for helpful suggestions on the Indigenous publishing industry; Mark Rose, for his expertise in Indigenous education; Cathie Henbest and Shirlaine Tse, for informative conversations about the education systems in Australia. During my visit to Dunwich State School on North Stradbroke Island in Queensland, Elisha Iselin, Leanore Gregory, David Christie, and Michele Connell shared with me invaluable insights and information on the Australian Curriculum and I hope to offer my sincere thanks. I also had the privilege to meet Aboriginal elder Aunty Margaret Iselin, and I am grateful for her kindness. My thanks also go to Megan Cope, Toni Cope, and Zhou Xiaoping for their hospitality and assistance which made my visit to Straddie possible and pleasurable.

Preface

xi

This research has been supported by the University Postgraduate Fellowship from the University of Hong Kong. It would not have been productive without the support from the School of English at HKU. My thanks to all staff members, in particular Julia Kuehn, Douglas Kerr, Ho Yee Lin Elaine, Haewon Hwang, and Adam Jaworski, for their guidance and support; and to all postgraduate fellows for cheerful talks and memorable times. I wish to thank the Faculty of Arts, HKU, for sponsoring me to attend the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University where the group discussions about the Gift was rewarding, for which I thank the Course Instructor Annelise Riles and all the friends I met during that wonderful summer at Ithaca. I am very grateful to the Australia–China Council for awarding me the Australian Studies Competitive Projects Funding, the Foundation for Australian Studies in China for conference and travel grants, the Australasian Society for the History of Children and Youth Symposium for the travel bursary, and the Australian Children’s Literature Association for Research for the postgraduate student bursary. These generous funds enabled me to conduct research trips to Australia and present my work at national and international conferences. I thank the conference/symposium convenors, in particular David Carter, David Walker, Greg McCarthy, Duan Manfu, Kristine Moruzi, Anthony Eaton, Erica Hateley, and the audience for their helpful feedback. I am thankful to Julia Kuehn, Tim Gruenewald, and Anne Brewster for their generous reports on my PhD thesis, which encouraged me to turn it into a book manuscript. Portions of this book were published in Australian Aboriginal Studies (Issue 2, 2016), Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian / New Zealand Literature (Issue 30, Vol. 2, 2016), Ilha do Desterro: A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies (Vol. 69, No. 2, 2016),《澳大利亚文化研究》 (Australian Cultural Studies Vol. 2, 2016), and Australian Studies – Proceedings of the 15th International Conference of Australian Studies in China (Peking University Press, 2018). My thanks to the editors and publishers for giving me permission to reprint material here. I thank Rod Garlett for permission to use his painting “Noongar Boodja Wangkiny (Our Land is Talking)” for the cover and I thank Clive Barstow and Susan Starcken for kind assistance in accessing and reproducing this image from the art collection of Edith

xii Preface

Cowan University. I am very grateful to Bill Ashcroft for his generous comments and the endorsement for the book. I am indebted to Clare Bradford for taking time out of her busy schedule to write the endorsement. I owe grateful thanks to series editor, Anne Brewster, for her invaluable comments, advice and editing. I appreciate Laurel Plapp and Emma Clarke at Peter Lang for their meticulous work. Finally, I would like to express my greatest gratitude to my family. This book is dedicated to them for their constant love and support.

Introduction

Indigenous Cultural Capital The representations of Aboriginal life and cultures in Australian children’s books, throughout much of Australia’s post-contact history, have been plagued by racial stereotypes and prejudice, starting with Charlotte Barton’s A Mother’s Offering to Her Children (1841), the first children’s book produced in Australia. In a chapter entitled “Anecdotes of the Aborigines of New South Wales”, Barton’s depiction of Aboriginal people as uncivilised savages set an example for children’s books published during the second half of the nineteenth century (McVitty 7). While early Australian children’s literature had little Aboriginal presence, Aboriginal people were either depicted in ways “as formulaic as the description of countryside” or treated injuriously as abhorred villains whom young British settlers encountered in their journey to explore Australia’s vast terrain (Nimon 7; see also McVitty 9). From the last decade of the nineteenth century, the retellings of Aboriginal myths and legends found in Mary Fitzgerald’s King Bungaree’s Pyalla and Stories: Illustrative of Manners and Customs that Prevailed among Australian Aborigines (1891) and Kate Langloh Parker’s Australian Legendary Tales (1896), were among the first attempts to present Aboriginal stories for child readers. The interest in collecting and publishing traditional stories arose from the then prevalent assumption that Aboriginal people were soon dying out. Fictional writings throughout the first half of the twentieth century romanticised Aboriginal people as “noble savages”, alongside negative depictions where pejorative terms were applied. Bigoted views prevailed and the representation of Aboriginality centred on aspects that intensified racial otherness. Aboriginal characters in adventure stories, for instance, appeared in a subordinate role such as trackers who possessed superior knowledge of the natural world. The popular Bush

2 Introduction

Christmas (1947) in both the film and book form, as a case in point, featured an Aboriginal friend Neza who helped the white children through his “natural” talents. The 1960s saw a turning point in the publication of children’s literature on Aboriginal themes. Nan Chauncy’s Tangara (1960) was the first children’s book to address the massacres of Aboriginal people in Tasmania and Patricia Wrightson’s The Rocks of Honey (1960) marked the first novel to portray an Aboriginal child as the main character (Dunkle x). In the latter an Aboriginal boy, Eustace, searches for ancient knowledge of the land. From the 1960s onwards, literature that included Aboriginal motifs for children tended to bifurcate into two modes of expression. First, “realistic fantasies” manifested the sympathetic and more or less anti-colonial views on Aboriginal dispossession and loss (Foster 40). The second cluster of texts incorporated Aboriginal legendary figures and celebrated cross-cultural engagement. Books of this kind often expressed a nostalgic view – “going native” – manifested by indigenised white children who were fascinated by Aboriginal traditional beliefs and cultures. Compared to the idealised portrayal of Aboriginal people during the earlier decades of the twentieth century, who inevitably appeared childlike and superstitious, children’s books with romantic inclinations produced during this period were arguably less condescending in their attitudes (Foster 40–1). Throughout most of the twentieth century, even after the rise of Aboriginal social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, the retelling of Aboriginal traditional stories remained overwhelmingly dominated by non-Aboriginal authors (O’Conor, “Legends” 67).1 When Australia’s first Aboriginal book for children, The Legends of Moonie Jarl, written by Butchulla storyteller Wilf Reeves and illustrated by his sister Olga Miller, 1

David Unaipon’s manuscript recording the Dreaming stories of his Ngarrindjeri people in South Australia and some from other places was published by William Ramsay Smith with the title Myths & Legends of the Australian Aboriginals (1930) without acknowledging Unaipon’s authorship. Unaipon’s work, finally published in his name under the original title Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines (2001), is recognised as the first book written by an Aboriginal author and targeting a public readership.

Introduction

3

was published in 1964, it was received less favourably by mainstream readers than non-Aboriginal works, partly because the author’s and illustrator’s “part-Aboriginal” identity was perceived to diminish its authenticity. The 1970s began to see more books by Aboriginal authors retelling Dreaming stories, though reception was largely mediated by the mainstream publishing industry to satisfy non-Aboriginal readers (Bradford, Reading Race 166–7). Typical of the Aboriginal texts for children include Oodgeroo Noonuccal (formerly Kath Walker)’s Stradbroke Dreamtime (1972), Dick Roughsey’s The Giant Devil-Dingo (1973) and The Rainbow Serpent (1975). Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, Australian children’s literature has entered what John Foster has called “the true post-colonial period” (42). One of the most prominent factors was that a growing number of Aboriginal authors and illustrators joined in the production of children’s books, though non-Aboriginal authors still dominated this field. Along with a proliferation of Aboriginal life writings during this period, particularly the Stolen Generations narratives spearheaded by Sally Morgan’s My Place (1987), there was an expansion of children’s books with strong Aboriginal motifs. The legacy of earlier children’s books provoked Aboriginal writers to assert a distinct identity of being Aboriginal and articulate defiant voices against the continuing impact of colonialism. In Black Words, White Page (1989) Adam Shoemaker writes of Aboriginal authors’ motives in engaging in literary production: “The power and impressiveness of Aboriginal writing stems from the authors’ intimate knowledge of their subjects, their strong belief in what they are accomplishing through literature, and their socio-political involvement and awareness” (122). Aboriginal literature has never been divorced from political intent to advocate Aboriginal rights (even though this was not always the primary intent of the authors). The rise of Aboriginal literature promoted an increasing awareness among Aboriginal authors of the need to write for child readers too, as children’s books could be politically or ideologically charged in expressing social beliefs and values. Moreover, it was recognised that books for children are an important site that can carry non-conformist or revolutionary ideas and attitudes, hence they have a role to play in cultivating young minds with informed Aboriginal histories and cultural perspectives, in prompting reflection on racialised ideology

4 Introduction

and practices, and in nurturing a potentially transformative interracial relationship for the future. In the 1990s, the Mabo decision and the release of the Bringing Them Home report were defining moments in Australian race relations. In the decision of Mabo v Queensland (No. 2) made on 3 June 1992, the High Court overturned the assumption that Australia had been terra nullius (i.e. land belonging to no one) before colonisation, acknowledging Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ possession of the land prior to European settlement.2 The Mabo decision was a historical landmark for judicial recognition of native title and heralded a new era for Aboriginal cultural revitalisation. In May 1997, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s report of the National Inquiry into the removal and institutionalisation of Aboriginal children brought to the fore critical debates on Aboriginal histories and the redress of racial injustices. These two significant events, among other debates and exigencies on race relations, shook the nation to reformulate the relationship with Aboriginal people, fuelled the memory war concerning justice and responsibility, and boosted Aboriginal land reclamation and cultural revival. The unsettling of racialised ideologies and the hitherto dominant discourse has had a profound impact upon Aboriginal cultural and literary development. The post-Mabo era has witnessed a vigorous production of children’s books by both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal writers addressing the multiple legacies of European colonisation in Australia. This body of texts constitutes a counter-discursive agency engaging in “refusing, realigning, deconstructing the ‘master narrative’ of western history, by interrogating its tropes as well

2

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the First Nations of Australia or referred to as Indigenous Australians (the capitalised “Indigenous” is to distinguish them from indigenous people elsewhere). Given the fluidity of terms used in the literature and given the situations where Aboriginal groups prefer the term “Aboriginal” to “Indigenous”, in this book “Indigenous” and “Aboriginal” are used interchangeably. Unless otherwise indicated, the term “Aboriginal” is inclusive of Torres Strait Islanders, while I use “Indigenous” to make an overarching theoretical claim, for example “Indigenous cultural capital”. In the following chapters the names of specific Aboriginal language groups are also mentioned, such as Yolngu, Anangu, Murri, etc.

Introduction

5

as its content” (Tiffin 179). The texts construct a revisionist understanding of Aboriginal cultures and histories in realistic or imaginative modes of expression and apart from addressing themes such as Aboriginal land rights and Aboriginal child removal, they introduce Aboriginal words within the English texts, present polyphonic narratives in Aboriginal storytelling traditions, retell Dreaming stories by situating them within specific cultural contexts, and so forth. In the postcolonial context, children’s literature is not only of literary and educational significance, but to some extent culturally and politically strategic in the reflection and resolution of historical conflict. Clare Bradford comments in her seminal work Reading Race (2001) that “the history of Australian children’s literature reveals a gradual move away from the racist and uncomprehending representations of Aboriginality common in nineteenth-century texts, towards more informed and respectful treatments” (5). Focusing on the latest development of Australian children’s literature, this book examines postcolonial narratives in the texts featuring Aboriginal themes and characters produced from the late 1980s to the present, primarily in the post-Mabo era. These texts are written for or about children by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal writers across a wide range of genres including Dreaming stories, novels, autobiographies, picture books, textbooks and other reading materials. By drawing a chronological sketch of representations of Aboriginality in Australian books for children, I subsequently eschew a dehistoricised critique of postcolonial narratives so as to explore the intertwined race relations that are grounded in tempo-spatial specificities. As Ali Gummilya Baker and Gus Worby remind us of “the past in the present”, there remains a knotting of unsettling discourses and debates even after Mabo (22). The post-Mabo texts for children are not free from the remnants of colonial discourse and stereotyped images of Aboriginal people. Marcia Langton’s remarks in 1993 remain resonant in the critique of misrepresenting Aboriginal people by non-Aboriginal practitioners: “The densest relationship is not between actual people, but between white Australians and the symbols created by their predecessors” (“Well, I Heard It on the Radio and I Saw It on the Television” 33). To expose and eradicate the insidious implications of colonial ideology is a protracted project in a postcolonial reading of children’s books.

6 Introduction

To situate the discussion of children’s texts within a postcolonial study can hardly avoid reference to disciplinary contestation concerning the term “postcolonial”. The prefix “post-” in the word “postcolonial” originally implied a chronological state of independence from the colonial rule after the Second World War (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Post-Colonial Studies 186). It may also suggest a society that is “after colonialism” or cleared of the impacts of colonialism (Ashcroft, Post-Colonial 10). But neither of these interpretations is applicable to the postcolonial narratives discussed here, for Australia proclaimed its independence in 1901 and many Aboriginal people take issue with the term “postcolonial” as they argue that they remain trapped within a colonial society or the legacies of colonialism. In this book, the term “postcolonial” follows its specific set of meanings within literary theory, which is “understood as a discourse generating a specific reading practice” (Ashcroft, “Postcolonial Studies” 742). Writing of the representation of race in children’s texts, Bradford views the “postcolonial” as a perspective that “enables investigation of how children’s texts represent the experience of colonialism in the past and its effects in the present” (Unsettling 9). This underlines the necessity to interrogate and dismantle the sustained construct of colonial dominance that has been taken for granted in mainstream discourse. The discourse of postcolonialism does not nevertheless imply radical rejection of dominant discursive practices; as Anne Brewster contends, it “may well imply a continuing relationship and complicity with various forms of colonisation” (Literary 19). At this point, it is necessary to rethink the task of postcolonialism defined by Simon During as “the need, in nations or groups which have been the victims of imperialism, to achieve an identity uncontaminated by universalist or Eurocentric concepts and images” (125). Regarding the victimhood of the colonised, lest we conceive Aboriginal people as entirely deprived of agency in the post-contact history, it is worth valorising not only their reactions in resisting colonial oppression but also “their own internal agendas and forces that continue to interact with and modify the direct response to the colonial incursion” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, PostColonial Studies 189). Moreover, confrontation and co-existence between colonised and colonisers challenge the assumption of an “uncontaminated” identity of either Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal subjects in Australian

Introduction

7

settler society. Negating Aboriginal people’s cross-cultural engagement with strangers either before or after the European arrival lends power to an essentialist claim of cultural purity or authenticity. The postcolonial endeavour needs to distance itself from the binary opposition it aims to dismantle between authentic/uncontaminated and inauthentic/assimilated Aboriginality. While postcolonialism remains semantically ambiguous, it is meaningful to emphasise the primacy of the relationships between colonised and colonisers: no matter how we conceive of “the post-colonial,” and whatever the debates around the use of the problematic prefix “post” … the grounding of the term in European colonialist histories and institutional practices, and the responses (resistant or other­ wise) to these practices on the part of all colonized peoples, remain fundamental. (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Post-Colonial Studies 189)

Reading postcolonial discourse in the body of children’s literature, this book shares the crucial concerns of postcolonial studies in its aim to examine the effects of colonisation and institutional practices and to identify forms of articulation and resistance within the domination. To tease out the intricate race relations in a colonial/postcolonial context, Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of the “contact zone” remains useful. This refers to a “space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish relations that involve conditions of corrosion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict” (Pratt, Imperial 6). Though power relations can be highly asymmetrical within the contact zone, interactions of different ideas and practices give rise to multiple forms of transculturation. The transaction or exchange as a corollary of the clash of cultures is a two-way process, manifested not only through the colonisers’ forcible imposition of a power structure and appropriation of what belongs to the colonised, but also through the appropriation and adaption mobilised by colonised subjects of the dominant culture. For the latter, Pratt comments that “[w]hile subjugated peoples cannot readily control what emanates from the dominant culture, they do determine to varying extents what they absorb into their own, and what they use it for” (Imperial 6). In the interweaving of cultural practices, as colonised subjects make use of and familiarise themselves with the dominant language and

8 Introduction

culture, they impress and re-inscribe the dominant culture with their own perspectives so as to reaffirm their cultural identity and to resist, constrain, or even alter the institutional dominance. This counter influence in postcontact history underlines the agency of the colonised in their struggle for survival and the response of the affected colonial hegemony and authoritarian institutions to the different forms of resistance. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital, Bill Ashcroft in his foundational Post-Colonial Transformation (2001) suggests that the cultural capital presented by the colonisers is acquired, consumed, and used by the colonised as “a strategy of self-fashioning and self-representation” in their resistance to colonial hegemony (40). I will explicate the notion of cultural capital later. While stressing the colonised subjects’ capacity to appropriate “imperial culture … [as] a form of capital” for anti-colonial purposes, Ashcroft recognises that “the acquisition of cultural capital can, and often does, flow both ways” and produces mutual influence on different cultural entities (Post-Colonial 42, 43). The desirable elements of culture in the transaction not only mean those of the dominant culture which are disseminated from the colonisers to the colonised, but also include the cultural heritage of the colonised which is valued in one way or another by the colonisers. Ashcroft observes the counter current in cultural acquisition during the process of colonisation: “Europeans who ‘go native’ acquire the capital necessary to enter a different lifestyle, and the threat this offers to the universal dominance of imperial culture explains the hysteria with which such instances are often regarded by imperial society” (Post-Colonial 43). Early European settlers acquired (in ways that could be violent and non-consensual) Aboriginal knowledge and skills in order to adapt to their new environment. As much as they were surprised by the sophistication of Aboriginal society and traditions, they were also gripped by fear and feelings of threat of the mysterious, the unknown Other. The counter flow of Aboriginal cultures in settler society was seldom recognised or at best relegated to the realm of the exotic object – a mixture of “strangeness and familiarity” – to be assimilated under the colonisers’ gaze and yet kept at a distance to preserve its imagined authenticity (Huggan, Postcolonial Exotic 13). The “doomed race” theory prevailed in

Introduction

9

colonial times; as Denis Byrne points out, it was believed that “the natives could only ever be the passive recipients of European ways and products” and hence “with few exceptions the early observers failed to attend to the process by which Aborigines were recontextualising or Aboriginalising elements of European culture” (83). In opposition to a one-way traffic of cultural exchange, Stephen Muecke emphasises that Aboriginal people have actively engaged “from the start (if not very successful) in trying to teach, influence and assimilate the newcomers” (Ancient 6). This view throws light on a meaningful aspect of cross-racial engagement or in Nicholas Thomas’s term “entanglement” between the colonisers and the colonised, which is characterised by “mutual appropriation and unequal exchange on colonial peripheries” (3). In this regard, it remains crucial in the postcolonial context of Australia to acknowledge Aboriginal people’s capacity to incorporate European culture into their own and transform the evaluation of their cultures by the dominant settler society. Stemming from Aboriginal oral traditions of communication and knowledge transmission, Aboriginal writing in English emerged from the late eighteenth century – Bennelong’s letter in 1796, the first known English text by an Aboriginal author – and was manifested through a range of forms such as correspondence, journalism, petitions, and court testimonies (see van Toorn, “Indigenous Australian” 1). These agentic texts recognisable to Europeans enabled Aboriginal people to negotiate their interests for survival under a colonial regime. Katherine E. Russo theorises the ways in which the English language and writing are appropriated by Aboriginal authors for cultural and political empowerment as “practices of proximity” in the contact zone (8). Developing from sporadic and practical writings during early colonial periods to a proliferation of poetry, prose, autobiographies, fiction, drama and other diverse literary genres termed “Aboriginal literature” in recent decades, Aboriginal writings have been documenting the social transformation brought by colonisation and Aboriginal people’s entangled relations with settler Australians. As Aboriginal writer Anita Heiss notes, regarding how Aboriginal people have mobilised the act of writing in English to their own advantage: “We have now mastered the same language that was once used against us – ­describing us as barbaric and savage – and we have empowered ourselves to tell our stories, in our

10 Introduction

styles, for our people” (qtd in Australia Council 2). To appropriate the “master” language as a tool for communication and negotiation shifts the modes of resistance from a radical rejection to a pragmatic utilisation, opening up the opportunity for advancing Aboriginal perspectives for cultural renewal and disrupting the colonial expressions of power and authority. The efforts of deconstructing colonial discursive dominance are not only evident in the awareness of Aboriginal authors in mobilising the English language in their own interests but also manifested through their engagement with editors, publishers and other stakeholders in the literary field. Although Western conventions of editing and publishing still sometimes amount to a hurdle for Aboriginal authors especially so when the publisher’s marketing plan runs counter to the author’s intention, Robin Freeman comments, Aboriginal writers “have established a niche within the Australian book market” with increasing recognition from reviewers, critics, judges of literary awards, teachers, and readers of diverse backgrounds (“Black” 7). Alongside mainstream publishers which remain interested in publishing Aboriginal writings since the 1960s, the growth of Aboriginal publishers especially since the 1980s and 1990s have contributed to stronger voices and the status of Aboriginal writers as active practitioners in literary production. In the Anthology of Australian Aboriginal literature (2008), Anita Heiss and Peter Minter stress that “one of the persistent and now characteristic elements of Aboriginal literature” is “the nexus between the literary and the political” (2). Aboriginal writers are producing texts from a distinct aesthetic and cultural position and their writings cannot be separated from the broader Aboriginal socio-political movements. They are resonant with major events in the struggle for Aboriginal land rights, legal recognition, educational equality and better social welfare. As an effective means of getting Aboriginal perspectives across to the national or even international audience, writings by Aboriginal authors seek to unsettle the dominant discourse on race relations and to inform non-Aboriginal readers who are “increasingly sympathetic to Aboriginal cultural and political demands” (Heiss and Minter 6). Propelled by the significant rise of Aboriginal life narratives since the late 1980s, Aboriginal literature has manifested a great

Introduction

11

potential to produce an attitudinal change in institutional policies and mainstream opinions that support racial justice and Aboriginal empowerment. Ashcroft notes that the most effective resistance of colonised subjects by means of language and writing is “the entry into the ‘scene’ of colonization to reveal frictions of cultural difference, to actually make use of aspects of the colonizing culture so as to generate transformative cultural production” (Post-Colonial 47). Considering resistance within colonial domination, it is crucial to understand hegemony and its control over the space that the colonised inhabit, confront and resist. In practice hegemony is a formative process, rather than a unitary system or structure of dominance. Raymond Williams remarks that hegemony is always an “interconnection of otherwise separated and even disparate meanings, values, and practices”, which contains fissures, gaps, and possibilities for the operation of oppositional forces (115). It is “continually resisted, limited, altered, challenged by pressures not at all its own” (Williams 112). On the part of the colonised, to launch effective resistance hinges on an identification of the inherent constraints or limits of the hegemonic. The postcolonial endeavour sees colonised subjects gathering forces in the interstices of the dominant structure to produce counter impacts, thereby contributing albeit incrementally to a meaningful reconfiguration of hegemonic discourse and practices. The fractures and fissures in the dominant discourse bring to light the strategic, cross-racial engagement in the contact zone where Aboriginal efforts can operate for possible changes. To what extent then is Aboriginal empowerment helped or hindered by the articulating force of mainstream discourse and institutional practices? In what way can the awareness residing in mainstream discourse open up possibilities for Aboriginal people to intervene and channel their cultural perspectives? From this vantage point, there seems to exist an opening between the dominant discourse and oppositional expressions, suggestive of the possibility of solidarity and cooperation. While Aboriginal writings shall be given overdue recognition, it is pertinent to acknowledge that non-Aboriginal writers play a necessary part in the postcolonial enterprise. Historically non-Aboriginal writers have produced and often inadvertently reinforced stereotypical representations of Aboriginality, but many also demonstrate well-intentioned interests in

12 Introduction

their consideration of Aboriginal issues as an integral part of Australian history and social relations. The postcolonial narratives in their works critique mainstream sentiments and opinions. These books, supportive of Aboriginal causes, are no less likely to push for a possible attitudinal change among a general readership which in turn benefits Aboriginal communities. Moreover, according to Langton, the historical and social formation of Aboriginality involves inter-cultural and inter-subjective experiences. It is “a naive belief that Aboriginal people will make ‘better’ representations of us, simply because being Aboriginal gives ‘greater’ understanding” (Langton, “Well, I Heard It on the Radio and I Saw It on the Television” 27). Binary oppositions or the attempt to exclude opinions from either side would lend power to the representation of Aboriginality as “undifferentiated Other”, which homogenises distinct and diverse Aboriginal cultural and language groups by disregarding their differences in geographical locations, gender, sex, and socio-economic status (Langton, “Well, I Heard It on the Radio and I Saw It on the Television” 27). With no intention to understate the complexity of writing about Aboriginality arising from different literary traditions, histories and experiences, and varying access to knowledge between Aboriginal groups and Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal writers, or to conflate disparate voices and interests among writers, this book hence considers postcolonial narratives in children’s books written by authors from Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal backgrounds.3 To discuss further the interface between articulations of Aboriginal cultures and the dominant discourse in the field of cultural and literary production, and much inspired by Ashcroft’s examination of cultural capital in the colonial/postcolonial contexts, I now return to Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital in reading postcolonial texts written for children. As children’s literature is acknowledged to be an effective vehicle for transmitting cultural capital, postcolonial narratives in Australian children’s books enable implied readers access to Aboriginal heritage – a rich cultural repository

3

Unless otherwise specified, Aboriginal children’s books refer to texts written by Aboriginal authors, and books with Aboriginal themes include texts written by Aboriginal and/or non-Aboriginal writers.

Introduction

13

of knowledge, history and value, which brings with it the possibility of acculturation. This cumulative process of acquisition, as I intend to argue, emerges as an embodiment of cultural capital as theorised by Bourdieu but carries an alternative, anti-colonial force. Cultural capital, in such forms as knowledge, skills, and educational qualifications, refers to cognitive acquisition and competence in deciphering cultural codes. The concept of cultural capital was initially developed by Bourdieu in his research with Jean-Claude Passeron during the 1960s to explain the reproduction of social structures and resources through the education system in France. In “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction” (1973), Bourdieu attributes the function of the education system in the social reproduction of power and symbolic relationships to the system’s sanctioning of cultural capital which is distributed unevenly between social classes (71). For Bourdieu, cultural capital is first and foremost inherited through the family. Though designed to provide equal opportunities for children from different social backgrounds, the schooling system in effect reproduces and intensifies the unequal distribution of cultural capital between different classes and class fractions “by proportioning academic success to the amount of cultural capital bequeathed by the family” (Bourdieu, “Cultural Reproduction” 86). While the dominant classes possess more cultural and economic resources to acquire cultural capital, the more cultural capital they have, the more likely they can achieve scholastic success and thereby their power and privilege is reinforced. As an integral part of capital, cultural capital can be convertible to other forms of capital as classified by Bourdieu, namely economic capital and social capital (“Forms” 243). In this respect, through academic approval and legitimation, “the cultural and educational mechanisms of transmission [have] … strengthened or taken over from the traditional mechanisms such as the hereditary transmissions of economic capital, of a name, or of capital in terms of social relations” and serve as a reproduction strategy to transmit capital in a less constrained or censored manner (Bourdieu, “Cultural Reproduction” 85). Therefore cultural capital, as an agency at the intersection of educational and social domains, contributes to the complex and dynamic interplay between knowledge transmission and the reproduction of social power relations.

14 Introduction

Bourdieu’s theory has been criticised for economic reductionism and presupposing the notion of capital (Guillory 6).4 Nevertheless, for Bourdieu, capital is in essence the agency for individuals or groups to gain operating power in a specific field where such capital is valued (“Forms” 241; see also Hage qtd in Zournazi 153). Cultural capital in general designates how the ways of learning and thinking practised primarily by the dominant (middle or upper) classes are pursued or sought after by lower classes to gain power and social mobility. The logic of distinction is at the core of cultural capital, as Bourdieu puts it: “cultural competence (e.g. being able to read in a world of illiterates) derives a scarcity value from its position in the distribution of cultural capital and yields profits of distinction for its owner” (“Forms” 245). Cultural capital transforms the distinctive value of embodied or possessed cultural knowledge into an agency for personal empowerment in the process of cultural and social reproduction. Cultural capital is identified by three interlocking states as defined by Bourdieu: first, the embodied or internalised state, such as acquisition or inculcation of culture and knowledge through body and labour; second, the objectified form of culture or cultural goods (e.g. books, musical instruments), which signify material and symbolical value; third, the institutionalised form (e.g. educational qualifications), which suggests that a recognised institution endows cultural competence or material manifestation with a status of legitimation on account of its symbolic and distinctive value (Forms” 243–8). In this light, cultural capital in children’s books consists of three fundamental aspects: first, the acquisition of desirable forms of knowledge, values, and ideologies through cumulative interactions between child readers and books; second, the incorporation of or writing 4

Bourdieu deploys terms such as “economic”, “interest”, and “profit” to describe their operation in cultural and literary production; however, his theory does not reduce varying cultural practices to the economic in a narrow sense, that is, commercial buying and selling. In Distinction (1984), Bourdieu argues that “[t]here is an economy of cultural goods, but it has a specific logic” (1). He suggests that the field of cultural production may concur with the logic of the economic, but the autonomy of the field is still governed by the logic developed within a specific field, for example, art for art’s sake.

Introduction

15

about culture and knowledge so that they can be embodied and transmitted as cultural capital through books for children; third, institutional acts of legitimation, as an important means to formulate cultural capital, through which the writer’s work (together with represented or incorporated cultural values and ideologies) can be recognised, disseminated, and preserved for generations of readers. Institutions that occupy prominent positions in the field of literature and culture play an important role in mediating or governing the production of distinctive value. Here, the term institution follows the use by Bourdieu, as John Thompson explains in his introduction to Bourdieu’s Language and Symbolic Power (1991): Bourdieu is using the term “institution” in a way that is both very general and active (a sense conveyed better by the French term institution than by its English equivalent). An institution is not necessarily a particular organization … but any relatively durable set of social relations which endows individuals with power, status and resources of various kinds. (8; italics in original)

The functional institution in the field of literary production has the power to consecrate or valorise writers and their works. Institutional legitimation involves a broad process of judgement and evaluation, such as publishing, editing, reviewing, teaching, the awarding of prizes and related events through which the value embodied in the books can be recognised, transmitted, and reproduced as cultural capital available to implied readers (see Bourdieu, Field 42; Huggan, Postcolonial Exotic 5). From this perspective, cultural capital is not simply concerned with cultural entities per se but a dynamic process in which a certain culture can be transmitted and expanded through institutional regimes of value production. The theoretical model of cultural capital, derived from Bourdieu’s systematic study of social and cultural practices, proves useful in analysing the nexus between institutional practices and cultural transmission. Cultural capital, as Graham Huggan suggests, is helpful to examine “how postcolonial writers/thinkers operate within an overarching, if historically shifting, field of cultural production” (Postcolonial Exotic 5). This book focuses on the formation of cultural capital through books with Aboriginal themes and through the interaction between writers

16 Introduction

and institutions that legitimate the value in writers’ works. Considering a postcolonial reading of children’s literature, I propose that Aboriginal cultures and histories embodied and transmitted in the field of children’s literature can be termed “Indigenous cultural capital”, with a purpose of exploring how Aboriginal cultural knowledge is deployed and represented in books for children. Indigenous cultural capital encompasses a broad scope of Aboriginal cultural and intellectual manifestations from the historical heritage to more recent developments in Aboriginal stories, songs, paintings, artefacts, social customs, religious beliefs and rituals, which are valued and transmitted in the public domain. Though by no means unproblematic in this sensitive field, the embodiment, operation, and transmission of Indigenous cultural capital in and through children’s books manifests the popularity of writing about Aboriginality and the rise of Aboriginal authorial agency in literary production. From this perspective, I intend to examine how Indigenous cultural capital can be directed to achieving Aboriginal empowerment and the enrichment of Australian young readers. This concept extends Bourdieu’s cultural capital to Aboriginal cultures and theorises the cultural capacity of the dominated in postcolonial, crossracial negotiations. There is no intention to ignore class ramifications and the associated socio-economic statuses of Aboriginal Australians; nonetheless, it is beyond the scope of this book to investigate the distribution of Indigenous cultural capital within Aboriginal communities and the varying situations of individual social mobility resulting from the acquisition of Indigenous cultural capital. To be specific, this book examines the deployment of Indigenous cultural capital from the following aspects: the representation of Aboriginal cultures within the books, which is available as a form of cultural capital for child readers to acquire; the institutional legitimation of Aboriginal cultures from the books, which produces Indigenous cultural capital through channels such as literary reviews, prizes, paratexts, and school curricula; and the ethical issues confronted by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal writers in writing about Aboriginal themes and motifs as a way to accumulate Indigenous cultural capital in their writing careers. The theoretical framework of Indigenous cultural capital offers a fresh perspective to explore postcolonial resistance and transformation within

Introduction

17

the field of cultural and literary production by both Indigenous and nonIndigenous practitioners. The inculcation of Indigenous cultural knowledge as Indigenous cultural capital through children’s books is significant in an educational and socio-cultural sense. Historically the erasure or devalorisation of Aboriginal knowledge and cultures in school education reproduced racial discrimination and contributed to the widening gap between Aboriginal and nonAboriginal students in academic performance. Aboriginal education began to emerge from the 1980s with a focus on the education of Aboriginal children (which was commonly referred to as “Aboriginal studies”) and gradually expanded to the education about Aboriginal cultures and perspectives for both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children. Since the 2000s the prominent progress has been made to incorporate Aboriginal perspectives into school curricula nationwide and to value the cultural inheritance that Aboriginal students bring to the class. The recognition of Aboriginal cultural value though the schooling system promotes and also is supported by the increasing publication of books, especially those produced by Aboriginal authors, which are intended to present Aboriginal life and histories to school children. As Aboriginal writer and political activist Jim Everett urges: it is imperative for Aborigines to write; write for children … Aboriginal writers must, of course, use English when writing, they must also use English procedures when writing. … This should be done with a view towards gaining for Aboriginal literary expression a just recognition of validity in the white education system. (97)

The recognition by and within educational schemes is among the most important institutional means of legitimation and enables Indigenous cultural knowledge to be elevated into a form of cultural capital available to young minds and valued by a wider public. For individuals, cultural capital is constitutive of what Bourdieu calls habitus, “a system of lasting, transposable dispositions which, integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions” (Outline 82–3; emphasis in original). Through inculcation and embodiment, Indigenous cultural capital is transformed and internalised into the individual’s habitus, thereby shaping their worldview, opinions, and

18 Introduction

behaviour vis-à-vis racial issues. Through instilling an informed understanding of Aboriginal histories and cultural knowledge into younger generations in the long run, the reproduction of racism can potentially be dismantled and a social structure that is less racially exclusionary be installed. To explicate the transformative possibility offered by Indigenous cultural capital in postcolonial discourse, it is necessary to untangle the conceptual connections between Indigenous cultural capital and cultural capital in general. In cultural and social reproduction, cultural capital is concerned with the way in which desirable forms of knowledge and values are acquired and transmitted. It is conducive to the reproduction of socially valued ideologies and dominant power relations. Following this logic, colonial hegemony and racialised ideology are reproduced and naturalised in mainstream discourse. However, this does not mean that cultural capital cannot be modified and reconfigured. Cultural capital is always defined by its historical and social specificity and shaped by negotiations between different cultural entities and power relations. Communication and hybridisation of disparate cultures are evident in the entanglement between colonised and colonisers. The reproductive nature of cultural capital is therefore better construed as a tendency to reinforce certain cultural aspects transmitted through a series of recognised modes, but not necessarily to perpetuate one particular culture. The hegemonic discourse where cultural capital is formed and accumulated, as previously discussed, always attempts to confront and assimilate heterogeneous or oppositional thoughts and practices to reinforce or modify the dominant ideology, thereby maintaining its superiority and dominant control. In this sense, cultural capital in general consists of an agglomerate of existing cultural elements and newly emerged alternative or even oppositional elements. The latter, the same as the relatively stable and core components, also inherits the self-productive and renewal capacity to engage in the process of transmission. In the postcolonial contact zone, it is meaningful to examine the marginal, contingent changes at the edge of cultural capital production wherein Aboriginal cultural knowledge and values are transmitted through recognised modes and evaluative mechanisms with the effect that Indigenous voices can be heard in Australian settler society. The notion of Indigenous cultural capital designates emergent dissenting

Introduction

19

voices within public discourse and signifies the possibility of reconfiguring existing cultural capital and impacting on its discriminatory operation that privileges colonial racialised ideology. In a theoretical sense, the relationship between Indigenous cultural capital and cultural capital in general describes postcolonial resistance and disruption that take place inside the field of cultural and literary reproduction. From this perspective, the notion of Indigenous cultural capital adopts a strategy of “abrogation and appropriation” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Empire 37–8).5 On the one hand, by presenting and reinscribing Aboriginal life and histories as a counter discourse, Indigenous cultural capital signifies an abrogation or disavowal of colonial discourse and its privilege of speaking from the centre. On the other, derived from the Western theoretical framework of cultural capital, this concept suggests a proactive utilisation of the dominant regimes of recognition to re-assert Aboriginal cultural value and to spread Aboriginal cultural and political messages to a wider Australian society. It underpins the active presence of Aboriginal cultural heritage in cross-cultural entanglement and recognises Aboriginal authorial agency which can be operated to further Aboriginal interests. Its operation in the postcolonial context reveals the limits of dominant forces and suggests a transformative possibility to avoid passive subjugation to colonial hegemony and to effect an attitudinal change in settler society. The circulation of Aboriginal cultural knowledge is not always appropriate and respectful; in fact, there have been many cases of appropriation and of the reproduction of racial stereotypes. Considering the deployment of Indigenous cultural capital, we should try to avoid the tendency of economic reductionism which endorses the attempt to convert Indigenous cultures into capital and that of cultural reification which reduces the culture to fixed or material expressions. At this point, it is necessary to clarify “capital” in the term “Indigenous cultural capital” and to reconsider the 5 In Empire Writes Back (2002) the terms “abrogation” and “appropriation” refer to the textual strategies in postcolonial writing. Abrogation suggests a refusal of the privilege of English as a dominant language and a rejection of its implied social relations. Appropriation means a proactive approach in which English is mobilised by the colonised to express local experiences in a vernacular style.

20 Introduction

intertwined power relations in the field of cultural production. Capital is both historically associated with colonisation and politically indispensable in the struggle against domination. During the colonial period, capital was the primary impetus and vehicle in colonial expansions on a global scale and signified a concentration of colonial power and resources. For Aboriginal people though, capital was (and in many ways continues to be) exploitative and instrumental in dispossessing them of ancestral land and depriving them of Aboriginal ways of living. However, the logic of capital needs to be examined as to some extent being distinct from colonial dominance. According to Bourdieu, capital is “accumulated labor” with “a potential capacity to produce profits and to reproduce itself ” (“Forms” 241). Engaging in social production, Aboriginal people are among the social agents accumulating labour and, to an extent, capable of gaining and exploiting the resultant material or symbolic profits. There is no denying that Aboriginal movements against colonial dominance involve, and have to mobilise, forms of capital to varying extents. The question remains as to how effectively capital can be mobilised as a vehicle to dismantle colonial power and hegemonic control. Aboriginal societies have been involved in economic exchange, barter, and trade for many centuries. It would be wrong to assume that Aboriginal people’s trading histories could not provide resources for an engagement with capital. Ignoring indigenous economies or imposing “unitary conceptions of indigenous economies”, as Thomas argues, fails to recognise their “entanglement with other systems such as capitalist trade” (4). In challenging the ahistorical view of seeing Aboriginal life and cultures as being ancient and archaic, Muecke exemplifies Aboriginal people’s “capital involvement” in the market economy (e.g. Noel Pearson’s initiatives of Cape York Partnerships) as “indigenous capitalism” (Ancient 103, 104). According to Muecke, this form of capitalism – which retains its roots in Aboriginal traditions – is responsive to the changing situations in settler society. As “a way of being [it] will be specific to the recourses and needs of a place and … one’s conduct will be informed by responsibility specific to that place” (Muecke, Ancient 103–4). The use of capital by Aboriginal communities is a potent sign of “indigenous modernity” as argued by Muecke, which is “a predisposition to (both) resistance and adaptation to the rapid changes

Introduction

21

introduced by invasion and colonisation” (Muecke, Ancient 5). Although indigenous capitalism would inexorably encounter a backlash or “moral pressure” from the dissidents who disapprove of a capitalist solution to the socio-economic problems in Aboriginal communities, Muecke suggests that “Indigenous capitalism is itself a symbol of a new way forward” (Ancient 104). In the light of Aboriginal people’s longstanding trading histories and contemporary initiatives, their link with capital in diverse forms and practices is not only historically significant but also suggests that Aboriginal cultures are neither inherently at odds with capital nor entirely opposed to changes in social economies. Aboriginal people can hardly stay away from the reach of capital as both a part of social existence and enabling agency. Speaking of the complex nature of capital, Stuart Hall reminds us that “[i]t has always been able to work between the different ethnically- and racially-inflected labor forces. So that notion of the overarching, ongoing, totally rationalizing, [sic] has been a very deceptive way of persuading ourselves of the totally integrative and all-absorbent capacities of capital itself ” (29). Despite the permeable and expansive nature of capital, it is important to discern the limits of its concentration if any possible power of resistance can be deployed. From this perspective, the notion of Indigenous cultural capital resists the assumption of capitalist essentialism without rejecting the notion of capital. Its implicit relationship with the framework of capital which is indelibly Eurocentric renders it “tactical” in Michel de Certeau’s sense of a form of resistance within a larger field of capital (34). To shed light on the operation of intervening forces, de Certeau defines the tactic as “a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus” (37). A tactical attack claims no space other than that of the enemy and, as “an art of the weak”, it gambles on the right timing for a breakthrough (de Certeau 37). This logic underpins the operation of Indigenous cultural capital which occurs within an inclusive field of capital. In its form, Indigenous cultural capital is defined and manipulated by Western regimes and institutional practices. Nevertheless, its capacity for Aboriginal empowerment and its redistributive effects work to neutralise to some extent the colonial bias historically embedded in the structure of capital. By mobilising and reproducing the subtle but meaningful resistance within the fissures or splits of the field

22 Introduction

of capital, Indigenous cultural capital can be conceptually adaptable and resilient to colonial dominance. It is necessary to add that the field of capital continues to be uneven and power-laden. To perceive Indigenous cultural capital as a tactical resistance is not simply to theorise a counter force with the automatic effect to rebalance the field. Nevertheless, in reconsidering the valuable repository of Indigenous culture and knowledge as a form of cultural capital, it is possible to examine how its recognition affects the reproduction of cultural capital in general and works for Aboriginal self-empowerment to resist stigmatisation and silencing by colonial discourse. Langton stresses that the fundamental task at this stage of the postcolonial project is “the need to develop a body of knowledge on representation of Aboriginal people and their concerns … and a critical perspective to do with aesthetics and politics” through an inclusive strategy “drawing from Aboriginal worldviews, from Western traditions and from history” (“Well, I Heard It on the Radio and I Saw It on the Television” 28). This view underpins this book’s theorisation of Indigenous cultural capital which draws on the Western framework of capital and cultural capital in a postcolonial context and values Aboriginal cultural traditions and perspectives in their engagement with mainstream discourse and power relations. The process whereby Indigenous cultural capital is facilitated by institutional legitimation and transmitted in public discourse addresses its inherent ambiguity. In this regard, the function of institutional practices and marketing schemes is double-edged. On the one hand, institutional mechanisms of value production confer recognition and legitimation, which is indispensable for the formation and expansion of Indigenous cultural capital. On the other, the gaining of institutional legitimation unavoidably subjugates Aboriginal writers and works to the dominant regimes of selection, production and consumption, the implications of which may render Indigenous cultural capital less politically effective and resistant to racialised dominance. The paradoxical process of value production in postcolonial projects, from a theoretical perspective, alludes to the inextricable relations between postcolonialism and postcoloniality. As Huggan explicates the difference and similarity between these two terms: postcolonialism encompasses an array of diversely structured views, spaces and

Introduction

23

temporalities that are subsumed under the anti-colonial banner, whereas postcoloniality tends to be “a value-regulating mechanism” in which “the language of resistance may be manipulated and consumed” (Postcolonial Exotic 6). Whilst the anti-colonial commitment in postcolonialism would suggest a boycott of commodification, postcoloniality, which functions in the value exchange of symbols, may suggest otherwise by manufacturing and circulating the cultural products pertaining to others in the market. These seemingly opposed ideas are “entangled” in practice since postcolonial resistance cannot be entirely separated from or unaffected by the modes of consumption and production (Huggan, Postcolonial Exotic 6). Postcolonialism conflicts with and yet implicates postcoloniality in searching for responses to racial domination. The operation of Indigenous cultural capital encapsulates such ambivalence and connections in the postcolonial endeavour. It subverts colonial regimes and their reproduction via the ways in which it engages dynamically with institutional structures and is facilitated by mechanisms of value exchange for expansion and transmission. In relation to the regime of evaluation and market-oriented practices, there is a rich literature on the appropriation and consumption of Aboriginal cultures by settler society.6 Huggan critiques the process in which the language of indigenous resistance and marginality is transmuted

6

For example, Nicholas Thomas in Entangled Objects (1991) traces European appropriation and collection of indigenous artefacts and objects (125–84); Mitchell Rolls in “The Sacred Savage” (PhD thesis, 1998) discusses the appropriation of Aboriginal spiritual beliefs, notably the Dreaming, and other cultural traits in literature and art; Eric Michaels in Bad Aboriginal Art (1994) questions evaluation standards regarding the “authenticity” of Aboriginal paintings (143–64); Terrie Goldie in Fear and Temptation (1989) discusses how indigenous cultures are appropriated to fulfill the Westerners’ need of becoming “native” to a foreign land (16); Harry Allen in his article “History Matters” (1988) offers a critical perspective on the construction of Australia’s historical continuum by “grafting white culture directly onto an Aboriginal root” (83); from the perspective of archaeology, Byrne in his article “Deep Nation: Australia’s Acquisition of an Indigenous Past” (1996) argues that Aboriginal artefacts – the reified past of Aboriginal culture – became a form of cultural capital not only for collectors to lift their social positions but also for the state to build up the national identity (93–4).

24 Introduction

into cultural products “available for commercial exploitation, and as signs within a larger semiotic system: the postcolonial exotic” (Postcolonial Exotic xvi). While this book is indebted to Huggan and other scholars’ criticism of value production in postcolonial texts, the proposition of Indigenous cultural capital points to a departure from the theory of exoticism (as discussed in such fields as anthropology, tourism, multiculturalism) through discerning both constraining factors and possible openings in postcolonial projects and in particular by revealing Aboriginal agency in their engagement with institutional and marketing schemes for self-assertion and self-empowerment. In a general sense, no writer can be above the market and books are always cultural commodities as long as they are meant to be read by a public. But writers have their own autonomy in a commercial environment. So do Aboriginal authors in their pursuit of cultural revitalisation through the act of writing. Aboriginal people have gone through a lengthy history of dealing with institutional policies and a market-driven economy and their cultures have survived and continue to thrive today. To an extent, institutionally distributed and marketed literary works promote an understanding of Aboriginality that could be otherwise difficult to access for many urbanised settler Australians, and the potential to inform a wider public community about Aboriginal causes should not be dismissed. Considering an increasing presence of Aboriginal authorial agency and social readiness for a reconfigured cultural capital, Indigenous cultural capital can perhaps resist or withstand capitalist exploitation, even if the cultural expressions cannot be separated from institution-facilitated commercial production in a postcolonial context. Moreover, the relations between the postcolonial project and the logic of the market economy, as reflected in the production of children’s books where Indigenous cultural capital is deployed, deserve a genre-based analysis. Children’s literature has an evidently educational (if not didactic) function. Many Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal writers for children are conscious of the cultural and ideological significance of fostering an informed understanding of Aboriginality among younger generations. Given this, the argumentation of Indigenous cultural capital here does not dwell much on critiquing the appropriation of Aboriginal cultures for

Introduction

25

profitable capital in the cultural market. Rather, Indigenous cultural capital is considered as an active form of capital valued in the field of children’s books, being limited by and making tactical use of institutional means for wider recognition and transmission. This notion prevents a passive cooption with institutional mechanisms and an easy assumption of inherent resistance to colonial dominance. By recognising Aboriginal cultural values, Indigenous cultural capital transmitted through the postcolonial narratives of children’s literature can be seen as a re-orientation of cultural capital pertaining to how Aboriginal life and cultures are conceived by the Australian public. The transformative process occurs when mainstream discourse is mediated by Aboriginal counter discourse in the postcolonial contact zone. The “confrontation and incorporation” between the dominant and the dominated is a process of mutual intellection, translation and convergence (Huggan, Postcolonial Exotic 27). This contentious process does not necessarily assimilate or undermine an Aboriginal discourse of resistance; on the contrary, it may open up the possibility for an oppositional, anti-colonial discourse to interrogate and even to subvert existing dominant codes, which ultimately reconfigures cultural capital in general in cultural and social reproduction. In this sense, as children’s literature is often invested by authors with a message of hope to young readers – the adults of tomorrow – Indigenous cultural capital re-orients knowledge of race relations and exercises a critical optimism that regards the circulation of Aboriginal cultures as an empowerment rather than merely an act of appropriation surrendered to hierarchical regimes for commodity exchange. Therefore, this book advances a new theoretical perspective to postcolonial readings of Australian children’s literature. Some of its guiding questions are: What is Indigenous cultural capital as it is represented in Australian children’s books with Aboriginal themes, and how do these expressions challenge colonial assumptions and dominant ideology? How do institutions legitimate the value that Indigenous cultural capital is based on and what kind of role do institutions play in the transmission of such cultural capital? In this process, how do Aboriginal writers adapt institutional mechanisms of evaluation and make use of Indigenous cultural capital that accrues through such dominant regimes? What ethical questions

26 Introduction

arise from the deployment of Indigenous cultural capital and how are they addressed in the representations of Aboriginality in children’s texts? What kind of interests and positions do Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal writers hold respectively and collectively in their treatment of Aboriginal cultural elements? Considering Indigenous intellectual property rights and cultural protocols, what is a possible ethical approach for non-Aboriginal writers in deploying Indigenous cultural capital? Part I – Chapters 1 and 2 – addresses how Indigenous cultural capital is deployed and manifested through Aboriginal themes in children’s books. The first chapter focuses on Aboriginal perceptions of land and country, a fundamental theme that evokes Indigenous cultural capital, in fictional and non-fictional texts published in the post-Mabo era. Considering the picture books Maralinga: The Anangu Story (2009) and Papunya School Book of Country and History (2001) which recount the Anangu people’s history of displacement and survival, this chapter shows how the narratives of decolonising landscape and reinscribing Aboriginal perspectives of country and history unsettle the colonial assumption of Australia as terra nullius and its peaceful settlement as found in the master narratives of Australian historiography. This chapter also analyses how the fiction – Crow Country (2011) and Gracey (1994) by non-Aboriginal authors Kate Constable and James Moloney respectively, and Jimmy and Pat Meet the Queen (1997) created collaboratively by white writer Pat Lowe and Walmajarri artist Jimmy Pike – engage historical and contemporary territorial disputes to inform young readers of Aboriginal land rights and their continuing efforts to re-establish connection to country. The second chapter examines the formation and circulation of Indigenous cultural capital in and through testimonial and autobiographical narratives of the Stolen Generations. This chapter first investigates the operation of a dialectical mechanism of remembering and forgetting in the development of the Stolen Generations narratives. In light of the inherent ambiguity in memories and the limits of genres, this chapter then considers Aboriginal autobiographies – Lowitja O’Donoghue’s Lowitja (2003), Doris Kartinyeri’s Kick the Tin (2000) and Nancy Barnes’s Munyi’s Daughter: A Spirited Brumby (2000), which present multifaceted, living memories of Aboriginal child removal and institutionalisation. The evoked Indigenous

Introduction

27

cultural capital showcases the potent force of Aboriginal life writings in breaking through the imposed apparatus of selection and consumption to gain a wider recognition of Aboriginal history, the rights disregarded and the ensuing suffering. Part II addresses institutional legitimation which confers consecration on Aboriginal writers/works and yet submits them to a set of non-­Aboriginal standards and marketing agendas. Since the regimes of evaluation do not necessarily subvert the autonomy of Aboriginal writers who engage a range of readers and audiences with distinctive Aboriginal storytelling traditions, Part II, consisting of Chapters 3 and 4, explores how Indigenous cultural capital is accrued and mobilised by Aboriginal writers to intervene in, limit, or even modify institutional modes of recognition. Chapter 3 examines the institutional practices enacted by book reviews, literary prizes, and paratextual devices which simultaneously promote and constrain the circulation of Indigenous cultural capital in post­colonial literary production. This chapter begins by tracing the reviewing history of the first Aboriginal children’s book The Legends of Moonie Jarl, written by Wilf Reeves and illustrated by Olga Miller, which was first published by Jacaranda Press in 1964 and republished by the Indigenous Literacy Foundation (ILF) in 2014. This example unfolds the ambivalent role of book reviews in the formation of Indigenous cultural capital and the act of r­ e-using book reviews to promote Aboriginal narratives and storytelling traditions. The second section of this chapter focuses on the history of the Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) Book of the Year Awards, the earliest and most influential prize for children’s books in Australia. Through examining the CBCA’s long-held interest in books with Aboriginal subject matter, this section seeks to explore in what ways the honour or prestige of the CBCA awards dis/empowers Aboriginal authors and how Aboriginal authors and professionals mobilise the cultural capital generated by prizes to unsettle, challenge, and alter the codes of consecration. The third section is concerned with the critical function of the paratext in literary legitimation and value production. It discusses two editions of Arone Raymond Meeks’ picture book Enora and the Black Crane, published by Ashton Scholastic in 1991 and by Magabala Books in 2009, examining how the dominant regimes of value production mediate the Aboriginal text for

28 Introduction

a white readership and how the Aboriginal author and publisher direct the very cultural capital accrued through the institutional legitimation in the paratextual space to their own advantage. Then, considering Bronwyn Bancroft’s Possum and Wattle: My Big Book of Australian Words (2008), this section further analyses the possibility for a transformed paratextual space in which Indigenous cultural capital could be operated to consolidate Aboriginal authorial authority and the collaboration between Aboriginal writers in the production of children’s books. Chapter 4 directs attention to the critical function of educational schemes in endorsing and disseminating Indigenous cultural capital. This chapter begins with a historical overview of the development of Indigenous education: from the decades-long omission of Aboriginal affairs and voices from school curricula, which caused difficulties in navigating the learning interests of Aboriginal students who confronted the Western educational paradigm, to the recent comprehensive approach of incorporating Indigenous perspectives as the cross-curricula priority. Against this background, this chapter examines two sets of School Readers informed by ideologies of different historical periods – Queensland School Readers issued by the Department of Public Instruction in Queensland from 1915 to the 1970s and the series of Indij Readers published between 2003 and 2012. It argues that through the school texts produced by Aboriginal writers and artists, the embodied Indigenous cultural capital can be acquired, utilised, and transmitted through the schooling system which once ignored and undervalued this body of knowledge. The ethics of deploying Indigenous cultural capital when writing about Aboriginal stories, including Dreaming stories and Aboriginal life experiences, is discussed in Part III, which is the concluding chapter. Drawing on theories of the gift to reconsider the historical indebtedness of settler Australians to Aboriginal cultural heritage, this chapter conceptualises Aboriginal cultural elements deployed in literary creation as a form of gift given by Aboriginal custodians to writers. This cultural gift does not suggest an intended or concrete act of giving but adopts a historically corrective view to acknowledge Aboriginal prior agency of initiating a metaphorical gift exchange and the ethical obligation of writers – both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal – to reciprocate. Particularly, this chapter investigates the

Introduction

29

ethical issues confronted by non-Aboriginal writers like Patricia Wrightson, Phillip Gwynne, James Moloney and Kate Constable, with a purpose of identifying the possibility of a caring and respectful position on the part of non-Aboriginal writers to reciprocate the Aboriginal gift metaphorically through their books for children. The ethics of reciprocity, offering a balanced consideration of self-interest and the interest of others in the mediation of relations between Aboriginal knowledge holders and writers and between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal writers. The collaborative relationship between Aboriginal storyteller Boori Monty Pryor and non-Aboriginal writer Meme McDonald offers an example of reciprocity by acknowledging Indigenous communal ownership of cultural stories. Considering the pertinent copyright issues, this chapter suggests that the morality of gift exchanges, which reproduces mutual understanding, respect and acknowledgement, offers a possible solution to the dilemma of non-Aboriginal writers in representing Aboriginality and a non-legislative approach to the protection of Indigenous collective ownership of cultural heritage. Indigenous cultural capital suggests an optimism of knowledge formation in re-orienting the cultural capital vis-à-vis race relations. This process involves an active engagement of Aboriginal writers in their struggle for literary legitimation and the ethical concerns of non-Aboriginal writers in literary representation of Aboriginality. Though the deployment of Indigenous cultures can be compromised by appropriation and exploitation, this book contends that Indigenous cultural capital in children’s literature empowers Aboriginal voices and enriches younger generations with a transformative vision of Aboriginal cultures and histories in the postcolonial context.

Part I

Chapter 1

Decolonised Landscape: Aboriginal Connection to Country

In postcolonial narratives, landscape can be as much cultural and political as it is geographical. It is inextricably linked with notions of place and space, home and habitation, frontiers and transgressions of the boundary between Aboriginal communities and a white settler society. Literary representations of the Australian landscape are implicated in territorial disputes between colonisers and colonised, and marked by their ongoing struggle, negotiation and re-inscription. In Australian settler society, the landscape possesses evocative power in literary texts. Literary geography not only captures the beauty and terror of the Australian landscape in language, but also etches into the national consciousness what it is that constitutes Australia and Australians. The conceptualisation of a white Australia, facilitated by what Bernard Smith describes as “mechanisms of forgetfulness”, excludes the presence of Aboriginal people (17). The attempt of decolonisation in postcolonial representation of landscape challenges this “forgetfulness”, denial and disavowal in the dominant discourse. The evocation of Aboriginal traditional land, or “country” as it is often called, echoes with “the country” occupied by settler Australians in a disputable sense (see Whitlock, “Outside Country” 179). The double resonance of country reveals the ambivalence at the core of Australian literary geography. As the earliest inhabitants in Australia, Aboriginal people have profound cultural and spiritual affiliations with their ancestral country. Such affiliations are embodied in rich and dynamic forms of expression, including stories, songs, dance, painting, carving and so forth. The “performative epistemic mode” in Aboriginal people’s engagement with the land contrasts with the Western perception of space which is often seen

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as static and alienated (Verran 250). Referring to the personified nature of country in Aboriginal beliefs, Deborah Bird Rose writes: People talk about country in the same way that they would talk about a person: they speak to country, sing to country, visit country, worry about country, feel sorry for country, and long for country. … country is a living entity with a yesterday, today, and tomorrow, with a consciousness, and a will toward life. Because of this richness, country is home, and peace; nourishment for body, mind, and spirit; heart’s ease. (Nourishing Terrains 7)

Aboriginal traditional connection to country, together with related knowledge and rituals, constitutes an important component of Aboriginal cultural heritage. Indigenous cultural capital in post-Mabo children’s books can be derived from the representation of Aboriginal connection to country, which is one of the most resonant themes informing young readers of Aboriginal cultural value and perspectives. These texts contest the Eurocentric dominance of space, expose territorial disputes during contact history, and reflect on an enduring impact of colonisation in Australian settler society. The articulation and mobilisation of Indigenous cultural capital through Aboriginal subject matter or characters not only re-affirms the profound connectedness between Aboriginal people and the land, but also recognises the dynamic and varied ways of re-establishing bonds between contemporary Aboriginal descent and country. It enables a conceptual transformation for young readers to acknowledge and value Aboriginal living experiences and histories on this continent. This chapter begins by examining the colonists’ imagination of Australia as an “empty space” which facilitated the process of naming, mapping and expropriating the land and subsequently constituted a putatively legitimate body of geographical and intellectual knowledge intended to erase the Aboriginal presence from the history of Australia. By engaging historical and contemporary disputes over Aboriginal land rights, the representation of Indigenous cultural capital in fiction and non-fiction for child readers, as this chapter shows, re-invests conceptually the landscape with Aboriginal perspectives of country and history, hence constituting a counter narrative which unsettles the dominant white ideology and valuation of the land.

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Decolonising the “Empty Space” The map can be defined as “a representational model, as an historical document, and as a geopolitical claim” (Huggan, “Maps” ii). It is a palimpsest bearing the marks of social and political changes in spatial dimension. Informed by Eurocentric perceptions of space, maps emerge as a complex knowledge system closely linked with the power of surveillance and domination. The Western ways of mapping the land contrast starkly with how Aboriginal people understand and experience the land. Bill Ashcroft traces the fundamental role of Greek ocularcentrism – a philosophical tradition of equating vision and knowledge – in the European perspectives of seeing and knowing the colonised space (PostColonial 125–7). Progressively developed through Western voyages across the world’s oceans, maps as a metonymic act of seeing became an embodiment of geographical knowledge, enabling the navigation of ships to remote destinations and projecting the desire for unknown (though evocatively imagined) spaces. Along with the invention of accurate chronometers, longitude and latitude, the emergence of cartography was quickly absorbed into the cultural capital of Western society. It assisted in the economic and political imperative to disseminate knowledge of the globe. Colonisation became a manifest exportation and sometimes violent imposition of this dominant cultural capital which shaped the perceptions and mapping of space. Notably, the construction of perspectival perception as “a highly codified method” developed since Renaissance, which fostered the viewer’s exterior position in relation to the object that was viewed, played a role in the European gaze of colonial space (Ashcroft, Post-Colonial 136). Space was then increasingly located as “a geographical object that can be treated in isolation, as a legal or economic unit” (P. Carter 136). The idea of disengagement of space from place, particularly from the localised experience in a specific place, was conceptually important in the dispossession of indigenous peoples from their ancestral land, among other far-reaching impacts on colonised societies. During the expansion of British colonies, the rhetoric of naming which invested spaces with Western knowledge and ideology was a key to

36

Chapter 1

realising colonial dominance by early explorers and settlers. In The Road to Botany Bay (1987), Paul Carter traces the tradition of naming in colonial Australia by British settlers who were “more than ever obliged to settle the country rhetorically … through the act of articulating it, to bring it into being” (137). The names bestowed by James Cook in charting the Australian coast, for instance, were not merely descriptive of geographical features, but “framed and isolated” the images of a vast landscape so that “such features are brought close, made homely, domestic” (P. Carter 31).1 Through erasure and inscription, the act of naming became a convenient and legitimate means to transform an unknown landscape into a space which was conquerable, controllable, and open to settlement. The colonial practice of naming was premised on the idea of conceiving Australia as essentially an “empty space” or “empty land” (Ashcroft, PostColonial 153; D. Carter 69). The emptiness did not refer to the absolute absence of human existence. There were scattered records written by early European explorers who witnessed but failed to recognise the significance of an array of Aboriginal people’s practices of sowing, fishing, building huts and dams, which were inconsistent with the widespread assumption of pre-colonial Aboriginal people as hunter–gathers (see Pascoe 19). The evidence of Aboriginal habitation and cultivation did not fall under the European definition of the proof of land ownership. More critically, to see Australia as “desert and uncultivated” provided the legitimacy in the legal sense for British colonisers to assert sovereignty over Australia (Attwood, “Law” 8). Before the term terra nullius (meaning a land belonging to no one) entered Australian legal and demotic discourse,2 the notion of empty 1

2

Among the names of 150 places given by James Cook, some described geographical or natural features, descriptively or imaginatively; some related to incidents during his voyage; a considerable number of names commemorated crew members and paid homage to British aristocrats, political figures, and naval officers. See P. Carter 2. In an article entitled “The Law of the Land or the Law of the Land?: History, Law and Narrative in a Settler Society”, Bain Attwood points out that the concept of terra nullius, originating from international legal discourse, did not as commonly held come into the demotic use in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Australia. Only in recent decades did the term enter public discourse by way of explaining colonial dispossession of Aboriginal Australians. Attwood traces today’s development of the

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37

space was “a state of mind”, prevalent in colonial descriptions of this vast continent (Cathcart 54). Considering the factors that contribute to the formation of empty space, Anthony Giddens identifies the importance of “those allowing for the representation of space … and those making possible the substitutability of different spatial units” (19). Maps made both factors viable for the colonial expropriation of Aboriginal land. Mapping space facilitated the process of incorporating the land into colonial discourse, and transformed Aboriginal land into imagined spatial units. In doing so, the geographical representation enabled the division of spatial units to create the possibility for trade and settlement and allowed the erasure of Aboriginal living places through acts of (re)naming. The notion of empty space in colonial discourse underpinned the fantasy of a white nation in a contested territory. As colonisation then settlement proceeded, repetitive references to Aboriginal people as a “doomed race” consolidated the stereotypes of Aboriginal inferiority and the assumptions that Aboriginal people would gradually but inevitably die out. The Aboriginal presence in literary texts frequently alluded to their absence. D. Rose points out the paradoxical dichotomy: Taken together, the two ways of representing Indigenous people – imminent absence and mythic presence – represent death and resurrection: the death of the Indigenous people, and their rebirth as a central mythic dimension of settler nationhood and settler identity. (“Year Zero” 25)

The ambiguous absence and presence of Aboriginal people suggested a division between the real and the mythic, the familiar and the alien, reflecting white consciousness towards racialised others. This representation of Aboriginality was coterminous with the invention of empty space which beckoned the coming of European settlers and civilisation. The “creation of term to Aboriginal lawyer and activist Paul Coe’s 1978 case before the High Court. Coe claimed the British “wrongfully treated the continent now known as Australia as terra nullius”, the precedent being the case of the Western Sahara at the International Court of Justice in 1975 when the term was used to challenge the legitimacy of the Spanish colonisation in 1884 (qtd in Attwood, “Law” 8).

38

Chapter 1

a vast emptiness” devoid of land ownership and inhabitants contributed to frontier mythology in Australian historiography (D. Rose, “Year Zero” 22). The fiction of empty space and the naming process enclosed the Australian landscape within the Western legal and epistemological framework, which negated an Indigenous past and presence. To confront and transform the detachment of place and history in settler societies, Ashcroft argues the necessity of adopting the strategy of palimpsest “by re-embedding time and place, history and location, through the agency of language” (Post-Colonial 156). The notion of a palimpsest offers a conceptual mode to re-imagine the land not only as a spatial existence, but a cultural and historical entity filled with different and even conflicting regimes of power, economic and socio-political systems, and traditions. To unveil the spatial and temporal connections of a locale, especially following colonial disruption, constitutes a tactic of resistance to the dominant discourse by mobilising the same vehicle of language for re-presentations. In doing so, a place can be re-invested with Indigenous perspectives and experiences. The non-fictional picture book Maralinga: The Anangu Story (2009) produced by Yalata Aboriginal Community and Christobel Mattingley, for example, informs young readers of the history of Maralinga in South Australia, traditional country of Anangu people.3 Maralinga is located in the south of today’s Great Victoria Desert named by the explorer Ernest Giles. Maralinga was used as a British nuclear testing site with the agreement of the Australian government for ten years between 1953 and 1963. The first of the following excerpts interrogates the Eurocentric naming of the desert in the nineteenth century. The second and the third excerpts point out that the government authorities imposed the wrongly borrowed name “Maralinga” for Anangu country and perceived it as an “empty” desert for nuclear testing: [1] Ernest Giles, who crossed the desert in 1875, called it the Great Victoria Desert, after a whitefella queen that Anangu had never heard of, in a faraway land they did not know existed. (12) 3 Anangu is the term for Aboriginal people of the central desert region in Australia, mainly speaking Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara.

Decolonised Landscape

39

[2] Politicians and scientists … regarded it as desert, open space largely uninhabited. They did not understand its importance to Anangu who had cared for the land for over 40,000 years. They knew nothing of its richness in tradition and law. (36) [3] In 1953 the site, some 100 kilometres north of Ooldea, was named Maralinga by the whitefellas. This time they took the word from an Aboriginal language of northern Australia. Because Maralinga means thunder, they thought it was appropriate to describe the sound of the explosions they would make over the next ten years. The Anangu word for thunder is tuuni. (36, 38) To name the largest desert in Australia (which stretches across Western Australia and South Australia) after Queen Victoria was to fill this space with the evocation of British imperial supremacy, whereas the lived experiences and living cultures of traditional landowners (which transformed space into Indigenous place) were ignored and erased. The irrelevance of the name to the Aboriginal people and the hollow connection between Queen Victoria and this country manifested the separation between the locale and the localised experiences. The imposition of an alien name – Maralinga – from a northern Aboriginal language for the Anangu country in South Australia accounted for a specific inscription of Eurocentric occupation that treated Anangu country as at once “empty” and “filled”. It revealed the white authority’s failure to acknowledge the place-based nature of Aboriginal languages and cultures. Instead, it erased the presence of Anangu people on the land by a gesture of token respect for Aboriginality that at the same time legitimated the use of the land for nuclear testing. The Eurocentric discourse disrupted the historical and cultural link between Aboriginal landowners and their land. While the Anangu place was given a misappropriated and false Aboriginal identity on the map, many Anangu people were displaced and evacuated from their home country.4 The Eurocentric view of space reproduced as part of the domi4

During the nuclear tests, a certain number of Anangu people remained in the affected area due to insufficient prior notice. Some of them lost their lives while others had their health seriously damaged. The nuclear fallout also severely contaminated the

40

Chapter 1

nant cultural capital remains a potent legacy of colonisation in a however postcolonial Australia. A counter-discursive process needs to involve the operation of Indigenous knowledge system where an alternative cultural capital functions and disseminates among the younger generations. This body of knowledge is essentially grounded in an understanding of the significance of land and country in Aboriginal traditional communities. For Aboriginal people, the land is an “ultimate source of knowledge and creativity”, fundamental to Aboriginal history and cultural life (Daes 7). The inseparable Aboriginal country and history informs the traditional way of learning for Aboriginal children; the representations of such cultural capital underlie the postcolonial texts for children which carry the transformative possibility of unsettling colonial representations of space in the Australian context. Another picture book Papunya School Book of Country and History (2001) produced by Papunya School tells the story of Anangu people who live in Papunya, near Alice Springs. It juxtaposes Aboriginal (Anangu) and Western ways of learning and understanding the land: We learn about our history and our country from our elders and our community. We learn by going to our country, by living there and being there. We learn through the Tjukurrpa yara – the Dreaming stories. We learn through the different songs and dances and paintings, that belong to different ngurra.5   But as well as learning in this traditional way, we can also find out about our country and our history by putting some of the pieces of the story into a book. That’s two way learning: Anangu way, and Western way. (2)

In contrast to the topographical representation of landscape in Western maps, Aboriginal perspectives of country are derived from their Dreaming as a home to ancestral spirits and a symbol for the continuation of life, deeply embedded in the history of past and present, and connected with

5

environment, posing a long-term threat to Anangu who lived on the land. But their struggles for the lost homelands did not cease. The title to Maralinga Tjarutja lands was finally handed over to traditional landowners, in accordance with the Maralinga Tjarutja Land Rights Act 1984. See Maralinga 39–45, 48–53, and 58–9. The word ngurra means home or homelands.

Decolonised Landscape

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bodily experiences and engagement. Indigenous cultural capital is evoked through such rich, dynamic understandings of landscape, challenging the Western authority of how space is viewed. It shall be noted that disseminating a body of knowledge does not happen overnight; nor would it simply overwrite another way of thinking. Indigenous resistance and transformation takes place in the processes of negotiation, interpolation and adaption. In this case it is equally important, as the Papunya School presents Anangu country and history in a book, to adopt the Western way of learning and to acculturate a wide non-Aboriginal readership to Aboriginal cultural values pertaining to land and country. In doing so, Indigenous cultural capital forms itself into the coding schemes of representation, thus informing and impacting Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal young minds.

Connecting Aboriginal Land and History In Maybe Tomorrow (1998), Aboriginal storyteller Boori Pryor articulates Aboriginal connection to country: “The land and Aboriginal culture go hand in hand. You can’t separate them. The land is the giver of life. It is our mother. It’s like the vein of life. If you cut this, if you separate these two things, we die” (6). Pryor’s comments accentuate the significance of maintaining the distinctive cultural and spiritual relationship between Aboriginal people and their country. In traditional societies, the Dreaming and the activities of the ancestral beings bring the land and people together in a tangible relationship. Places associated with the ancestral beings of the Dreamtime are often sacred sites, including totemic places, adjacent objects and geographical features (such as Dreaming tracks, ceremonial venues for men’s or women’s business, initiation places, ancestral pathways, and burials). Sacred sites are an embodiment of Aboriginal spirituality and secrecy (though not all sacred sites are secret and vice versa), and culminate the cultural and historical significance among different types of landscape in Aboriginal communities.

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Chapter 1

Throughout colonial history and its aftermath, Aboriginal people have never ceased their struggles for land and their attempts to maintain their connection to country. The Mabo decision (No. 2) in 1992 and the subsequent Native Title Act 1993 represent legal advances in recognising Indigenous peoples’ land rights. The Mabo decision rejected the notion of terra nullius in Australia and marked the judicial recognition of native title at common law since the first legal action was brought to consideration in Milirrpum in 1970.6 But the backlash from mainstream society was strong. Considering Aboriginal claims of native title, not least in relation to sacred sites in the post-Mabo era, Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs note that Aboriginal presence in land issues had a radical change from literally nowhere to everywhere, causing not only moral culpability but also fearful sentiments of settler Australians who “see Aboriginal people as lacking and yet having ‘too much’ at the same time” (16). The “lacking” is indicative of the lower socioeconomic status of Aboriginal people (according to all major socioeconomic indices), which is a consequence, at least in part, of the legacy of colonial dispossession and which gives rise to a sense of white settler Australian guilt and shame, whereas “having too much” implies the fear, worries, and anxiety in whites who feel threatened by the rising power of Aboriginal people as stakeholders in the use of land (Gelder and Jacobs 16–17). These two seemingly antithetical propositions are enmeshed and intertwined, conjuring up an uncanny image of Aboriginal sacredness in the public discourse, and contributing to what Gelder and Jacobs term “postcolonial racism” (17). This unsettling discourse about Aboriginal sacredness characterises contemporary Australia in which Indigenous cultural capital is examined. Indigenous cultural capital manifests itself as a cultural power generated 6

Milirrpum v Nabalco Pty Ltd (1971) 17 FLR 141. It was also called the “Gove land rights case”. In 1968, the Yolngu people sought recognition of sovereign rights over their traditional land on the Gove Peninsula in Arnhem Land. Their claims were rejected by the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory which “concluded that Yolngu relations to land were a matter of religion and therefore not law” and that these relations did not confer proprietary interest in the land (N. Williams 204). This case marked the first litigation on Aboriginal native title rights.

Decolonised Landscape

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from the wealth of Aboriginal traditions, particularly in relation to the profound cultural and spiritual connection to country. It is an intersection between Aboriginal traditions and modernity, and describes how cultures of the colonised thrust into the dominant discourse. This cultural capital embodies a symbolic tendency to convert into economic capital, which inevitably clashes with the non-Aboriginal interests. The tensions over Aboriginal claims to native title are evident in this regard. To further Gelder and Jacobs’ discussion of an uncanny Australia, it is not difficult to see that an excessive pity over Aboriginal lacking or absence stems from an insufficient understanding of the surviving and functioning Aboriginal cultures. The discourse of Aboriginal lacking risks reproducing the colonial mindset of terra nullius and extinction of Aboriginal people. Repetitive imagination and “(re)discoveries” of Aboriginal lacking are often driven by white guilt and shame to satisfy the need of a selfindulgent sentimentalisation and serve as an excuse for not having done much to ameliorate Indigenous disadvantage (Healy 203; Rolls, “Great Australian Silence” 10; Simpson 187). Meanwhile, fear and resentment over too much Aboriginal presence derives from an erroneous calculation of the economic and political gains made by the Aboriginal population. An imaginary Aboriginal sacred in whites’ campaigns to reject Aboriginal people’ demands for restitution of dispossessed land fuels uncertainty and insecurity, adding to an uncanny illusion of Australia which is seen as at once “ours” (whites’) and “theirs” (Aborigines’) (Gelder and Jacobs 138). Furthering the analysis of the “postcolonial uncanny”, Alison Ravenscroft notes that “white Australians’ disquiet and discomfort are the bases of our formation as whites, as settlers” (87). The white identity, derived from a reinforced racial dichotomy, underpins such split-yet-interwoven views of Aboriginal lacking or having too much, which “coexist and flow through each other in what is often … a productively unstable dynamic” (Gelder and Jacobs 24). The uncanny Aboriginal presence essentially results from a misrecognition of Indigenous cultural capital and its symbolic power. It is a joint product of the white structural oblivion to Aboriginal concerns and the continued racism in postcolonial Australia. The pressing questions remain: how can Indigenous knowledge about land and country be recognised against the backdrop of Aboriginal history, dispossession

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Chapter 1

and displacement? How does this body of knowledge in the texts inform young readers to build up a shared space? The theme of Aboriginal land and country is evident in the postcolonial narratives of children’s books, where Indigenous cultural capital can be identified and acquired. Though framed in a fictional mode, a number of novels for young adolescents explore the complexities and ambiguities of land disputes and engage in cross-racial dialogue to redress colonial injustice figuratively. Then how do these texts deploy and unpack Indigenous cultural capital to inform child readers of the historical conflicts between Aboriginal people and white pastoralists, and of the ongoing tensions between the development of urban landscape and the preservation of Aboriginal sacred sites? In what ways do these postcolonial narratives reflect Aboriginal perceptions of the human–land relationship, and how do they interrogate the master narrative of Australian history and re-embed the Aboriginal history in the representations of country? To answer these questions, I intend to consider Kate Constable’s time-travel novel Crow Country (2011) and James Moloney’s realistic fiction Gracey (1994). Cultural amnesia in white settler society and Aboriginal people’s attempts to re-establish the disrupted connection to country underline the central theme in these two novels written by both non-Aboriginal writers.7 Crow Country is set in Dja Dja Wurrung Country, which is located in Boort, a real small town near Bendigo in Victoria. The main plot tells of a murder that took place in the 1930s, in which the pastoralist Mr Mortlock killed the Aboriginal stockman and custodian Jimmy Raven while they argued over the construction of a dam in the Mortlock’s property, which Jimmy believed would jeopardise the sacred place where Aboriginal people gathered. Jimmy and Mr Mortlock, together with another white man Clarry, once served in the army during the First World War and had formed a deep friendship with each other. But after the murder, Clarry helped Mr Mortlock to cover it up. Another thread is formed through 7

The dilemma facing non-Aboriginal writers in writing books with Aboriginal themes will be discussed in Chapter 5. For a discussion of James Moloney’s and Kate Constable’s perspectives and approaches in this respect, see the second section of that chapter.

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the contemporary young characters Sadie (Clarry’s great granddaughter), Lachie (Mr Mortlock’s great grandson) and an Aboriginal boy Walter. The two threads are linked by the protagonist Sadie, who stumbles back in time and witnesses the un-resolved crime. Under the guidance of the Crow, the totem and messenger of the country, Sadie reveals the truth of Jimmy’s death and returns the lost sacred object once held by Jimmy to his people. This novel unpacks the conflicting interests of white settlers and Aboriginal traditional landowners in Australian pastoralist history. The large-acre property of the Mortlocks is located near Lake Boort, which is within the Murray–Darling Basin, a major pastoral area in Australia. Historically the irregular flow of rivers, the resultant severe floods and droughts, in the Murray–Darling Basin led to the construction of an intensive irrigation system for agricultural and pastoral development (Goodall 163). However, the seemingly unquenchable demands of irrigation met with fierce opposition from Aboriginal traditional landowners for several reasons (see Goodall 163). First, the changed watercourses and underground water levels due to the irrigation projects severely affected the livelihood of Aboriginal people. Compounded by years of overgrazing, the environmental deterioration made it harder for them to maintain their traditional way of life. Second, the source of water or waterholes were of significance in Aboriginal knowledge system. The changed landscape would jeopardise their cultural and ritual sites and threaten traditional cultural transmission. In the novel, the Mortlocks claim that their family property has been “looked after for five generations” while local Aboriginal people are “gone” (Constable, Crow 158). It closely reflects a binary view of the white pastoral legacy and the absence of Aboriginal history and labour within this legacy. Since the turn of the twentieth century and up until the 1970s and 1980s, notions of pastoralism that omitted the crucial role of Aboriginal people contributed significantly to evocations of Australian nationhood and the sense of Australianness. By the 1920s, images of flocks of sheep in rural settings, which in a sense provided “the best evidence of successful settlement”, had gradually replaced the bush legend and signified a civilised, pacified and prosperous Australia (D. Carter 149).

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The progressive history of pastoral achievements worked to construct “a racialised, ‘white’, rural society” that excluded the presence of Aboriginal people and erased their experience and knowledge of managing the land (Goodall 168).8 The characterisation of Jimmy, nevertheless, captures the uneven power and race relations in the then rural Australia. Jimmy is both an Aboriginal “clever man” – the custodian or deputy of Aboriginal traditional ­landowners – and “a good man, a good worker” for Mr Mortlock (Constable, Crow 179, 57). Jimmy’s double role does not mean a mitigation of the historical and racial confrontation between traditional landowners and white pastoralists; rather, it reflects both difficulty and expediency of Aboriginal people to continue their living in the post-contact history, who had to support themselves without relying solely on mission charity and to maintain their traditional contact with the land (e.g. hunting and harvesting bush tucker between the mustering seasons). Referring to the presence of Aboriginal labourers in pastoral history, Heather Goodall writes, “[t] he two groups of landholders coexisted, uneasily and sometimes in open hostility, but with some advantages for both” (163). The vexed racial relationship is also untangled through another detail in this novel: when serving in the army during wartime, Jimmy saved Clarry’s life; Jimmy, Clarry and Mr Mortlock became best mates on the battlefield in France. Jimmy’s dedication to fight for the nation, however, was not recognised after the war. Only because of Clarry’s insistence and Mr Mortlock’s support was Jimmy’s name finally put on the war memorial. The split interests in the land 8

Aboriginal people used fire-stick farming over the centuries to maintain open pastures on which game grazed and to promote the growth of edible foodstuffs and to make country easier to walk through. A range of other land management practices were also in use. These practices contradict the colonial assumption that there was no farming or cultivation before white settlement. Aboriginal people also used fire to burn the land in a systemic and controllable way. The method gradually changed the Australian landscape from rainforest to scrubland or pastures, which the modern grazing industries rely on and benefit from. For more, see Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate on Earth (2011). Aboriginal writer Bruce Pascoe’s non-fiction Dark Emu (2014) also provides evidence of land management, habitation, agriculture, and food production in Aboriginal societies before the arrival of Europeans.

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use render the close and relatively equal relationship of comrade-in-arms further dissolved into an inevitable racialised confrontation. Mr Mortlock insists on the plan for building a dam over an Aboriginal sacred site. So Jimmy has to confront Mr Mortlock to take up his responsibility: “I got to speak with Mr Mortlock,” said Jimmy. “Telling me I’m not allowed to dam Cross Creek!” shouted Mr Mortlock. “Bloody cheek! Mustn’t do this, mustn’t do that! You’d think it was his own damn land!” “Not my country. But this is my business.” Jimmy stood tall, unmoving. (Constable, Crow 88–9)

The quarrel between the white property owner and the Aboriginal traditional landowner poses a critical question – to whom does this land belongs? Different from Western ownership of land usually conceived as an estate or a form of property in which one has an interest, Aboriginal traditional landowners undertake custodianship or guardianship through which they form a reciprocal connectedness with the land. The rights conferred by the land are as important as the obligations derived from the land. Indigenous cultural capital, as invoked in this novel, is drawn from such distinct and dynamic connections to land. The conflict between Indigenous cultural capital and non-Indigenous capitalist interest (i.e. signified by the dam) underlines the tension in the novel. For Jimmy, it is his “business” or obligations to take care of the sacred site. Contrary to the widely held assumption of Aboriginal place boundedness, Jimmy takes up the custodial responsibility on a country he was not born to. As he reveals to Sadie, “My country is way down south by the sea … I don’t reckon I’ll ever see my country again. But I know a special place when I see it. There’s a special place in that valley. I know it. The people who belong to that place, they’re not here to protect it, so I got to do it.” (Constable, Crow 91–2)

Forced away from his country, Jimmy is committed to a new country where he lives now, safeguarding the sacred object and site for local Aboriginal community. Jimmy’s case is not exceptional in real life. Aboriginal custodianship is by and large based on a kinship system. Aboriginal kinship places

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each person into specific categories based on descent and generation level. It is a classificatory system of determining relatedness, not one based on consanguinity. Moreover, it is not necessarily formed through biological relations because an Aboriginal person can be the descendent of certain sacred objects or places.9 Aboriginal kinship systems are different from the vertical family tree commonly seen in European genealogy.10 Though the situation may vary in different places, it is possible that a person is eligible to claim the right over a different tract of land and there are recorded examples where people form new kin and shoulder responsibilities in a new country (Goodall 181–2). This is particularly the case for Aboriginal societies in the aftermath of colonisation. Against the Eurocentric assumption of “wilderness” in Australia, Marcia Langton argues Aboriginal “laws of succession … enable[s] estates whose traditional owner groups have met with disaster to be handed on to neighbouring groups through matrilateral relations” (“Burning Questions” 26). The practice of succession is in accordance with Aboriginal “customary land laws” to ensure their distinct and lasting relationship with the land; as Langton stresses, “[e]xtinction of a land-owning group, therefore, does not lead automatically to extinction of Aboriginal native title and customary ownership arrangements” (“Burning Questions” 26). Aboriginal traditional laws and practices of succession contest the widespread misconception of place-boundedness in white dominant discourse and provide a strong counter evidence that the forced displacement or removal of Aboriginal people should not constitute a reason for the permanent loss of native title. 9

10

For instance, Justice Toohey, Aboriginal Land commissioner, reports that in the place near Alice Springs “Kirda may call a sacred object ‘father’ or call a site and the country around it ‘father’. Kurdungurlu may say about the same object, site or country, ‘That is my mother’ or ‘my uncle’” (qtd in G. Pryor 422). For example, in the Kimberley areas where the Kukatja people of the Malarn, Yaka Yaka, and Wirrumanu communities live, according to their kinship system, the sisters of one’s mother (aunts) who share the same “skin name” can be called “mother”, and similarly the brothers of one’s father (uncles) also serve as “father” in terms of social responsibility and etiquette. In this sense, one can have several mothers and fathers and the notion of descent is expanded. See Greene, Gill, and Tramacchi 38–43.

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The fictional confrontation between Mr Mortlock and Jimmy mirrors Aboriginal people’s difficulties and efforts to maintain their relationship with the land in both history and contemporary era. Following the Mabo case, in fact, a wave of heated debates erupted over the question of whether the grant of pastoral leases could extinguish native title. Tracing the historical development of legal policies and opinions with respect to the conflicting land interests between pastoralists and traditional claimants, Henry Reynolds points out that during the 1830s and 1840s senior colonial officials well understood the continuance of Aboriginal rights to the land.11 In the second half of the nineteenth century, the colonial governments in Queensland, Western Australia, and South Australia issued legislation that recognised the Aboriginal rights of use and occupancy on pastoral leases (Reynolds, “Native Title” 128). However, in the wake of the intensification of pastoral use of land from the 1840s, the expulsion of Aboriginal inhabitants and the pastoralists’ campaign to call for enhanced security on their properties became more intense. The legislation was compromised and Aboriginal land rights on pastoral leases were, in Reynolds’ words, “ignored, unenforced and apparently never tested in the colonial courts” (“Native Title” 128). In addressing the Aboriginal interest in pastoral lands, the 1996 Wik People v. State of Queensland case12 was a hard-won success, which rules that native title is not necessarily extinguished by pastoral leases. In other words, Aboriginal land rights and interests can co-exist with non-Aboriginal proprietary rights on pastoral lands. Nevertheless, Aboriginal independent law making with regard to land control and management remains a struggle.

11

12

For instance, the New South Wales Executive Council in a dispatch to the Colonial Office on 11 October 1848 urged to “fully recognise the justice and expediency … of securing for the Aboriginal inhabitants the right of wandering as heretofore in quest of food” on land under pastoral lease (qtd in Reynolds, “Native Title” 126). Secretary of State Earl Grey, supportive of Aboriginal customary rights, also made clear in an intra-office memo in March 1849 that “the Imperial government ‘did not intend … to exclude the natives’ from land held under lease” (Reynolds, “Native Title” 125). The Wik Peoples v The State of Queensland & Ors; the Thayorre People v The State of Queensland & Ors [1996] HCA 40 (‘Wik’).

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In this novel, a recurring reference to the Aboriginal Law transmits a strong intention of restoring legal justice and rights for traditional ­landowners. The causality – “when the Law is broken, there must be punishment” – links Jimmy’s death and Mr Mortlock’s mysterious suicide, and underpins the dried lake and the subsequently deserted dam due to the sabotage of sacred sites (148; italics in original). This fictional plot alludes to many real tragic incidents caused by territorial disputes, which were dismissed, closed, or never brought to court for justice. While informing young readers of the historical injustice germane to Aboriginal land rights, the novel pins the hope of transformation on the younger generation. Aware that Jimmy has been secretly buried in the Mortlocks’ family graveyard, Lachie proposes to Sadie and Walter to put up a marker for Jimmy’s grave. The grave marker is symbolically meaningful, for it recognises an assertive presence of Aboriginal land interests on a pastoral property and hence creates a reconciliatory space for the deceased Jimmy and Mr Mortlock who were both opponents and mates. This determined action taken by the three teenagers suggests that efforts to redress historical wrongs can be a starting point for building a shared future. Indigenous cultural capital evoked in this novel inculcates young readers with a historical perspective on Aboriginal struggles for land rights. By redressing the historical injustice, the novel Crow Country demonstrates Aboriginal efforts to resist cultural amnesia in dominant discourse, to reconnect country with custodial duties of preserving sacred sites, and to re-assert the Aboriginal Law which governs the human–land relationship. Indigenous cultural knowledge and traditions are activated in the novel’s thematisation and characterisation to inform a postcolonial counter narrative which unsettles the dominant geographical representations. Sacred sites are of cultural and spiritual significance to Aboriginal communities. The preservation and maintenance of these sites is often incommensurate with the need of urban development. How does the conflict of interests and values fuel the social debates pertinent to Aboriginal sacred site? How does the site inform and challenge the Australian history of race

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relations? James Moloney’s fiction Gracey,13 which concerns an excavated massacre site and the contested histories of frontier violence, provides young readers with more thoughts about Aboriginal sacred sites. As the novel begins, six skeletons of Murri people with traces of gunshots are excavated at the construction site of the new Community Hall. It turns out to be the site of a massacre that occurred during colonial occupation of the land. Local Aboriginal people demand the authority to re-bury the skeletal remains and to build a memorial monument in the place where the Community Hall is halfway built. The novel manifests the opposing interests and attitudes of Aboriginal community and settler Australians towards the massacre site, through the parallel perspectives of the Aboriginal protagonist Gracey and a white policeman named Trent: [Gracey] NO BUILDING ON MURRI GRAVES, declared the sign. … “Let’em know whose land this is.” … “They want to start building again – the whities here. They don’t give a shit about the bodies they dug up. Old history, they reckon. Best forgotten. Time to get on with their precious Community Hall.” … Anger. (Moloney, Gracey 117) [Trent] The blacks have got a complete disregard for it [money], of course. No idea of the costs involved in doing anything. The latest is they want the new Community Hall built somewhere else now, because of the bones found on the original site. They want to re-bury those six skeletons. They don’t give a damn about the thousands spent already, surveying, digging foundations, wages to workmen standing around, not allowed to get on with it. (Moloney, Gracey 101)

Gracey’s narrative shows the protest of local aggrieved Aboriginal people who firmly object to the continuation of building the Community Hall at the site where their ancestors were brutally killed. Massacre sites are evidence of the frontier violence during European invasion, regarded as “one of the most important and impassioned category of contemporary ‘sacred’ places” in Australia (Weiner 197). In Aboriginal communities, there has

13

It was the second novel in Moloney’s trilogy on Aboriginal subject matter. The other two titles are Dougy (1993) and Angela (1998).

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been a strong intention to protect the sanctity of massacre sites from disturbance, particularly from settler intruders. As James F. Weiner notes, the reasons are manyfold: massacre sites are home to the spirits of the deceased, who experienced tragic deaths and whose blood shed and mingled with the earth consecrated the place (198). For Aboriginal descendants, these sites bear the most sorrowful past of their ancestors and therefore they should be treated with greatest reverence and respect (Weiner 198). It is important to note that massacre sites, as well as sacred sites in general, are of both historical and contemporary significance to Aboriginal people, contrary to the view of regarding them as “[o]ld history … [b]est forgotten” (Moloney, Gracey 117). The living significance of Aboriginal sacred sites is often central to the contestation, in which Aboriginal interests of conserving their heritage sites are pitted against the economic interests of urban (and other) development. Trent’s view is representative among many settler Australians who respond the Aboriginal claim of heritage sites with contempt and antagonism. On the one hand, the assumed Aboriginal people’s disregard for money or capital (i.e. they have “[n]o idea of the costs involved in doing anything”) is conceived as their lack of understanding of how modern society works. This “lacking” rationalises an entrenched idea that Aboriginal people and their cultures are at odds with modernity and civilisation. On the other hand, Aboriginal cultural and spiritual beliefs attached to the sacred sites become an inexplicable burden of being “too much” for white society and an obstacle to modern development. Echoing the aforementioned postcolonial racism, the “lacking” and the “too much” are intertwined, creating an impression that Aboriginal sacred sites only emerge after development projects are foreshadowed or commence (G. Pryor 423; Merlan, Caging 211). This ill-informed idea reflects the binary oppositions between heritage and modernity, spirituality and practicality, sacredness and secularism in race relations. The competing racial interests and ideologies unfolded in this novel can be interpreted as the conflict between Indigenous cultural capital germane to sacred sites and the capital involved in urban development. What underpins this conflict is a failure of understanding in mainstream Australia of the distinctive relationship between Aboriginal people and their sacred sites.

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In this regard, the novel demonstrates different perspectives of valuing Aboriginal sacred sites by the Aboriginal community and by white authorities. After human bones are accidentally discovered by Gracey’s younger brother, Dougy, the anthropologists and police soon take charge of the remains to conduct “further tests and investigation”, which involves sending the sample materials overseas so as to “pinpoint the age of these remains as accurately as possible” (Moloney, Gracey 40, 42). The anthropological discourse leaves out Aboriginal knowledge of the site’s cultural, spiritual and historical significance and Aboriginal people’s emotional investments, which leads to an escalating racialised protest and tension later in the novel. There is an overlapping yet potentially conflicting relationship between the archaeological or research value of a sacred site and its significance to the Aboriginal community (Sullivan vi). The value of Aboriginal sacred sites is readily evoked through their “apparent public appeal” to Aboriginal people, “in contrast to research significance” (Sullivan vi). The sacred sites manifest Aboriginal continuing connectedness to country and their ancestors. According to the Australian Government’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999,14 Aboriginal heritage value of a place is defined as the “significance to Indigenous persons in accordance with their practices, observances, customs, traditions, beliefs or history” (Section 528). To adopt a holistic view of the significance as identified and defined by Aboriginal people, as opposed to supporting a “narrow focus on protection of archaeological evidence of human occupation”, was in fact a recent phenomenon in legislation to protect Aboriginal sacred sites (Stephenson). In the 1960s and 1970s with the rise of Aboriginal rights campaign, heritage laws – later known as “relics” Acts – were enacted to protect Aboriginal sites at the state and federal levels. In these Acts, however, the value of Aboriginal sites or cultural relics (human remains, rock art, etc.) was by and large considered from archaeological perspectives. The role of Aboriginal communities was limited in the planning, managing, and decision-making process related to the preservation of their heritage sites. David Ritchie, among other critics, points out that in the early 14

Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, Act No. 91 of 1999.

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“relics” legislation “[t]he use of the word ‘relic’ and the use of the past tense in describing Aboriginal occupation of Australia preclude the possibility of continuing significance of any such relic to contemporary Aboriginal peoples” (229). Archaeologists, rather than Aboriginal peoples, played a primary role during consultation over the legislation and preservation of these sites (Hayes 3). Despite the legislative changes in the late 1970s and 1980s, the archaeological and historic significance of a site as a relic of the past remained as a key focus for decades, much more so than acknowledging the continuing importance of heritage sites to contemporary Aboriginal groups (see Hayes 4). In Queensland where the novel Gracey is set, Aboriginal sites were protected by “relics” Acts – the Aboriginal Relics Preservation Act 1967 and its Amendment Act 1976. Before the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act 2003 and the Torres Strait Islander Cultural Heritage Act 2003 came into force,15 throughout the late 1980s and 1990s – the period of the setting of this novel – the protection of Aboriginal sites was under general heritage legislation, the Cultural Record (Landscapes Queensland and Queensland Estate) Act 1987. In the Cultural Record Act no clauses were particularly dedicated to Aboriginal heritage (as such, the involvement of Aboriginal people was precluded); nor did it include a comprehensive consideration of distinctive Aboriginal cultural values other than an archaeological value (see Ritchie 231; Hayes 33; Evatt 4–8). This sets the social and legal context in which tensions over the excavation site take place. Centring on the disputes over a massacre site, this novel reaches inside the contested histories of the frontier and unsettles the dominant narratives of peaceful settlement in Australian historiography. As Gracey scavenges in the local library for more knowledge about Aboriginal massacres in Queensland, to her unease she finds “so little about what happened to Aborigines” and the “attitude” of telling the history of frontier conflicts, in which “if a white settler had been killed or injured, it gave that man’s name 15

There are marked improvements in these two Acts to recognise Indigenous tradition not only as that to the past but also its connection with contemporary Indigenous people, and to acknowledge the principal role of Indigenous communities in conserving their cultural heritage. See Hayes 34–50.

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and details of what happened to him. Once there was no more ‘trouble’ from the Aborigines, they weren’t mentioned any more” (Moloney, Gracey 85). While helping a librarian to sort out the archival materials about the McNamaras, the town’s biggest pastoralist and business family, Gracey accidentally finds out that Stan McNamara, who came to work at the station where the town was established in the 1860s, is associated with the killing of the six Murri men. In the letters that Stan wrote to his mother, he revealed the guerrilla attacks of Aboriginal people who attempted to drive the white settlers away. As a warning and to exact revenge on what he regarded as barbarous and troublesome savages, Stan and his companion Kemp shot dead six Aboriginal people in a sudden flurry and buried them secretly afterwards. The novel reveals the often unacknowledged injustices perpetrated against Aboriginal people on the frontier of white invasion. The silence of frontier conflicts does not result from an all-encompassing censorship, but more from an implicit code or “euphemism of punishment” found throughout colonial discourse to describe the unofficial violence on the Australian frontier (Foster, Hosking, and Nettelbeck 6, see also Griffiths 139–40). As shown in Stan’s letter in the novel, the killing of six Aboriginal people is tacitly admitted among colonists (between Stan and his family) and framed as justifiable defence, or at most a regrettable misdeed, which is excused without being prosecuted. Since the late 1960s and the early 1970s historical studies of the colonial frontier have revised the narrative of the peaceful settlement into a revelation of racialised conflicts characterised by violence and bloodshed between European intruders and Aboriginal people (Ryan 33, see also Attwood and Foster 6). However, to re-examine the other side of the frontier remains heatedly debated; and as Reynolds notes, “[t]he difficulty which Australia has experienced in deciding what to do about massacre sites is an indication of a more general problem – how to incorporate the ‘border wars’ into the central national story”, in which a new nation of Australia was established on a land wrestled from others (Why 180). It is also challenging, as Ann Curthoys remarks, for settler Australians to confront “a past in which they were neither heroes nor victims, but rather agents of a colonising … process that destroyed the lives of many people” (qtd in Attwood and Foster 12). The violence, sometimes

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murderous, on the colonial frontier contrasts with the imagined glory of pioneering white forefathers and unsettles an Australian identity forged in much historiography. Towards an acknowledgement of and reflection on the historical injustice, W. E. H. Stanner’s term “the great Australian silence” in one of his 1968 Boyer Lectures remains resonant in the sense that the amnesia of Aboriginal dispossession in the grand narrative of Australian historiography lingers on with insidious impacts upon the dire situations of Aboriginal people today (18). As Stanner argues, the omission of Aboriginal history is not simply a product of collective “absent-mindedness”, rather “a structural matter … which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape” (25). Although scholars have rightly pointed out that this “great Australian silence” reigned mainly from the beginning of the twentieth century to the 1950s, and even within this period much information about Aboriginal history and affairs circulated widely through various media and specialist texts, it is important not to obscure the fact that the absence of informed Aboriginal history and cultural perspectives prevailed in school education over a much longer period of time, reproducing systemic forgetfulness across generations (see Curthoys 192–4; Rolls, “Why Didn’t You Listen” 12–18 and “Great Australian Silence” 7–9; Reynolds, Why 2–4; M. Rose 67). While it is arguable that much post-Mabo literature authored by both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal writers has addressed (and continues to address) this lacuna, children’s books are playing a role. The transformation of cultural capital in children’s literature carries the possibility of undermining the mechanisms of silence that have obfuscated the complexities and nuances of frontier history. In Gracey, the unresolved frontier conflict becomes a catalyst for violent protests by the Aboriginal community against local authorities, and subsequently the tragic suicide of Gracey’s elder brother, Raymond, when he is held in custody. The novel does not provide an easy solution to the racialised divides in contemporary Australia, but ends with hope for the future. Gracey realises what she can do to make a change: “there were no books which told the story I wanted to know, no history books for blacks the way there were for whites. It was time someone wrote those books. Someone” (Moloney, Gracey 164). A new history informed by

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Aboriginal voices and experiences would possibly work towards a better understanding of race relations and towards the building of a shared space in Australian society. Though the way in which this novel (authored by a non-Aboriginal writer) features an Aboriginal narrator and protagonist might be controversial, to address the necessity of historical rewriting is cogent. This rewriting, whether by Aboriginal people or others, underlines the significance of formulating Indigenous cultural capital through books for younger generations. Moloney’s novel Gracey untangles historical injustices to Aboriginal people and contemporary land disputes over Aboriginal massacre sites. It manifests the way in which Aboriginal claims for land rights are inscribed with the spatial history of violence and silence. In this novel Indigenous cultural capital presents as a challenge to the dominant evaluative standards related to Aboriginal sites and through revealing the other side of the frontier, addresses the importance of rewriting Aboriginal history in ways that have the transformative possibility of a less racially biased view.

Native Title and Aboriginal Sovereignty The historic Mabo decision recognises that Indigenous people were in possession of their land before the Crown asserted sovereignty over Australia. The decision opened the possibility – through enabling legislation – of Indigenous people claiming back their ancestral land and related rights. However, the legislation is not without debate. As Richard H. Bartlett argues, the decision itself “did not challenge the legitimacy or the nature of the acquisition of the traditional land of the Aboriginal people, or their sovereignty over that land” (412). Moreover, in response to intense pressure from state governments, mining companies, pastoralists and other vested interests, the amount of land available for claim under the Native Title Act is limited. The burden of proof necessary to demonstrate that a particular group of Aboriginal people are the rightful claimants and that they have

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ongoing and unbroken traditional ties to the land under claim is onerous. According to the judgement of Justice Brennan in Mabo decision: Where a clan or group has continued to acknowledge the laws and (so far as practicable) to observe the customs based on the traditions of that clan or group, whereby their traditional connection with the land had been substantially maintained, the traditional community title of that clan or group can be said to remain in existence. The common law can, by reference to the traditional laws and customs of an indigenous people, identify and protect the native rights and interests to which they give rise. However, when the tide of history has washed away any real acknowledgment of traditional law and any real observance of traditional customs, the foundation of native title has disappeared. (66)16

The proof of connection is intrinsically problematic, because Aboriginal people who have borne the brunt of dispossession and who have lost either partially or entirely their traditional connections to their country, and who perhaps are most in need of land, are the very people least likely to be able to demonstrate connections to their land to the satisfaction of the Native Title Act (see Boase 13). In practice, even in instances where traditional connections are evident, proving this is not straightforward. Demonstrating enduring and traditional affiliation to country is a lengthy process requiring considerable financial and human resources, creating an onerous burden for Aboriginal claimants (see Keon-Cohen 192–7; Boase 13). Set against this background, the book Jimmy and Pat Meet the Queen (1997) provides an intriguing reading of the native title claim from an Aboriginal perspective. It is a collaborative work written by Pat Lowe, a white writer, and illustrated by artist Jimmy Pike, a Walmajarri man from the Great Sandy Desert.17 The story is full of humour, mocking mercilessly the impracticable and irrational requirement for demonstrating unbroken traditional ties to country through white apparatuses.

16 17

Mabo v Queensland [No 2] (1992) 175 CLR 1. Jimmy Pike and his wife Pat Lowe collaborated on a number of award-winning books for children. For more discussion on Aboriginal–white collaboration, please see Chapter 5.

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The first episode entitled “Native Title” begins with a meeting in Fitzroy Crossing where a white lawyer explains to the Walmajarri people the Mabo decision in the High Court. Jimmy and his people are told that Aboriginal people could claim back their land but “not quite” as the lawyer immediately lists loads of conditions which render native title extinguished (Lowe 2). Facing questions from the audience, the lawyer is flustered and embarrassed by his own perfunctory, self-contradictory talk. A note of sarcasm in the dialogue tends to reveal that native title in a biased, Eurocentric law system can merely be empty rhetoric. After figuring out that their country in the desert has “no towns” extinguishing native title, the Walmajarri people see a chance of getting it back. Nevertheless, the lawyer reminds that they shall prove it: You can travel around your country with an anthropologist and show him your main waterholes and other important places. He can mark them all on a map, and write down the stories you tell him. Then he can put all that information in a book, and show it to the Native Title Tribunal. (Lowe 4)

This is apparently not the Walmajarri way of proving attachment to country. As Pat explains to Jimmy, the Walmajarri country is now called “Vacant Crown Land”, which means “it belongs to the Queen” (Lowe 5).18 The astonished Jimmy decides to challenge the Queen: “Bring her here and I’ll ask her: ‘All right, show me all the waterholes!’” (Lowe 5). As the plot develops, the Queen accepts Jimmy and Pat’s invitation and comes to the desert. The following episodes unfold the Queen’s awkward experience of camping and hunting with Jimmy and Pat, together with other Walmajarri people. In the last episode entitled “The Proof ” Jimmy shows the Queen a waterhole which appears invisible to her in the middle of the desert. When the water comes out of the dug hole, the Queen admits “[t]his is your country and, as far as I’m concerned, you can keep it!” (Lowe 29).

18

Crown land means originally all land vested in the Crown since the British settlement. Nowadays Crown land in Australia belongs to state governments, instead of the monarch or the Queen. For more details about Crown land, see Crown Lands Act 1989.

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The story comes to a happy ending that “the Walmajarri Republic was born” (Lowe 29). This simple and funny story, accessible to younger and older readers alike, interweaves half-realistic and half-imaginary elements to address Aboriginal people’s concerns and difficulties in land reclamation after the Mabo case. As Lowe writes in the acknowledgements, “[a]ll the people and places in this book are real. The story is true, although most of it hasn’t happened yet” (n.pag.). By proving directly to the Queen that Walmajarri people were and remain owners of the land, this inventive story produces an entertaining effect, ridiculing and denouncing the unfair native title system that places the onus of proof on Aboriginal claimants. It also articulates Aboriginal people’s uncompromising resistance to colonisation and their aspiration of attaining self-determination and sovereignty. The story sets Indigenous cultural capital, manifested by the Walmajarri people’s localised and practical knowledge of finding waterholes in the harsh environment, in opposition to the burden of proof required through the legislative framework of the Native Title Act and its need for documentation in the forms of a “map” or “book”. It manifests the self-contradictory nature of such requirements because Aboriginal system of knowledge “in use” as opposed to “in record” demonstrates the genuine evidence of how Aboriginal people maintain, live on, and pass down their traditional connections to country. In this story, Indigenous cultural capital is presented as an assertive voice in Aboriginal reclamation of traditional land rights. Interestingly, the fictional approval from the Queen, who personifies a higher (though nominal) supremacy than Australian authorities, suggests Indigenous cultural capital can be figuratively mobilised as a liberated agency departing from or transcending existing legal schemes to achieve Aboriginal rights of governing their own affairs in Australia. For Aboriginal people, there is no uniform way of relating to their land or of maintaining these relationships (Merlan, “Indigeneity” 133). Indigenous cultural capital needs to be understood in the historical, legal, and local contexts. It would be simplistic and unfair to interpret their profound connection to country as initiatives for economic or political gains. As Lester Irabinna Rigney stresses the cultural and spiritual significance

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embodied in the Indigenous human–land relationship: “[o]ur indigenous spirituality and culture are rooted in the soils of our land and the interconnectedness of all things that live above or below its surface. The land represents much more than an economic asset. It is an integral part of our very being and we are a part of it” (“Native Title” 127). In this respect, a considerable number of children’s books published in the post-Mabo era project Indigenous cultural capital through a strong motif of Aboriginal land and country. As this chapter shows, they cover a wide range of pertinent issues to interrogate the colonial discourse and historiography and to re-affirm Aboriginal land rights. The representation and dissemination of Indigenous cultural capital through these texts is immensely important, for it helps young readers to develop an understanding of the rich Aboriginal cultural heritage related to land and country, and to be acquainted with different perspectives of viewing place and history, thus envisioning a better shared space where they grow up and have an important stake.

Chapter 2

Living Memories and the Mechanism of Forgetting: Narratives of Indigenous Child Separation

In May 1997, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) report Bringing Them Home: National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families was tabled in Parliament, marking a significant moment in the post-Mabo era. The issue of “the Stolen Generations”, a term first used by Peter Read in 1981 and referring to several generations of Aboriginal children of mixed descent who were forcibly taken away from their families and institutionalised by the authorities from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1970s, provoked intense debate about the dark history of Australian race relations. A proliferation of Aboriginal testimonies and autobiographies documenting the removal experiences contributed to much anguish, sorrow, guilt and shame in the public discourse. The narratives of the Stolen Generations bring to the public consciousness the removed children’s personal pain of forcible separation from parents, wrongful treatment by the adoption agencies including physical and sexual abuse, and the difficulties of living on the brink of white settler society. It is not coincidental that the genres of testimony and a­ utobiography – first-person and semi-documentary narratives – have been given prominence in voicing Indigenous suffering as a legacy of the child removal policies. These agentic texts are considered to enact tactical resistance which Michel de Certeau describes as “play[ing] on and within a terrain … organised by the law of a foreign power” (de Certeau 37; see van Toorn, “Indigenous Australian” 2–3). This resistance within the context of racial dominance can be understood as follows: first, while testimony is primarily a language used in the courtroom and autobiography has its generic root in Western literary conventions for bourgeois intellectuals to record

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chronologically individual adventures or significant events (see Hornung and Ruhe 1), testimony and autobiographical narrative have been adopted by Indigenous authors. According to Penny van Toorn, the transcripts of testimonial evidence for court inquiries were used to present Aboriginal voices and their witnessing power under colonial control from as early as the late eighteenth century (van Toorn, “Indigenous Australian” 1–2). Aboriginal autobiography, as a form of testimony in a broad sense which reveals an individual account of what has happened, has also played an indispensable role in documenting Aboriginal lives and making their voices heard by non-Indigenous audiences. Though Aboriginal testimony and autobiography have never been unaffected by dominant power and editorial control that may have resulted in distorted or truncated versions of their stories, the recognisable genres render the enunciation of Indigenous voices accessible to the dominant authorities and the wider public. They offer a tactical approach adopted by Aboriginal people to negotiate their interests within the constraints and impositions of colonial dominance. Second, Aboriginal testimonies and autobiographies continue to be shaped by the oral traditions through which Aboriginal knowledge and cultures are handed down from generation to generation (Kennedy 132). As Doreen Mellor and Anna Haebich note, “To Indigenous Australians, the recording of oral histories, personal visions and reflections is a highly significant activity, which provides not only an archive, but also a connection with culturally definitive ways of articulating heritage” (10). Aboriginal storytelling, as a specific and skilful task in traditional communities, transmits crucial information and knowledge (Mellor and Haebich 10). To record and transmit Aboriginal life stories through testimonies and autobiographies is therefore culturally resistant to dominant forces by maintaining the continuity of Aboriginal traditions tactically in the field of cultural production. Aboriginal testimonies and autobiographies constitute a counter narrative, documenting and disseminating a history about Aboriginal childhood, racial injustices and the violation of human rights, which remained “in the twilight of knowing” for many non-Aboriginal Australians until the National Inquiry in the mid-1990s (Haebich 563). For child readers, to read the stories of growing up and of socialisation constitutes an important process of acquiring cultural capital. The stories of the Stolen Generations

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inform them of Aboriginal child removal and institutionalisation, and thereby shape their understanding of Aboriginal life and history. This knowledge formation, enacted through Aboriginal autobiographical and testimonial narratives, exemplifies an important component of Indigenous cultural capital transmitted for children during the past three decades. In this light, I am interested in not only the body of knowledge regarding the Stolen Generations but also how this body of knowledge is constructed and accessed. Narrative or storytelling is “the most fundamental mnemonic act” (Attwood and Magowan xii). It heals the “historical wound” through an active and conscious remembrance of the past (Chakarabarty 77). Nevertheless, Aboriginal memories of the Stolen Generations are not lodged in the past but resonate in the present, enabled through stories told and re-told. Debbie Rose addresses the ways in which Aboriginal stories transmit knowledge with an immediacy because oral stories are embedded in an ever-lasting time and space. She stresses that remembrance, for Aboriginal people, is “the living experience of the past” (“Hidden Histories” 15, italics in original). Aboriginal children of today remain threatened by the high rates of family violence, sexual abuse, juvenile delinquency and suicide, and they continue to be taken away from their families through welfare and juvenile justice systems (see Whitlock, “Active Remembrance” 25). The problems as such are among other things a manifestation of the continued impact of the systematic removal of Aboriginal children for over a century. To remember the pain in the past embodies the hope for a remedy in the present. Indigenous cultural capital circulating in and through the memories of the Stolen Generations has the potential to unsettle racial discourse and reconfigure the cultural capital to further Indigenous interests in Australian settler society. However, to reconcile with the past is a disturbing and protracted process for both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians. Edward Said remarks that the critical question of reflecting on an unsettling history is “not only of what is remembered but how and in what form. It is an issue about the very fraught nature of representation, not just about content” (176). As I will further elaborate, the incorporation of Aboriginal memories into cultural capital is associated with verification which tests

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the revealing nature of Aboriginal testimonies and autobiographies within a larger legal and political context. Furthermore, memories of the Stolen Generations are inevitably subject to mechanisms of selection, commodification, and consumption within the dominant discourse, which may counteract or neutralise the resistant power revealed by these narratives. In this regard, it is important to understand how Indigenous cultural capital works within a field that remains dominated by non-Aboriginal authorities and institutions, and in what ways the tactical retellings of Aboriginal living memory of separation and displacement can be culturally and politically effective in redressing the past wrongs. Amid the sweeping demand for remembrance in the powerful discourse of reconciliation (Whitlock, “Active Remembrance” 24), forgetting is often recognised as a subject that should be combatted so as to bring to light for non-Indigenous Australians a hitherto scarcely known history, or as a tendency that should be prevented from happening due to its implications of immorality and liability for repeating the past wrongs. Though seemingly antithetical to the process of remembering, the act of forgetting may shape and enrich the construction of memory. It is necessary to question the binary between memory and forgetting. As Andreas Huyssen puts it, “[i]s it not rather that, paradoxically, each and every memory inevitably depends both on distance and forgetting, the very things that undermine its desired stability and reliability but which, at the same time, are essential for the vitality of memory itself ?” (9). Though the connection and interdependence between remembering and forgetting is rarely discussed, memory has always profited from its opponent – the forgotten – which offers a justifiable reason, a needed will, or even desire to enable remembrance. If remembering highlights the significance of remembrance, forgetting alludes to the urgency of such remembrance. With regard to traumatic events, it can even be argued that the ultimate goal of remembering is that one can afford to forget. At this point, I am not seeking to valorise forgetting but to suggest the necessity of a conscious understanding of the mechanism of remembering and forgetting, which generates and reproduces our knowledge about the past. The development of the Stolen Generations narratives is not only about memories and the imperative to remember but also deeply associated with the act of forgetting. In this context, forgetting is by no means

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an accidental failure to remember, but a deliberate or inadvertent action of not knowing, ceasing to think of, silencing, neglecting, denial or disavowal. It involves the colonisers’ amnesia – the trope of forgetting – as evident in much Australian historiography, and the selective forgetting, often poignantly and at times strategically, employed by the colonised. For the former, a discourse of anti-forgetting in the pursuit of reflection and reparation pushes the boundaries of what shall be remembered and how to remember. For the latter, forgetting is not necessarily an absence of knowledge and it is not to suggest that Aboriginal people who were removed as children or had their children moved forgot the inflicted trauma, but rather an acknowledgement of their agency – the exercise of reticence – in difficult and complex situations. In this respect, forgetting may function as a tactic of resistance, by which knowledge awaits the proper moment for public disclosure. Considering the formation of cultural capital, as I will further analyse, forgetting creates a prerequisite of scarcity which stimulates the flow of knowledge and a consequential increase of exchange value of this knowledge. The questions remain: how do the “mechanisms of forgetting” operate (Rolls, “Great Australian Silence” 11), if not always being appropriated, to mediate the production and transmission of Indigenous cultural capital? How can forgetting be possibly mobilised to facilitate a less-troubled reflection of the past? Remembering and forgetting constitutes a dialectical mechanism through which knowledge formation is processed. By examining the interplay between remembering and forgetting, this chapter will focus on the making of Indigenous cultural capital in and through the testimonies and autobiographies of the Stolen Generations.

The Narratives of the Stolen Generations Bain Attwood terms the child separation stories over the decades as “the stolen generation narrative”, which constitutes a sense of what Jerome Bruner calls “narrative accrual” – a set of stories developed and transmuted through the processes of presenting and re-interpreting (Attwood,

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“Learning” 183; Bruner 18). This section will outline the development of the Stolen Generations narratives over the last few decades and examine how memories and the forgetting of child removal have been transformed into Indigenous cultural capital circulating in the public discourse. Before the 1970s, the stories of child removal seldom occupied a central position in Aboriginal oral or written narratives and few non-Aboriginal Australians were aware of the history of Aboriginal children being forcibly removed and institutionalised (See Read, “Return” 8; Attwood, “Learning” 185). Aboriginal memories of removal experiences were rarely disseminated beyond the affected families through the public media.1 As Attwood points out, there were multiple factors which contributed to Aboriginal people’s reticence, at least in the public sphere (see “Learning” 185–8). One possible explanation is that the enormous grief and loss brought by the violation of the mother–child relationship were too unbearable to be represented (Attwood, “Learning” 186). Aboriginal mothers who had their children wrenched from them by the welfare authorities or the police had little chance of seeing their children again (some were reunited years or decades later). There were cases in which they were told afterwards that their children were dead (this was not always true). While it was by no means that these grief-stricken mothers would, as some claimed at the time, “soon forget their offspring”,2 mechanisms of forgetting that functioned in traditional Aboriginal cultures – such as the well-known suppression of names of the recently dead (see Rolls, “Great Australian Silence” 11) – might have possibly rendered silent their enormous pain. Furthermore, and more prominently, Aboriginal people of mixed descent were confronted with severe racial prejudice under the assimilation 1 2

Though the archive was rich with records documenting child removal, few accounts made it into broader public discourse or accessible publications. According to the Aborigines Act 1905 (WA), the Chief Protector of Aborigines assumed the role of legal guardian of every Aboriginal and “half-caste” child under sixteen. This often-quoted remark was said by James Isdell in 1909, who was a travelling inspector and protector of Aborigines in the Kimberley, Western Australia: “I would not hesitate for one moment to separate any half-caste from its Aboriginal mother, no matter how frantic her momentary grief might be at the time. They soon forget their offspring” (qtd in Jacobs 149).

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policy and most of them grew to have a complicated feeling towards their own Aboriginality (see Attwood, “Learning” 187). Feelings of shame and humiliation on the part of many Aboriginal parents, who were believed to be unqualified to raise their own children because of the inferiority of being Aboriginal and hoped their children could be better off by having education and welfare, may have resigned themselves to the public silence over the child removal. Moreover, some fair-skinned Aboriginal people, out of concern that their children would be removed from them and due to other reasons, denied their Aboriginality. Their children grew up knowing little of Aboriginal heritage. The loss of children and the self-denial of Aboriginal identity amounted to a double deprivation imposed on Aboriginal people and communities. In the cases where Aboriginal people were resisting the colonisers’ often-made demand to speak or to tell their life stories, refusal to disclose their pain and sorrow could also be an act of agency. Investigating the reticence about child removal till the 1970s in Aboriginal oral narrations, Attwood suggests that Aboriginal people “had to come to terms with the racial structures that governed their lives, and minimising oppression by denying or forgetting events, or suppressing the feelings of loss and anger they provoked, was an important means of survival” (187). The attempt at forgetting could be a manifestation of extreme pain and a “conscious strategy” in response to the trauma inflicted by the child removal policies (Attwood, “Learning” 187).3 Yet this long silence, resulting from the above and other complex reasons, prefigured the outburst of separation stories at a later historical period and rendered the Indigenous cultural capital derived from these hidden stories politically powerful. From the early 1970s Aboriginal removal experiences started to emerge in Aboriginal life writings. Aboriginal authors reminisced about their

3

This remains to be seen in Aboriginal testimonies recorded in much later period. For instance, Link-Up (NSW) submission 186 in the Bring Them Home report tells of an Aboriginal mother refusing to be reunited with her child (the narrator): “she got very upset and was shaking and was crying and denying. She [said] she didn’t know any woman that’d be looking for a mother. She was crying and shaking, didn’t want to know, didn’t want to see me” (HREOC 204; square brackets in original).

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childhood experiences at the Children’s Homes, revealing much of poignancy and lasting frustration, as well as some happy and memorable moments they spent with caring sisters or adoptive families (see Attwood, “Learning” 199). Since the mid-1970s more critical reflections on the practices of child removal emerged in the autobiographies written by Charles Perkins, Jimmie Barker, and Margaret Tucker (see Read, “Don’t Turn” 22). In particular, Tucker’s accounts of her experience at Cootamundra Domestic Training Home appeared in her autobiography If Everyone Cared (1977), the television series Women of the Sun (1982) and later a documentary film Lousy Little Sixpence (1983). Different forms of Tucker’s stories were interwoven into a strikingly powerful account on the suffering of forcible removal, and the publicity of the time shaped her stories into a thematic exemplar of miserable removed children (see Attwood, “Learning” 193–5). Since then, the stories of child removal have shown a departure from the reminiscences which included occasional caring and loving moments at the Children’s Homes to an emphasis on the tragic aspects of child separation stories (see Attwood, “Learning” 199–200). Much encouraged by the Aboriginal rights movement in the late 1960s and 1970s, such as the 1967 referendum to include Aboriginal people in the national census and the landmark Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976, Aboriginal narratives of child removal embraced Aboriginal or “part-Aboriginal” identity which had long been suppressed or denied. From the beginning of the 1980s, the narratives of the Stolen Generation gradually shifted the focus from the personal to the political (Read, “Don’t Turn” 22). This change attracted more people (including historians and social workers) to focus on the grave consequences of the assimilation policy and added to the momentum of Aboriginal rights petitions. Particularly the historical study done by Read and his initiative to establish Link-Up in 1981, an organisation which provided assistance to affected Aboriginal members for family reunion, played a significant role in bringing the Stolen Generations stories to the public’s consciousness. From the mid-1980s to the 1990s, child removal and institutionalisation gradually featured more prominently in the representations of Aboriginal collective memory (Attwood, “Learning” 195). The chronic trauma resulting from the loss of children during much of the twentieth

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century was compounded with the violent dispossession of land in earlier contact history, underlining an “unspeakable and unrepresentable” history of Australian race relations (Huyssen 13). Led by Sally Morgan’s widely read My Place (1987), there emerged a number of autobiographies that centred on the Aboriginal identity of the authors and their heart-wrenching experiences of forcible removal. These included Glenys Ward’s Wandering Girl (1987), Alice Nannup’s When the Pelican Laughed (1992) and Doris Pilkington’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (1996). Compared to the earlier stories, the narratives of the early 1990s gradually addressed the removal experiences from a specific locale on a regional or even national scale, and foregrounded the events’ symbolic meaning and emotional evocation (Attwood, “Learning” 200). These narratives struck a chord in public readers. As the key texts on child removal entered into the English curricula in High School during this period, the stories of the Stolen Generations reached a wider and younger readership (van Toorn, “Tactical History” 257). Meanwhile, the market demand and expectations in turn promoted a proliferation of writings about the forcible removal of Aboriginal children from their families. As stories of traumatic memories were often considered to be a revelation of the deepest and truest feelings, an increasing number of Aboriginal autobiographies were readily marketed as accounts of what Stephen Muecke calls “the psychological outcome of social oppression” (“Aboriginal Literature” 416). In his discussion of My Place and Wandering Girl, Muecke draws on Foucauldian repressive hypothesis regarding the prohibited knowledge of sexuality to analyse a logic of speaking of and about Aboriginality. Muecke argues that Aboriginal writing is not merely an enunciation of social suppression, but also due to the fact that there had been a “readiness, even eagerness, to publish works by Aboriginal writers” (“Aboriginal Literature” 413). In a sense, “an account of negative content (e.g. ‘we have been oppressed’) having the positive effect of getting a book published” (Muecke, “Aboriginal Literature” 417; italics in original). The play of the market in affecting how Aboriginal autobiographies were framed and received in public discourse could hardly be ignored. The emergence and development of the Stolen Generations narratives from the 1970s to the 1990s projects a trajectory of how Indigenous cultural capital about Aboriginal child removal began to take shape, how

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it went beyond Aboriginal families and communities, and made its presence in mainstream discourse. These narratives documented important knowledge about Aboriginal history and the violent race relations in Australia. The acts of storytelling or writing, which enabled the circulation of this knowledge, was subject to Aboriginal traditions, social and political exigencies in a larger context. As Anne Brewster notes, “in the telling of Aboriginal life stories, the decision as to who tells what to whom is always a considered and inevitably a political choice” (Literary 37). What promoted a rapid reproduction of this knowledge was the construction of Aboriginal collective memories involving a petition for justice and reconciliation, and an outer push of repressive hypothesis – as much as the public believed so – which effectively evoked a liberating desire and anticipation on the part of non-Aboriginal people to know what had been suppressed, denied or forgotten in mainstream history. There existed a paradoxical relationship between an allegedly repressive mechanism of forgetting and its effect of stirring up narration of Aboriginal memories and non-Aboriginal remembrance. To an extent, the imaginary repressive paradigm created a necessity for non-Indigenous remembering and increased the value of much needed knowledge of Aboriginal history in its publicity and circulation. The production and dissemination of this knowledge about Aboriginal child removal was then transformed into Indigenous cultural capital to inform the public of past wrongs and racial injustices. Thereby, the formation of Indigenous cultural capital in mainstream discourse obtained the potential to generate a socio-cultural and socio-political impact. During the 1990s and 2000s, the Stolen Generations narratives received widespread attention and provoked unprecedented debates in Australian society. The most significant text was the HREOC report Bringing Them Home (1997), which put Aboriginal child removal and redress of historical injustices in national spotlight. The report documents the devastating impact of government policies, laws, and institutions in severing the familial bonds between Indigenous children of mixed descent and their parents through means of “compulsion, duress or undue influence” (HREOC 5). According to the child removal policies implemented from 1910 to 1970 (though the actual removal of Aboriginal children also took place before

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and after this period), the government agencies, churches and welfare institutions were responsible for taking away “half-caste” or “part-Aboriginal” children, placing them in Children’s Homes, dormitories, orphanages, or with foster families so as to assimilate them into the white settler society, allegedly in their best interests. The report revealed that a great number of removed children experienced physical, sexual, and psychological abuse, and that their original families were shattered and damaged. The report criticises the racially motivated removal of mixed-descent Aboriginal children as an attempt to eliminate Aboriginal people, or to “breed out the colour” in a systematic manner, which was tantamount to genocide and breached the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide ratified by Australia in 1949. The Inquiry of Indigenous child separation from their families collected testimonial submissions in oral or written form from 535 Indigenous people across Australia. The submitted testimonies were selected, excerpted, and printed in bold type as evidence of child removal in the full 689-page report. Though not all testimonies were included, the report consisted of many tearful accounts of Aboriginal sufferings. The HREOC President, Sir Ronald Wilson, stressed that the report should “keep intact the actual words of the storytellers … as if they [readers] were listening to the stories themselves” (2). But the role of editors should not be dismissed in presenting an organised narrative based on the voices of affected Aboriginal witnesses. For instance, Submission 843 is a testimonial account of an Aboriginal woman who recalled her separation from siblings because she was sent to work at the age of fourteen, as quoted in the report: So this meant the grieving took place again. The grief came for my younger sister and two brothers whom I thought I would never see again. […] I was again in a different environment … With the hardships going and thinking of my sister and brothers which I left at the Orphanage. My heart full of sorrows for them. (HREOC 10; bold letters and 2nd ellipsis in original)

The adverb “again” in the witness’s beginning sentence can catch the immediate attention of readers: where does it come from? Below the testimonial account is the editor’s explanation, informing readers of the witness’s tragic childhood experience before the separation with her siblings:

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Chapter 2 Confidential submission 843, Queensland: woman removed at 11 years from an informal foster placement with an uncle and aunt arranged by her father due to his travelling for seasonal work and after the death of her mother and placed in an orphanage in the early 1940s. (HREOC 11; italics in original)

The editorial voice echoes the witness account, directing readers’ attention to piece together retrospectively the Aboriginal witness’s disrupted life: she had suffered the death of her mother when she was young, and then “at 11 years” been taken away from her uncle and aunt (even though her father may possibly have come back to visit them between the seasonal work), and endured “grieving … again” “at the age of 14” when leaving her younger siblings who had also been removed to the orphanage (HREOC 10–11; emphasis in original). The excerpted testimony and the reversed narrative of editorial comment are interwoven to accentuate the trauma imposed repetitively on an Aboriginal girl who was forcibly separated from family members. Organised and commissioned by the HREOC, the report becomes an authoritative platform which empowers the solicited Aboriginal testimonial voices to negotiate their interests with government bodies and institutions. In this regard, the report allows Aboriginal witnesses to recall and reconstruct the fragmentary memories of child removal that centre on grief and loss. By situating public readers to “witness” the trauma wrought by the child removal policies, it generates a moral demand for empathy and compassion on the part of non-Indigenous readers and an exhortation to them to engage in the process of reflection and remembrance (see Whitlock, “In the Second Person” 197). In doing so, Aboriginal memories that inform readers of historical wrongs and racial injustice are turned into Indigenous cultural capital which has the potential to effect an attitudinal change of the existing cultural capital held by the mainstream society. The circulation of Indigenous cultural capital is manifest as a tactical manoeuvre to expand social readiness and public engagement to redress the uneven racial and power relations. The HREOC report, which integrates Indigenous voices, editorial statements and recommendations for actions, constitutes a prototype of narratives in the pursuit of reparation and reconciliation. It leads to a profusion of the Stolen Generations stories in the public arena. For instance,

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Carmel Bird’s edited The Stolen Children: Their Stories (1998) consists of a selection of full-length Aboriginal testimonies submitted to the Inquiry, some of which had not been quoted in the report,4 and non-Indigenous perspectives from politicians, scholars and people from other walks of life (including a journalist, an editor and a policeman’s son), which form an interracial dialogue in response to the exposed stories of child removal. Bird pleads with non-Indigenous readers to “listen to their [Indigenous] voices” and she “hope[s] that people may be moved to examine the full texts of those [parliamentary] debates in the cause of understanding, reconciliation and apology” (15, 117). Many Voices: Reflections on Experiences of Indigenous Child Separation (2002), edited by Mellor and Haebich, is also worth noting. The book presents the opinions, dialogues, and interviews for a three-year Bring Them Home Oral History Project, which was to address one of the recommendations of the HREOC report. Commenced in 1998, this project not only solicited the voices of the removed people, their parents and extended family members, but also collected the perspectives of adoptive parents and institutional personnel such as police officers, welfare workers, and administrators who were involved in the separation of Aboriginal children from their families. It aimed to establish “a comprehensive public record based on first-hand testimony” so that more non-Indigenous Australians can have a deeper understanding of the removal practices and the enduring impacts on Aboriginal life (Mellor and Haebich 3). Moreover, since the issues about the Stolen Generations took on a national focus, Aboriginal testimonial accounts, such as those published in the HREOC report and the subsequent collection The Stolen Children, have re-surfaced exponentially in various literary publications, including an increasing number of autobiographies, as well as other literary forms

4

Bird’s collection was in fact the only publication of the testimonies authorised by the HREOC and gained the permission of individual Aboriginal witnesses. The HREOC turned down other proposals for publishing or commodifying of the submitted testimonies due to the concerns of witnesses’ privacy (van Toorn, “Tactical History” 263). This act partly contributed to the popularity of Bird’s collection. The testimonies and materials of the National Inquiry now can be accessed by following the application procedures of Australian Archives.

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by Aboriginal authors, and non-Aboriginal works with Aboriginal characters and subject matter. Drawing on various real-life testimonies of Aboriginal child removal, a considerable number of fictional texts present the first-person, quasi-testimonial accounts of Aboriginal traumatic experiences and often juxtapose Aboriginal sufferings with an outpouring of white Australians’ confession, guilt and shame. The deployment or cross-­referencing of Aboriginal testimonies in the books for children demonstrates a way of activating Indigenous cultural capital in specific contextualisation. The crossover graphic novel Requiem for a Beast (2007) by Matthew Ottley, for example, features fictionalised Aboriginal memories of child removal and non-Aboriginal consciousness of the past wrongs through the depiction of a white boy’s redemptive journey. The narratives of and about the Stolen Generations – with the themes of speaking of trauma and engaging in individual and national healing – converged in a trend of what Gillian Whitlock terms “active remembrance” through “the therapeutic paradigm of reconciliation, a powerful discourse for acts of engagement between indigenous and non-indigenous subjects in settler societies” (“Active Remembrance” 24, 32). The exponential exposure of the memories of the Stolen Generations, accompanied by various acts of remembrance, becomes the defining moments of Australian race relations in the postcolonial context, linking both the unsettled past and an uncertain future. At this point it is necessary to probe further into the question of what makes for this active remembrance in the public consciousness. Paradoxically, what gives impetus to and sustains the act of remembering is a discourse of forgetting or about forgetting in political, social and academic debates. The political polemics ignited by Prime Minister John Howard’s speech at the first Conventions on Reconciliation following the release of the HREOC report provoked much anger and disappointment. Howard expressed his personal sorrow but refused to apologise on behalf of the federal government.5 That he “did not believe that current generations of Australians could be held accountable for or regarded as guilty for the acts 5

It was not until February 2008 that then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised on behalf of Parliament to Aboriginal people who had suffered from the child removal

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of earlier generations”6 was criticised as a failure to recognise the historical continuum and as an excuse to eschew the responsibilities of the nation. Later in the Federal Government’s submission to the National Inquiry, the Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs, Senator John Herron, asserted: “there never was a generation of stolen children” because “the proportion of separated Aboriginal children was no more than 10 per cent” (qtd in Dow 5). This remark questioned the credibility and accuracy of the National Inquiry regarding how many Aboriginal children were taken away.7 For those who bear the scars of forcible removal and many others who believe that the historical wound can hardly be reduced to numerical calculation, this denunciation amounts to a blatant imposition of historical amnesia – a persisting trope of forgetting, enacted through the “coercive exercise of power … that occludes from public space the social logics within which the victim could ‘make sense’” (Lloyd 214). The discourse of forgetting remains a frequent device mobilised by the powerholders to obfuscate the history and to silence the suffering of the powerless. Though this discursive device was nothing new, it sufficiently stirred an upsurge of public anguish and sorrow. Judith Herman’s analysis of the relationship between the perpetrator and the victim in the aftermath of trauma can be drawn as an analogy to the federal government’s denial of past wrongs: In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure that no one listens. To this end, he marshals an impressive array of arguments, from the most blatant denial to the most sophisticated and elegant rationalization. (8)

6 7

policies. Rudd ruled out financial compensation but set the federal government to “close the gap” between Aboriginal communities and the rest of Australian society. From the House of Representatives Hansard No. 213, on 27 May 1997. The National Inquiry concluded that a high percentage of Indigenous children – between one in three and one in ten – were taken away due to the racially motivated policies. But this percentage of removed children was roughly estimated because much documented data was lost and witnesses could not be found in many cases.

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The trope of settler forgetting is perceived as not only counter to factual reality but also morally wrong and malicious. An imperative to expose the forgotten (especially the deliberate attempt of forgetting) gathers force from the opposite side and ultimately bursts into an urge for remembering. Even though there is no definite relation between the act of remembering and the prevention of recurrence of past wrongs, the proper acknowledgement and remembering of historical injustices is believed to ameliorate the present situation of the victims (see Neumann 124). The discourse of remembering is then transformed into a discourse about forgetting, driven by the moral obligation to excavate the forgotten and to annihilate it. In the HREOC report the speech of the GovernorGeneral, Sir William Deane, at the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation in Canberra is quoted at length, in which he addressed to “all well-meaning people”: true reconciliation between the Australian nation and its Indigenous peoples is not achievable in the absence of acknowledgement by the nation of the wrongfulness of the past dispossession, oppression and degradation of the Aboriginal peoples. … It is simply to assert our identity as a nation and the basic fact that national shame, as well as national pride, can and should exist in relation to past acts and omissions, at least when done or made in the name of the community or with the authority of government. (qtd in HREOC 4; my italics)

As the audience is exhorted to embark on a journey of reconciliation, the speech argues against a continuing forgetting in settler society, which is not only associated with “omissions” of the “past acts” of racial injustices but also linked to the “absence” of apologies to acknowledge the wrongs and the responsibilities. To combat this forgetting is regarded as pivotal to a moral and ethical restitution of Australian national identity defined by its shame and pride, past and present. From this perspective, the discourse of reconciliation is framed through remembering what has been forgotten or an anti-forgetting discourse to achieve personal healing and moral redress on a communal level. Fuelled by an urge for remembering and a condemnation of forgetting, the HREOC report generated an unprecedented demand for separation stories among the non-Indigenous public who were keen to know what

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had happened and morally obliged to engage in national redemption. In fact, given that the Inquiry was the first national investigation of Aboriginal child removal, it attracted much public attention and media coverage from the very beginning. As the two-year investigation was almost concluded in November 1996, the HREOC decided to delay the release of the report till March 1997 so as to include recommendations for recompense. The mounting expectations of the public made the long-awaited report an instant bestseller after its release in May 1997. With 9,000 copies sold within the first twelve months, the report was later published in different formats including hard copies, CDs, and on-line downloads (see van Toorn, “Tactical History” 259). Van Toorn suggests that the stories of the Stolen Generations are both a desirable commodity in the cultural market and a potent force with political and moral impact (“Tactical History” 259). The mechanism of forgetting underlines the expansion of the Stolen Generations narratives and their enabling force: for one thing, the discourse about forgetting exposes the gap in the non-Indigenous public knowledge about Aboriginal history of child removal, hence stimulating the circulation of knowledge as commodities; for another, the moral implications of forgetting connect individual non-Indigenous readers to the socio-political exigencies and national debates, especially in response to the questioning of national subjectivity and “maturity” in dealing with the past wrongs and negligence (Rolls, “Great Australian Silence” 8). While awaiting an overdue formal apology from the Prime Minister on behalf of the federal government, there was an intense eagerness among non-Indigenous Australians to express personal guilt, shame, and apology through signing Sorry Books, joining the National Sorry Day and a “Journey of Healing”, as well as other memorial activities. In a sense, the blatant forgetting in the political sphere produces a space for the non-Indigenous public to reflect on their individual consciousness of and relationship with the nation state and its colonial history. Probing the reason behind the wave of national redemption, Haydie Gooder and Jane Jacobs argue that the exposure to colonial deeds and crimes renders contemporary settlers unsettled about their national subjectivity, in comparison with the moral legitimacy of Aboriginal people. To those “guilt-afflicted settler Australians” the sweeping apologies and acts of remembrance can be a means for their “restitution

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of a legitimate sense of belonging” in the postcolonial context (Gooder and Jacobs 232, 243). Another important factor contributing to the development of the Stolen Generations narratives is academic debates in the field of Aboriginal history. The “history wars” between “black armband history” and “white blindfold history” came to public prominence during the 1990s and the 2000s.8 The contestation involved, among other historians (and politicians), Henry Reynolds, whose widely read works on colonial policies and practices of Aboriginal dispossession unsettle an Australian history of heroic achievement, and Keith Windschuttle who argues that so-called “political correctness” has undermined the intellectual rigour of historians. For instance, Windschuttle proclaims in his provocatively titled The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Vol. 3: The Stolen Generations 1881–2008 (2009) that the history of the Stolen Generations is a myth. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to survey this debate, but its polemics challenged and enlightened the public understanding of Australian colonial history and its race relations. Here I want to draw attention to the mechanism of forgetting that has been mobilised in the critical discussions of re-writing Australian history. From W. E. H. Stanner’s oft-quoted term “a cult of forgetfulness” (25) in his 1968 lecture “The Great Australian Silence” to Henry Reynolds’s memoir Why Weren’t We Told (1999), there has been a trail of anthropological and historical studies which challenge the prevalent practices of silence and effacement in the history of Aboriginal-settler relations. As Mitchell Rolls argues in his critique of Stanner’s and Reynolds’s arguments, “considerable

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The “history wars” refer to the public debates over how the history of colonisation in Australia is represented. Since the late 1970s (though there were earlier examples) there has been an increasing interest in Aboriginal history and revisionist accounts of the impact of colonisation on Aboriginal people. The “black armband view of history” was coined by historian Geoffrey Blainey in his 1993 Sir John Latham Memorial Lecture which was subsequently published under the title “Drawing up a Balance Sheet of Our History” in Quadrant, arguing that the excessively critical and negative view of Australian history assailed the favourably held rendition of settlement. The “white blindfold history” termed by Reynolds was a counter response (qtd in Attwood and Foster 16).

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information concerning Aboriginal history, the nature of dispossession, and contemporary circumstances was widely available and a constituent element of day-to-day life”, and hence many of those proclaiming the act of silencing and forgetting in Australian historiography are “overlooking the range of material through an assortment of media that was in fact telling and to which they were exposed” (“Great Australian Silence” 7; see also Rolls, “Why Didn’t You Listen” 11–15). Chris Healy points out the irony in the postcolonial caution about forgetting: “Non-indigenous Australians imagine again and again that they have only just learned about indigenous disadvantage … as if for the first time. These endless (re)discoveries of, and about, Aboriginal people are only possible because non-indigenous Australians forget their own forgetting” (203). Though being critical of settler Australians’ negligence about Aboriginal problems over the years, this view suggests the paradoxical effect of forgetting in generating the discourse about Aboriginality, which yet does not necessarily serve the interests of Aboriginal people. We can call the latter inclination of forgetting the complex racial history, or a belief of the total silenced history imposed by colonial hegemony, as “postcolonial forgetting”. The rhetoric of postcolonial forgetting manifests an eagerness to create a blank space or a less-burdened starting point to instil a different knowledge system about Aboriginal–settler history. Though either a good intentioned new start or a generalisation of the complex past is problematic, this postcolonial forgetting at the very least secures public attention and gathers a counter force in resisting colonial amnesia and in challenging the denial and denigration of truth on whatever scale. In the development and circulation of the Stolen Generations narratives, the mechanisms of remembering and forgetting underline a profound logic in the making of Indigenous cultural capital. The discourses of and about forgetting are particularly complex due to its entanglement with different ideologies and power relations in the postcolonial context. Nevertheless, an open and positive position can still be embraced. By taking advantage of the public interest aroused by the rhetoric of forgetting, Aboriginal memories reconfigure the cultural capital concerning Australian race relations within mainstream discourse. As testimonies and autobio­ graphies are most frequently used to document Aboriginal memories of

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child removal, it is necessary in the next section to discern the relationship between memory and its representational forms, and to what extent the genres of child removal stories help us understand the historical truth and what has been remembered or forgotten.

An Archive of Living Memories In the discussion of the Stolen Generations, Aboriginal autobiography and testimony are sometimes merged into “autobiographical testimonies”, a term referring to Aboriginal voices solicited as evidence of forcible removal and circulating in the public discourse (Whitlock, “In the Second Person” 197; T. Wilson 78). Aboriginal testimonies collected during the National Inquiry were different from those solicited in court, as the HREOC report states: “The nature of the Inquiry process and of the information sought and provided meant that evidence and submissions could not be tested as thoroughly as would occur in a courtroom” (17). Other than standing on their own as individual self-supported stories, the testimonies in this context carry significance as a collective body of evidence for child removal, “seeking an outcome of discursive justice rather than prosecution and legal judgment” (Whitlock, “Active Remembrance” 27). This ambiguous definition of “testimony” – as a truth-telling narrative widely disseminated in social discourse but not to the point of serving as verifiable evidence in court – contributes to the crisis concerning the narratives of the Stolen Generations.9

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At the legal level, the forensic demands of the court challenged the veracity of Aboriginal claimants’ testimonies which in many cases lacked the support of documents or witness accounts. In August 2000, a test case of the Stolen Generations to seek government compensation failed. For more, see Toohey and Saunders 1. Although it is not to conflate the first-person narratives and the evidence offered for judicial cross-examination, the credibility of testimony has created a crisis of retelling Aboriginal forcible removal and complicated the Stolen Generations narratives.

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Generically, testimony is a speech of personal truth. Its inherent claim to reveal the truth would inevitably render the witnessing subject liable for cross-examination and verification. The genre of testimony therefore not only suggests the confessional nature of giving personal witness to what has happened, but also implicitly evokes a judicial context in which the witness account is to be examined. As Leigh Gilmore notes, [b]ecause testimonial projects require subjects to confess, to bear witness, to make public and shareable a private and intolerable pain, they enter into a legalistic frame in which their efforts can move quickly beyond their interpretation and control, become exposed as ambiguous, and therefore subject to judgments about their veracity and worth (7).

The questioning of veracity tests the limit of testimony to document the history of child removal. It underlines the controversies related to the way in which Aboriginal voices were collected during the National Inquiry10 and the polarised opinions regarding the scale and impact of the forcible removal. More critically, the demand for verification disturbs the resistant power that Aboriginal testimonies may signify. According to Gayatri Spivak, testimonial speech occurs when the oppressed gives witness of his/ her truth to the less oppressed (7). Regarding the relationship between testimony and resistance, Spivak comments that the oppressed “may sometimes agree to be hailed to testimonial in the belief that resistance will thereby find effective consolidation”, notwithstanding that it could “bring subalternity to its own crisis” (9). This view applies to Aboriginal testimonies of child removal. It is easy to assume that the voice of the voiceless is subversive against the authorities in a transparent manner and that the power is even doubly resistant when it comes to Aboriginal female subjects (Muecke, “Aboriginal Literature” 409; Huggan, Postcolonial Exotic 162). Testimony does not always embody political intent; nor does it guarantee the effect of 10

The HREOC did not inquire into cases when children were placed in the Children’s Homes at the wishes of their parents, or because of serious illness or neglect; nor did it take evidence of administrative and welfare officers who were engaged in the removal so that they could possibly defend themselves. This led to questions about the veracity of testimonies and the findings of the report. For more, see Howson 19.

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resistance. Giving testimony could place Aboriginal witness in a hazardous and vulnerable situation, for s/he confronts an emotionally challenging process of recalling the trauma in the past and being questioned about the consistency and veracity of his/her accounts. It is therefore necessary to recognise that testimony has the potential to launch Aboriginal resistance to dominant forces, yet its resistant value is not readily produced. The ambiguity inherent in testimony seems to be worse when it comes to autobiography, which has considerable weight in the debates given its accumulated impact in shaping public sentiment and knowledge about the Stolen Generations. The genre of autobiography is ambivalent because of the conflation of hero/heroine, authors and narrators. While purporting to offer certain objectivity, it remains by and large a subjective account. At times autobiography blurs the line between personal experience and collective voices. On the one hand, a profusion of autobiographies promotes the Stolen Generations stories to shift the focus from individual and personal events in a specific area to a collective memory that bears significance in the national history. In this process, Indigenous cultural capital expands in its capacity to propel moral redress for past wrongs. On the other, the value of retelling Aboriginal memories through autobiography is often undermined by the accusation that any value is merely symbolic and not historically reliable, given that “memory can be notoriously malleable and so unreliable” (Attwood, “Learning” 209). The problem of veracity in autobiography does not so much concern the difference between truth and lies but deals with the limits of representation itself (Gilmore 5). The ambivalent nature of autobiography can compromise the credibility of Aboriginal stories and constrain what Indigenous cultural capital circulating in these counter narratives is expected to achieve. As the witness’s private memories are exposed under the spotlight in the public sphere, moreover, the descriptions of trauma in these autobiographical testimonies, such as sadistic flogging, sexual harassment and abuse, and twists of fate, are inclined to be gazed upon with voyeuristic curiosity. Voyeurism, a process of consuming rather than experiencing trauma, poses a potential threat to the privacy of Aboriginal witnesses. The voyeuristic gaze, compounded with the redemptive impetus within settler society, precipitates the commodification of traumatic stories of

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being stolen. Admittedly, as a predominant theme in the narratives of the Stolen Generations, trauma consolidates those who experienced sufferings and those who have sympathy for them in a process of healing or “collective catharsis” (Whitlock, “Active Remembrance” 26). Aboriginal stories that do not conform to the universal mould of trauma, however, are less likely to receive wide acceptance in the book market, which underlines a problematic aspect of the reconciliation discourse which privileges the therapeutic paradigm (see Whitlock, “Active Remembrance” 30–6). This alerts us to the questions of what has been forgotten and what is likely to be forgotten in the performed act of remembrance. Texts that depict the positive aspects of child removal (which comprise only a small proportion compared to the majority of trauma stories) often receive very critical responses. Notwithstanding that they have the potential to challenge the racialised assumption which conceives Aboriginal people as repressed subjects, as Whitlock observes, these non-traumatised narratives “are likely to be seen as deviant and misguided” (“Active Remembrance” 31). It is not to suggest that removed Aboriginal children were not victims of racial discrimination or that these texts positively endorse the policy of separation. At this point, it is important to consider what Muecke reminds us is the “complex series of apparatuses of exclusion and co-option” which decides what kind of Aboriginal removal stories is accepted by the mainstream readership (“Aboriginal Literature” 417). It sheds light on the debates concerning the historical truth and illuminates how this body of separation stories is constructed and affected, and to whom it is addressed. The vigorous processes of soliciting and disseminating testimonial and autobiographical accounts through institutions (such as governmental bodies, committees, and schools) and the market involve various risks and dangers, which test the representative nature of the genres. In particular, the apparatuses of inclusion and exclusion, which epitomise the rules in the dominant terrain, channel and constrain the dissemination of Indigenous cultural capital through Aboriginal separation stories. However, as Muecke argues, Aboriginal writings of removal experiences “could be seen as a site of multiple constraints pertaining both to forms and contextual relations. These constraints are not negative, they tend to make sure that a text will have a specific application in renegotiating meanings” (“Aboriginal

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Literature” 417). In this view, while the representative limits of testimony and autobiography in expressing Aboriginal memories of removal experiences exist, the genres can be productive in enabling Aboriginal authorial agency and allowing Aboriginal people to voice their interests in mainstream discourse. In other words, despite being within the terrain governed by the dominant ideology, Indigenous cultural capital generated from Aboriginal autobiographical testimonies embodies a chance of breaking through the imposed apparatus to gain a wider recognition of Aboriginal sufferings and rights. This section will focus on Aboriginal autobiographies – Lowitja O’Donoghue’s Lowitja (2003), Doris Kartinyeri’s Kick the Tin (2000) and Nancy Barnes’s Munyi’s Daughter: A Spirited Brumby (2000) – published at the time when the Stolen Generations were at the centre of national debates. All three authors spent some of their early life at the Colebrook Home for Children in South Australia.11 While considering the somehow inconsistent memories of O’Donoghue about her childhood days and Kartinyeri’s and Barnes’ recalling of their different, if not entirely contrasting, removal experiences, I suggest that the multifaceted stories of the stolen children open up a critical space to reflect on an archive of Aboriginal living memories and to explore the authorial agency of articulating Aboriginal visions of history. By investigating the existing constraints on Aboriginal memories and autobiographies, I will elaborate on the ways in which Indigenous cultural capital is mobilised, invested, and operated by Aboriginal authors in retelling their own separation stories. Lowitja O’Donoghue, a well-known Aboriginal woman and public administrator, was made Australian of the Year in 1984 and was the founding chairperson of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission in 1990. She published her autobiography Lowitja in 2003, primarily targeting 11

The Colebrook Home was established at Quorn in 1927 and moved to Eden Hills in 1944. Until its closure in 1981, over 350 Aboriginal children had lived at Colebrook (see HREOC 30). According to their autobiographies, Nancy Barnes stayed at Colebrook from 1930 to 1941, Lowitja O’Donoghue from 1934 to 1948, and Doris Kartinyeri from 1945 to 1959. O’Donoghue once took care of the baby Kartinyeri at Colebrook.

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young readers. In the episode entitled “Taken Away”, O’Donoghue recalls her childhood experience of being “taken away” at the age of two and brought up in the Colebrook Home (Lowitja 2). She never saw her Irish father again, and she only met her mother when she was in her thirties. Her brother and three of her four sisters were also removed from home. O’Donoghue concludes at the end of this episode: “We are called the stolen children” (Lowitja 2). This autobiography implies that the descriptive terms “taken away” and “stolen” weigh equally. In an interview with Andrew Bolt in 2001, however, O’Donoghue admitted that her removal was probably at her white father’s request and she would see herself “as a removed child and not necessarily stolen” (Bolt 1). Her concession was sensational amidst an already intense debate about the Stolen Generations. Criticism from both sides – for and against the healing process of the Stolen Generations – came “in a rare moment of unity” (Neill 13). Some Aboriginal activists were of the opinion that O’Donoghue’s remarks contradicted her public persona as a high-­profile member of the Stolen Generations and that it might jeopardise the Aboriginal community’s demand for a formal apology and reparation from the government. Meanwhile, political conservatives took her case as evidence that the Stolen Generations did not exist. Windschuttle launched an attack in his comments on the nuanced differences between “taken away”/“removed” and “stolen”: being “taken away” from parents and “removed” to institutions evokes compassion and sympathy, yet it does not necessarily lead to a moral judgement on the act of removal; whereas, being “stolen” would immediately direct the public attention to the perpetrator for moral and legal judgement (330–1). An editorial in The Weekend Australian entitled “Sad Semantics Betray the Stolen Children” claimed that “Lowitja O’Donoghue’s naivety, neglect or misinformation has allowed the debate about reconciliation to be reduced once again to semantics” (qtd in Windschuttle 324). Facing the debates of semantics and politics, O’Donoghue delivered a speech at the 2001 Stolen Generations Conference in Adelaide under the title of “Stolen, Taken or Removed, We Suffered all the Same”. She argued that even in circumstances where children were voluntarily relinquished to authorities, Aboriginal parents’ decision to relinquish were forced or hardly of their

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own making.12 O’Donoghue pleaded with the public to recognise different forms of separation and called for an understanding of Aboriginal pain over the years. After all, she was separated from her mother at a young age and that pain lingered on till they were reunited after many years, although, even then, a language barrier made it impossible for them to communicate with each other.13 O’Donoghue may not have expected the overwhelming backlash against her initial remarks. The controversy did not so much deal with the factual circumstances of her removal, but tied in with the political and moral implications for the reconciliation project. According to Windschuttle, the inconsistencies in O’Donoghue’s childhood memories can also be found in her contradictory accounts of living in the Colebrook Home from 1934 to 1948. Matron Ruby Hyde and Sister Rutter, in charge of Colebrook from 1927 to 1952, were fondly remembered by many Colebrook children, including Kartinyeri and Barnes in their respective memories of their days at Colebrook (see HREOC 107, 147). For O’Donoghue, journalist Stewart Cockburn recalled that she told him during an interview in 1977 that at Colebrook “she had a happy childhood there with 50 other part-Aboriginal boys and girls” (qtd in Windschuttle, 328). However, her autobiography Lowitja (2003) seems to contradict this “happy” memory, noting that the days at Colebrook were preoccupied with strict rules and “many of us were very unhappy there” (3). O’Donoghue wrote that the people who managed Colebrook believed Aboriginal children were “dirty and ignorant”; before she left at 16, “Matron said to me ‘you’ll never make anything of your life!’” (Lowitja 3). Though O’Donoghue does not mention the Matron’s name in her book, here Matron was likely to be Ruby Hyde who was in charge of the Colebrook Home at that time. The fun time, for the young 12 13

The edited version of O’Donoghue’s speech was published in The Australian, 15 March 2001, p. 13. Indigenous writer Melissa Lucashenko comments on Lowitja O’Donoghue’s case, revealing the sad situation when Lowitja met her mother again after many years. Lowitja could not speak the tribal language and her mother could not talk to her in English. So even though they knew they were mother and daughter, they were not able to communicate. See Lucashenko, “Whose” 89.

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O’Donoghue and other Aboriginal children at the Home, was to make up Aboriginal words so as to “make fun of Matron” (O’Donoghue, Lowitja 3). Such mischievous action was probably the way in which children resisted the institutionalised life. In retrospect, however, whether “taken” or “stolen,” “happy” or “unhappy” at the Children’s Home, O’Donoghue has probably stated different aspects of her childhood stories to the best of her knowledge in different contexts. Brewster points out that Aboriginal women have for long assumed the role of passing on traditional knowledge and cultural practices in their communities and hence their autobiographies often embody an “‘educative’ value” (Literary 55). This is evident in O’Donoghue’s autobiography where the top right corner of nearly each page with text provides for young readers the explanations of specific terms, such as “Dreaming”, “Stolen Generations”, and so forth. Her autobiography also retains the feature of oral narration, with a subtitle stating this is a story “as told to Joan Cunningham and Karen Jennings” (on the cover). Though the autobiography transforms the relationship between the narrator and the listeners to that between the author and the readers, it remains to be shaped and guided by the inherited oral traditions for knowledge transmission. For Aboriginal people, it is important to “know what to remember and what to forget, what to let go of and what to preserve” (D. Rose, “Hidden Histories” 16). This is the result of both the skills of traditional storytelling and the adapted, strategic maneuverers for cultural survival in the aftermath of colonisation. Memories by nature are always engaged with the present whenever people reach into their past. As Whitlock reminds, “It is evident that Indigenous writers make strategic use of their opportunities to document traumatic personal histories, and it is by no means the case that they choose to tell all” (“Active Remembrance” 34). The politics of memories are more a matter of strategic investment of Indigenous cultural and political interests, an emphasis on hitherto obscured or suppressed facets of the past, than a fabrication of Indigenous history. The reconstruction of the memories of separation can be seen as a hedge against racial dominance and a manifestation of Aboriginal resistance in the postcolonial context. At this point, it is worth reflecting on the contextual relations that shape and influence individual and personal memories. The contextual factors, such as

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the dominant discourse and social expectations, may come into play with Aboriginal memories. By the 1970s, many removed Aboriginal children, who were brought up during the White Australia policy and had been made to believe that the white education system had bettered them, were expected to have positive feelings when they recalled their schooling days. It was not rare, as shown in the first section, to find Aboriginal memories of caring and close relations between the inmates at Children’s Homes during this period. When O’Donoghue mentioned her childhood experience in the 1977 interview, her “happy” memory did not surprise the audience at that time. From the 1980s onwards, as discussed previously, along with the advancement of Aboriginal movements, more and more Aboriginal adults came to “regain” their Aboriginal identity (Attwood, “Learning” 192). As they struggled for more rights to be recognised by mainstream society, the traumatic memories were foregrounded in the narratives of the former stolen children, and the national project of reconciliation which commenced in the 1990s was at least in part a response to these voices. It is understandable that O’Donoghue’s later memory may incorporate her awareness of the experience of others, which for instance came to light by way of the HREOC report. Yet her attempt at engagement in the national healing process is not necessarily for her individual interests. As Rolls points out, “[i]n respect to colonialism … the trauma iterated by today’s individuals is not isolable from broader socio-cultural and socio-political currents and exigencies” (“Great Australian Silence” 20). Aboriginal trauma or suffering in the discourses of reconciliation can be transformed into “a source of regeneration, a collective catharsis and a means of creating a moral community which has come to terms with the violence of its national history” (Whitlock, “Active Remembrance” 35; see also Humphrey 9). Stimulated by the reconciliation project, an upsurge of traumatic texts in the forms of autobiography become an empowering asset and offer a strategic opportunity for Aboriginal authors, like O’Donoghue, to tap into this newly formed cultural capital for the purpose of healing and reconciliation. O’Donoghue’s case displays a set of constrained power relations that manage and control the production of Indigenous cultural capital in relation to the diversified experiences of separation. Considering the impact of readers’ preference in regard to Aboriginal writings, van Toorn among

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other critics is concerned that if “a narrow set of codifications is taken to be representative, the diversity of Aboriginal historical experiences and representational modes is likely to be suppressed” (“Tactical History” 254; see also Whitlock, “Active Remembrance” 31–2). Referring to Aboriginal writers who fail to live up to non-Aboriginal standards against which Aboriginal narratives are measured, Sonia Kurtzer points out that the “frustration would be better directed at the hegemonic culture which seeks to control the manufacture and public circulation of images of Aboriginality” (27–8). The selective reception of Aboriginal stories undermines narratives of the Stolen Generations and their cognate Indigenous cultural capital. Nevertheless, Aboriginal authorial agency opens up the possibility for the operation of Indigenous cultural capital in redressing pain and injustice both historically and at present. In the following discussion of Aboriginal memories, Doris Kartinyeri’s Kick the Tin and Nancy Barnes’s Munyi’s Daughter: A Spirited Brumby, published in the same year of 2000, can be read comparatively. These two autobiographies present the different life tracks that started from the Colebrook Home. However, as I will argue, both authors transform their respective childhood memories to express the hope that the historical wrongs shall not be repeated. Doris Kartinyeri is an Aboriginal woman of Ngarrindjeri heritage. Her autobiography was “professionally edited, promoted and marketed” by Spinifex Press, an independent feminist publisher (Hosking 66). The book launch was held at the site of former Colebrook Home at Eden Hills in Adelaide. O’Donoghue, Kartinyeri’s former Colebrook companion, came to deliver a speech in front of the media and a large audience. The picture on the cover illustrates the book’s title “Kick the Tin”, which draws a scene of the can kicking – a game that Kartinyeri played with other Aboriginal children at Colebrook. As the word “tin” is embedded in her name (KarTINyeri), Kartinyeri sees herself like a “tin” being kicked around. It is a poignant metaphor for the sorrows and tortures she has been through. On the back cover is a powerful account of her life: The legacy of being a member of the Stolen Generations continued for Doris as she was placed in white homes as a virtual slave, struggled through relationships and

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As Kartinyeri recollects in her autobiography, her mother died at the hospital when she was only a one-month-old baby. Before her father came to take her home, she had been “stolen” from the hospital and removed to the Colebrook Home (Kartinyeri 6). After she left Colebrook in 1959 at the age of fourteen, Kartinyeri experienced continuous sexual harassment and abuse, and developed a drinking problem. One of her most traumatic memories was being sexually abused by the lay minister of the church. She writes, “How would anybody know what I was going through? Where is the guiding hand a child is meant to have? … I felt these terrible experiences had ruined my life” (61–2). Kartinyeri interrogates the assimilation policy with enormous sadness and anger, striking an emotional chord in her readers. Kartinyeri began her journey of healing by writing the fragments of her painful memories. She writes, “My life has been literally kicked about, just like the tin we used to kick around. I believe that our Aboriginal brothers and sisters experienced much suffering because of the abusive behaviour of white fella governments and regimental, oppressive institutions” (2). Kartinyeri evokes the painful memories of those who have also been racially discriminated and oppressed. By shifting the personal reference from the singular (“my” and “I”) to the plural form (“we” and “our”), Kartinyeri translates her individual misery into the collective suffering of “Aboriginal brothers and sisters”. Michael Jackson explains the empowering effect of Aboriginal writing, in which the “transformation of particular subjective experience into a universalized and trans-subjective category enables one to grasp and control the situation one experienced first in solitude and powerlessness” (141–2). Identifying personal trauma as part of a collective memory can be a way of self-empowerment, enabling Aboriginal subjects like Kartinyeri to come to terms with the inflicted trauma of the past and to direct this power to heal others who share similar pains. Drawing on feminist theories on women’s autobiography, Brewster argues that a sense of collectivism in self-presenting voices of Aboriginal women writers

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suggests a tendency of linking personal poignancy to communal suffering and a way in which individual subjectivity is connected to the networks of social conflicts (Literary 31–2). The act of writing in this sense does not only serve personal healing but also is tied to Aboriginal collective identity and responsibilities. The “cultural capital of Aboriginal memory,” as Brewster points out, is then effective in “produc[ing] a nation-wide sense of solidarity and common interest among Aboriginal people” (Literary 6). Re-affirming her Aboriginal identity, Kartinyeri concludes: “I am proud to be a Nunga. The battles and struggles of living in two worlds that I endured throughout my life have proven my aboriginality” (135). Kartinyeri identifies Aboriginality as an inner quality enabling her to battle against racialised subjugation. Susan Hosking comments that Kartinyeri’s story “slips comfortably into the genre of battler stories that occupy so much space in the Australian psyche” (68). In identifying an anti-authoritarian sentiment deeply rooted in Australian national identity, Kartinyeri transforms her autobiography into a story of suffering and courage in the face of universal dominance and oppression. Kartinyeri’s autobiography captures the emotional and spiritual expectation of public readership and in doing so, she effectively renders her memory an asset to empower herself and the Aboriginal community towards healing and reconciliation. Kartinyeri’s case therefore demonstrates how the tactical treatment of Aboriginal memories as Indigenous cultural capital engages with the national discourse of reconciliation to challenge racialised dominance in Australian history. By comparison, Nancy Barnes’s self-published Munyi’s Daughter was not so lucky in terms of public acceptance; even its launch, according to Hosking, was “disquieting and uncomfortable” (66). The opening sentence of Barnes’s life story appears inconsistent to most readers: “We are referred to as ‘The Stolen Generation’. I consider myself ‘Saved’” (1). To be “saved” is an unusual interpretation of the removal experience. “This is an Aboriginal autobiography that nobody wanted to publish, and few have gone out of their way to read”, Hosking comments on Barnes’s book (68). Back in 1930, the two-year-old Barnes was admitted to the Colebrook Home. She was too young to know who had sent, taken or stolen her at that time, but she had contracted polio and she believed that she was saved by the care of Sister Rutter and Sister Ruby Hyde, and by other older Aboriginal brothers and

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sisters. Barnes remembered fondly her stay at Colebrook during 1930–41. Barnes grew up to have a successful career and she became “a fully qualified kindergarten teacher and … the first Aboriginal woman appointed to the Aboriginal Affairs Board” (Hosking 68). Barnes’s success in life can be seen from her broad smile in the three photos printed on the book’s cover. Each of them shows Barnes at a different life stage – when she was a young girl, in her middle age and as a grey-haired woman. The central and biggest picture was published by the Sydney Morning Herald when Barnes was Director of the Ida Standley pre-school in Alice Springs. Her confident expression sends a clear message to readers that this autobiography can be read as an inspiring story of courage and triumph. As a saved child, Barnes’s alternative account challenges the public understanding of child removal experiences, hence it may not have been as welcomed by non-Aboriginal readers who were habituated to experiencing guilt and shame for others’ suffering. But beyond her smile on the cover, Barnes tells a story of “courage and poignancy” within a larger context of racial injustice in Australian history (vi). The resisting power embedded in her autobiography stems from her courage in telling an alternative separation story, and from her stand against racial inequality and prejudice. Barnes relates how in her early years of working for white families, the housekeeper once told her to eat alone in the kitchen and wait on the table while they had meals. In a calm but determined tone, Barnes refused: “I quietly replied to her, that I was employed to look after the children, and that I would do to the best of my ability. But wait on tables I would not, as I did not see this as part of my duties” (59). Barnes’s rejection of the unreasonable demand was done “quietly”, bringing the concession from her white employer and retaining her own dignity in a racially discriminating situation. Perhaps because of her childhood illness, Barnes understood how to make strength out of weakness. Barnes neither argued nor compromised in this uneven power relationship. From this perspective, Barnes’s resistance should not be construed as anything less than other Aboriginal life stories of fighting against racialised subjugation. Barnes writes about her search for roots towards the end of the book, without foregrounding it like most separation stories do. She recalls the meetings with her mother whom she met only twice in her adult years. For

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they were not able to communicate in the same language, the estranged mother-daughter relationship turned out to be sorrowful. Their second meeting was the last time that Barnes saw her mother because she passed away before long. The tragic sense of alienation between mother and daughter was cruel for Barnes who “couldn’t face” it and she sighed, “[h]ow much grief this caused Munyi [her mother], I could not imagine” (167, 169). Though these tearful moments that echoed the trauma in many separation memories only amount to a fraction of Barnes’s autobiography, it would be unfair to read her story as “an endorsement of colonial policies” (Hosking 70). Barnes blames the tragic relationship with her Aboriginal mother on the policy of separation, which not only alienated them but also destroyed the familial, language and cultural links between them: “We were both innocent victims of a Government policy that did not take into account the pain of those separated as we were” (167). Barnes stresses the devastating effect of child removal policies and by presenting a personal story of both tragedy and success, her autobiography expands the readers’ understanding of multi-faceted separation experiences. Barnes’s autobiography displays the complexity of the Stolen Generations narratives, the reception of which has been subject to historical and social exigencies concerning Australian race relations. As Rolls points out, “[e]xigencies determine what is remembered and how, what is forgotten and how, and what functions the remembered and the forgotten serve” (“Great Australian Silence” 21). Reflecting on the selective apparatuses in the discourse of reconciliation, it is necessary to recognise what is likely to be forgotten in the very act of remembrance. Barnes’s story is not exceptional. As a matter of fact, it is consistent with the finding of the National Inquiry, as noted in the report: “[t]he bulk of the evidence to the Inquiry detailed damaging and negative effects. … The Inquiry did receive some submissions acknowledging the love and care. … However, all of the witnesses who made these points also expressed their wish that they had not had to make the sacrifices they did” (HREOC 11). Part of the sadness in the Stolen Generations stories, especially the non-traumatic ones such as Barnes’s autobiography and probably O’Donoghue’s case too, is that not all their sacrifices and sufferings have been recognised properly by the broader public. The controversy caused by the minority opinions

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among the already minoritised voices of Aboriginal people exposes the apparatuses of inclusion and exclusion in the dominant discourse, where Indigenous cultural capital circulates and is contained. Different from Kartinyeri’s traumatic account, Barnes mobilises her personal memory in an unconventional manner. Her agency of resistance is “disguised” by her courageous and persistent pursuits of self-esteem and independence as an Aboriginal woman with polio. Though not without denouncing the policy of separation, Barnes’s autobiography contributes to an archive of the Stolen Generations narratives, which requires readers to recognise the breadth of separation stories and to reflect on the assimilation policy in history. Only when Aboriginal history embodied in their memories is understood by a wider Australian public as Indigenous cultural capital, in which Aboriginal people’s courage, persistence and determination in their struggle for survival is fully acknowledged, can there be a chance of constructing reconciled race relations in the postcolonial context. To conclude, the living memories of the Stolen Generations constitute a significant body of Indigenous cultural capital. In documenting and reconstructing the fabric of Aboriginal personal and collective memories through testimonies and autobiographies, Aboriginal authors use strategically their “organised memory against organised forgetfulness” in the dominant culture (Fitzgerald 58). Non-Aboriginal discourses responding to these memories contribute to and complicate to varying extents the circulation of Indigenous cultural capital. A dynamic interplay of forgetting and remembering precipitates the process in which Indigenous cultural capital is formed, developed and reproduced. This form of cultural capital operates within a framing terrain affected by the limits of genres in representing memories and the selective apparatuses embedded in mainstream discourse. Nonetheless, the resistance generated by Indigenous cultural capital manifests the potential of transforming cultural capital pertaining to the public knowledge about Aboriginal history.

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Book Reviews, Prizes, and the Paratextual Space in Children’s Books

The operation of cultural capital in children’s books is more complex and systemic than the individual process of inculcation and incorporation of cultural value. It entails institutional acts of recognition and legitimation, through which certain knowledge and value embodied within the books can be accessed and acquired by young readers in the form of cultural capital. Regarding its three interrelated states, the notion of cultural capital is buttressed by a dynamic triangular relationship between the bearer/learner, the subject being learned (i.e. knowledge or the objectified state of knowledge such as books), and the process of institutional legitimation. Distinct from the “embodied” and to some extent “objectified” state of cultural capital, in Bourdieu’s definition, the “institutionalized state” of cultural capital “has a relative autonomy vis-à-vis its bearer and even vis-à-vis the cultural capital he effectively possesses at a given moment in time” (“Forms” 243, 248). Such characteristics lay stress on the indispensable role of institutional authority and power in the formation and transmission of cultural capital. The “power of instituting” generates and secures belief in the value of books, thereby conferring recognition on the cultural capital embodied in the books and expanding capability of that cultural capital (Bourdieu, “Forms” 248). The “institution” in Bourdieu’s sense is broadly considered as a set of established social relations which bestow status, power, and other resources on individuals ( J. Thompson 8). In the field of literary and cultural production, various institutional agents form a complex network of power relations. Such a network produces the desirability and belief in the value of cultural products and thereby enables a transformative process of what Bourdieu terms “social alchemy” (“Forms” 249). The process of legitimation exerts a considerable effect on writers and works in the book market where a key factor at play is, according to Bourdieu, “the power to say with

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authority who are authorised to call themselves writers; or … the power to consecrate producers or products … with a preface, a favourable review, a prize, etc.” (Field 42). Bourdieu focuses primarily on the hierarchy of writers in their capacity to consecrate others in the literary field. Nevertheless, the institutional power of consecration or recognition is performed not only by established writers but also by various other agents, such as publishers, editors, reviewers, awarding committees, and schoolteachers.1 Bourdieu’s view remains useful to explicate the role of these agents in producing the power of consecration. As mentioned by Bourdieu, book reviews, literary prizes, and paratextual devices (such as a preface) are conventional means of consecration to confer recognition on writers or works. The act of institutional legitimation justifies the value of cultural entities, through which desirable forms of knowledge, values and beliefs are transformed into cultural capital. To discuss the formative process of Indigenous cultural capital in children’s books, it is crucial to consider the roles of literary legitimation in evaluating Indigenous writers and works. Institutional legitimation involves a broad set of norms and standards by which the writers’ statuses or the works’ value are sanctioned and recognised. For Indigenous writers and works, the function of institutional recognition is double-edged. On the one hand, by re-centring the marginalised Aboriginality in the process of value formation, institutional recognition flags Indigenous cultures and traditions, and promotes acceptance and understanding in mainstream society. Indigenous cultural expressions are thereby transformed into Indigenous cultural capital. The more cultural capital writers acquire and accumulate, the more capable they become in the position of enunciation, in terms of enjoying a larger readership and continuing their writing careers. Indigenous cultural capital has the potential to empower Indigenous writers to navigate their interests in the field of literary production. On the other hand, to incorporate Indigenous cultures into a form of cultural capital inevitably subjects them to the mechanism of selection and evaluation associated with the dominant institutions in mainstream discourse. The imposition 1

The next chapter will consider the role of the education system via school curricula, implemented by schoolteachers, in the formation and transmission of Indigenous cultural capital.

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of neoliberal, market-oriented institutional agendas may undermine the resistant voices articulated by Indigenous writers of children’s books. At this point, it is essential to reconsider the possibilities opened up by institutional evaluation and the strategies mobilised by Indigenous writers in postcolonial cross-cultural contexts. “Regimes of value”, as John Frow defines them, “are mechanisms that permit the construction and regulation of value-equivalence, and indeed permit cross-cultural mediation” (144). In defining and judging what is desirable among various cultural entities, the evaluative regimes play a mediating role which in effect regulates and enables cross-cultural exchanges. Mediation does not merely involve assimilation of the dominated into the dominant culture through the standards imposed; rather, it is a two-way process. In this negotiated process of producing value or value-equivalence, what is seldom discussed is the counter strategies adopted by the dominated in response to the dominant rules of evaluation. It is not uncommon for Indigenous writers to re-appropriate the moment of consecration to get their messages across to a wider readership/audience. For them, the strategy of appropriation not only makes use of their cultural capital accruing through institutional recognition but changes the codes of recognition in subtle but meaningful ways. Although the power relations within the contact zone are often radically uneven, Indigenous cultural capital possessed by Indigenous writers enacts what Ashcroft calls an “interpolation” which releases “the capacity to interpose, to intervene, to interject” in the dominant discourse and transforms the regimes of evaluation through which cultural capital is generated (­Post-Colonial 47). A process of re-negotiation initiated by Indigenous stakeholders thereby offers a prospect of reconfiguring the cultural capital available to young generations so that they can have a better understanding of the rich and diverse Indigenous cultures. This chapter exemplifies the ambivalent role of book reviews, children’s book prizes, and paratexts as means of institutional legitimation. These institutional means are not isolated in producing recognition or consecration. In essence, they constitute a rhetoric of persuasion of the value of specific texts. Book reviews in this chapter mainly refer to reviewing articles and critiques written by reviewers, literary critics, or librarians. It is necessary to be aware that reviews in a broad sense also take the form of judges’ reports on literary awards and appear, for instance, as a preface

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written by an authorised person and as the front-and-back-cover blurbs (i.e. extracts of reviews) in the paratextual space. In the discussion of children’s literature, the above means of legitimation are particularly interrelated in the sense that, compared to adult literature, the difficulty of getting children’s books reviewed has rendered the children’s book industry increasingly inclined to be consecrated through various book awards, together with related celebratory events that boost the popularity of writers and their works, and through different paratextual devices which deliver the efficacy of authoritative recognition onto the books. Despite Indigenous authors, Indigenous publishing houses, and a range of Indigenous media through which Aboriginal texts have come into greater prominence in recent years, their capacity to influence the broader mainstream book market remains constrained. This chapter therefore explores how effective the institutional means of legitimation is to the accumulation of Indigenous cultural capital in the field of literary production. There is a tendency for Aboriginal writers to engage with these institutional means not only to gain recognition for their works but to deploy their consecrated positions of enunciation to further unsettle racialised dominance. This chapter discusses the instances in which Indigenous writers, in response to the imposed regimes of value, identify the chances of legitimation as a potential channel to re-invest Indigenous perspectives and to use Indigenous cultural capital in their interests. The counter actions in postcolonial contexts, though sporadic and marginalised, demonstrate the potential to negotiate a reconfiguration of cultural capital in general via the modified codes of institutional recognition.

The Politics of Reviewing: The Reviewing History of Australia’s First Indigenous Children’s Book Book reviews constitute a recognised means of producing belief in the value of books. A favourable review confers recognition and legitimation on focused writers and their works, through which they accumulate

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cultural capital in literary production. Compared to adult literature, children’s books have long been marginalised and reviewing children’s literature remains peripheral in the review space, particularly in highprofile mainstream newspapers or journals. Jenny Pausacker, a professional reviewer, claims in The Australian Author: “the most immediate problem for children’s book writers is … the pure and simple lack of reviewing” (“Good Intentions” 20). Moreover, the “rule of brevity” dominates in the reviews for children’s books; as a result, several children’s texts are crammed into a single reviewing article which features short and descriptive comments (Pausacker, “Good Intentions” 21). This is also the case in the magazines which specialise in reviewing children’s books, such as Magpies, a well-known journal that reviews children’s books published in Australia and overseas, and Reading Time sponsored by the Children’s Book Council of Australia.2 For a proportion of Indigenous books (such as many picture books) which target child and adult readers alike, the story outlines or simplified descriptions in book reviews could reduce the curiosity of sophisticated readers to read those books, thus narrowing down the possibility of such books informing and educating a potentially wider readership about Indigenous cultures. In contrast to an exponential increase in the sheer number of children’s books published in recent decades, an insufficient number of professional reviewers, the shortage of review pages, the reviews appealing to a small public readership, and other factors contribute to less reviewing opportunities for children’s books. Lacking reviewing opportunities is discouraging for writers; it could be more so for Indigenous authors who are relatively new to the market of children’s books. In the children’s books industry, reviewers are often regarded as gatekeepers who offer guidance and recommendation as to what is most 2

Magazines that focus on reviewing children’s books are facing multiple challenges. From 2014 and after fifty-seven years of history Reading Time has stopped issuing hard copies and has moved online as a review site of the CBCA, continuing to provide reviews of Australian children’s books. Another Australian review journal of young adult literature, Viewpoint: On Books for Young Adults, produced its final issue in summer 2014, after twenty-two years of production.

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suitable for children of different ages. As a recognised medium between authors and readers, reviewers play a critical role in the interpretation and reception of books.3 The adjudication of reviewers affect strongly, if not determine, the ways in which books with Aboriginal themes are valued. Nadia Wheatley, a non-Aboriginal author for children who writes about Aboriginal subject matter in many of her books, addresses the impact of book reviews on writers or reviewees: “they feel they have suffered the power, the politics, the position and the influence of the reviewer” (“Pain” 69). The politics of reviewing, which to some extent reflects social ideologies and reader interests of the time, impact on what books get reviewed and how they are reviewed. A chronological reading of reviews would not only shed light on this fundamental act of bestowing legitimation on children’s books with Aboriginal themes but also suggest how these books have been read and valued by reviewers and by generations of young readers whose reading experiences are shaped consequently. A changed understanding of Indigenous cultures, in this light, contributes to the formation and distribution of the institutionalised state of Indigenous cultural capital. This section considers a book which is significant in the history of Australia’s Indigenous literature for children – The Legends of Moonie Jarl (hereafter referred to as “Moonie Jarl”) – written by Wilf Reeves and illustrated by Olga Miller. It was first published with limited market impact by Jacaranda Press in 1964. To mark the 50th anniversary of its first publication, the book was republished by the Indigenous Literacy Foundation in 2014, at which time it was recognised and promoted as Australia’s first Indigenous book for children. The republished Moonie Jarl kept the entire format and content of its first edition, but the reception of the book has changed dramatically over the span of fifty years. In fact, the reviews of Moonie Jarl are emblematic of an increased recognition of Indigenous cultures by Australian mainstream society. In what way then do reviewers’ critiques hamper or enable Indigenous cultural capital?

3

For a discussion of the intricate relations between reviewers and writers for children’s books, see England 73; Pausacker, “Getting it Right” 75.

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Moonie Jarl consists of twelve traditional stories of the Butchulla people4 retold by Moonie Jarl (which means “storyteller”), also known as Wilf Reeves, and illustrated by his sister Olga Miller, who were from Fraser Island-Maryborough in Queensland. They were the children of Ethel Reeves, a sister of the English missionary Ernest Gribble, and Frederick, the headman of the Wondunna clan of Butchulla (see O’Conor, “Legend” 76–80). Educated in both Western and Aboriginal ways, Reeves retold the traditional stories that he learnt from his father. Olga Miller later became an Aboriginal historian, author, illustrator and teacher, dedicated to Aboriginal education and nature conservation on Fraser Island. The book presents each story through texts and visual images (including story map and key). The story map shows geometric designs and figurative symbols on a single page to illustrate the accompanying text. Because the border-divided images on the story map are not arranged in sequential order, the key guides readers to follow the signs and symbols in numerical sequence. Traditionally, the storyteller drew in the coloured sand on Fraser Island to tell the Butchulla children stories of legends and behavioural rules. Reeves and Miller introduce their distinctive storytelling tradition and cultural value to the readers of Moonie Jarl. Non-Butchulla readers are invited to cross the cultural divide, but the need to follow the key and story map reminds them of their status as cultural outsiders, hence to some extent preserving a sense of reverence for the Butchulla culture (O’Conor, “Postcolonial” 134). Notably the author draws connections between the spirits of the Butchulla and those in Western mythology, as well as other Aboriginal cultures, by placing them on a relatively equal footing: In Greek mythology the Minguin [a messenger of the Butchulla spirit] would be the Oracle, since he also has the power of speech among other wonderful powers. As our customs and speech differ from tribe to tribe, so too do the legends. The superhuman animal, which in my father’s stories was called Melong, might well be what some people refer to as the “Bunyip”. (Introduction in both editions, 3–4)

4

The Butchulla people traditionally live on Fraser Island and the adjacent mainland around Hervey Bay in south-east Queensland.

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By invoking Greek mythology as a point of reference, the author acknowledges the evaluative standard in mainstream society, enabling readers from different cultural backgrounds to have a better understanding of the spirit beings in traditional Aboriginal stories. More importantly, a comparative point of view affirms an essentially equal status between traditional Aboriginal cultures and that from the ancient West, and between the Butchulla culture and that of other Aboriginal groups. The distinctive format and sensitive treatment of cultural differences presented by this book, however, did not receive due recognition in the 1960s when it was first published. Jacaranda Press, an independent nonIndigenous publisher with an interest in Indigenous literature, received Reeves and Miller’s manuscripts and published a print run of 5,000 copies in 1964, targeting middle Primary School readers (O’Conor, “Legends” 74–5).5 The small print run meant limited market impact.6 While the Aboriginal political and cultural movement began to gather momentum in the 1960s and 1970s, those of mixed heritage, or “part-Aborigines”, were still severely discriminated against and marginalised by Australian mainstream society. Compared to the non-Aboriginal tradition of collecting Aboriginal myths and legends for child readers since the late nineteenth century, the authenticity of traditional stories recounted by “part-Aboriginal” authors was questioned. Mary Durack published a review of Moonie Jarl in the 1964–65 issue of the Australian Book Review, revealing a regard for earlier collections of legendary tales by non-Aboriginal writers: The question inevitably arises – how authentic are these tales [in Moonie Jarl]? … K. Langloh Parker and Keith McKeown soft pedalled on this theme too, but they 5

6

Jacaranda Press published Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s We Are Going: Poems (1964), which was the first collection of poetry authored by an Aboriginal woman. Moonie Jarl was published one month before We Are Going, but the latter had an enormous success in sales. The standard of print run might be different for books targeting different types of readers. 5,000 copies for a readership of school students could be classified as a small print run. In comparison, the first book published by Jacaranda Press, the poetry collection Living Verse (1954) by Andrew Kilpatrick Thomson, had an initial print run of 30,000 targeting secondary school children; approximately 500,000 copies were ultimately sold after a number of reprints. See O’Conor, “Legends” 74.

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covered a rather more comprehensive field of legend and brought their annotations the perspective of their wide reading and experience. The tales of Moonie Jarl, however, though limited, are just as faithfully interpreted and as valuable. (40–1)

Durack’s review assigns authority to established white writers in retelling Aboriginal traditional stories. Kate Langloh Parker’s Australian Legendary Tales (1896) was a collection of Aboriginal stories from the Narren River of northern New South Wales, which in effect reflects the Eurocentric view of Aboriginal people at the end of the nineteenth century. Parker’s book was one of the earliest children’s texts presenting Aboriginal legendary tales, and its selected version (1953), edited by H. Drake-Brockman and illustrated by Elizabeth Durack (the sister of Mary Durack), was awarded the CBCA Book of the Year in 1954.7 Keith McKeown, an entomologist, published The Land of Byamee: Australian Wild Life in Legend and Fact (1938) which includes retellings of Dreaming stories of the Wiradjuri people from western New South Wales and photographs of Aboriginal people and animals. Though alluding to the then prevalent racialised assumption of classifying Aboriginal people as part of Australian wildlife, the book was once considered as “one of the most important books written on the aborigines” (qtd in Walsh). While Durack’s review takes the quality of non-Aboriginal writing as the benchmark and in fact also recognises Moonie Jarl as meeting this standard, her praise is framed by the evaluative standards of her time, which reveals the discrimination against Aboriginal authors of mixed heritage. It is necessary to add that Durack herself was a prolific writer and historian, honoured as a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1977 and a Companion of the Order of Australia in 1989 in acknowledgement of her service to community and literature. As a matter of fact, Durack had published ten books by 1964, three of which concerned Aboriginal subject matter and characters (see O’Conor, “Postcolonial” 133). Durack’s established authority and reputation in writing about Aboriginality carried weight in her review and lent 7

Kate Parker’s Australian Legendary Tales (1896) and its selected version (1953) edited by H. Drake-Brockman will be discussed further in the next section to illustrate the historical role of the CBCA Book of the Year Awards in evaluating children’s books with Aboriginal themes.

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power to the idea that white writers not only speak for but speak better than Aboriginal people. Hence in regarding Moonie Jarl as “limited” in presenting Aboriginal experiences, or at best as “authentic” as non-Aboriginal collections, Durack’s review reinforces a biased comparative judgement of mixed-race Aboriginal storytellers and privileged white writers in mainstream discourse (see O’Conor, “Postcolonial” 133). Furthermore, in comparison with Reeves’ statement of cultural diversity and his drawing of connections between Aboriginal and Western cultures, and between Butchulla and Aboriginal cultures from other places, Durack’s review also reflects some entrenched misconceptions and imagination of Aboriginal spirituality. As she comments on “the creator spirits’ very practical prowess in peopling the land”: This important aspect of the dreaming, ruled out for the young of our society, is common knowledge to Aboriginal children who delight, with their elders, in petrified evidence of the spirit heroes’ potency. … Remarkable of Aboriginal culture is the similarity of the central myths throughout the continent. (41)

As much as Durack’s review tries to address the importance of Aboriginal Dreaming, it is inclined to generalise Aboriginal cultures across Australia and to mystify Aboriginal spirituality, thereby justifying the dichotomy between Aboriginal and white settler cultures. Apart from alerting readers to the spiritual power of Dreaming spirits, the review does not mention the book’s distinct storytelling technique. It seems to consider the book more as cultural exotica than as an embodiment of Indigenous cultures. Durack’s review reflects the general opinions of a white readership towards the emergence of Indigenous children’s texts at that time. This not-so-favourable review could impede distribution of the book to a wider readership and hence accumulation of cultural capital by the Aboriginal author/illustrator. Though there might have been a small number of reprints after the first publication,8 the overall acceptance of Moonie Jarl among

8

In 1965 Angus and Robertson in London, by arrangement with Jacaranda Press, published an edition of Moonie Jarl, which was presumably promoted to the overseas market.

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Australian readers was limited. So was its chance of further reviews and the possibility of gaining wider recognition during the 1960s. It is worth noting that Moonie Jarl received attention from Judith Wright, indicating at least some awareness of and interest in this book among writers in the 1970s’ Australian mainstream literary landscape. Wright was a renowned Australian poet and environmentalist, dedicated to nature conservation (including campaigning for the conservation of Fraser Island) and strongly supportive of the Aboriginal land rights movement and a treaty between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. The following was an editorial foreword to Wright’s truncated article “The Koori Voice: A New Literature” (1973) published in The Australian Author, an influential reviewing journal published by the Australian Society of Authors: Condensed from a paper given at the Consultants’ Seminar in Socioliterature, EastWest Center, Honolulu August 1973. In the interests of keeping this article to a reasonable length and also of centering on only one main point, Miss Wright has here excluded her references to other important books such as Dick Roughsey’s Moon and Rainbow and The Legends of Moonie Jarl by Wilf Reeves, illustrated by O. Miller. (38)

Although Moonie Jarl was not actually reviewed, it did at least rate a mention in the brief introduction to Wright’s article. In this review, Wright draws the reader’s attention to a proper recognition of the then emergent Aboriginal literature in English. She points out that the instant success of Oodgeroo Noonuccal (then called Kath Walker)’s We Are Going (1964), the first collection of verse published by an Aboriginal woman, was much due to “its curiosity value (poetry is not normally a best-selling literary form in Australia). Australian reviewers, as was to be expected, played up this aspect” (40). Wright comments on the inherent literary aesthetics, the inseparable connections to the land, and the articulate political advocacy for Aboriginal rights in the works by Aboriginal and “part-Aboriginal” authors including Kath Walker, Jack Davis, Kevin Gilbert, and Colin Johnson9 (38–44). Wright also alerts to a lasting problem of patronising 9

Colin Johnson, who is of Black American heritage and later changed his name (through many different versions) to Mudrooroo, was at the time considered to be an Aboriginal novelist.

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Aboriginal books by reviewing them in line with European literary criteria, even though the difference in Aboriginal writing is occasionally and partially acknowledged. She is mindful of the problematic issues arising in reviewing Aboriginal books by white literary critics: It tacitly accepts that such verse is the product of a writer who is to be excused from meeting certain artistic standards – our standards – because it would be “unfair” to apply them; yet it goes on to attempt to “place” the work within contemporary Australian verse (by writers with quite other intentions). This is an uneasy position. (42)

Wright’s critique addresses the complex and often hierarchical relationship between white reviewers and Aboriginal / “part-Aboriginal” writers, and the general acceptance of Aboriginal literature of the time. As we can assume, Wright’s comments on Reeves’s Moonie Jarl and Aboriginal artist Dick Roughsey’s work were likely to recognise the contribution they made towards an emerging body of important literature giving voice to those hitherto silenced. Unfortunately, notwithstanding being introduced to an overseas audience in Honolulu, Reeves and his Moonie Jarl still struggled to be known to an Australian public readership in the 1970s. Another important reviewer in relation to Moonie Jarl who should be mentioned in his own right is Maurice Saxby, an Australian author, critic and reviewer, regarded as “the Godfather of Australian children’s literature” (Hamilton). Recognised as an authority on Australian children’s literature, Saxby served as the first national president of the Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) and maintained a lifelong service to children’s literature.10 In his foundational work entitled A History of Australian Children’s Literature: 1941–1970 (1971) and the revised version published three dec10

Saxby was associated with the CBCA for over sixty years. He was dedicated to promoting Australian children’s literature on an international scale. Saxby was a member of international jury for the Hans Christian Andersen Awards, and during his second term in 1986 Patricia Wrightson received the Hans Christian Andersen Medal. It was the first time that the Medal, which has been the world’s most prestigious award in children’s literature, was awarded to an Australian writer for children. The role of the CBCA and Wrightson’s works with Aboriginal subject matter and characters will be discussed in the next section.

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ades later entitled Images of Australia: A History of Australian Children’s Literature 1941–1970 (2002),11 Saxby made references to Moonie Jarl with a few slight but notable differences. In the 1971 edition which reviews the previous thirty years’ history of Australian children’s literature, Saxby’s comment on Moonie Jarl was succinct. Beginning by introducing Moonie Jarl as “an interesting addition to the children’s collections”, Saxby notes that the author is “a part-aborigine” who “claims to have transcribed some of the stories told to him by his father” and “retells his stories simply and with economy” (History 211). Unlike Durack’s review, Saxby does not focus on Aboriginal spirituality, but comments on the book’s narratives that consist of stories, “symbolic illustrations” and “numerical key[s]” (History 211). He also recognises that Reeves’ storytelling is connected to how the stories were told traditionally on Fraser Island. Nevertheless, Saxby disapproves of the colloquial style in Moonie Jarl, in which “[u]nhappily the mannerisms of both author and artist are intrusive (an overuse of the explanatory ‘You see,’ ‘now’ and asides such as ‘This was like a schoolroom’)” (History 211). Saxby’s 2002 update did not make revisions in the places mentioned above, but he added two important points: An interesting addition to children’s collections and a forerunner of tellings by the Aboriginal people themselves is The Legends of Moonie Jarl (1964). … “Wandi” [the Aboriginal name of the book’s illustrator, Olga Miller] has added symbolic illustrations which narrate the story in sign form, each pattern carrying its own significant meaning. (Images 403; the underlined sentences are those newly added in the 2002 edition)

Saxby’s revision recognises Moonie Jarl as a groundbreaking work, valuing Aboriginal people’s retelling of their own traditional stories and acknowledging the cultural significance embodied in Aboriginal illustrations. These remarks give Moonie Jarl a more positive commentary. Moreover, Saxby’s 11

As a most influential critic in the field of children’s literature, Saxby traces the history of Australian children’s literature in a series of scholarly works, which include A History of Australian Children’s Literature 1841–1941 (1969) and its revised version Offered to Children: A History of Australian Children’s Literature 1841–1941 (1998), together with the above mentioned.

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authoritative position in the field of children’s literature lent weight to the value of Aboriginal cultural traditions recounted, hence facilitating the accumulation of cultural capital on the part of its Aboriginal author and illustrator. Saxby’s revised commentary reveals a changed frame of recognition in social attitudes thirty years after his first review, allowing him to recognise a greater value that he had not recognised previously. It is also indicative of the growing cultural capital of Aboriginal storytelling in a broader context during these recent decades, which promotes a reidentified recognition bestowed on this book. Given Saxby’s authoritative accounts of the history of Australian children’s literature, it is likely that his views on Moonie Jarl were read by other reviewers, librarians, and researchers on children’s literature, whose interests might have rekindled enthusiasm for the book. Based on her research of nearly 300 books of traditional Indigenous stories published for children between 1881 and 2004, Juliet O’Conor, a children’s research librarian, identifies the pivotal position of Moonie Jarl in the history of Australian children’s books, as evident in her article entitled “The Legends of Moonie Jarl – Our First Indigenous Children’s Book” (2007). O’Conor rightly points out that Moonie Jarl “is the earliest children’s book to be written and illustrated by the Indigenous people to whom whose stories belong” (“Legends” 67). This article identifies the narrative and aesthetic merits, as well as cultural significance, of Moonie Jarl, and traces the family history of Reeves and Miller, especially their parents’ remarkable cross-racial marriage in the early twentieth century. To examine the transformative narratives in Moonie Jarl through the lens of postcolonial criticism, O’Conor writes in another article, entitled “Postcolonial Transformation and Traditional Australian Indigenous Story” (2006): The Legends of Moonie Jarl is important not only as the turning point in Australia’s literary history for a child readership, but also in the unique way this picture book challenges colonial assumptions and transforms reader perceptions of Aboriginality and traditional culture. (“Postcolonial” 132)

This statement recognises the historical and educational significance of Moonie Jarl which informs young readers of Indigenous traditions and has the potential to unsettle enduring colonial ideologies and to enable a

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transformative understanding of Indigenous cultures. O’Conor’s research also reflects an increasing critical attention on Indigenous children’s texts as a genre and as a cultural repository for children in the postcolonial context. The transformative potential of Moonie Jarl upon contemporary readers was further promoted when the Indigenous Literacy Foundation (ILF) republished it in 2014. The ILF is a national independent charity with a commitment to improve the literacy level of Indigenous communities. Among many other initiatives, the ILF publishes books in consultation with Indigenous community members. The eldest son of Olga Miller, Glen Miller, who is active in many Indigenous organisations seeking to preserve the Butchulla culture and Fraser Island’s environment, is currently serving as a Board member of the ILF. He has collected many second-hand copies of Moonie Jarl over the years (pers. comm. O’Conor to author). He worked with Fraser Coast Councillor and other local Butchulla elders for the republication of Moonie Jarl. The launch of Moonie Jarl’s second publication was held at the Olga Miller Memorial Garden, a learning space dedicated to Olga Miller for her lifelong contribution to the Aboriginal cause and now used for the teaching of Aboriginal Butchulla culture at the University of Southern Queensland Fraser Coast Campus. In fact, the ILF used O’Conor’s research (to her great delight) and celebrated Moonie Jarl as “Australia’s first Aboriginal children’s book” in the publicity campaign (“ILF”; pers. comm. O’Conor to author). In this case, the attitudinal change in book reviews, notably O’Conor’s research which re-identifies the pivotal importance of Moonie Jarl in the history of Australian Indigenous children’s books, reflects the shift in the public acceptance of Indigenous cultures. It enables Moonie Jarl to gain recognition as Indigenous cultural capital in a way that was not possible in the 1960s and 1970s. For the ILF, to embrace this positive change towards recognition is strategically meaningful. Not only is the value of Moonie Jarl redefined, it has the potential to reach a wider pool of new readers. The timing of the book’s re-launch was also symbolically significant – two weeks after native title on Fraser Island (K’gari) was officially recognised. The Koori Mail, a national Indigenous newspaper, followed the book re-launch with a timely report, in which Glen Miller was quoted saying: “To celebrate the 50th anniversary of this book’s first publication

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is significant enough and to do it so soon after the Fraser Island (native title) acknowledgement makes it especially exciting” (“Legends Book” 36). The republication of Moonie Jarl, which followed the return of K’gari to its people, not only celebrates the traditional stories originating from K’gari but also re-asserts the K’gari people’s traditional connections to country. In retrospect, from its first publication against the background of the Aboriginal civil rights campaigns of the 1960s, to its republication right after the return of native title (K’gari) in 2014, Moonie Jarl’s struggle for recognition is emblematic of the Aboriginal rights movement over the past fifty years. The attitudinal change towards Aboriginal cultures in mainstream society is concretised in book reviews, leading to the gradual recognition of this book and its expanded Indigenous cultural capital. The publication and reviewing history of Moonie Jarl exemplifies the function of book reviews in formulating an institutionalised state of Indigenous cultural capital. In this case, the reviewers played a role in engaging or disengaging readers with a book that was new to its time and remains significant in today’s postcolonial context. The reviewers’ power to judge and re-identify its value brings overdue recognition for Moonie Jarl, its Aboriginal author and illustrator. Indigenous cultural capital gained through the legitimation of book reviews affirms the value of Aboriginal story­telling traditions and further promotes it for a wider Australian readership. Probably because it is the first of its kind, Moonie Jarl has attracted attention from influential reviewers and literary critics, regardless of negative or positive reviews over its half-century history. This does not suggest that it would be easier for Aboriginal texts to get reviewed, compared to other genres of children’s literature. But as shown in this case, Indigenous cultural capital has been accumulated in a protracted struggle for literary legitimation and this accumulative cultural capital can empower Aboriginal people to speak for themselves and promote more writing and publishing of Aboriginal children’s books. My purpose in addressing the politics of reviewing is to offer a glimpse of Indigenous authors’ struggle for literary recognition and their strategic appropriation of the power of consecration. Aboriginal authors and community have sought to make use of their hard-won cultural capital via book reviews and to enlarge cultural and political recognition. The

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following section will further elaborate on the possible ways in which Aboriginal writers re-appropriate the means of legitimation and re-invest Indigenous cultural interests into mainstream discourse, through a study of their entangled relationship with literary prizes.

The Power of Consecration: The CBCA Book of the Year Awards Literary prizes serve as one of the most conspicuous means of consecration for children’s books of all genres, and books with Aboriginal themes are no exception. The year of 1999 saw the strongest evidence of Aboriginal themes in the Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) Book of the Year Awards, which are among Australia’s most prestigious and influential literary prizes. The winners of all four awarding categories12 went to books with Aboriginal subject matter: Phillip Gwynne’s Deadly, Unna? (1998) won the Book of the Year: Older Readers; My Girragundji (1998) by Meme McDonald and Boori Pryor topped the Younger Readers’ section; The Rabbits (1998) by John Marsden and Shaun Tan was awarded the Picture Book of the Year; and Going for Kalta: Hunting for Sleepy Lizards at Yalata (1997) by Yvonne Edwards, Brenda Day and Tjitji Tjuta (meaning “Anangu kids”) won the Eve Pownall Award for Information Books. In addition, among the books shortlisted for the Eve Pownall Award, all but one address Indigenous and racial issues.13 These award-winning books reflected a large demand for and production of the books with Aboriginal themes in the post-Mabo era. They present multiple facets of Aboriginal 12 13

The CBCA Book of the Year Award now has five categories. In 1999, as listed above, there were only four categories. The most recently added category is Book of the Year: Early Childhood, introduced in 2001. They are Maybe Tomorrow (1998) by Boori Pryor and Meme McDonald, The Ngaanyatjarra of the Gibson Desert (1998) by Liz Thompson, and Side by Side (1998) by Alan Tucker.

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life, cultures and histories, and bring to young minds ideas of equality, justice, mutual understanding and respect. To acknowledge and celebrate the quality of the entries in 1999, the judges’ report14 issued by the CBCA states: Aboriginal themes and issues featured strongly in all categories, and in fact on all the Short Lists. … The access to Aboriginal cultures given to both black and white readers is an inclusive access which recognises that cultural diversity is vital to a multicultural society. … the remarkable outcome is a reflection of the fundamental importance of this issue in contemporary Australian society, and a magnificent tribute to the commitment of Australia’s children’s writers to exposing their young readers to books that will challenge and empower them. (4)

The report recognises Indigenous cultural value embodied in award-winning books and acknowledges the books’ social and educational significance for Indigenous and non-Indigenous young readers. As a matter of fact, the judges’ report of every year consists of a summary and detailed comments on individual award-winning books, as part of the CBCA’s ritual of celebrating and consecrating Australian children’s writers and their books. Through an institutionalised performance of “investiture” in Bourdieu’s sense to invest belief in the value of works, the CBCA operates as an agent that effectively transform Indigenous cultures into Indigenous cultural capital in the children’s book market (Language 119). A news report in The Canberra Times followed the 1999 CBCA award announcement, with the straightforward title “Aboriginal Themes Make Children’s Book Awards an Open and Shut Event This Year” (Moran 5). The news suggested that the CBCA expressed a clear-cut stance on Aboriginal issues by privileging and honouring Aboriginal writers and books on Aboriginal themes. The judging panels might have already distrusted the media attention which would ascribe the awards to so-called “political correctness”. Upon the release of the final results, the judges’ report declared that the “judges selected the winners according to the criteria, with no 14

The judges’ report of each year is available in every third issue of the CBCA’s quarterly journal Reading Time (till 2013). The reports of recent years can be found on the CBCA’s and Reading Time’s websites.

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reference to the books’ political stance or subject matter, so that the overall results came as a genuine surprise” (4). This self-proclaimed “surprise” implies an underlying concern that the award determinations might have been seen as being ideological or driven by interests other than a judgement on literary merits. As the most long-standing and influential prize for Australian children’s literature, nonetheless, how could the CBCA escape from any ideological implication in its literary evaluation? If books on Aboriginal themes became a preoccupation of the 1999 CBCA Awards, did the consecration of Aboriginal themes make an “open and shut event” without disputes or questions? Considering the presence or otherwise of Aboriginal themes on the awarding lists over its seventy years of history, in what ways has the CBCA aligned the books on Aboriginal themes with its long-term goals and judging criteria? And more crucially on the part of the emerging Aboriginal writers and illustrators, what kind of impact have they brought to the CBCA with regard to its judgement and valorisation of the writing of Aboriginal subject matter and characters? For these questions, it is necessary to trace the CBCA awarding history and its significant role in promoting Australian children’s literature. Inaugurated in 1946, the CBCA Book of the Year Award was the earliest prize for children’s books in Australia. From the outset, the CBCA established two fundamental goals: “to encourage children to read while pointing them to literature of quality; and to promote the publication of worthwhile literature for children” (Saxby, “Introduction” 7). Committed to these goals, the CBCA awards have expanded from Book of the Year (first given in 1946) into the current five categories of awards: Book of the Year – Older Readers (since 1982) / Younger Readers (since 1982) / Early Childhood (since 2001), Picture Book of the Year (since 1956), and Eve Pownall Award for Information Books (since 1993). These categories of awards cover the book entries across genres and for different age groups of child readers. For each category, the judging panel selects one winner and two honour books from the shortlists (usually up to six shortlisted books). Apart from the release of shortlisted titles, the CBCA have issued a list of Notable Books since 1991, promoting a wider selection of worth-reading books for children. In terms of the judging procedure, there is usually a four-month gap between the announcement of the shortlist and the final

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publication of winners and honour books. The interim enables the immediate reprint of shortlisted books, media publicity and speculation, and other activities seeking to generate interest among young readers. Every August, the CBCA’s announcement of winner and honour books and its organised Children’s Book Week usually attract the active participation of libraries, publishers, educators, and school students. With the help of media publicity, the CBCA gives prominence to the award-winning writers and books. Meanwhile, the wide public impact also establishes the authority of the CBCA as a significant presence in the Australian children’s literary landscape. The CBCA awards took the model of the Newbery Medal (US) and the Carnegie Medal (UK). Following the establishment of the CBCA Book of the Year Awards, there has been in fact a mirror effect of prizes rising to confer honour and prestige on writers and illustrators dedicated to children’s literature in Australia, such as the Premier’s Literary Awards for writings for young adults in New South Wales, Victoria, and Western Australia, the Dromkeen Medal, the Aurealis Awards, the Pixie O’Harris Award, and a list of children-voted book prizes. These tokens of esteem constitute what James English identifies as “the economics of cultural prestige” (4). As a cultural practice in a consumer society, the rise of prizes serves the “market transactions” of cultural value (English 26). The prizes mediate “various individual and institutional agents of culture, with their different assets and interests and dispositions, to engage one another in a collective project of value production” (English 26). From this perspective, the CBCA awards have played a particularly important role in regulating and promoting the value exchange in the Australian children’s book market. Apart from being endowed with an award title, a certificate and prize money, each CBCA award-winning book (also including Notable Books) is entitled to have a specially designed sticker on the cover as a token of esteem or honour. This tradition started in 1986 and became consistent from 1991 when the CBCA issued a new sticker and the bromide for publishers to purchase and reprint on the cover of all award-winning books. In return, the CBCA earns “a small profit” from stickers and other promotional items (Bensemann 45). The sticker has become a symbol of the CBCA as shown directly on the book, suggesting authoritative recognition of the book’s

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quality. It is an effective marketing strategy since the individual purchase of children’s books are mainly done by parents, many of whom would go straight to the books with stickers carrying the imprimatur of the CBCA in the bookstore. Besides, the mainstay of the CBCA judging panels has long been teachers and librarians. They are also the primary readers of the CBCA judges’ reports, reviews on Reading Time and its other publications. The CBCA awards provide an authoritative recommendation when teachers and librarians look for suitable materials for school children and in turn their choices guarantee a student readership for the CBCA award-winning books. In this respect, the CBCA awards have far more substantial and effective impacts on book sales than any other literary prizes in Australia (Macleod, “Early Years” 2). As Laura Harris, the publisher at Penguin Australia, points out, [t]he Children’s Book Council Book of the Year Awards are a powerful medium in getting attention for your books. Not only is there prestige to be shortlisted, but this listing results in definite sales. A shortlisted title goes into immediate reprint and the book is secured a fairly long life, and the author’s subsequent works will carry the kudos of the nod and more than likely secure a bigger slice of the market than they previously may have enjoyed. (80)

In this view, the CBCA awards not only present an honour for talented writers but also promise economic and symbolic return that many writers can only dream of – an increase in book sales, a guarantee of reprints and a large readership. The CBCA recognises the value of distinction through the distribution of prestige and its bestowed recognition transforms that value embodied in the books into an institutionalised state of cultural capital which can be accumulated and possessed by writers. The process of consecration embodies a logic of economic exchanges, for the awards not only produce and augment the pursued cultural capital on the part of writers and works, but also procure the necessary financial support for the management of the awarding organisation. The funding of the CBCA awards was received from the Commonwealth Literary Fund during 1966–1972, the Literature Board of the Australian Council from 1972, the Visual Arts Board of the Australian Council from 1974,

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and after experiencing an emergency funding crisis following the termination of funding from the Australian Council in 1988, the awards were supported by publisher sponsorship and individual or corporate donations (see Bensemann 42–3). In 1995, the committee established the CBCA Awards Foundation to raise funds (which had reached the 1 million dollar goal by 2006) so as to secure the financial viability of the awards.15 Obviously, the CBCA fund-raising capability is tied to its longterm commitment to promoting an Australian children’s book industry, its social and media influence, and its authority established through the power of legitimation. From this vantage point, the intricate relationship between Aboriginal writers/illustrators and the CBCA awards is ambivalent. The awards are not only an honour or incentive for Aboriginal writers/illustrators to continue working on children’s books, but also represent an entanglement with the mechanism of value and profit production, in which Aboriginal texts are inevitably seen as a marketable product promoted by the awards in a consumer society. Receiving the kudos of the awards becomes “a claim to authority and an assertion of that authority” (English 51). The cultural capital accruing through the instituting power of prizes can be converted into other forms of capital, such as economic capital, for writers. Nevertheless, the practice of prizes cannot be entirely reduced to economism because any recognisable literary prize is never equal to economic transaction (English 5). In this regard, an important but lesser-known aspect of a prize is its tie with the operation of ideologies sanctioned through selection criteria and standards. The CBCA awards have constituted a contemporary canonical body of children’s books in Australia (Hateley 41). During over seventy years of history, the selection of the CBCA awards reflects ideologies of the time and desirable social-cultural ideas embodied in the award-winning books. Therefore, through an examination of the codes of recognition and ideological implications of the CBCA awards, this section will further untangle the

15 See Awards Handbook 2013, p. 3.

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formation of cultural capital in relation to the award-winning books with Aboriginal themes. As a matter of fact, CBCA has long held an interest in Aboriginal subject matter. In retrospect, since Leslie Rees’ The Story of Karrawingi, the Emu (Karrawingi is the word for “emu” in the Mathi languages, from the north-west of Victoria along the Murray river, near Mildura or Balranald)16 was designated the first Book of the Year in 1946, books with Aboriginal themes have been one of the preoccupations of the CBCA awarding lists (pers. comm. Marmion to the author; Macleod, “Early Years” 4). There are multiple reasons for “privileging” books on Aboriginal themes. An increased number of book entries with Aboriginal subject matter contribute to the fact that more books of this kind are awarded. But more importantly, writing with Aboriginal themes and motifs are aligned with the CBCA’s awarding criteria and its commitment to promoting the excellence of Australian children’s literature. The awarding criteria are listed in the CBCA Awards Handbook. Though the Handbook is amended every year, the main selection criteria have remained the same in general over the years: The Judges assess entries primarily for literary merit, including cohesiveness in significant literary elements; language chosen for its appropriateness to the theme and style of the work with proper regard to the aesthetic qualities of language; and originality in the treatment of literary elements as they apply to the form of the work.17

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The Story of Karrawingi, the Emu (1946) tells the adventures of an emu family. Rees appropriated a list of words for “emu” from a variety of Aboriginal languages to name the emu characters, yet without acknowledging in his book what languages or specific places these Aboriginal words belonged to. Doug Marmion, the Linguistics Research Fellow at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), identifies the origins of at least four terms used in this book: Karrawingi (the protagonist) means “emu” in Mathi languages; Baramool (Karrawingi’s father) is likely from Djadjawurrung, an Aboriginal language from central Victoria; Koondalloo (Karrawingi’s mother) is perhaps from Gangulu, a language from central Queensland; Wooron (Karrawingi’s child) closely matches the language (e.g. Yuwaalaraay) used in south-central Queensland or north-central New South Wales (pers. comm. Marmion to the author). Awards Handbook 2013, p. 5.

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It is not surprising that the CBCA emphasises the quality of “originality” as an essential criterion, which needs to be considered in the context of the historical development of Australian children’s literature and the role assumed by the CBCA in this respect. During the early colonial years, books for Australian children were imported from overseas, rather than produced locally. Throughout the nineteenth century, British children’s books were read in Australia, for they were believed to be the best for the young “British” subjects. Young Australians formulated the imagination of their mother country (Britain) and British identity through being immersed in the folklores and adventure stories of Britain. The year 1841 saw the first children’s book published in Australia – A Mother’s Offering to Her Children written by Charlotte Barton, but other “earliest contributions to ‘Australian’ children’s literature, were written by people overseas, many of whom never came here” (Nimon 3). By the late 1800s books for Australian children, either published in Australia, or written in Australia and yet published in Britain, still followed the “genres common in English children’s literature” (Nimon 3). Historically, Australian children’s literature was strongly influenced or even dominated by the outsiders’ views and writings.18 Although Australian children’s literature had a vigorous development during the twentieth century, the British colonial influence was undeniably profound. The nationalist focus in Australian literature for children came to the fore, especially during the decades after the Second World War. The then newly established CBCA, which echoed the socio-political concerns of repositioning Australia in an international context, expected to build up a growing body of children’s literature featuring Australian national culture (Saxby, “Introduction” 9; Hateley 42; Macleod, “Early Years” 3). The slogans of Children’s Book Week, when the winners and

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It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that Australian writers began to feature Australian real-life child characters and adventure stories. Ethel Turner’s most successful and influential Seven Little Australians (1894) reflects “Australian characteristics” in the depiction of naughty, playful and optimistic child characters, who are distanced from the “British” models. See Kathryn Wells’ analysis of Ethel Turner in “Australian Children’s Books”.

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honour books are announced and celebrated each year, reveal such ideological connections: the first slogan “United Through Books” in 1945 reflected the hope for peace after the war; “Books are Common Wealth” in 1951 celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Commonwealth of Australia; and “A Page of History” in 1988 marked the Australian Bicentenary (see Hillel and Hamilton 35). Moreover, the institutional development of the CBCA from state branches to a national organisation took place when the educational publishing industry expanded in Australia during the 1950s (Macleod, “Battle” 125). Given that most judges are from education related backgrounds, the ideological and educational investment has been evident throughout the CBCA’s judging and awarding process, with the aim of identifying what is appropriate for Australian children and promoting children’s books in a thriving educational publishing industry in Australia. The CBCA has played a leading role in promoting Australianness by giving prominence to books written by Australian writers. An eligible award winner must be an Australian citizen, a permanent resident, or a resident living in Australia for a minimum two years up to the year of publication of the entry books.19 For the CBCA, “the Australian Awards should recognise Australian creators” (Goodman 10). Meanwhile, the CBCA’s tendency to celebrate nationalist literature for children also ties in with the aspiration of many Australian writers to take up the responsibility of cultivating young readers with distinctive Australian culture and history. In this regard, the awarding committee and award-winning writers can be mutually influenced. For instance, Australian Legendary Tales (1953), selected and edited by H. Drake-Brockman from K. Langloh Parker’s collection of Aboriginal legends, was published by Angus and Robertson in Sydney and awarded Book of the Year in 1954. Parker’s original collection of Aboriginal stories was first published in London half a century previously, entitled Australian Legendary Tales: Folk-Lore of the Noongahburraks as Told to the Piccaninnies (1896). Parker’s collection was acclaimed as “the most influential of all

19 See Awards Handbook 2013, p. 6.

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collections of Aboriginal stories produced for children” (Bradford, Reading Race 110). The 1954 CBCA Book of the Year Award not only enhanced the classic status of Parker’s collection but also consecrated the truncated “legendary tales” in Drake-Brockman’s edition. In a sense, since the tales had originated in Australia and were now published in Australia, the recognition of an Australian prize was deemed to be appropriate. In the foreword, Drake-Brockman speaks of the reason for republishing Parker’s collection, highlighting the importance of these Aboriginal “legends” or “myths” in the interests of realising a nationalist literary aesthetic: Fifty years on, the majority of us remain ignorant of this lovely legendary world they created, a magic world, a world of myth woven about the characters of our own trees and birds and beasts – which are entirely different to any others in the world – and about our hills and rivers and stars. These are indeed Australian stories that belong to Australia and to all Australians – dark, white, or newly arrived! (vii)

Identifying Aboriginal stories as appropriate makings of the original “Australian stories” fits the CBCA’s judging criterion of originality. Nevertheless, to value Aboriginal legends as a desirable asset “belong[ing] to Australia and all Australians – dark, white, or newly arrived” may lead us to question whether the sense of originality in relation to Aboriginal stories, which both Drake-Brockman’s edition and the CBCA intended to celebrate, is a form of exploitative appropriation. Considering further Drake-Brockman’s edition from a postcolonial perspective, the subtitle of the Parker’s edition which contained the pejorative term “piccaninnies” used to address Aboriginal children was omitted. Drake-Brockman also changed Parker’s reference to Aboriginal people from “black” to “dark” Australians, for the latter was then believed to be less racially discriminative. However, the residual colonial mindset and patronising attitude disclosed by Drake-Brockman’s edition marked the book as a product of its time. For instance, the attempt to preserve the endangered legends of the “child-race” who “has not attained to the stature of our civilisation” is condescending (Drake-Brockman vi). Although granting the award does not necessarily mean that the CBCA endorsed racial discrimination, the institutional recognition may have inadvertently reinforced colonial ideology embedded within the book.

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Perhaps the most contentious example of associating Australianness with Aboriginality is Patricia Wrightson, a multiple award-winning writer.20 Wrightson has been undoubtedly the “most consistent of all Australian children’s writers in her use of Aboriginal characters and themes” throughout the 1950s–1990s (Murray 252).21 In the epilogue to An Older Kind of Magic (1972), Wrightson urges the exploration of the “magic” that is distinctive to Australia so as to appeal to Australian young minds: Those of us who were bred in the old lands and live in the new have found this out. We have tried to plant here the magic that our people knew, and it will not grow. It is time we stopped trying to see elves and dragons and unicorns in Australia. They have never belonged here, and no ingenuity can make them real. We need to look for another kind of magic, a kind that must have been shaped by the land itself at the edge of Australian vision. (150)22

Wrightson has been one of the most successful Australian writers for children, winning the CBCA Book of the Year Award three times and a number of other awards, including the Hans Christian Andersen Medal, the highest honour for writers in the field of children’s literature. Mark Macleod comments that Wrightson’s consistent attempts to draw on Aboriginality in her fiction are “clearly aligned with both the aims stated by the CBCA in its constitution and the unstated agenda implied in its practice. All her fiction is set in Australia and explores Australian history – in this case through Indigenous mythology” (“Battle” 126). Nevertheless, the CBCA’s implicit standards, in giving prominence to the representations of Aboriginal cultures as an essential symbol of

20 For more discussion on Wrightson’s works in relation to the ethics of writing, see Chapter 5. 21 Wrightson’s most renowned trilogy The Song of Wirrun, which comprises The Ice is Coming (1977), The Dark Bright Water (1978) and Behind the Wind (1981), features the ancient spirits who reside in the vast landscape of Australia. 22 Wrightson here is echoing similar exhortations dating from the early twentieth century, when interest was expressed in developing a nationalist artistic and literary aesthetic by turning to Aboriginal art, mythologies and vocabularies. See Rolls, “Painting” 5–7.

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Australianness in children’s books, are not unproblematic. The consecration of awards constitutes an attempt of canonisation, which tends to assimilate Aboriginal legendary tales to the national mythos. While Wrightson’s works have been upheld as canonical Australian children’s literature, the de-contextualisation of Aboriginal spirit beings from their traditions as shown in her books has recently been criticised as cultural appropriation and a form of desecration (Bradford, Reading Race 49–56). Moreover, her writings are largely informed by early anthropological and ethnographic documents, which are hardly free from colonial ideology and which render her own works “doubly Orientalist” (Bradford, Unsettling 79). The critical reflection on Wrightson’s award-winning books also challenges the awards per se. This is not to say that the CBCA justifies the Eurocentric representations of Aboriginality in Wrightson’s books; rather, the legitimating power of the CBCA awards may simultaneously consecrate Aboriginal cultures represented in these books and desecrate them by reinforcing colonial ideology. The standard of “originality”, more often than not, underlines the comments on the awarded books with Aboriginal subject matter in the CBCA judges’ reports. The yearly report interprets the selection criteria in a detailed manner by commenting on whether specific book entries meet or fail the prescribed criteria, hence reflecting a track record of the CBCA awarding focuses, preferences and adjustments throughout the years. Entries with Aboriginal themes and characters secure the reviewing attention in the judges’ report almost every year (at least from 1992 onwards). The judges comment on various aspects of the writings on Aboriginality, including the quantity of entries with Aboriginal subject matter, their merits and demerits, writers and illustrators, Indigenous publishers, and so forth. Compared with books on other themes in judges’ reports, the CBCA has maintained a long-held interest in books on Aboriginal themes throughout the years. For example, in the 2004 judges’ report: The judges were most encouraged to see a stronger field of books by Indigenous Australian writers, as well as books about Indigenous people and their culture. Indigenous artists and writers are working together with publishers, translators, historians and designers to produce works of great originality, both in the use of vernacular language and in the style of illustration. (5)

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The judges commended the books on Aboriginal themes, particularly the emerging works produced by Aboriginal writers and artists in which the deployment of Aboriginal vernacular language (Aboriginal languages and/or Aboriginal English) and Aboriginal styles of painting are deemed outstanding in meeting the standard of originality in both content and style. Being valued and awarded constitutes an important means for the formation of cultural capital, yet the critical questions remain: what kind of effect do the regimes of value bring to Aboriginal writers and in what sense could they mobilise Indigenous cultural capital accruing through the institutional act of prizing for their own benefits? As we can see, the CBCA’s privileging of Aboriginal themes has neither been self-evident, nor indisputable. In the process of value production, the role of CBCA awards is ambivalent: on the one hand, the awards give prominence to authors and books on Aboriginal themes, which possibly promote the growth of Indigenous cultural capital possessed by Indigenous writers and artists; on the other, the institutional means of legitimation canonises literary representations of Indigenous cultures and subsumes them under an nationalist endeavour, and meanwhile channels the power of consecration to re-assert institutional authority and objectives. The function of prizes therefore represents a complex convergence of awarding and appropriating, literary legitimation and commercialisation, material gains and symbolic power. An understanding of the ambiguity at the core of institutionalised awards, nevertheless, is helpful to avoid the simplified tendency of seeing the prize either as a neat fable of privileging Aboriginality or as capitalist exploitation of Aboriginal cultures. To further illustrate this point, I will take the inaugural Eve Pownall Award for Information Books for example. This award was introduced by the CBCA in 1993, aiming to “raise the standard of information books written for young Australians” (1993 Judges’ Report 2). The inaugural winner was Tjarany Roughtail: The Dreaming of the Roughtail Lizard and Other Stories Told by the Kukatja (1992), published by Magabala Books. Written in both Kukatja and English, this book tells the traditional stories of Kukatja people of Malarn, Yaka Yaka and Wirrumanu communities in Kimberley region. It is a collaborative work by Gracie Greene, Lucille Gill, and Joe

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Tramacchi.23 The 1993 judges’ report comments on the first-year entries for the Eve Pownall Award: The overall quality of the entries can be inferred from the fact that only two were considered worthy of shortlisting, and no honour book was selected. It is of note also that the two chosen were innovative in format which precluded the need for traditional information guides such as indexes and bibliographies. Though some of those in the traditional format were competent, none of them was considered worthy of shortlisting. (2)

The judges’ remarks exemplify both consecration of books and assertion of the CBCA’s authority, which go hand in hand in the process of managing the power of selection and judgement. The judges’ critical comments on the entries, stressing only a limited number of books as “worthy of shortlisting”, upheld the awarding standards and reinforced the CBCA’s authority in selecting quality books for children. The way in which the CBCA judges the entries worthy or not worthy of being awarded a prize has been criticised as patronising writers and publishers. Macleod points out that with relatively few literary critics of high profile, public librarians and teacher librarians have been the mainstay of the CBCA judging panels; “with the CBC[A]’s assumption that its standards are universally agreed”, the “phrases ‘up to standard’ and ‘not up to standard’ are invoked by the judges’ reports and appear in the minutes of the annual general meeting frequently”, compared to literary awards for adult literature where those strict and even didactic comments would be rarely seen (Macleod, “Children’s Book Council” 30; “Early Years” 4). In determining this Eve Pownall Award, the CBCA also re-asserted its authority by withholding the awards for honour books and restricting the shortlisting to only two books, underlining an implicit statement that the more

23

Gracie Greene and Lucille Gill are Aboriginal, living at Wangkatjungka community and in Broome respectively. Joe Tramacchi is of Italian origin, a school teacher at Noonkanbah. Gracie told the stories in both Kukatja and English to Lucille and Joe. Other people – Helen Nagamara, Pasty Mudgadell and Christine Mudgadell – took part in the writing in Kuktatja, and Joe wrote the stories in English. Lucille contributed to the paintings and line drawings.

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difficult it is to get an award, the higher standards and credibility the award has.24 After all, the CBCA’s enhanced authority and power of consecration increased the value of the 1993 award-winning book, Tjarany Roughtail. The judges acknowledged its embodied cultural value and production qualities: Tjarany Roughtail … [sets an example] of innovative titles, stretching the boundaries of the information book. The judges want to take this opportunity to commend publishers who are moving towards providing more Australian-based information books, something which has been in short supply for some time. … Tjarany Roughtail is a remarkable publication not only for the insights it provides into Kukatja culture in particular and Aboriginal cultures in general, but also for the attention to detail given to its design and presentation. (1993 judges’ report 7)

The honour signified by the inaugural award and the judges’ positive comments constitutes an act of institutional legitimation. Although the “innovative” features (echoing the key criterion of originality) and the “Australian-based” content are consistent with the CBCA’s long-term identification of books with Aboriginal themes, the judges’ comment acknowledges the distinct Kukatja culture in relation to the diversity of Aboriginal cultures, without generalising one universal Aboriginal culture or maintaining the Aboriginal–White binary. In this case, the CBCA award is meaningful not only because it facilitates the dissemination of Kukatja/Aboriginal cultural knowledge which transforms into Indigenous cultural capital, but also because it promotes traditional stories produced by Aboriginal authors with both the white collaborator ( Joe Tramacchi who writes the Kuktatja stories in English) and the Aboriginal publisher Magabala Books, as they engage in the cultural market and accumulate Indigenous cultural capital. This is also evident in the judges’ report which presents, along with the detailed review of Tjarany Roughtail, a photo of the award-winning authors – Gracie Greene and Joe Tramacchi – with

24 Throughout the CBCA history, withholding of awards can also be seen in other awarding categories and years. Notably the category of Picture Books of the Year, introduced in 1955, had no yearly winner seventeen times during the first thirty years of its awarding history (i.e. up to the year 1985). See Macleod, “Battle” 62–3.

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their book Tjarany Roughtail at the Australian Book Fair. This picture is unusual in a sense because in most circumstances only the front cover of the awarded book is shown in the judges’ report. In celebrating the presence of Tjarany Roughtail and its authors at the Australian Book Fair, the report further advocates the popularity of this book, which represents an embodiment of cultural capital being sought after. Considering more recognition could be gained from a public readership through related events organised by the CBCA such as the awarding ceremony and Children’s Book Week, the judges’ report projects a trajectory of augmented Indigenous cultural capital for the book and its authors. Awards are crucial to endorse and promote the circulation of Indigenous cultural capital, if not always in an appropriate way, in the field of Australian children’s literature. The act of prizing endows Indigenous authors (awardees) with recognition, and in return the CBCA (awarders) asserts its own institutional authority and goals in promoting Australianness in children’s books. In a sense, the awards as a means of empowerment form a mutually beneficial relationship between awardees and awarders, though this relationship is by no means on an equal basis. It should be noted that for Indigenous authors, the enunciative position as a writer and the events celebrating writers are often used to consolidate Indigenous cultural and political interests in general. This is consistent with the nature of Indigenous writings which to a large extent is political, as much as being a literary expression of cultural aesthetics. It is not uncommon that the empowered Indigenous writers/awardees deploy the accumulated Indigenous cultural capital as an asset to negotiate with the institutions/awarders. These acts as such may lead to the change of institutional practices pertaining to Indigenous matters. The biennial CBCA National Conferences, which invite writers, publishers, editors, reviewers, educators, librarians and related professionals to discuss the latest development and the future trend of children’s literature in Australia, can be a platform where negotiations between different stakeholders can take place. At the First CBCA National Conference in 1992, Linda Burney, a Wiradjuri woman and President of the NSW Aboriginal Education Consultative Group (AECG), was the only speaker who contributed two papers. Burney is not a writer herself, but she provides

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consultative services for writers working on curriculum materials that involve representations of Aboriginal people and cultures. In her speech entitled “Evaluating Material about Aboriginal People”, Burney stresses the importance of consulting relevant Aboriginal communities (consultative groups or custodians) before using specific Aboriginal knowledge and cultural elements in writing for publication. Prior permissions from Aboriginal communities and acknowledgements of the source materials are required to ensure Aboriginal ownership of their heritage and the appropriate transmission of Aboriginal cultural knowledge. Burney also suggests a checklist when examining a book drawing on Aboriginal cultural elements: “noting whether the right people have been acknowledged, whether there was an Aboriginal person working on the program with the author, whether the illustrator was Aboriginal, and so on” (87). Though it was not new in addressing Aboriginal cultural sensitivity in the public arena, Burney’s speech was informative not only to writers working on books with Aboriginal subject matter and characters but also to judges, publishers, editors, educators, and reviewers at the conference, who played a part in the production and evaluation of children’s books. In this regard, Burney’s voice at the CBCA conference represented an active engagement of Aboriginal stakeholders in the institutional practices pertaining to the awarding selection and judgement. An indirect implication could be seen from an informed comment in the 1993 CBCA judges’ report. The shortlisted book entitled The Fat and Juicy Place (1992), written by Diana Kidd and illustrated by Bronwyn Bancroft, received the judges’ acknowledgement in the report: Aboriginal artist Bronwyn Bancroft’s black-and-white drawings and decorations complement and enhance the text, and although the author is not herself Aboriginal, the book had been thoroughly and sensitively researched and has the endorsement of the NSW Aboriginal Education Consultative Group Incorporated. (1993 judges’ report 5)

Addressing the presence of an Aboriginal illustrator and the endorsement from the NSW Aboriginal Education Consultative Group Incorporated (where Burney was President of the AECG), the 1993 CBCA judges’ report echoed Burney’s checklist in her speech at the 1992 CBCA national

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conference. It is difficult to prove the direct impact of Burney’s speech on the CBCA judging panel in their subsequent selection and evaluation process. But as shown in the 1993 judges’ report, the request of gaining permission from Aboriginal communities (or Aboriginal Education Consultative Groups at the state level) was transformed into an implicit standard for the CBCA judges to consider the appropriateness of deploying Indigenous cultural knowledge in the book entries. This standard, informed by Aboriginal perspectives, has been repeatedly brought up in judges’ reports in the following years. For instance, the 2008 judges’ report comments that the “pleasing increase in entries about Indigenous Australians was complemented by increased cultural sensitivity and correct acknowledgment of sources” (5). This emphasis on cultural sensitivity in the writing about Aboriginality reflects a timely if belated response of the CBCA in addressing the growing concerns of Aboriginal communities. Though adjustment on the part of the CBCA did not happen overnight, Aboriginal attempts of engagement and negotiation with evaluative regimes initiated or propelled such a subtle but meaningful change of the institutional codes of legitimation. This institutional change then has led to a reconfiguration of cultural capital, which the codes of legitimation sanction and disseminate, in relation to the ethical representation of Aboriginality in children’s books. At the 1998 CBCA National Conference in Adelaide, the award-­ winning Aboriginal writer Melissa Lucashenko25 was invited to talk in a panel session “Whose Dreaming, Whose Story?” concerning the ethical position of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal writers in writing about Aboriginal stories. It is controversial for non-Aboriginal writers to engage in writing about Aboriginal subject matter and characters. Lucashenko insists that Aboriginal stories, including Dreaming stories and Indigenous life experiences since the European arrival, have been kept and should be told only by Aboriginal people (“Whose” 89–90). She relates the appro-

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Melissa Lucashenko is of the Yugambeh/Bundjalung people. Her first book Steam Pigs (1997) won the 1998 Dobbie Literary Award and was later shortlisted for the 1999 NSW Premier’s Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. In 1998, she also published her award-winning novel for young adults Killing Darcy.

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priation of Aboriginal stories to colonial pillage and injustices, particularly the Stolen Generations and the devastating impacts on Aboriginal people. She argues that “many non-Aboriginal people still don’t realise how this [child removal] policy was linked to the stealing of our lands, as well as the stealing of our culture” (“Whose” 89). This statement is politically evocative and powerful. The transcript of her address is followed by an author’s note about the audience response at the conference: “This talk, which contains material that’s hard for some white people to hear, was received very well and more importantly, honestly, by the Adelaide audience. Such responses are enormously encouraging, and are one of the reasons I keep bothering to turn up” (Lucashenko, “Whose” 90). Lucashenko made strategic use of her recognised position as an award-winning writer at such a conference, which empowered her to articulate a strong view against cultural appropriation. As the editor of the conference proceedings notes, this panel informs the “treatment of Aboriginal people and Aboriginality in children’s literature in the past and the present, and what changes were likely in the future” (Hoeven 86). Given a strong interest of the CBCA in children’s books on Aboriginality, this panel discussion was likely to stimulate the judges (and potential judges) to consider the eligibility of writers to retell traditional Aboriginal stories and to re-assess the distribution of the power of legitimation in future awards. According to Macleod, there has been a recent tendency of the CBCA to shift their preference from non-­Indigenous to Indigenous writers/illustrators when considering awards on books recounting Aboriginal stories: “Although, controversially, the CBCA judges continued to make awards to books on Indigenous themes by non-Indigenous writers and illustrators, such awards have become less frequent” (“Battle” 154). There are many reasons for such a change. Regarding the heated debate concerning “who writes about what to whom”, I am not suggesting that non-Aboriginal authors who write about Aboriginal subject matter shall not be considered for awards. In this example, I am suggesting that the enunciation of Aboriginal writers (e.g. Lucashenko), whose efforts have been instrumental in Aboriginal cultural revitalisation in general, exerts a counter impact challenging the institutional codes of evaluation.

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Recent CBCA awards have seen an individual book with Aboriginal themes by Aboriginal authors being recognised in two categories, a situation rarely found among books on other subject matters. These cases provide indirect proof of the CBCA’s redirected interests in the telling of Aboriginal stories by Aboriginal writers. For instance, in 1999, Going for Kalta: Hunting for Sleepy Lizards at Yalata (1997) by Yvonne Edwards, Brenda Day and Tjitji Tjuta was the first books deemed to be notable in the categories of both Information Books and Picture Books; in 2001, A is for Aunty (2000) by Aboriginal painter Elaine Russell was shortlisted for the Picture Book of the Year and chosen as the Honour Book in the category of Information books; and in 2002, Papunya School Book of Country and History (2001), produced by teachers and students at Papunya School near Alice Springs, was both the winner of the Eve Pownall Award for Information Books and shortlisted title of Picture Book of the Year. The strong presence of Aboriginal writers and their cultural perspectives in the awarding list reflects an encouraging alteration of the evaluative standards, and such a change could ultimately reconfigure the formative codes of cultural capital available to both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children. In this light, the 1999 CBCA award results were probably an accumulative outcome of the increasing attention on Indigenous issues and a longterm negotiation between awarders and awardees. It does not mean that there has been a triumph for Aboriginal writers and works with Aboriginal themes in the cultural market. Nor does it suggest that awarding committees like the CBCA could reverse the Aboriginal and mainstream cultural positions, or break down the dominant evaluative mechanisms. But it is necessary to see that institutional acts of prizing are an important means of formulating Indigenous cultural capital which can be mobilised by authors and accessible to young readers. The institutional mechanisms of evaluation are not necessarily a top-down hegemonic structure; rather, voices from Aboriginal authors and professionals can potentially lead to modification of institutional standards of evaluation and legitimation, and thereby change the codes of recognition in the formation of cultural capital. The strategic engagement with literary legitimation hence empowers Aboriginal people and cultures in the postcolonial context.

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Transformation and Collaboration in the Paratextual Space This section analyses the critical function of the paratext in enacting literary legitimation and explores a transformed paratextual space in the formation of Indigenous cultural capital. The paratext refers to a set of heterogeneous devices of a book, such as a preface, a dedication, the author’s profile, back/ front cover blurbs, and so forth, which serve to frame the text into a book and to justify the value of the text.26 Gérard Genette, in his foundational work Seuils (1997), conceives the paratext as a threshold of the book, which is “a zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition but also of transaction” (2; italics in original). The paratext enables the trajectory of a text to be presented as a book, a promotional process that is invested with the power of validating the desirability of a writer’s work in the market. Though the paratext may be marginalised, neglected, or even disdained as gimmick making, the fringe of the book often accommodates a convergence of varying discourses and practices (Genette 2). The interlocking relations between different interest holders (such as writers, publishers, reviewers, implied readers, educational or awarding institutions) are reflected in the paratext, forming a network that facilitates value formation of the book. The paratext constitutes a relatively independent aesthetic and physical space, a site that enables what Bourdieu sees as the operation of “legitimizing agents” to consecrate writers and works (qtd in Huggan, Postcolonial Exotic 164). The presence of Indigenous cultural elements and the endorsement of a third party (vis-à-vis writers and readers) in the paratextual space, such as a favourable preface by another established writer, the blurb of reviewers’ comments, and award stickers, not only highlights the cultural perspectives that are distinct from mainstream culture but also foregrounds Indigenous authors’ identity and eligibility to approach Indigenous 26

According to Genette, the paratext consists of peritext, referring to the devices “around the text” (still within the book) such as the title, and epitext, the elements “outside the book” such as author’s interviews and letters (5). Noted that this section focuses primarily on the discussion of peritext. To avoid confusion, I use the general term “paratext” throughout.

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subject matter. Similar to the aforementioned book reviews and literary prizes, the paratext enables an institutionalised formation of Indigenous cultural capital by conferring recognition on Indigenous authors and the value embodied within their works. The formulated Indigenous cultural capital is represented as a symbolic power, leading to authorial authority, publicity, sales, and reprints. However, Indigenous writers may feel ambivalent about paratextual recognition of their writings. For a considerable period of time, the paratext under the control of non-Indigenous editors served to mediate the writing of Indigenous authors to a white, public readership (see Davie 112; Freeman, “We Must” 136). Editors decide whose work is published and negotiate how a work can reach its readers. While editing and publishing of Indigenous texts, especially in the instances of early Indigenous life writings, white editors recorded the stories from Indigenous storytellers/authors and participated to a varying extent in the writing process. Jennifer Jones examines the editorial treatment in Margaret Tucker’s If Everyone Cared (1977), pointing out that the substantive changes between the author’s manuscript and the edited versions, with regard to Indigenous textual features of kinship, spirituality and political resistance, manifest “the subjugation of Indigenous priorities” to “the interests of the publisher’s projected white reader” (“As Long” 8, 10). Again, in Black Writers, White Editors: Episodes of Collaboration and Compromise in Australian Publishing History (2009) Jones provides evidence of numerous amendments to Oodgeroo’s Stradbroke Dreamtime (1972) by her editor, Barbara Ker Wilson, who specialised in children’s publishing at Angus & Robertson. As Jones notes, Oodgeroo ultimately had to compromise on the editorial changes to her manuscript, which was stripped of its colloquial language, removing any hint of the distinctive Aboriginal voice of the characters. Aboriginal perspectives on land, spirituality and contemporary Aboriginal culture were removed. Some positive depictions of an Aboriginal worldview were replaced by racist representations of Aboriginal people. Any overt criticism of white people or depiction of their racist attitudes were deleted. (Black Writers 6)

However well intentioned, Wilson’s editing transformed the text “from strident political prose into harmless entertainment” ( Jones, Black Writers 4).

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The editing of Indigenous texts by white editors may counteract or neutralise the anti-colonial resistance that Indigenous writers intend to achieve. The paratext, of which editors are conventionally in charge, often gives prominence to the “craft of text-making and to the centralizing role of the editor in that process” (Grossman 157). As shown in detail later in this section, the paratext manifests the editor’s “management of the textual economy of Aboriginal writing” in the marketplace (Grossman 157). In this sense, the writer’s Aboriginal identity and the unique cultural features represented in the books could be magnified through the paratextual devices, but this valorisation is often turned into a commodification of Aboriginality. The paratext also unfolds a set of relations beyond writers and editors. The institutional endorsement inscribed through paratextual devices – a scholarly foreword, prize-winning records, the blurb written by a renowned columnist) – not only legitimates and anticipates Indigenous narratives but may also situate Indigenous authors within the dominant evaluative regimes and reaffirm the authority and interests of non-Indigenous scholars, awarding committees and artistic or educational institutions. The mediation of the paratext, in this sense, simultaneously consecrates Indigenous writers and compromises the anti-colonial theme conveyed through their writings. The paratext thus becomes a controversial space for Indigenous authors and their narratives. In an essay entitled “Race and the (Para)Textual Condition”, Beth McCoy argues that the paratext is an ideologically contested space, which is imbued with the “ever-changing modes of white domination and of resistance to that domination” (156). She explores the cross-racial confrontation and negotiation channelled through the paratext in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845). In her discussion of slave narratives, McCoy observes that African American writers gain legitimated recognition and benefits transacted through the paratext, in a situation of “no choice but to apprehend them [paratextual devices] as key to individual and collective survival” (159). McCoy further elaborates on the contradiction and the possible openings afforded by the paratext: while “African Americans diagnosed paratextual space as one way through which white supremacy could be channeled, they also saw that same space

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as offering possibilities for resistance” (159). The promising aspect of this argument identifies the paratext as a zone of resistance to the dominant regimes that bind the voice of the dominated. The idea of deploying the critical function of paratextual devices sheds light on a similar perplexing question in the Australian context – could Aboriginal writers possibly adapt to, or even make use of, the mechanism of evaluation within the paratextual space for their own benefit? If so, in what way could they redirect the cultural capital, which accrues through the mechanism of evaluation, to resisting the authoritarianism brought by the very same mechanism in the paratextual space? During recent years, with support from Aboriginal independent publishers, Aboriginal writers for children have increasingly engaged in the editing and publishing processes, rather than merely being storytellers or knowledge providers. Penelope Davie speaks of the emergence of Indigenous agency in the growing Indigenous publishing industry: “While paratexts have in the past been written by non-Indigenous editors or commentators, more recent texts tend to have paratexts written by the Indigenous author, or by other Indigenous stakeholders in the texts production” (114). In this context, to gain access to more power via the paratext involves a conscious moving up in the literary hierarchy from author to publisher/editor. This upward mobility does not refer to a change of identity (from writers to editors) but to a crisscross of participation and engagement. More and more trained white editors have become aware of Indigenous cultural protocols and sensitivity when they approach Indigenous texts, contributing to an increasing presence of Aboriginal authorial practices in the publishing industry. Davie further elaborates: For the author to be seen as in control of the information within the text, not just as the producer of the narrative, but also as the agent in control of the way in which the narrative is framed, is a major change in the production of Indigenous children’s literature. For this to be the case, the relationship between the text and the reader must be seen as a function of the author’s authority, rather than depending on the authority of the non-Indigenous “expert”. (116)

In line with this change, the paratextual devices (e.g. a dedication, a glossary, author’s notes, illustrations) begin to emerge as a vehicle to manifest

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Indigenous storytelling traditions and practices, for instance, the origin of stories, authorised permission from Indigenous committees or custodians, acknowledgement of Indigenous source materials, and other issues related to the eligibility of telling Indigenous stories. As such, the paratext serves as an agent to present Indigenous authorial authority, which is not mutually exclusive with its simultaneous use as a marketing tool. The Indigenous publishing industry, as Robin Freeman observes, has seen an increasing control on the part of Indigenous authors “over the form and means of telling their own stories” (“Black” 2). The transformation in paratextual space empowers Indigenous authors to resist the imposed dominance of Western literary traditions. In this regard, this section discusses two editions of Arone Raymond Meeks’s award-winning picture book Enora and the Black Crane, published by Ashton Scholastic in 1991 and Magabala Books in 2009, respectively. It shows that the paratext can be transformed into a territory where the Indigenous writer and publisher manage to re-seize authorial control by re-investing it with Indigenous perspectives and authorial practices. It also considers Bronwyn Bancroft’s Possum and Wattle: My Big Book of Australian Words (2008) to examine the ways in which Indigenous writers identify the marginalised paratext as a space to articulate their collective voices to a mainstream readership. Arone Raymond Meeks’s Enora and the Black Crane tells the story of a young Aboriginal man, Enora, who finds birds with rainbow-colored plumage. Enora tells other people what he has seen, but no one believes him. The next day, Enora goes alone to the place where the beautiful birds gather to take on their colours. He kills a crane, but its colours soon disappear. Before long, Enora finds himself turned into a bird, whose feathers remain black forever. This is the first children’s book for which Meeks wrote the text and painted the illustrations. The first edition of the Enora story was published in 1991 by Ashton Scholastic, one of the mainstream publishers of children’s books in Australia. On the front flap is a profile of the author showing the right side of his face against the backdrop of a blue canvas, which has a light sketch of his face in silhouette. Below this less identifiable snapshot of the author, there is an editorial account that begins with a conspicuous capital “A” for the first word “Aboriginal”, as a graphic device to attract attention:

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From the opening sentence, Meeks’s “Aboriginal” identity is highlighted as an artist, yet the specific origin of Meeks’s story or his people (the Kuku Midiji people of Laura in Queensland) is not indicated. To subsume Meeks’s story into the “cultural heritage of his people” might give a homogenised impression of Aboriginal Australians, ignore the diversity and specificities of their cultures, and maintain the divide between Aboriginal people and mainstream white society. Moreover, the brief introduction to the book sketches the Enora story with descriptive words such as “lush”, “tropical”, and “native”, constituting an exotic account of the Aboriginal Dreaming story and arousing a romantic imagination of Aboriginality. By summarising this Dreaming story as “a story of creation and the loss of innocence”, Enora and the Black Crane is translated into a Genesis story in the sense that the punishment on Enora who is turned into a black bird parallels Adam and Eve’s eviction from paradise. Evocative of a story that Western readers are well familiar with, the cultural translation in this paratextual space addresses or hails a white readership. The editorial introduction of Meeks as an Aboriginal artist continues on the back flap, where readers are invited to learn that the author has developed a passion for the arts since his childhood. Notably, the young Meeks is portrayed as an Aboriginal boy who is eager to draw paintings but poorly or strangely equipped: “Painting and drawing have always been an important part of Arone’s life – for his first attempts he mixed clay with berries for paint and used his own hair to make brushes” (n.pag.). Meeks’s use of “clay”, “berries”, and “his own hair” as painting materials could perhaps arouse curiosity, sympathy, or even shock from the nonIndigenous reader. The account alludes to a sense of exoticism and primitivism, creating a misleading assumption that Aboriginal people always produce their paintings in a “traditional” or “authentic” manner. This paratextual gimmick simultaneously supplements the exchange value of Meeks’s story and trivialises the cultural value that Aboriginal paintings may signify.

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The editorial also gives an account of Meeks’s formal training and artistic career. It lists the details of Meeks’s educational experiences, the awards he has won, the national and international exhibitions in which he has featured, and a number of galleries and museums that have collected his paintings. The list shows more than the trajectory of what a gifted Aboriginal young artist can achieve to the extent that it reaffirms the prestige and authority of these institutions. For instance, well known to the Australian public the Holmes à Court Collection in Perth with a special focus on Indigenous painting and artefacts is listed among the famous collectors and is modified by the adjective “prestigious”, signifying institutional legitimation and consecration for Meeks and his works. At the same time, the list also reclaims the authority of non-Indigenous institutions in judging the value of Indigenous works. From this perspective, this paratextual space shows an attempt to assimilate Indigenous works into the dominant regimes of evaluation. This example shows the invisible conflict between Aboriginal text and mainstream culture in the paratextual space. The market-oriented strategy in which the Scholastic edition frames the Aboriginal text for a non-Aboriginal readership inevitably diminishes the cultural significance of Dreaming stories. Nevertheless, such tension in the Scholastic edition was hardly noticed in the early 1990s. The book was awarded the Ezra Jack Keats UNICEF International Children’s Book Award and shortlisted for the Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) Book of the Year Award for Picture Books in 1992. The awards not only represented honour or prestige for the author but also promised both economic return and symbolic impact in the children’s book market. In this process, the bestowed recognition transformed the value of the distinction into an institutionalised state of cultural capital that could be accumulated and mobilised by the author. While the Enora story reached out to a readership beyond Meeks’s family and community, the institutional recognition and the popularity of Meeks’s debut picture book bestowed cultural capital that Meeks as a young Aboriginal visual artist probably could not have accessed. In 2009, the Enora story was republished by Magabala Books and relaunched in Cairns where Meeks grew up. Magabala Books is an

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independent Aboriginal publisher, aiming to promote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. The general manager of Magabala Books, Susie Haslehurst, believed that “18 years later it [the Enora story] still has life so we’ve taken the beautiful story and the beautiful illustrations, redesigned it all and packaged it together and hope it will have another life out there” (qtd in Howes 52). The re-launch also displayed Meeks’ original artworks for the book’s illustrations, which had “actually been stored away with the original publisher” (qtd in Howes 52). Even Meeks hadn’t “seen them for a long time … so this is an experience” for him (qtd in Howes 52). The Magabala edition of the Enora story retains the body text and illustrations but changes the paratextual design. Since the two published editions are nearly two decades apart, how is the cultural capital accumulated by the previous edition reinvested in the new edition? If two decades ago Meeks was in a relatively passive position to accrue cultural capital, in what way does the re-publication actively deploy the accumulated cultural capital to recognise Indigenous cultural value and authorial practices in the paratextual space? In this edition, the authorial practices, as opposed to the editor’s voice, are brought to the fore in the paratextual space. Opposite to the title page, Meeks’ dedication states: “To my grandfather, Ronald Meeks, and to John E Darling and Tex” (n.pag.). According to Meeks, his grandfather passed on this traditional story when Meeks was young. The dedication conveys Meeks’s gratitude to his grandfather. By manifesting the kinship relations, the act of dedication conforms to Aboriginal storytelling tradition, in which the storyteller pays homage to Aboriginal ancestry and custodians of cultural knowledge. In this case, the dedication is not only a statement of a personal reciprocal relationship in relation to the book but evidence of Indigenous cultural protocols to acknowledge the Indigenous cultural heritage to which Meeks’s story belongs and to recognise the kinship through which the story is transmitted. In this new edition, the author’s picture and biographical notes occupy an entire page at the end of the book. The picture shows Meeks sitting in front of the drawing board, holding the colour palette and looking into the camera with a smile. His biographical note opens with the following words:

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Arone Raymond Meeks is one of Australia’s leading visual artists. Descended from the Kuku Midiji people of Laura in Cape York, Far North Queensland, Arone grew up in Cairns with his grandparents. As a young boy he listened closely as his g­ randfather passed on his traditional cultural knowledge. Art had already begun to influence Arone’s life and he vividly remembers these stories and the impact of living close to country as he played with colour and different mediums. (n.pag.)

Meeks is identified as a nationally renowned artist, rather than accentuating his Aboriginal identity in the first line. The following sentence indicates to which Aboriginal group Meeks belongs and from whom his traditional knowledge is inherited. The author’s kinship relations suggest that the storytelling is undertaken by an authorised person and conforms to the cultural protocols observed by his group. Here, instead of conforming to Western standards of evaluation and legitimation, the author’s biographical notes re-assert the importance of Indigenous social bonds with Aboriginal ancestors, communities, and country. As Meeks said at the re-launch, “[i]t’s a story that gives a sense of culture and a sense of place. It’s a story about respect and coming of age and that connection back to culture” (qtd in Howes 52). Notably at the end of this introductory paragraph, Meeks’s fondness for paintings since his childhood is described as “play[ing] with colour and different mediums”, replacing the rhetoric of Indigenous primitivism and exoticism in the previous edition. In this paratextual space where conventionally the author is introduced and appraised, Indigenous cultural value and practices are invested and transformed into a form of cultural capital, which consolidates the Aboriginal author’s authority and informs young readers of Aboriginal traditions. Apart from reinscribing the paratextual space with Aboriginal storytelling traditions, the Magabala edition does not reject the recognition conferred by non-Indigenous institutional regimes. The cultural capital derived from the honour received by Meeks is reinvested in the new edition. An account of the award-winning experiences of Meeks, particularly the awards received for the Scholastic edition of the Enora story, is given at the end of the author’s biographical notes. The UNICEF award medal is printed alongside the text, signifying international recognition of Meeks’s talent and the importance of the Dreaming story. Because an international (UNICEF) award presumably carries more weight than a national (CBCA)

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award in terms of the scale of recognition and appeal to an international readership, and probably because there is no blank space for the logo of the CBCA award to be shown, the Magabala edition privileges the former award. This can be seen as a reversed play with the logic of recognition and the recognised, in which recognition from the awarding committees is to an extent subject to the power of selection by – the recognised – the Aboriginal publisher and author. The latter tactically re-seize control of the paratextual space to build up the cultural capital that can be used by them and for them. The comparative reading of the two editions of Meeks’s Enora story shows a great contrast of paratextual approaches adopted by mainstream and Aboriginal publishers. Given the different times and social contexts in which these two editions were produced, I do not intend to set up the binary between mainstream and Aboriginal publishers for these two “categories” actually encompass a rich diversity. Moreover, as Clare Bradford points out, while mainstream publishers tend to frame the Aboriginal texts with a market-oriented strategy so as to reach a wider readership, it is not “always feasible for Indigenous authors to publish with Indigenous publishing companies, which are generally small-scale operations producing limited numbers of children’s books” (“Reading Indigeneity” 336). In this regard, Meek’s Enora story was fortunate to be published by both mainstream and Aboriginal publishers and to be valued by readers since its first publication. Compared to the mainstream publishers, there are only a limited number of Indigenous publishing houses in Australia, such as Magabala Books, IAD Press, Aboriginal Studies Press, and a few others. The oldest independent Indigenous publisher in Australia, Magabala Books is committed to publishing books by and for Indigenous people. Since its establishment in 1987, it has produced over 200 titles across genres. To cover the publishing and management costs, Magabala Books has to survive intense competition. Financial support from private and public donations and funding schemes assists its management. For books published by Magabala Books, the paratext happens to be a regular place to record this information. For example, in the Magabala edition of Enora and the Black Crane, there is a statement on the copyright page together with other publishing information:

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Magabala Books receives financial assistance from the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts advisory body. The State of Western Australia has made an investment in this project through the Department of Culture and the Arts in association with Lotterywest. (n.pag.)

This statement acknowledging the funding from government bodies reveals a pragmatic gesture to engage with institutional donors in a beneficiary relationship. Such an engagement is likely to facilitate Magabala Books’ ability to cover the operational costs and to benefit talented Aboriginal writers and artists such as Meeks. In addition, government funding indicates an acknowledgement of the presence of small and marginalised stakeholders within the publishing industry. This recognition signifies an opening for Indigenous publishers to insinuate themselves into the evaluative and publishing framework, and hence to get a bigger say in the field of cultural production. It also reflects a growing Indigenous cultural capital that has been recognised and valued in mainstream society. From this example, it is not difficult to see an intertwined relationship between dominant institutions and Indigenous cultural expressions. Institutional legitimation and recognition play a necessary role, symbolically and/or financially, in the formation and transmission of Indigenous cultural capital that recognises the value of Indigenous cultural heritage in Australian society. The legitimating function of the paratext does not necessarily go against the interests of Indigenous authors; rather, it can support Indigenous authors to remain active in the field of cultural and artistic production, and promote Indigenous cultural value to a diverse young readership. Meanwhile, it is equally important to understand the agency of Indigenous authors and publishers within this contested space. They are not necessarily subjugated to the dominant regime of legitimation. There has been a transformative tendency in a redefined paratextual space, in which Indigenous authors and publishers may identify their agency and re-orient the accumulated cultural capital for their own benefits. Recent years have seen collaborative voices presented by Indigenous authors in the paratextual space. Bronwyn Bancroft is an award-winning Indigenous artist, writer, and illustrator. Her Possum and Wattle: My Big Book of Australian Words (2008) was published by a mainstream publisher, Little Hare Books. It is an English wordbook illustrated with an

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Aboriginal style of painting, which celebrates a variety of Australian animals, plants, and landscape. On the copyright page, Bancroft states in the dedication: “I would like to dedicate this book to two of my close friends. Euphemia Bostock for her unique and powerful use of words and Sally Morgan who taught me the meaning of words” (n.pag.). Bancroft’s gratitude to Bostock and Morgan demonstrates their long-standing friendship and shared artistic and political pursuits. The first dedicatee, Bostock, is a wellknown Aboriginal artist, textual designer, and political activist advocating Indigenous rights. Bostock and Bancroft were the founding members of Boomalli Aboriginal Art Co-operative, an organisation established in 1987 to promote national and international recognition of Indigenous artists and Indigenous contemporary and urban arts. In The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture (2000), the entry for Bostock is written by Bancroft who writes, “Euphemia Bostock epitomises all that is special about Aboriginal life – she is the matriarch of an extended family, active in political life, working in many levels of artistic practice, and a mentor for her people” (546). The second dedicatee, Morgan, has been a household name since the publication of her bestseller My Place (1987), which raised the public’s awareness of the Stolen Generations under the policy of assimilation. Morgan and Bancroft have collaborated on several children’s books and projects, such as Dan’s Grandpa (1996), In Your Dreams (1997), and Sam’s Bush Journey (2009). They appreciate each other’s work and have been friends since they first met; and both of them “have grown close in the fight against the exploitation of Aboriginal imagery and the continuing infringement of the copyright and moral rights of Aboriginal artists” (Barrowclough 12). In the paratextual space of Possum and Wattle, Bancroft dedicates her book to two successful Aboriginal artists and writers to acknowledge their cooperative and reciprocal relationship. Considering the illocutionary force of dedication, Genette argues that dedications not only show an author’s intention of “offering the work as a token of esteem to a person” but also are a statement of “a relationship (of one kind or another) between the author and some person, group, or entity” (117, 135). This proclaimed relationship transforms the act of dedication into an indirect validation or endorsement of the value embodied in the book. The power of legitimation is derived

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from the association with the authority of the dedicated person or group. In this case, the dedication transmits the literary legitimation conferred by the Aboriginal artist and writer (Bostock and Morgan) to empower another Aboriginal author (Bancroft). It subverts the usual practice that the dominant regime imposes the power of legitimation on an Aboriginal author. This is not to say that Bancroft mobilises her relations with friends to increase the credibility of her own book. Rather, I suggest reading this dedication as a form of collaboration between Aboriginal writers/artists. This collaboration via the paratext is not merely a result wherein a senior Aboriginal artist and a famous Aboriginal writer use their cultural capital to empower a younger and less-well-known Aboriginal author but a convergence of their individual cultural capital to make a public presence and to anticipate a wider social recognition for Aboriginal writers and artists. This can be seen as a tactical approach for Aboriginal people to recognise, accumulate, and reinvest cultural capital in their own right in the cultural production. In this sense, Bancroft’s wordbook is not an individual work but a collaborative manifestation of Aboriginal cultural perspectives through the paratext. Furthermore, the collective voices of Aboriginal writers in Bancroft’s wordbook can also be seen in the preface written by Sally Morgan. The function of a preface is regarded as “a typically rhetorical apparatus of persuasion”, which serves to convince readers of a worthy reading experience (Genette 198). A preface is of importance to validate the author’s talent and the book’s value. In the preface to this wordbook, Morgan introduces young readers to the use of Aboriginal languages before the arrival of Europeans and in contemporary Australian society. Morgan speaks of the author’s artistic efforts to present the richness of Aboriginal languages to the readers: “Some of the words in this book come from a number of different Aboriginal languages. The pictures that accompany them have been painted by Bronwyn Bancroft, a famous Bundjalung woman artist who is very proud to share her cultural heritage with you” (n.pag.). Morgan’s preface recognises Bancroft’s artistic achievement and Aboriginal identity that proves her eligibility to transmit the cultural heritage of Aboriginal languages. In addition, writing a preface for another writer implicitly re-asserts Morgan’s established position in the field of Aboriginal literature. The fact that an

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Aboriginal author entrusts another Aboriginal author to write a preface shows a cooperative tactic by which an Aboriginal writer (Morgan) generates cultural capital for another Aboriginal writer (Bancroft). This tactic transforms the situation where the preface of Aboriginal texts is written by non-Aboriginal scholars or editors and marked by their expertise. The collaboration is grounded on sources within the Aboriginal community rather than an external authority. For Aboriginal writers, to re-seize authorial control through collaborating voices adapts the regime of legitimation and contributes to a reconfigured structure of recognition in the paratext. It thereby suggests an opening through which Aboriginal writers accumulate cultural capital yet without being passively submitted to market-oriented schemes in the paratextual space. Though the collaborative approaches between Aboriginal authors and publishers or between Aboriginal writers usually operate on a limited scale, there has been a transformative tendency for Aboriginal writers to enact authorial authority in the paratext. This marginal space has become an important site where Aboriginal authors identify their collective power to accumulate and use Indigenous cultural capital and where they can harbour their forces of resistance to dominant regimes and rules. The postcolonial resistance of Aboriginal authors is not necessarily a total rejection of institutional mechanisms but a mobilisation in their own interests. As Freeman writes, “Indigenous writers demonstrate agency in articulating their purpose in writing and by participation in the publication process” (“We Must” 146). Although operating in contentious terrains such as book reviews, literary prizes, and paratextual spaces where power relations are highly uneven, the tactical manoeuvres of Aboriginal authors and publishers open up the possibility to force certain alterations, re-definition or even compromise to varying degrees on the part of dominant evaluative regimes in the field of literary production. The tactics demonstrate “the capacity of the colonized subject” in the postcolonial context “to intervene in colonial discourse to contest it, change it, or generally make the voice of the colonized heard” (Ashcroft, Post-Colonial 45). From this perspective, manifested through transformative and collaborative Aboriginal authorial practices, Indigenous cultural capital shores up the status of Aboriginal writers and

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leads to effective changes of the recognising codes by which cultural capital is produced and distributed for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous children. This transformative intervention is of major importance, for a reconfigured cultural capital imbues a young public readership with a deeper understanding of Indigenous cultural heritage.

Chapter 4

School Texts: From “Silent Apartheid” to “Cross-Curriculum Priority”

According to Bourdieu, a specialised, institutionalised state of cultural capital is formulated through educational schemes which valorise the knowledge possessed or obtained by individuals (“Forms” 247–8). This important relationship between educational institutions and cultural capital is predicated upon the production of value or value-equivalence (such as academic qualifications). Examining cultural capital embodied in and disseminated through canonical works, John Guillory stresses the importance of school syllabi and curricula in preserving and reproducing the value of literary texts, since a valid judgement of value occurs “in a certain institutional context, a setting in which it is possible to insure the reproduction of the work, its continual reintroduction to generations of readers” (28). The educational schemes provide a specific institutional framework in which the works included in school syllabuses and curricula undergo a regulated process of selection, interpretation and evaluation. Through the role of teachers and their interaction with students, the school systems ensure that the cultural value embodied in selected works is elevated into cultural capital which is then sought by a wider public. Besides other interlocking institutional schemes discussed in the previous chapter, educational institutions exercise an effective and powerful function in sanctioning literary legitimacy and the value of texts. Thereby the cultural capital embodied in texts can be formulated, disseminated, and inculcated among young readers. This chapter is interested in the formation of Indigenous cultural capital within the educational terrain, enabled through school texts that are informed by Indigenous cultural and historical perspectives. Nevertheless, school education has long been a constrained site for the learning of Indigenous cultural knowledge. To highlight the trajectory from the initial absence

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of Indigenous cultural capital in educational material to its presence, it is necessary to sketch a brief historical overview.

Indigenous Education in the Classroom Prior to the European settlement, Australia’s Indigenous societies had developed a set of integrated systems of learning and mentoring, which ensured that their knowledge, skills, rituals, laws, and other socio-cultural aspects were handed down to younger generations. Referring to the history of Indigenous education, Kaye Price remarks that “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have always had their own education and this education began as soon as the child moved in the womb, as soon as it was known that there was a new responsibility” (4). In traditional societies, Indigenous knowledge transmission constituted a fundamental part of everyday life and took place in the settings of bush, desert, beaches, or wherever skills and knowledge needed to be demonstrated or performed. Through observation, imitation, and hands-on practices, children were expected to learn from their elders, peers and community members, and the learning process was usually completed collaboratively as a group rather than on an individual, competitive basis (Wheatley, Playground 30). The objects of learning varied from country to country, usually including storytelling, songs, dancing, paintings, and so forth. Every child was believed to be capable in one skill or another. Specialised skills (such as storytelling, identifying medical herbs, fishing and hunting) were nurtured and honed according to the different talents of each child; teaching was continuous until children obtained sufficient experience to handle specific tasks on their own (see Price 3–4). Though greatly different from Western ways of learning, Indigenous education functioned to transmit cultural knowledge and to sustain social development. Following colonisation, however, the education of Indigenous children was predicated upon the Eurocentric view which at first believed them primitive and “uneducable” (Price 4). Then under the

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policy of assimilation, Indigenous children were required to acculturate to Western ways of schooling. But the deficient education system failed to provide an engaging learning environment and resources for Indigenous students. While the Western educational paradigm was seldom questioned, the underprivileged Indigenous students were believed to be responsible for their low achievements at school and the binary assumption of Indigenous inferiority and white supremacy was reinforced. Despite the attempts to assimilate children of Indigenous heritage to mainstream white society, the severely inadequate formal education prepared these children as unskilled workers or cheap manual labourers: girls were educated to do domestic work, such as sewing, cooking, laundering, and nursing, whilst boys were often assigned to work on the mission from a young age (see Price 4). Until very recent decades, Indigenous cultures and histories were denigrated when mentioned at all but were mostly invisible to children at primary and secondary schools in urban areas. Aboriginal representations in school texts were infused with stereotypical or tokenistic images, reinforcing the Eurocentric hierarchy between colonised and coloniser, black and white, inferior and superior. As Mark Rose points out, deprivation of Indigenous culture and knowledge in the classrooms enacted a “silent apartheid … bolstered not so much by the vacuum that it creates through sustaining ignorance, but more by the profusion of inappropriate by-products generated to fill the void” (70). The proliferation of Aboriginal absence and misrepresentations informed by colonial and subsequently settler ideology exacerbated the difficulty of accessing Indigenous cultural value through white education systems. Moreover, the detrimental effect of “silent apartheid” was inter-generational since many teachers with little knowledge or few contacts with Indigenous people during their own upbringing and service training would reproduce misinformed knowledge about Indigenous people and cultures, or simply exclude Indigenous content from their teaching plans. Such prevalent phenomena constituted a “cycle of ignorance” which “replicate[d] itself as if it were a regenerative pandemic” in the education sectors (M. Rose 70). It promulgated ill-informed Aboriginal representations to young students and intensified an entrenched racial ideology in mainstream society. M. Rose argues that historically the Australian education system

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The silent apartheid in the classroom constituted a lasting problem in imparting valid Indigenous cultural knowledge through a Western paradigm and reflected the troubled racial relationship in Australian settler society. Though the evidence of talented Indigenous students was occasionally documented, Indigenous students were generally disadvantaged in a Western education system (see Price 5). The first Australian national survey of literacy and numeracy conducted by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) revealed in its report Australian Studies in School Performance (1977) an enormous disparity of educational attainments between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students (Bourke and Parkin, 152–4). This alarming finding prompted government authorities and educational bodies to seek redress. From the late 1970s to the beginning of the twenty-first century, an increasing number of strategies, programmes, actions, and reports enacted through education authorities and institutions made efforts to narrow the gaps between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students.1 Notably, the strategy of “Closing the Gap” was initiated in 2008, seeking to promote educational equity and excellence in schooling by improving education outcomes, promoting high expectations of Indigenous students’ performance, increasing collaboration among all school sectors, and supporting Indigenous communities to be

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Several major landmarks included the Aboriginal Student Support and Parent Awareness Program, under the legislated National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Policy in 1989; the Strategic Results Projects initiated in 1997 with the evaluation report What Works? Explorations in Improving Outcomes for Indigenous Students (2000); the Parent School Partnerships Initiative conducted during the mid-2000s; the Indigenous Education Ambassadors Program in 2000 with an aim of supporting Indigenous students to realise their full potentials at school. For more, see Price 6–14.

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involved in school education.2 Under this strategy, The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Action Plan 2010–2014 endorsed by the Council of Australian Governments was released in June 2011. This Action Plan declared that the education authorities of all States and Territories shall take concerted efforts to halve the gap in educational achievements (including reading, writing, and numeracy levels) and to remove the discrepancy in Year 12 attainment rates between Indigenous students and their peers. Among various actions and strategies with the aim of improving equity and quality of Indigenous education is a fundamental change occurring in primary and secondary schools. This was initially prompted by the recommendations outlined in Australian Directions in Indigenous Education 2005– 2008, published by the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA). These recommendations provided ways to engage Indigenous students in school learning activities, so that Indigenous education could be “built in” as an integral part of school business (MCEETYA 4). This marked a paradigm shift from the stand-alone modules of Aboriginal studies, which began in the 1980s with the focus on the education of Aboriginal students. Although the subject of Aboriginal studies had gained some success, it had unintended shortcomings, including the limited availability for the total population of Aboriginal students, absence of long-term commitments and sustained funding support, and the consequential difficulty to implement, monitor and evaluate the programme outcomes in the long run (see Rigney, “Including” 14; Groome 111; Buckskin 3). A more “integrated” Indigenous education into school curricula had a profound implication for the acquisition of Indigenous cultural knowledge among all school students, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous (MCEETYA 16). Subsequently, and guided by the goals established in the Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians adopted by the

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Kevin Rudd’s government initiated the strategy of “Closing the Gap”, which was initially to eliminate the disparity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous life expectancy and later extended to cover other Indigenous disadvantaged sectors.

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Ministerial Council in December 2008,3 the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA)4 developed a national curriculum for government, Catholic and independent schools across Australia.5 In this Australian Curriculum, the histories and cultures of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders for the first time rose to be one of the cross-curriculum priorities,6 which was designed to create the opportunity for all young Australians to gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures, deep knowledge traditions and holistic world views. This knowledge and understanding will enrich all learners’ ability to participate positively in the ongoing development of Australia through a deepening knowledge and connection with the world’s oldest continuous living cultures. (ACARA, “Cross-Curriculum Priorities”)

This initiative means that Indigenous perspectives should be addressed in all applicable learning areas, content descriptions and teaching materials, as a mandatory part of the national curriculum. Although the questions as to which version of knowledge and history is taught and how they fit into the curricula across different states and territories has remained heatedly debated, this action marked a significant advance in Australia’s Indigenous education, enabling both Indigenous and non-Indigenous students to access the rich repository of Indigenous cultural heritage. Despite the challenges facing this ongoing nationwide transformation of the educational structure,7 the strategy of incorporating Indigenous 3 The Melbourne Declaration attaches importance to social equity and justice, seeking to improve academic outcomes of Indigenous students and to inculcate Indigenous cultural significance into all students. 4 The ACARA is an independent educational authority, responsible for developing a national curriculum for students from Foundation to Year 12, together with the corresponding national assessment, data collection, and reporting programmes. 5 Since 2014 the Australian Curriculum (from Foundation to Year 10) has been implemented in all states and territories across Australia. 6 The cross-curriculum priorities in Australian Curriculum include three different perspectives: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures, Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia, and sustainability. 7 Since the 1980s, proposed by the document A Core Curriculum for Australian Schools: What It Is and Why We Need One (1980), there has been an anticipation of

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perspectives into school curricula signifies an institutional recognition of Indigenous knowledge and cultures. In this regard, the active presence of Indigenous perspectives in the classroom not only refers to the Indigenous content taught in class but also includes the cultural knowledge that Indigenous students bring to the class. To recognise and value Indigenous cultural capital possessed by Indigenous students is significant in a pedagogical sense. In Teaching and Learning in Aboriginal Education (2011), Harrison Neil identifies traditional ways of learning acquired by Aboriginal students from their family and community members as a form of cultural capital: Cultural capital refers to the ways in which people relate to their world. These ways serve as cognitive structuring processes, are fundamental to a culture, and underlie how people think and act. Aboriginal people in Australia, for example, are characterised by cultural and linguistic diversity and each community has its own language or dialect, and its own traditions and customs. … Strategies to ensure success for gifted Aboriginal students will acknowledge the necessity, importance and centrality of both cultural capital and social capital in the development and expression of human knowledge, abilities, skills, competencies and attributes. (81)8

This proposition is in line with Bourdieu’s connotations of cultural capital and habitus. Developing in his study of the education system, Bourdieu initially used cultural capital as a theoretical hypothesis to explain unequal

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a future orientation for equal access and shared cultural knowledge so as to replace the common discipline-isolated subjects. See Brennan 260–1. Towards this end, the newly established Australian Curriculum sets the integration of Indigenous perspectives to be a cross-curriculum priority. Nevertheless, the national curriculum has been heatedly discussed in terms of its applicability and rationale. In-service teacher training and high-quality supporting materials are much needed. Many teachers remain inadequately equipped with the knowledge and resources to deal with Indigenous content or to work with Indigenous students. Though the concept of social capital is beyond the discussion of this chapter, it is worth noting that Neil recognises Aboriginal kinship relations and the close interconnection within Aboriginal communities as a form of social capital. The notion of social capital, proposed by Bourdieu, refers to actual or potential benefits generated from a certain membership, network resources, mutual trust, etc. See Bourdieu, “Forms” 248–52.

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academic achievements of students from different social classes by relating their academic performance to the unevenly distributed cultural capital between classes (“Forms” 243). Cultural capital, inherited and invested through the family and reinforced by the school system, underpins the importance of family or pre-school education since the more cultural capital one acquires from the family, the better academic performance one is likely to achieve at school.9 Associated with the notion of cultural capital, a person’s learning process constitutes what Bourdieu terms habitus, which in a lasting and unconscious manner shapes one’s perceptions, views, and behaviour and adapts them to confront ever-changing circumstances (Outline 72). One’s learning is inextricably linked with and benefits from what one has already acquired. The habitus enables the cognitive abilities, which are gained from the family and instilled into the learner’s mind from a young age, to apply in the school environment. The interplay of cultural capital and habitus hence activates the children’s domestic, accumulated learning and affects their learning outcomes at school. Scholars and educators, like Neil, have been increasingly aware of the strong relationship between Indigenous cultural learning and academic achievement of Indigenous students. Indigenous cultures and ways of learning serve as a scaffold which helps Indigenous children adapt their cognitive capability in the school environment and better equip them to be confident and accomplished learners. From this vantage point, to embed Indigenous perspectives in the Australian Curriculum and to recognise the formulated Indigenous cultural capital in the classroom can possibly change the disadvantaged status of Indigenous students. From the predicament of “silent apartheid” to being “cross-curriculum priority” there has been a protracted process of imparting Indigenous cultural perspectives to school children. Despite considerable improvements, there are still difficulties in achieving an equal, engaging and effective learning environment and pedagogic structure that fully values Indigenous cultural knowledge and traditions. The mainstream education system poses

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Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital, nevertheless, has been criticised for understating the fundamental role of individual efforts in affecting one’s academic achievement.

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both challenges and opportunities for the formation of Indigenous cultural capital available to Indigenous and non-Indigenous children.

A Comparative Reading of School Readers School Readers refer to a group of texts compiled, edited or adapted for primary and mid-secondary school students. They are either used in class or read after class as supplementary materials. Entering school curricula and course designs as a conventional and effective practice in literacy and literary education, the Readers enjoy a targeted and defined readership. For students, the collections of School Readers constitute a miniature canon, which preserves the aesthetic and literary value of selected texts and reflects social ideologies of the time. They offer a literary and historical site to examine the critical role of educational institutions in shaping students’ understanding of Aboriginality in settler society. In this light, this section examines two clusters of School Readers: Queensland School Readers issued by the Department of Public Instruction in Queensland from 1915 to the 1970s, and the series of Indij Readers published between 2003 and 2012. The collection of Queensland School Readers, first printed in 1915, was widely used across all grades of primary schools in Queensland. The selected literary texts and the colour plates added since the 1930s became a nostalgic memory for many adults (“Milestones” 14). Like the Readers issued by other state authorities, including Victorian Readers, Tasmanian Readers, and New Australian Series (for school children in New South Wales), Queensland School Readers were compiled during the time when books for children were relatively difficult to obtain. They dwindled gradually till the 1970s and ultimately went out of print, because schools were then supplied by various other literary sources (“Milestones” 14). The state-issued School Readers have passed into history, but their influence on the generations of students was far reaching. Bradford reviews their importance for Australian children at that time:

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Chapter 4 It is difficult to imagine a more influential set of texts. For the Readers were not merely read by children; they were used as literacy materials. Children listened to them and read them, silently and aloud, many times over; some texts (especially poems) were committed to memory; and children were drilled in and tested for their capacity to read and comprehend the content of the Readers. (“Indigeneity” 118)

To “instil into the minds of pupils such a love of literature as will last beyond school-days”, as stated in the preface of each book, Queensland School Readers selected a wide range of literary writings that were considered suitable for children of different levels, including short stories, fairy tales, biographies, poems, and excerpts of novels. A proportion of writers were from Australia, but the majority were English or Scottish writers, novelists and poets. As a matter of fact, the publication of School Readers had long been a British tradition.10 Even though all the compiling, editing and printing was completed in Queensland, Queensland School Readers incorporated a number of texts from the Readers published in Britain. Take Queensland School Reader Grade VI issued in 1938 for example. Eight out of the fifty-one selected texts and two coloured illustrations among the total seven were directly “imported” from a range of British school books, including Royal Readers IV, Highroads of Literature V, Royal Treasury of Story and Song VI published by the London-based Thomas Nelson & Sons, and Modal Reader IV, Systematic Readers III & IV, and English Study Reader IV by the cooperated publisher Blackie and Son Limited in the UK. Besides the above two major educational publishing presses, the textbooks (e.g. New Readers) produced by Longmans, Green and Co. also contributed to other grade levels of Queensland School Readers. 10 In the State of Victoria, prior to the publication of Victorian Readers that started from 1928, school reading materials were primarily imported from Britain to cultivate Australian child readers, such as the Irish Books of Lessons and the British Royal Readers. In 1896, the Victorian Education Department started to issue their elevenmonthly magazine the School Papers, which was initially designed to supplement the reading materials for elementary and primary school students. The inclusions were adapted or directly taken from British educational publications. Later there appeared Victorian Readers, but only around a quarter of the writers included in the issues published between the 1920s and the 1930s were Australian authors. See K. Smith, “Suitable for Children”; O’Conor, Bottersnikes 34–7; Langer and Farrar 118.

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The inclusion of a considerable number of texts by British writers in the Readers was out of the consideration that British “quality” education was believed to be the most suitable for young Australians. The pedagogical emphasis was to cultivate in school students “the growth of national patriotic sentiments, which cannot be included at too early an age” (qtd in Bradford, Reading Race 21). In this context, the school texts transmitted a discourse intertwined with a centrifugal affection for Britain and an emerging Australian national patriotism. As O’Conor notes, in the School Papers and Readers produced during the first half of the twentieth century, “Australian nationalism and unwavering belief in the superiority of British endeavour were most often overtly and sometimes subtly embedded in both the selection and form of content” (Bottersnikes 41). Queensland School Readers published during the 1930s and 1940s reflect the continuing trajectory of the formation of Australian nationhood that still traced its traditions and roots back to Britain. Aboriginal people and cultures in these Readers were mostly elided, but when mentioned at all, the representations were stereotyped and derogatory. In a sense, Aboriginality (both in respect to its absence or presence) was positioned in the service of national endeavour, in which Australia was strategically tied to its British heritage. Queensland School Reader Grade VI (1938) provides an exemplary collection in this regard, which reflected the quasi-absence of Aboriginality in a national discourse of Australians’ ambivalent but persistent connections with Britain. The pedagogical design of Grade VI prioritised poetry among other genres. The poems amounted to twenty-three pieces out of the fifty-one texts in this collection. Following an orthodox Western literary tradition, the editor believed that the aesthetics of poetry “will prove a ‘joy for ever’ to the diligent scholar”, hence most suitable for nurturing and civilising young minds (iii). Among these selected poems, the theme of home was resonant and complicated in the juxtaposition of the nostalgic feeling for Britain as the mother country and the patriotic sentiment for Australia as a newly founded federation. For instance, the poem “Home-Thoughts from Abroad” by English poet, Robert Browning, expressed homesickness of being away from England and the poetic piece, entitled “Home” by English writer Veronica Mason, narrated a young Australian’s imagination of Britain’s

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unfading glory and beauty. The longing for British Isles contrasted with the poems in which the love of country paid tribute to Australia. Dorothea Meckellar’s iconic “My Country” set up Australian patriotic ideals with a fervent love for “a sunburnt country” and besides, James Brunton Stephens’s patriotic lines in “An Australian Anthem” expressed strong sentiments for the then newly founded federation. This collection captured the complexity of an Australian formation of national identity and the legacy of British colonial history. However, in this context Aboriginality was presented through its absence. To be precise, it was conveniently ignored or omitted. Take James Lister Cuthbertson’s poem “The Bush” in this collection for example. Born in Scotland, Cuthbertson11 served as classical master at the renowned Geelong Church of England Grammar School in Victoria. He was devoted to adapting the system and standards of English public schools in Australia. Much loved and honoured by his students, he had a great influence upon the schoolboys during his time as teacher and Head Master. Cuthbertson wrote poems and verses, many of which he contributed to the Grammar School’s Annual and Quarterly founded by him. Cuthbertson’s poems were characterised by naturalist simplicity, much inspired by his days in Geelong. “The Bush”, his four-stanza poem included in Grade VI, paints the natural scenery of Australian bushland. It accentuates what the bush offers “us” – settlers – the blue and cloudless sky, noontide, woodland, fragrant gums on the one hand, and the mystery for being empty on the other. The last two stanzas stress the clash between loveliness and loneliness of the bush, and the interweaving of haunting and enchanted feelings: And the loveliness bold   Loneliest landscapes wear. These are the haunts we love,   Glad with enchanted hours … (36)

The poem depicts the bush as an ambivalent and evocative symbol of the Australian landscape, which is at once empty and filled, desirable and fearful. 11

For more, see the entry of the biography of James Lister Cuthbertson (1851–1910), written by P. L. Brown in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 3.

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As the plenitude that the bush bestows is lauded, the poem exudes the settlers’ desire to establish emotional, deep connections with the landscape, a landscape in which the presence of Indigenous people is conveniently erased. If Cuthbertson’s depiction of the Australian landscape filtered out the existence of Aboriginal people, in the same collection Henry Kendall’s “The Last of His Tribe” drew upon the mythology of Aboriginal people as a dying race. Kendall, an Australian-born poet, was widely regarded as a national poet and remembered for his melancholy and romantic narration of Australian themes. First published in 1864, “The Last of His Tribe” remains familiar to many Australian adults nowadays. Nevertheless, the way in which this poem laments the tragedy of Aboriginal people is problematic by today’s standards. The first stanza depicts a later well-known image of the “last” Aboriginal warrior: He crouches, and buries his face on his knees,   And hides in the dark of his hair; For he cannot look up to the storm-smitten trees,   Or think of the loneliness there –   Of the loss and the loneliness there. (168)

The poem portrays an isolated Aboriginal warrior who bends his weary body and broods over the past glory of his tribe in the bleak and dismal situation. The desperate and wretched man is conscious of the “doomsday” ahead for him, the same doomsday his tribesmen who have fought and fallen before his eyes met. He could do nothing but suffer the loneliness and dream “of foes that he sought, and of fights that he fought / With those who will battle no more – / Who will go to the battle no more” (Kendall 168). The “foes” and “fights” that Kendall alludes to does not identify the European invaders; rather, it is another Aboriginal tribe. The mood of poem is elegiac, saturated with nostalgia and pathos. The poem was much informed by colonial ideology of the “doomed race” theory, and the then popularity of Kendall’s work in School Readers in turn strengthened such an ill-founded ideology.12 12

This poem was also included in, for instance, Victorian Readers Eighth Book published in 1940.

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In Queensland School Reader Grade VI, the juxtaposition between the “last” Aboriginal warrior and the vibrant celebration of federation was misleading, because it not only created an impression that Aboriginal people’s contribution to the new nation was their imminent disappearance but also legitimated the founding of a white nation with British roots. It is evident that School Readers endorse the social values and ideologies that are represented in and transmitted through selected texts for school pupils. While educational schemes intensify colonial hierarchy and the dominant ideology of racial otherness, it is necessary to recognise institutional legitimation as a vehicle to make the ideological investment possible. The function of such legitimation is subject to specific historical and social contexts in which literary texts are read and valued. The ideology transmitted through children’s books, as John Stephens notes, is either “to perpetuate certain values or to resist socially dominant values which particular writers oppose” (3). It is worth considering whether the introduction of Indigenous writings through school curricula, such as in the form of School Readers, contributes to the formation of Indigenous cultural capital and possibly dismantles the silent apartheid in the education sector. To this end, the recently published series of Indij Readers, written by Indigenous writers, artists and educators and designed to enter the school curriculum, exemplify a recognised attempt to impart Indigenous cultural knowledge to young students. Indij Readers contain four series published in 2003, 2004, 2007, and 2012 respectively. Each series consists of a package of storybooks and an accompanying Teacher’s Guide. Storybooks of each series are further categorised into “Indij Readers for Little Fullas” and “Indij Readers for Big Fullas” according to different literacy levels of readers. Targeting both Indigenous and non-Indigenous students, the series addresses various themes of Indigenous cultures and histories, presenting “life as it is, or has been lived by Indigenous Australians” (Rushton and Cossey ix). The foreword to Teacher’s Guide (Book III) highlights the books’ literary value for students: In every sense of the word, the Indij Readers books are works of literature. Through a rich engagement with this literature, students will develop their literacy skills including accurate phonemic-phonetic relationships and will establish and extend their experience and enjoyment of imaginative writing. (Brock vi)

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The series cover a wide spectrum of genres including Dreaming stories, fiction, biographies, information books, poetry, and musical lyrics. The writings introduce to students the multi-faceted, contemporary Indigenous people’s life, cultural traditions, literary and artistic creativity. Notably, the non-conventional genre – rap in hip hop music – is included to demonstrate an innovative aspect of Indij Readers. In the second series, the book Raps for Big Fullas (2004), written by “Monkey” Mark Ross who is a musician and artist of Jarbwadjali descent, shows a combination of popular street music and Aboriginal song lines. An audio CD of Ross’ collection of raps is also attached for the interested readers. The rap entitled “Dreamtime” articulates racial injustices endured by Indigenous Australians since colonisation. With the well-conceived end rhyme, it calls for carrying forward Aboriginal traditional songs and stories: Once the corroboree is gone, we’re finished So the importance should never be diminished Nor should the songs or stories from the old days Shouldn’t have to surrender our culture or old ways Total disrespect for our culture and meantime I wish I could go back to the Dreamtime. (Ross 14)

The author mobilises the popular, urbanised form of street art to express Indigenous concerns of cultural continuity, which renders the resisting voices powerful and accessible to the youth. This rap also reflects the dynamics and vitality of Indigenous cultural traditions in contemporary society. As Teacher’s Guide (Book II) comments, “The ‘Dreamtime’ rap offers an excellent opportunity to discuss historical perspectives in a structured fashion” (Gilbert and Cossey viii). The “structured” teaching and learning of Indigenous history through school texts provides an institutional setting for the transformation of Indigenous perspectives as enunciated in this rap into a recognised cultural capital. Then, this formulated Indigenous cultural capital, which is a form of Indigenous self-articulation, unsettles the systematic silencing and denigration of Indigenous cultures and histories within the school educational framework. A salient feature of Indij Readers is the use of language in some texts, which intermingle Aboriginal English and Standard English. In fact, the

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word “Indij” in the series title comes from the dialectal abbreviation of “Indigenous”. For many Aboriginal children, Aboriginal English is their first language and becomes an integral part of their identity. But Aboriginal English was long considered grammatically “wrong” and, due to its “inferiority” to Standard English, students were not allowed to use Aboriginal English at school. In the pedagogical sense, incorporation of Aboriginal English into everyday learning processes is effective in providing Aboriginal children “with a verbal bridge to learning Standard English” because they can build on their mastery of one dialect of the English language over another (Neil 116). This approach does not mean to bring the two ways of speaking into confrontation, but seeks to draw on the strengths of both in a pragmatic way. Aboriginal students’ code-switching capability and literacy skills are nurtured through implicit and explicit comparison of different features between their home language and the school language in a range of learning contexts. Ample evidence has shown that recognising the use of Aboriginal English in the classroom may reduce impediments to acquiring Standard English, contrary to a widespread fear that introduction of the vernacular may impede language acquisition (Neil 123; Siegel 57). Moreover, realising the potential of Aboriginal English in school environments helps to build up the self-esteem of Indigenous students and to redress the hierarchical dominance of Standard English over other dialects in the sense that “non-standard dialects (the dialect of identity) are valued at the same time as the standard dialect (the dialect of power) is explicitly and systematically taught” (qtd in Cahill and Collard 217). From this perspective, Indigenous cultural capital acknowledged through the use of Aboriginal English in class enables Aboriginal students to use their language of identity to acquire the language of power. As the new national curriculum requires, while Aboriginal oral traditions of storytelling and contemporary Indigenous literature are taught and appreciated, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous students are expected to be aware of different languages and dialects spoken by Indigenous people, including Aboriginal English and Torres Strait Islander Creole Yumplatok (see ACARA, “Cross-Curriculum Priorities”). In Indij Readers, the use of Aboriginal English therefore not only creates a sense of intimacy with Aboriginal readers and empowers them in respect to the development of

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literacy competency, it also exposes non-Aboriginal readers to Indigenous languages and cultural perspectives. In the third series, for example, the storybook Firewood and Rabbits is narrated in Aboriginal English. Written by Ron Jackson and illustrated by David Leffler, the story tells a nostalgic memory of Aboriginal life on the mission. The protagonist and his brother chop off the roof of an abandoned wagon and make it into a boat to help their mother fetch more wood from the other side of the riverbank. But their father gets furious when he finds out what they have done. “I ought to flog you both for the crazy plan, for ruining the axe, and – you coulda drowned, the both of ya.”   “We were careful, Dad, and there’s heaps of it over there. Mum’ll never be short of wood again – and Dad, there’s rabbits as well. You nearly fall over them there’s so many.” ( Jackson 18)

The dialogue incorporates vernacular and colloquial expressions that are characterised by Aboriginal English, such as “coulda” (could have), Mum’ll (Mum will), “ya” (you). Syntactically, the addition and omission are common, for example: “you coulda drowned, the both of ya” – to use “the” in front of “both” for emphasis is mostly seen in colloquial or less formal occasions; and “You nearly fall over them there’s so many” – there is an omission of conjunction “because” before the clause “there’s so many”. In Teacher’s Guide (Book III) the term “Aboriginal English” is explained so that teachers have an informed view to deal with the peculiar usage of these phrases. The explanation of cultural gaps is also important. For instance, the phrase “ought to flog you” is culturally loaded. In the above quoted dialogue, there is a switch from Standard English to vernacular in the father’s words, indicated by the dash. The vernacular sentence conveys vividly the father’s concern for the safety of his boys. Given some stereotypical associations of Aboriginal families with domestic violence,13 Teacher’s Guide (Book III)

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Reports such as “Little Children are Sacred” draw the public’s attention to the high rates of child abuse and family violence in Aboriginal communities. In 2007,

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notes that “ought to flog you: a threat to scare or instil fear rather than a threat of actual physical beating” (Last et al. 15; emphasis in original). This explanation clarifies that it is a casual expression of a worried Aboriginal father and that readers or cultural outsiders need not construe it as a sign of family violence. In this case, being introduced to distinct linguistic features and cultural implications in the context of the Aboriginal community, student readers shall be able to appreciate Indigenous writings and comprehend Indigenous perspectives embedded in the story. Indij Readers present an interface between Indigenous traditions and contemporary cultural expressions, between formal, written English and dialectal, colloquial Aboriginal English. Compared to Queensland School Readers, it is evident that Indij Readers re-assert Indigenous cultural value and challenge the dominant educational framework that once excluded Indigenous traditions, identity and languages. This transformative effect is achieved through two interrelated aspects: first, the storybooks by Indigenous writers and artists constitute counter narratives that inform and enrich young readers; second, Teacher’s Guide(s) provide helpful sources and teaching plans (including activity design, cultural information, vocabulary and grammatical features, questions for class discussions, and so forth) for a better understanding of the texts. Thereby Indij Readers offer a guided vehicle to engage teachers and students in the learning of Indigenous literature, cultures and histories. The entry of Indigenous perspectives into school education avails Indigenous cultural knowledge of a recognised, regulated channel to be taught and learned. The educational framework provides an institutional condition for the formation of Indigenous cultural capital which students can access and acquire. This cultural capital empowers Indigenous students to gain confidence in learning and celebrate their own cultural heritage, and

the Howard government introduced the Northern Territory National Emergency Response (also called “The Intervention”). The legislation and related actions aimed to tackle the alleged child abuse and neglect among Aboriginal communities in Northern Territory. The Intervention is the subject of heated and ongoing debate. See Australian Human Rights Commission’s Social Justice Report 2007, Chapter 3 “The Northern Territory ‘Emergency Response’ Intervention”.

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to enrich non-Indigenous students’ understanding of diversified Indigenous cultures. In this regard, Indigenous cultural capital in the school system can be an agency to disseminate Indigenous voices and to inform the broader public. This counter-force will ultimately reconfigure the cultural capital residing in the dominant discourse of a wider Australian society. To navigate Indigenous interests in the dominant education system that once enacted a silent apartheid remains a struggle. Yet the indispensable role of school education is of significance for Indigenous cultural survival and revitalisation. In view of the institutional change enabled by the educational policies and initiatives during recent decades and the active engagement of Indigenous writers, artists, and educators who have adopted this institutional vehicle and disseminated their voices through school texts, as we can see, Indigenous cultural knowledge thereby goes beyond Aboriginal communities and circulates in the mainstream education system as Indigenous cultural capital to benefit both Indigenous and non-Indigenous children.

Part Iii

Chapter 5

The Gift and the Ethics of Representing Aboriginality

Interactions between Indigenous Australians and Europeans throughout history are routinely described in terms of confrontation and dispossession. Nevertheless, historical encounters varied enormously. Some seemingly insignificant moments shaped racial relations profoundly. One such moment was the exchange of a gift. This chapter will begin by considering two controversial incidents of Aboriginal interactions with Europeans, through the lens of the gift. The exchange of the gift with a historically corrective attitude, as I will explicate later, can shed new light on the ethical representation of Indigenous life and cultures in Australian children’s literature. In 1840, the British explorer (and later colonial official) Edward John Eyre set out on an expedition into the interior of South Australia to find the alleged inland sea. Regarding early British settlers as “water dreamers”, Michael Cathcart points out the strategic importance of water in Australian history: “in a country where water was scarce – and where it was central to the cultures of the Aboriginal people – the battle for land was also a battle for water” (6). These twin exigencies – land and water – meant a protracted conflict was inevitable between colonised and colonisers. Nevertheless, rare instances of peaceful encounters can be found. In his published Journals of Expeditions, 1840–1,1 Eyre recorded in detail that Aboriginal people who he met along the journey demonstrated their generosity by sharing water and their knowledge of where and how to dig waterholes in the middle of the desert.2 He wrote with personal appreciation: 1 2

It was published by E. J. Eyre in full title: Journals of Expeditions of Discovery into Central Australia, and Overland from Adelaide to King George’s Sound, in the Years 1840–1. The following extracts are from the Volume One of Eyre’s Journals. As Eyre noted in his journal on 7 January 1841, the Aboriginal people who he met manifested hospitality by offering him pieces of fruit and water that quenched the

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In this incident, Aboriginal knowledge of water constitutes a prior “gift” from the not-yet-colonised to the would-be-coloniser. Eyre’s gift was actually a return to Aboriginal people for their generosity. Eyre was conscious of white settlers’ indebtedness to Aboriginal people and the token of a gift could possibly minimise the antagonism arising from his intrusion upon their territory.3 However well intentioned, Eyre’s gift expressed his ambivalent attitude of romanticising and patronising the Aboriginal people, who were regarded “children of the wilds”; and admittedly, the token of a gift can hardly be accounted a fair exchange with Aboriginal knowledge of water, given that Eyre (as many early colonisers did) mapped water sources which facilitated the colonial dispossession of Aboriginal land.4 Nevertheless,

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thirst of his men and the horses. When the Aboriginal men saw the clumsiness of Eyre in digging a waterhole in the loose sand, they came to offer help by scooping up the water with what seemed to Eyre incredible skill. As Eyre wrote in his journal, he was aware that the Europeans’ presence on Aboriginal land constituted “an act of intrusion and aggression” and their appropriation of land and water resources posed a threat to the living of Aboriginal people: “This would especially be the case in those parts of the country where water was scarce, as the European always locates himself close to this grand necessary of life. The injustice, therefore, of the white man’s intrusion up the territory of the aboriginal inhabitant, is aggravated greatly by his always occupying the best and most valuable portion of it” (6 October 1840). See the episode entitled “Invasion” in the picture book Maralinga: The Anangu Story (2009), which mentions the story of “old Mr Eyre” told by senior Anangu men from Maralinga Tjarutja lands, South Australia (11). Anangu people showed Mr Eyre and other “strangers, who did not know the desert, where to find water to survive”, but soon found out that the white intruders “recorded rockholes, claypans and ‘native dams’” and began to take possession of land and water resources (11, 12).

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Eyre’s gesture of gratitude was at least responded to by Aboriginal people who acknowledged his motive of reciprocation. In retrospect, this incident reveals a rare, historical moment of cross-racial encounters. Eyre’s gratitude for the water and Aboriginal people’s recognition of his reciprocation, from the perspective of social exchanges, constituted a temporary reciprocal moment during initial contact history. Aboriginal people may have entered into relations with strangers through various exchanges, by offering water in the above case, as part of their social rituals. The gift exchange has long been valued in Aboriginal societies, and plays a role in negotiating relationships with outsiders, including European settlers during post-contact history.5 The Elcho Island Memorial in Eastern Arnhem Land of the Northern Territory is an example. Initiated by the Yolngu leaders Burramura and Badanga in 1957, the memorial displayed beside the church a set of Aboriginal secret-sacred artefacts used for ceremonial rituals among the regional clans. According to Howard Morphy,

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The exchange during the first contacts often obscured the discrepancy of meanings between Aboriginal people and Europeans. For instance, immediately after Captain Arthur Phillip sailed the First Fleet into Botany Bay in 1788, a similar scene happened where the Aboriginal people let the European arrivals drink their water and the newcomers offered the gifts. The Aboriginal people perceived themselves engaging in a social ritual, by offering water to strangers. But for Governor Arthur Phillip, as the records written by Lieutenant Tench showed, the exchange was purported “to take possession of his new territory and bring about an intercourse between its old and new masters” (qtd in Cathcart 11). There is a rich ethnographic literature showing that Aboriginal people perform gift exchanges both within and between different groups. The gift could be tangible or intangible goods to which traditional knowledge or skills are attached. Each practice of the gift may conform to distinct rules and traditions. For instance, according to the records collected during the early twentieth century by Walter E. Roth in his voluminous North Queensland Ethnography (eighteen Bulletins altogether), the corroboree at Pine Mountain of mid-west Queensland comprised a ritual of gift exchange. Each Aboriginal warrior entered into the designated area of the corroboree, threw down his weapon and declared the place where he came from. Other warriors then went to his back and put into his other hand the presents – a spear, a boomerang and so forth; if this warrior had daughters to marry off, he could receive many more presents. See Mauss 90.

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this event was sensational, because in normal circumstances these sacred objects would not have been revealed all together during one ceremony, or placed in front of women or uninitiated youth, let alone the Europeans settlers (240). It could be an act of sacrilege in a strict sense according to the Yolngu belief; however, it was neither intended nor turned out to diminish the power of these objects (Morphy 240–2). On the contrary, the memorial transformed the public revelation of hitherto concealed Aboriginal sacred artefacts and knowledge into a “gift” to facilitate communication and engagement both within and outside Aboriginal communities. As Morphy observes, the internal consideration was to use sacred objects to sanction more flexible marriage alliances and to unite the separate clans on the mission; whilst the outward expectation was to establish “an exchange relation with Europeans: by showing Europeans their most sacred and valuable possessions they hoped to get in return better education, employment, control over access to their lands and more influence in their own affaires” (240–1). By juxtaposing Aboriginal sacred objects and Western religious symbols (the church), the Yolngu asserted the value of their own culture and increased an intercultural dialogue with Europeans settlers on an equal footing (see Owen). This display could be considered as a conscious and strategic initiation of gift exchange through which the Yolngu anticipated the reciprocation of a deepened understanding and recognition from the wider Australian society. In fact, the Elcho Island Memorial – which accumulated experiences for the Yolngu to engage with the Europeans – was believed to have prepared the Yolngu a decade later to gain recognition for their land rights in the Yirrkala bark petition, in which the Yolngu made strategic use of their traditional cultural symbols to advance legal claims and ultimately achieved a landmark recognition of native title in Australia (Bowrey 408; Morphy 241).6 The Yolngu have engaged in pro-

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In 1963, the Yolngu at Yirrkala sent a bark petition to the House of Representatives in Canberra, in order to reject the government permission of the bauxite mining in Arnhem Land. The petition, written in both English and Gumatj (one of the Yolngu languages), was placed on two panels of bark and painted on the borders with traditional designs and symbols by the Dhuwa and Yirritja groups. This strategic use of Aboriginal cultural elements to announce their rights over traditional land

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tracted efforts at communication with the government and multinational companies. Their gift of Aboriginal cultural objects was transformed into Indigenous cultural capital, contributing to a gradual attitudinal change of white authorities and sectors of the non-Indigenous public who grew sympathetic to Aboriginal rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The juxtaposition of the above incidents does not intend to conflate the different historical contexts in which each exchange of gifts occurred. Nor does it imply that Aboriginal cultural heritage is always intended as a gift for outsiders. As a matter of fact, Indigenous cultures have suffered from cultural pillage, misrepresentation, and denigration. These two incidents evoke an historical indebtedness of settler Australians to Aboriginal cultural knowledge and heritage, though such indebted relations have rarely been acknowledged. Marie Louise Pratt comments, “[o]ver time, the combination of unsolicited encounter, dispossession, and perdurance produce a relation of indebtedness between the ex-dispossessors and the exdispossessed, and indigeneity becomes the unfolding of that relationship” (“Afterword” 401–2). The indebtedness is lodged within the interracial relations between indigenous and non-indigenous people in settler societies. In Australia, the “white” nation is constantly haunted by its enduring colonial legacy because Aboriginal resistance to the master narrative of Australian history keeps stirring a consciousness of guilt and anxiety deep in settler society (Hage, “Multiculturalism” 421). The colonial past becomes an unpaid debt, which fuels what Ghassan Hage calls the symptom of “white paranoia” (“Multiculturalism” 418; see also Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism 152). In this sense, cultural appropriation amounts to settlers’ indebtedness to Aboriginal knowledge holders. As such, this indebted relationship can be aptly viewed in terms of the model of the gift proposed by Marcel Mauss, who argues in his influential

disrupted the official legal discourse and rendered the petition itself difficult for the legal authority to dismiss. See Morphy 254–5. Following the bark petition, although the court case in 1968 failed to recognise native title in Milirrpum v Nabalco Pty Ltd (the Grove Land Rights case), the resilient struggles of the Yolngu eventually achieved a hard-won success, resulting in the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976.

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work The Gift (1925) that there is no free gift: “in theory these are voluntary, in reality they are given and reciprocated obligatorily” (3).7 Drawing on ethnographic observations of gift practices in many indigenous societies (including Australia) and the evidence of ancient legal systems, Mauss identifies the obligation to reciprocate as the essence of gift exchange, which suggests that in the circulation of gifts the thing received would ultimately be given back to its original owner so that his loss could be restored (Mauss 13). The rendering of goods or services, namely “total services” and “counter services” in Mauss’s words, maintain a dynamic equivalence in a cycle of reciprocity (7). In this view, the gift that has been received is at once a gift and a debt that shall be paid back. The giver’s power over the recipient is enduring until the gift has been properly reciprocated. Coincidentally, the word “indebtedness”, literally indicating the condition of being in debt or owing gratitude for someone’s service or favour, embodies a close connection between a debt and a gift that deserves acknowledgement. Considering the historical indebtedness in cross-racial relations, Aboriginal cultural heritage can be tentatively considered as both a debt and a gift, which reminds European settlers that as recipients they are morally obliged to reciprocate what has been taken or received. This chapter opens with a retrospective view of cross-racial engagement through the prism of the gift, instead of the debt. The purpose is to 7

The potlatch, identified by Mauss as one of the most extreme gift-giving rituals, illustrates why the gift must be reciprocated obligatorily. The tradition of potlatch is practised by indigenous people in the north-west coastal areas of Canada and the United States. During the feast, the store of food or goods are lavishly consumed, given away, or destroyed. The logic of potlatch is to return more than what is received. It is competitive in nature, aiming to defeat the rival chief and to retain the titles among tribal nobles. Mauss epitomises the rule of giving and returning in the potlatch: “[t]o give is to show one’s superiority, to be more, to be higher in rank, magister. To accept without giving in return, or without giving more back, is to become client and servant, to become small, to fall lower (minister)” (95, italics in original). The inherent competition, or the fear of losing one’s honour, compels the recipient to pay back the gift. Note that the nature of the gift in general is not necessarily rivalry, but the reciprocal obligation involved in the potlatch widely exist in the gift rituals practised in many other societies.

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suggest a strategic shift of perspectives to rethink the role of Aboriginal cultural heritage in Australian society, from a colonial debt to an Aboriginal gift. This is not to negate the ongoing historical debt which is the result of colonial cultural appropriation and exploitation, but to suggest a gift with the obligation to reciprocate, which offers an alternative way of conceiving the relationality of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. This move embodies the theoretical ambiguity and flexibility in the connotation of the gift. As mentioned above, the double meanings of the gift are inherently ambiguous – the gift can become a debt or burden attached to what has been accepted; but as a gesture of friendship and hospitality, the gift can improve interpersonal relations and resolve discrepancies (Mauss 81). These two features are nevertheless convertible – in this case, the transformation of a colonial debt into an agency of the gift to reconcile racial relations is predicated on the ground that the act of reciprocating the gift with due respect and acknowledgement could open up opportunities to reflect on or revisit the historical moments in which the giving or taking occurred, thereby adjusting or altering the relations in the present. To some extent, the givenness of a certain historical point could be released from the determination of history when placed in an on-going cycle of reciprocity. Hence even though cultural appropriation cannot be undone, at least a meliorating corrective attitude enabled by the agency of the gift could be realised. At this point, let us return to the moment when the white intruders expressed gratitude for Aboriginal knowledge of water, or when the Yolngu showed their sacred objects as a symbolic gift to disseminate Aboriginal value and knowledge to the broader Australian public. During these moments and in the contexts characterised by drastically asymmetrical relations, the gift of Aboriginal cultural heritage opened up opportunities for a deepened understanding on both sides. The ethical relationship of reciprocity at the very least transmitted a symbolic sense of mutual trust, respect, and acknowledgement. From the perspective of social exchange, to give, to receive and to reciprocate the gift not only involves the exchange of objects or services, but also establishes, re-activates and preserves social connections which value humanity and sociality, honour and trust, selfinterest and generosity. As Mauss stresses, the cycle of reciprocity suggests a morality of social living (Mauss 89–90). To consider Aboriginal cultural

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heritage as a gift that embodies the reciprocal obligation hence evokes a hope for social equity and communal living, rather than reproducing excessive guilt, paranoia or even threat (see Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism 147–52). The model of the gift offers a different theoretical framework to reflect on cross-racial relations and to anticipate at least due respect for and acknowledgement of Indigenous cultural heritage in Australian society. With a primary focus on the ethical deployment of Indigenous cultural heritage as a specific form of cultural capital in literary creation, in this chapter I intend to suggest that Aboriginal stories, including a broad spectrum of cultural elements (notably the Dreaming spirits, Aboriginal history and life experiences) deployed in children’s books, can be considered as a gift, not necessarily explicitly intended or fully recognised, received by writers and a general readership. In this view, children’s books, which incorporate reference to Aboriginal stories, embody a metaphorical gift exchange between Aboriginal custodians as the givers and writers as the recipients who are expected to “return” such an intellectual gift through their books in an appropriate manner. Considering this gift of Aboriginal stories, it is necessary to note that a cycle of reciprocity was initiated by Aboriginal ancestors and generations of Aboriginal people who have preserved, developed, and transmitted the body of Aboriginal stories and storytelling traditions for centuries. Conceptually, the flow of this gift is mappable along both horizontal and vertical dimensions.8 It is vertical because Aboriginal stories are handed down historically from Aboriginal ancestors to contemporary Aboriginal descendants and because different kinds of cultural knowledge embodied in these stories are distributed hierarchically within the community according to the divisions of gender, age, initiatory status, etc. Meanwhile, it is

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The vertical or horizontal flow of the gift is contingent upon the relationship between the giver and the recipient. The vertical exchange means the gift flows in accordance with hierarchical, religious, or genealogical orders. For instance, the people offer their sacrifice to the gods or spirits, anticipating a good harvest in return. In the horizontal direction, the gift is exchanged between people of relatively equal status such as neighbours or friends. See Yan 169–73; Mauss 20–1; Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism 148.

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also a mode of horizontal exchange because Aboriginal stories flow from Aboriginal people to the realm of non-Aboriginal Australians, given the fact that they have been to varying extents shared, deployed, consumed or appropriated by multiple non-Aboriginal publics since colonisation. The gift of Aboriginal stories therefore signifies a historical and cultural bond connecting Indigenous custodians and their communities with both Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers and a public readership. Elsie Roughsey drives home the idea of giving embedded in Aboriginal consciousness of storytelling. In An Aboriginal Mother Tells of the Old and the New (1984), one of the earliest completed manuscripts of Aboriginal women’s autobiography,9 Roughsey states the reason and responsibility for telling the stories of her people – the Lardil from Goonana, Mornington Island in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria: In the outer parts of the world, people of other states and continents do not know of my people really. Lardil customs, laws, culture and its legends will never be known to the people who never saw the tribes of Goonana people, the Lardil. They have so many things that are interesting … are still not known so far. Only very few have been told, or given to a white man. (4, my italics)

Aboriginal authors have long been conscious of presenting their stories (though not all of them) as an intellectual givenness for a wider, nonAboriginal readership. The gift exchange as such promotes a dynamic engagement and negotiation between Aboriginal communities and settler Australians, enabling Aboriginal cultures to enter into mainstream society as a form of cultural capital. In a metaphorical sense, Indigenous cultural capital in the literary field is derived from this historically inherited and culturally activated gift of Aboriginal stories. To conceptualise Aboriginal knowledge holders as the givers who have initiated the gift exchange accentuates Aboriginal prior agency in cross-racial relations. It shifts the racial relations from the dominant and dominated positions to a giver-and-receiver paradigm. Nevertheless, it 9

Elsie Roughsey completed the manuscript of her autobiography in 1972, but it was not published until 1984 after a prolonged editing and negotiating process. See the note of her editors, Paul Memmott and Robyn Horsman, 240–2.

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does not intend to maintain the binary oppositions by simply privileging one over the other. Nor does it imply that the acts of giving and reciprocating are undertaken within equal power relations, either historically or in the present. With regard to writing about Aboriginality, this chapter focuses on the relationship between Indigenous knowledge holders and writers, including both Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers. The challenge remains for non-Aboriginal writers, however, to treat the gift of Indigenous cultural capital respectfully and appropriately and to respond to the Aboriginal communal givers in an ethical sense. Against this background, this chapter will employ the model of the gift to analyse the ethical deployment of Indigenous cultural capital in the writing of children’s books. The structure of reciprocity is useful to shed light on the tension between Aboriginal cultural protocols and writers’ literary creation in representing Aboriginality. Moreover, given that in principle Indigenous collective ownership of cultural heritage is incompatible with the existing legal framework of copyrights, the morality of obligatory reciprocation could possibly envision a non-legal solution to protect Indigenous interests in writings that deploy Indigenous cultural capital.

The Ethics of Representing Aboriginality The increasing popularity of Aboriginal themes and motifs in writings for children has given rise to a contentious debate on the ethics of representing Aboriginality, which centres on who is eligible to tell Aboriginal stories and how the stories can be told. Here, Aboriginal stories include not only Dreaming stories, but also depictions of Aboriginal life experiences. The stories of the Dreaming spirits are often a central component of Aboriginal narratives. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to fix Aboriginal Dreaming stories in a mysterious past and to dismiss the importance of contemporary stories that carry Aboriginal life and traditions forward. For Aboriginal people the conventions of oral literature are still alive and, following such

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traditions, an event would quickly rise to be a “story” and circulate with its own inflections. The stories of Aboriginal life experiences, especially those recording contact history after the arrival of the Europeans, are integral to the sociocultural understanding of where they originate. They are also valued as an important part of Aboriginal intellectual heritage. To consider stories of the Dreaming and of Aboriginal life experiences in general, nevertheless, does not mean that all Aboriginal stories are equally secret and sacred, or freely accessible. The complexity of Aboriginal cultural and spiritual contexts renders the act of storytelling complicated and sensitive. Clare Bradford draws attention to the long-standing problems in retelling Aboriginal stories: From the publication of the first major collection of Aboriginal narratives for children, Kate Parker’s Australian Legendary Tales (1896), and until the 1980s, retellings of traditional stories produced by mainstream Australian publishers were in the main ignorant of Aboriginal customary law governing who had the right to tell stories, and in what circumstances. (“Oh How Different” 208)

Aboriginal storytelling stems from a system of inherited rights and obligations. Aboriginal stories are traditionally passed on to the descendants or authorised persons who are eligible recipients of a certain body of knowledge and the retelling must conform to the rules of specific places where the stories originate (Bradford, “Oh How Different” 202). Amongst other Aboriginal writers, Jackie Huggins believes that Aboriginal Dreaming stories “should be exclusively written by Aboriginal people” (12; see also Lucashenko, “Whose” 89–90). In an article entitled “Interested in Writing about Indigenous Australians?” Patricia Mamajun Torres maintains that cultural appropriation, or retelling Aboriginal stories without permission from the Aboriginal custodians and committees concerned, has been a chronic problem in the field of literary and cultural production (see also Michaels 144; Bradford, “Oh How Different” 208). The cultural protocols for writing about Aboriginal themes or motifs, such as Protocols for Producing Indigenous Australian Writing (second edition) issued by the Australia Council for the Arts in 2007, aim to provide guidelines to circumvent this problem. Lack of awareness of Aboriginal cultural sensitivity may result in inadvertently misrepresenting Aboriginality, reinforcing colonial

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ideology, or causing offence, as is often the case in non-Aboriginal writers’ books for children that include Aboriginal themes or motifs. Patricia Wrightson, a prize-winning white writer for children, attempted to incorporate Aboriginal spiritual figures into the characterisation in a number of her books. Wrightson celebrates the value of Aboriginal spirituality. As she describes, for example, in the epilogue to her novel An Older Kind of Magic (1972), Aboriginal spirituality is “another kind of magic, a kind that must have been shaped by the land itself at the edge of Australian vision” (Older 150–1). Distinct from the imported “elves and dragons and unicorns”, this “folk-magic” is “true in Australia” (Wrightson, Older 150–1).10 This novel depicts a cohort of mysterious spiritual figures as “stranger[s]” and “allies”, who assist four child protagonists to sabotage the plan of turning part of the Botanical Gardens into a car park (see the opening page of Older). The plot is embedded in stark contrasts between old and new, ancient and modern, spiritual and material. The portrayal of Aboriginal spirits oscillates between them being “simple creatures, not very clever, but bright with the happy mischief of children” and being alien, estranged and mystic as Wrightson seeks to achieve so-called authenticity “when the magic is dark, mysterious, and a little frightening” (Older 103, 150). Moreover, these fascinating and haunting Aboriginal spirits appear as ahistorical, transcending temporal and spatial divisions. For instance, the scene in which the spirits come out in the Botanical Gardens for the appearance of the thousand-year comet is pictured as such: “The bush and the tribes were gone; but the ancient creatures of the land were here to watch and croon” (Older 137–8). Here, Aboriginal people are dismissed as belonging to a bygone era and the representation of Aboriginal spirits is de-contextualised and separated from where they originate. Wrightson’s treatment of Aboriginal spiritual elements is largely informed by Western narrative traditions and Eurocentric views towards Aboriginal cultures. In a critical study of Wrightson’s writing about Aboriginal spiritual figures, Bradford finds it problematic that Wrightson 10 Note that relegating Aboriginal religions to the realm of “magic” or “folk-magic” shows a widespread contemporaneous misunderstanding of the nature and complexity of Aboriginal religious beliefs and spirituality.

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rigidly divides traditional Aboriginal stories between the sacred at the zenith and nadir of the profane (Reading Race 50). For Wrightson, the spirits or legendary figures (residing between the zenith of the secret-sacred and the definitive stories of the nadir)11 are a “freely experienced stratum of fairies and superstitions” and a space for “creative freedom” (Wrightson, “When Cultures Meet” xiii). In fact, Aboriginal Dreaming stories originate from a profound system of spiritual and performative rituals. Catherine Berndt notes that Aboriginal tradition is “a continuum … in a way all Aboriginal culture was sacred” (93, italics in original). The idea of Aboriginal Dreaming stories as an evolving tradition contrasts with Wrightson’s misinformed distinction between the secret-sacred and ordinary narratives that retell Aboriginal spirituality. Moreover, Wrightson’s equating of Aboriginal spirituality with “fairies and superstitions” relies on a Eurocentric classification between scientific reality and non-reality, fact and fiction. This classification system is irrelevant to Indigenous knowledges and to treat Aboriginal stories of spirituality within the Western discourse of myths risks denying the distinct aspects of Aboriginal cultures and religion that Wrightson attempts to acknowledge. Wrightson explains that in her literary creation the resources of Aboriginal legendary stories come from “the works of anthropologists and early field workers and of laymen” (“Ever” 612). This approach can also be problematic, as Bradford points out, for it may reproduce “Orientalist perspectives” in early folklores and tales (Unsettling 79). In search for “fantasy” figures in Aboriginal “folklore”, Wrightson proclaims that “to recognise story and drama in a halting phrase, to hear in a few broken words the poetry and terror of strangeness experienced, and to convey these things in the techniques of print – that is the writer’s job” (“Ever” 615–16). The transcription of Aboriginal oral narration is often characterised by disruption, omission and repetition, yet Wrightson’s reference to this as “a halting phrase”, “broken words”, and “terror of strangeness” represents these qualities as deficiencies and seems to misunderstand the cultural base that she 11

For Wrightson, definitive Aboriginal stories are those like “How the Kangaroo Got Its Hop”, which leaves little room for re-creation (Wrightson, “When Cultures Meet” xi–xii).

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values and celebrates in her writings. Her remarks reveal a mixed attitude, as Bradford writes, of “fascination and fear; respect and disdain; desire and suspicion” towards Aboriginal cultures (Unsettling 79). The criticism of Wrightson’s books exposes how Aboriginal storytelling traditions could be taken for granted by non-Aboriginal writers when referring to the Dreaming. Indigenous cultural capital is sought after in the book market where the value of Aboriginal stories is celebrated and exploited in Australian children’s books. Nevertheless, the question of who may deploy this Indigenous cultural capital in writing for children evokes a tension between Aboriginal cultural protocols and non-Aboriginal writers’ freedom of creativity. The controversy not only relates to the retelling of Dreaming stories, but also involves the treatment of Aboriginal subject matter and characters more generally. Phillip Gwynne’s debut novel Deadly, Unna? (1998) and its adapted film version Australian Rules (2002), for which Gwynne wrote the screenplay, provide examples of the controversy. In fact, the novel Deadly, Unna? was an immediate success, winning multiple literary awards and entering into school reading lists (see Ellingsen). When this novel was adapted into film, however, an intense dispute between the local Aboriginal community and the filming team was ignited. The debate also drew wide attention back to the novel, which was then criticised for its breach of Aboriginal protocols. The main focus of the controversy is that the climax of Gwynne’s novel, in which two Aboriginal young men are killed in an armed robbery, is based on the real death of two youths from Point Pearce in a pub shooting on 18 February 1977. The Aboriginal victims, aged fifteen and eighteen, attempted to rob the Port Victoria’s hotel with three other boys; the white hotel manager fired a shotgun, but was eventually not charged over the deaths (Ellingsen). This tragic incident exposed the racialised tensions in Australian society in the 1970s. Though years had passed, for the grieving Aboriginal families the allusions to their lost boys and the manner of their death in the film were not only emotionally unacceptable, but culturally offensive and forbidden in accordance with Aboriginal beliefs and practices. What’s worse, sufficient consultation with the concerned Aboriginal community had not been undertaken before the production of the film. According to Sally Riley, the responsible person for Indigenous issues at the

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Australian Film Commission, Gwynne and the filming team, “consulted too little too late” (qtd in Ellingsen). The filming production encountered strong rejection and criticism from the deceased boys’ families and the local Aboriginal community, who demanded excision of the shooting scene in the film. But their request was ultimately refused. The film sparked a wide debate on the ethical representation of Aboriginality. According to Gwynne, his book Deadly, Unna? was meant to be a fiction, and it was received as such when it was published. Aboriginal cultural protocols did not occur to the publisher Penguin or to the film producers. But this fiction mirrors real life events in many ways. Gwynne had lived in Port Victoria, west of Adelaide in South Australia, when he was young. The novel is set in “the Point”, reminiscent of a place near Port Victoria named “Point Pearce” where the local Aboriginal community lives. The nickname of the Aboriginal protagonist who is shot in the novel – “Dumby Red” – is taken from a real person, who lived in Point Pearce but was not involved in the shooting, and did not object to Gwynne’s fictional adaptation (see Ellingsen). It was a blurred line between fiction and reality that caused objection from local Aboriginal people who did not approve of the writer’s way of using the sensitive incident (i.e. the Aboriginal deaths) as a creative source, or of the derogatory language in the book used to depict the racial tensions of the 1970s. It is controversial to employ racist language for anti-racist purposes, as the words with racist connotations may still offend Aboriginal people (see Huggins 12). In response to the disputes, Gwynne explained: “When the truth didn’t serve my purpose, I made it up. I wanted to capture the essence of a town that was redneck and racist. I included the names and aspects of reality. But it was naive of me not to disguise it enough” (qtd in Ellingsen). Gwynne was criticised for appropriating an Aboriginal “grief ” story without permission, while his book primarily addresses a cross-racial friendship with a theme of reconciliation. This is a dilemma for a non-Aboriginal writer. Similar to Wrightson’s questionable way of identifying a source of creative freedom, it did not occur to Gwynne that his fictionalisation of Aboriginal life experiences could offend the people with whose stories he identified. Well intentioned though he may have been, Gwynne’s case highlights the tension between Aboriginal cultural sensitivity and the

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non-Aboriginal author’s choice of materials in creative writing. Believing that “this consultation thing means books by committees”, Gwynne finally decided not to include any Aboriginal characters in his future books (qtd in Ellingsen; see also Eggins). Gwynne’s withdrawal, as a newly established writer, from the contentious discourse of Aboriginal representation raises the question of whether it is possible to negotiate this tension or whether the only way for non-Aboriginal writers to avoid offense is to avoid writing about Aboriginal subject matter at all, as Gwynne has resolved to do. As Aboriginal stories are increasingly valued as an important repository of creative sources and generate cultural capital for writers and for Aboriginal communities, the more pressing questions perhaps are these: how should writers, especially non-Aboriginal writers, who accept the gift from Aboriginal knowledge holders and therefore have an obligation to it, treat this gift and in what way can ethical reciprocity be fulfilled? In what circumstances does writing about Aboriginality risk being offensive or infringe relevant cultural protocols? How can non-Aboriginal writers avoid such offence or infringement or the charge of appropriation, and continue to engage with this material? To address these questions, we can look further into the cases of Wrightson and Gwynne through the lens of the gift. It should be noted that Wrightson’s and Gwynne’s writing approaches or styles differ greatly. Here the discussion is grounded on the basis that for both writers Aboriginal materials are a source for creative writing. Aboriginal storytelling is ­primarily a place-based tradition and most stories can be attributed to ­certain Aboriginal groups from which they originate. Concomitantly, novels with Aboriginal themes and motifs to an extent connect to specific places and Aboriginal groups; they are not entirely the outcome of the author’s own creativity. In this sense, writers form a firm or loose bond via their works with the Aboriginal communities where their stories come from. As for whether a return gift or counter-gift constitutes an ethical reciprocal relationship with the original giver, there exists an intricate relationality between self-interest and the desire for sociality. The analysis of interest in the gift is helpful to understand the specific concerns between different parties involved. As Mauss stresses, the gift is associated with self-interest and manifests the power relationship between the giver and the recipient

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(3–4). The self-interest promotes the circulation of the gift, but does not necessarily reduce gifts to commodities.12 The sociality (as opposed to the self-interest) implies the desire to develop contacts with others and to connect to others’ interests. It holds the key to a successful reciprocation of the gift that has been received. A dynamic balance in considering both self-interests and others’ interests captures the essence of the “morality of the exchange through gift”, which consolidates and reproduces mutually beneficial relations (Mauss 90). In this sense, according to Mauss, the gift constitutes a mechanism to associate individual interests with the making of social relations (see M. Douglas xviii). The morality of the gift is an investment in both personal fulfilment and in an outward result of benefitting the other side on the basis of mutual respect and recognition. This relational thinking is crucial for writers who wish to deploy Indigenous cultural capital in literary creation. Here, the self-interest can be construed as individual motives to engage in the gift exchange, such as the author’s investment in creative writing. For Wrightson, Aboriginal spiritual beings are what she identifies as a unique capacity that satisfies the need “for a truer and more human authenticity” in literary representations (Older 152). With an objective of “enrich[ing] Australian tales” for Australian child readers, her books show evidence of an intense interest in Aboriginal stories (Wrightson Older 152). In Gwynne’s case, the shooting scene depicted in his book is to showcase the racialised conflicts of the day. Meanwhile, how the story is received by Aboriginal communities suggests whether or not a potential reciprocal relationship with the givers of Aboriginal stories can be established. A consideration for the interests of Aboriginal knowledge holders informs a moral gesture to reciprocate their gift; its absence on the other hand may cause resentment from the original 12

Though the gift is never free of interest, the gift exchange is irreducible to the market exchange of objects or services, because interpersonal relations derived from the trade ultimately serve the transaction of goods whereas the exchange of goods as a gift, more often than not, aims to reproduce interpersonal relations. Moreover, the frequent incommensurability between total services and counter-services in the circulation of the gift is distinguished from the trade of commodities that is mediated through monetary value on the basis of calculation and measure.

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giver or a degradation of Indigenous cultures. In Wrightson’s case, as much as she tries to avoid the appropriation of Aboriginal sacred knowledge, her judgement of what can be retold emerges from a Eurocentric conceptual and narrative framework. This is not to say that Wrightson deliberately tramples on Aboriginal religious beliefs in her creative writings, but her reliance on early anthropologists’ materials and laymen’s tales that were informed by colonial ideology perpetuates the misrepresentations of Aboriginality in her own works. Wrightson’s case reminds us that in the relationship formed through the Aboriginal gift of stories, writers have the responsibility to develop a concrete understanding of Aboriginal storytelling traditions via connections with Aboriginal people and to treat the representation of Aboriginality in a respectful manner. In this regard, Gwynne’s case shows how reciprocity is disrupted by a clash of the writer’s interests and Aboriginal people’s interests. Though Gwynne may be well intentioned in telling a story in which an Aboriginal issue is deeply embedded, insufficient prior consultation meant that he failed to take into consideration the concerns of the affected Aboriginal families and their community. While the book and the film have brought Gwynne the cultural capital by which a writer can be sustained in a competitive field of literary and cultural production, the Aboriginal people whose stories were told were left with few resources and little time to cope with their grief, pain, and anger over a sense of injustice. Indigenous cultural capital is deployed without proper acknowledgement (though that is not the writer’s conscious intention), thereby rendering the power relation between the giver and the recipient unbalanced and leaving the already precarious race relationship further uneven. As shown in this case, the cycle of reciprocity is a result of negotiation and communal consideration; otherwise, sentiments of discontent may arise and result in disruption or termination of the exchanges. The gift reproduces the exchange of objects as well as the exchange of mutual recognition (Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism 148). The morality of reciprocity is essential to a mutually beneficial relationship. In this respect, the ethics of the gift underpins the writers’ obligation in literary creation to observe writing protocols which call for recognition of the interests of Aboriginal story givers. As Linda Burney points out:

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whether you’re Aboriginal or you’re non-Aboriginal, if you are using source material that has been given to you by an Aboriginal community or Aboriginal people, there are processes that you should go through. There are codes of behaviour … that you should observe. (83–4)

It is true that Aboriginal writers are also obliged to observe the traditions of storytelling and comply with cultural protocols. Given that uneven or non-reciprocal giving has long dominated cross-racial relations, Aboriginal writing protocols are a protective approach to safeguard the collective cultural and political interests of Aboriginal people against unauthorised cultural appropriation. The protocols do not exclude the engagement and perspectives of non-Aboriginal writers, but to necessitate the ethics of reciprocity for both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal writers and to minimise the use of Indigenous heritage without due acknowledgement.

A Solution to the Dilemma of Non-Aboriginal Writers With regard to the relatively marginal position of Aboriginal voices, nonAboriginal writers and publishers may continue to dominate the production of children’s books. However, it would go too far to fault non-Aboriginal writers for taking part in intellectual discussions of Australian history and culture, in which Aboriginal issues and their stories constitute an indispensable component. The interests of non-Aboriginal writers in Aboriginal concerns, to an extent, could contribute to a changed public attitude in the postcolonial context towards one of being respectful to Aboriginal people and their cultures. After all, inter-racial history as a colonial legacy cannot be left for Aboriginal people alone to resolve. As a non-Aboriginal writer who writes about Aboriginal subject matter and characters in fiction, James Moloney remarks: The topic [of Aboriginal themes] is, to me anyway, the most important issue contemporary Australians face and as such, writing about it, exploring it through story is a valuable way of encouraging intellectual discourse on the matter. By intellectual

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From this perspective, non-Aboriginal writers’ representation of Aboriginality and cognate issues may be able to complement Aboriginal voices and stimulate a wider intellectual discussion on the issues deep at the heart of Australian society. Writing about Aboriginality and attempting to be mindful of Aboriginal interests and benefits conforms to the logic of reciprocity which values inclusiveness, recognition and trust. Looking back at Wrightson’s and Gwynne’s works through this logic, one need not underappreciate their attempts to write about and circulate Aboriginal cultures to a wider readership; yet one may wonder if a stronger sense of their outsider position and an informed respect for Aboriginal concerns might have resulted in a better outcome. To reciprocate the gift of Aboriginal stories, the central question in the deployment of Indigenous cultural capital remains: what kinds of strategies can be mobilised to achieve a balance between the non-Aboriginal writer’s interests in Aboriginal subject matter and the moral obligation to consider the cultural sensitivity of the original knowledge holders? As Kate Constable puts it, “[i]s it possible for a non-Indigenous person, however well-meaning, to venture into this territory without causing offence?” (“Treading” 18) For this question, I intend to return to Constable’s Crow Country (2011), discussed in Chapter 1, to identify the way this non-­ Aboriginal author chose to negotiate the interests and obligations in writing about Aboriginality. Crow Country incorporates a Dreaming figure, Waa the Crow, and a white child character Sadie. The plot begins with an Aboriginal character Jimmy Raven who is killed by a white pastoralist, Mr Mortlock, in a time after the First World War. With his last breath Jimmy gives a sacred object to his mate (Sadie’s great grandfather), Clarry, with whom he fought the war. But Clarry covers up Mr Mortlock’s crime and does not give the object back to Jimmy’s clan. Years later, Sadie follows the guidance of the Crow, travels back into the past, finds Jimmy’s lost sacred object, returns it to the Aboriginal custodian. It should be noted that Jimmy might not have intended to give the sacred thing to a white man – Clarry – as a gift. But

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the presence of this givenness amounts to a loss that has to be restored or returned. Through a time-travel plot that enables Sadie eventually to fulfil this cycle of reciprocity, the novel evokes an opening of history figuratively to call for racial justice, reparation and reconciliation. The characterisation of Sadie and the Crow shows the author’s approach to treating Aboriginal subject matter in the book. While drawing on the spirit being Waa the Crow, which is the totem of the Dja Dja Wurrung country for the Yung Balug Clan in northern Victoria, the author designs a closely intertwined but essentially parallel story – Sadie’s story – as a return gift. In other words, by writing Sadie’s story in response to the presence of the Dreaming figure the Crow, the novel concretises a gift relationship between the author and the Dja Dja Wurrung people where Waa the Crow comes from. In the novel, Sadie is set to follow the instruction of the Crow, out of awe and respect, to know about the past and to complete her mission of returning the lost sacred thing to Aboriginal custodians. Sadie is not depicted as a white child chosen by the Aboriginal messenger (the Crow) to inherit Aboriginal tradition or “magic” power. Nor does the portrayal of Sadie fall into the trope of an “indigenised white child” who is fascinated by Aboriginal traditional culture; the narrative of indigenisation as such would inevitably result in a romanticised representation of Aboriginal spirituality and legitimate white settlers’ emotional bonds with the land (Bradford, Unsettling 127). Sadie’s involvement in this crossgenerational task – to return what has been given – figuratively suggests that contemporary non-Aboriginal Australians should make reparation to Aboriginal people for crimes committed in the past. The story of restoration, as the Crow clarifies, “belongs to you [Sadie]. You must do what Crow cannot do” (Constable, Crow 108). Sadie’s role is designed for her to take responsibility as a white person to amend the historical wrongs; and in this regard, the novel does not slip into a conventional story of a white child’s adventures in the Aboriginal spiritual world. On the other side, the plot design attempts to avoid treating the Aboriginal spirit figure as a tame subject. The Crow is ever present but appears to Sadie whenever it needs to give a hint or an instruction. Metaphorically, the presence of the Crow comes as a gift to Sadie so that she could reveal the dark secret of the past. The representation of the Crow is

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neither mystified nor unsophisticated. It is drawn respectfully, as the author explains, presenting “a much more powerful force than Sadie, with her limited knowledge and vision, can really appreciate” (Constable, “Treading” 20). The Crow befriends Sadie, but Sadie returns to her life after she has played her part while the Crow remains powerful and omnipresent. The relationship between the Crow and Sadie implicitly suggests two disparate but interconnected entities: one signifies the Aboriginal Dreaming tradition and the other represents responsible young Australians. It is a story of reciprocation and reconciliation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal figures, in which the metaphor of the gift is embedded. As a non-Aboriginal writer who writes on Aboriginal subject matter, Constable stresses the importance of paying homage to the original knowledge holders. She recalls the process of writing this book: It seemed to me that the closest thing to the right approach was to acknowledge our ignorance; to respect the guardians of the land (human and spiritual); and to try to grope our way toward an independent understanding of the magic within the landscape, acknowledging without taking possession. (“Treading” 19)

What Constable refers to as a potential strategy of “acknowledging without taking possession” suggests an engaging attitude of developing an understanding and appreciation of Aboriginal traditional stories while recognising the origin of these cultural elements. Such a respectful and detached approach reflects a caring-without-intruding gesture of the author in the sense that the writer’s curiosity or interest towards Aboriginal stories does not necessarily result in an act of exploitation, insofar as one cannot claim the knowledge as one’s own. The author attempts to care for rather than appropriate Aboriginal cultural value, taking the interests of both sides into consideration. Constable takes this caring approach onto multiple levels in Crow Country: First, Sadie making her way to find and return the Aboriginal sacred thing constitutes an attitude of “acknowledging” the importance of an Aboriginal sacred object while not “taking possession” of it as her own. Second, treating Sadie’s story as a line of narratives relating to but not taking over the Dreaming figure of the Crow also demonstrates an attitude of “acknowledging without taking possession” to balance the author’s

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creativity and Aboriginal source materials. The conjunction of these two strands of stories brings to the fore the vitality of Aboriginal cultural tradition and transmits an aspiration for and imagination of reconstructed whiteness and racial justice in Australian settler society. Third, the author sent the book manuscript back to the Dja Dja Wurrung people to be read and corrected by the elder Gary Murray and the cover image includes the illustration of the Crow and feathers by Murray’s daughter Ngarra Murray (see Constable, “Treading” 20). Respecting the Aboriginal authority in interpreting their Dreaming figure enacts the caring of Aboriginal cultural protocols on the part of the author when reciprocating the intellectual gift of Aboriginal stories. As Hage writes, “care emerges out of a form of gift exchange between the self and others” (Against Paranoid Nationalism 5). In this view, caring is a form of participation, sharing the understanding of the problem at stake and the hope for a just, communal relationship. It is not only a concern of personal interest, but also a consideration for others. At this level, caring describes a stance of empathy being informed and engagement in a gift relationship, orienting the balance between self-interest and communitarian ethos. At the very least, caring entails the respect for Aboriginal cultural protocols and the acknowledgement of Aboriginal knowledge holders. The negotiation through gift exchange facilitates the dissemination of Aboriginal cultural knowledge while avoiding relentless appropriation or conservative protection. From this perspective, an ethical possibility for non-Aboriginal writers could be caring without dominating the discourse, and engaging with rather than deputising for Aboriginal voices. To this book, Gary Murray has given his endorsement, as he writes in the book’s foreword: “Waa and Sadie’s story is about the justice of friendship, respect, reconciliation and recognition of People, land and culture. Crow Country is a spiritual cultural collaboration for all who love a good story” (n.pag.). This collaborative result – Crow Country – can be seen as a metaphorical exchange between the Aboriginal gift of the Crow story and the author’s return gift through the plot design, characterisation and production of her book. The cycle of reciprocity is fulfilled through a caring approach, which demonstrates mutual recognition of the interests

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from both sides and contributes to a reciprocal relationship between the Aboriginal custodian and the non-Aboriginal writer. Caring seeks to promote a relational consideration that channels the non-Aboriginal writers’ literary creation away from the infringement of Aboriginal interests in their cultural knowledge, thereby contributing to an ethical deployment of Indigenous cultural capital in the writing for children. In a sense, that Constable’s caring receives the acknowledgement from the Yung Balug elder, as noted in the foreword, evokes the forgotten moment in history, documented by Eyre, in which Aboriginal people appreciated the motive of his return gift. The ethical moments of giving, receiving and reciprocating strengthen an invisible bond between different parties involved. Here I do not intend to conflate the varying gift practices mentioned above, but it is worth considering how the gift in a general sense relates the self to others and negotiates the different interests in between. In this sense, the morality of the gift exchange provides a potential model for non-Aboriginal writers to consider in their writing of Aboriginal characters and themes.

The Gift and Indigenous Collective Ownership There has been a long and sometimes perilous history of collaboration between Aboriginal storytellers and white writers in producing children’s books. The ethical concerns I have outlined could impinge upon the deployment of Indigenous cultural capital in such writing. This section explores the structure of reciprocity in the cross-cultural and interracial collaboration between Boori Monty Pryor and Meme McDonald. For them, caring is directed to Aboriginal families and communities where the stories originate. From this vantage point, the ethics of the gift offers a useful framework to improve recognition and protection of Indigenous collective ownership of cultural heritage. Boori Pryor is an Aboriginal dancer, didgeridoo performer and storyteller with Kunggandji and Birra-gubba heritage. Meme McDonald is a

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white writer from the south-west of Queensland. They have co-authored five books and won significant literary awards.13 Their cooperation, as McDonald comments, values cultural and professional strengths from both sides and has been a cross-cultural enrichment (see “Interview”). The idea of gift giving is embedded in their books and throughout their writing processes. For example, in their first co-authored book Maybe Tomorrow (1998), Pryor laments the tragic deaths of his four family members: “These four people had so much to give. … These four people had lots of good stories and secrets of this land. It’s not just the death of a human being, it’s the death of all that dies with them” (4–5). Pryor stresses Aboriginal people’s capacity to “give” as they are inheritors of a rich body of knowledge and traditions. As the co-author, listener and receiver of Pryor’s family story, McDonald expresses her gratitude in the acknowledgements at the end of this book: The privilege of writing this book with Pryor has taken away a lot of that sorrow and replaced it with a treasure box of experiences. My eyes and my heart have been opened to see this country, my home, in a new way. My children will grow up with this understanding – thank you, Pryor, for this gift. (204)

For McDonald, Aboriginal stories and culture are a gift from Pryor. This gift embodied in their books would then further enrich and benefit both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal young readers. It would be wrong to assume that Pryor, an Aboriginal storyteller/ writer, is not obliged to comply with the ethical protocols and to reciprocate the gift of Indigenous cultural heritage with respect and acknowledgement. In a traditional sense, Aboriginal traditional stories that originate from a specific tract of country are told by custodians or authorised persons from that particular area and in different versions for different groups of audience (Bradford, “Reading Indigeneity” 336). In this sense, Pryor’s Kunggandji and Birra-gubba identity does not grant him a free pass to retell his people’s

13

Among McDonald and Pryor’s award-winning books, My Girragundji (1998), awarded the 1999 CBCA Book of the Year for younger readers, and Njunjul the Sun (2002), the winner of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Young Adult Fiction, have been adapted and put onto the stage in theatre.

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traditional stories in the tracts of country belonging to other groups, or even to recite his people’s stories within his community without appropriate authorisation. So whenever giving performance in different places, Pryor pays tribute to the original landowners there, telling them he is now in their land. He stresses, I performed my work in Melbourne, paying my respects to the Wurundjeri people. … In Sydney, through Dad’s friends with the Church, there’s two or three dance groups there, that I make a connection through. You need to pay your respects to the traditional people of each place and then you are not taking anything away from anybody, you’re just adding. (qtd in “Interview”)

Pryor’s cultural consciousness manifests an ethical approach of Aboriginal people in respect to their cultural heritage. The rules of mutual respect and reciprocity have long been observed within and across Aboriginal communities. Pryor carries forward this tradition and stresses an ethical approach of “adding” rather than “taking” away. It is consistent with the participatory mode of caring in the sense that retelling the inherited stories as an act of returning the ancestral gift should strengthen, rather than undermine, the communal basis of Aboriginal cultures. Pryor and McDonald’s collaboration on My Girragundji (1998) provides a good example to show how the idea of gift is invested in a coauthored book that draws on Aboriginal spirituality and how the book ultimately becomes a return gift for the community from which the story comes. My Girragundji tells a story of an Aboriginal boy and his spiritual protector, a frog. The story is based on Pryor’s growing-up experiences as an Aboriginal boy, interweaving traditional stories including “hairyman” and “the seven sisters”. In the story, the little frog gives the protagonist much courage and strength but, in the end, it is eaten by a snake. McDonald found the story intriguing and touching, when her daughter prompted Pryor to come up with a sketch of this story at the halftime of a football match (see “Interview”). What occurred to McDonald was that it would be something “uplifting to read” to interweave the pieces of the frog story and bring them together in a book (qtd in “Interview”). Regarding the ending, McDonald expected to “work through it in a story and come to a point where you know you’ve received a great gift from the life of that

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creature, rather than their death” (qtd in “Interview”; my italics). The finalised version of My Girragundji does not dwell upon the sad aspect of the frog’s death but brims with the protagonist’s hope and strength to embrace his future. This ending challenges a stereotyped assumption that Aboriginal stories with deaths (or bad spirits) are didactic moral tales used to discipline children. In this case, the “gift” of Aboriginal spirituality that McDonald identifies in the story of My Girragundji echoes the “gift” of Aboriginal cultural heritage that she has learned from Pryor as she mentions in the acknowledgements of Maybe Tomorrow. McDonald demonstrates her interests in the value within the Aboriginal oral story of the frog, and invests cultural awareness in the written story (My Girragundji) as a return gift, which constitutes a gesture of caring. Her “caring” for Aboriginal stories receives the approval and appreciation from Pryor, as he says: “McDonald uses the power of the white man’s magic, the words, to tell the magic of the black man’s stories” (qtd in “Interview”). In this case, the “white man’s magic” and “the black man’s stories” form a relationship of reciprocal exchanges on a basis of mutual recognition. The deployment of Aboriginal stories, in which the non-Aboriginal writer plays a part, does not turn into an act of appropriation; rather, the act of deployment transforms into a negotiable scheme between the Aboriginal storyteller and the non-Aboriginal writer. The empathic strategy addresses the storyteller’s or writer’s interest in Aboriginal stories and attributes their work to the Aboriginal community. As the afterword of My Girragundji notes, the “story had come home to its beginning” when the draft was sent to Pryor’s family for cultural editing and to seek the approval for publication (77). The emphasis on “home” indicates the recognition of Aboriginal collective cultural heritage and storytelling traditions that the story of My Girragundji is derived from. As McDonald remarks, “there is a great sense that the books belong to more than just Pryor and I … it is very much that these books do belong to a whole family of people. They have to be right for that family first, and something that they would be proud of and really happy about” (qtd in “Interview”). My Girragundji is mainly narrated by Pryor and written by McDonald. The creative input of Pryor and McDonald ought to be credited, but it is also important to be aware of the collective interests of

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Pryor’s extended family from which the stories in My Girragundji originated and within which they circulated before becoming a book. In an ethical and symbolic sense, the book amounts to a return gift made by both writers to the original knowledge holders. This idea that the stories return to or belong to the original giver underlines a process of obligatory reciprocation, in which the gift given is ultimately given back to its original owners in one way or another. In other words, the gift relations demand a reciprocal gesture of the writers to reciprocate or benefit the Aboriginal community for what has been received. From this perspective, the cycle of the gift entails recognition of Indigenous collective ownership of cultural and intellectual heritage. At this point, the ethics of reciprocity sheds new light on the current legal problems of copyrighting Indigenous cultural and intellectual property. In the report Our Culture: Our Future – Report on Australian Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights (1998), Indigenous cultural heritage is identified as including the tangible and intangible aspects of Australian Indigenous cultural knowledge, practices and traditions, “developed, nurtured and refined by Indigenous people and passed on by them as part of expressing their cultural identity” ( Janke xvii). For Aboriginal people, the most essential part of the cultural heritage is derived from the Dreaming in which ancestral spirits moved across country, created life and natural features, and established the Law which governed the relations between the land, animals, and different groups of people. After the world came into being, ancestral spirits did not disappear but were transformed into, or their essential essences remain manifest in, stars, rocks, waterholes, and other sacred places, where much of their residual power remains. The Dreaming varies from place to place, but it is everlasting from time immemorial to an infinite future. Hence the Dreaming remains a dynamic force in the lives of Aboriginal people, and a realm of influence in which they actively engage and in doing so, they in turn influence the Dreaming. For Aboriginal communities, their cultural heritage is derived from a collective past, accumulated and owned on a communal basis, and transmitted for future generations. The cultural heritage produces Indigenous cultural capital through varying forms of expression. However, the communal

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ownership of Indigenous cultural heritage has not yet been recognised by the Copyright Act 1968 enacted in Australia. This Copyright Act, which is used to protect intellectual works from attempts of appropriation, mutilation, and derogatory treatment, can hardly apply to Indigenous cultural and intellectual heritage. It rules that the protected work, as opposed to ideas or concepts, must be originally produced in material form and by an identifiable author. By contrast, Indigenous cultural production follows an intrinsic set of rules and authorial practices. Different from the Western “ideology of creative authority” which is individual-based, as Eric Michaels suggests, Aboriginal cultural works are characterised by communal interests and a “reproductive” process (145). Aboriginal writings based on the Dreaming stories reproduce the traditional, pre-existing work, transmitted across generations and held in trust for the whole clans ( Janke, “Protecting” 15). Each Aboriginal group is entitled to its specific cultural heritage. Members within traditional communities inherit rights and obligations to preserve their heritage, though the relationship between the living Aboriginal people and their ancestral heritage is not static in the sense that they are not passive before it, but rather dynamically engaged with it through interpretation and adaptation. For Indigenous cultural and intellectual work, individual talent and input are credited, but the ownership is usually construed as a place-based, collective intellectual outcome (Brown, Who 45; Brewster, Giving xiv). Moreover, Aboriginal stories were traditionally transmitted in oral or performative ways, rather than being preserved in written forms. Although some stories have been transcribed into the written form by anthropologists and writers, this “oral literature” could only retain a proportion of the complex and nuanced styles, rhythms, paces, gestures, and ritual contexts which are integral to the traditional storytelling (Davis et al. 1). Lastly, because spirituality is essential to Aboriginal traditional stories, Indigenous cultural integrity can hardly be reduced to a measurable and objectified form. Therefore, Indigenous cultural heritage and its collective ownership in principle do not conform to the legal application of Western copyright law. In 2003 the Indigenous Communal Moral Rights (ICMRs), an amendment to the Copyright Act, was proposed and drafted, with an aim of introducing Indigenous communal moral rights. But the ICMRs regime has not

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become law yet.14 In an article entitled “Can Culture Be Copyrighted?” Michael Brown points out the paradox in the legal scheme of copyright, which intends to protect Indigenous heritage but violates the cultural integrity in essence (197). While alternative legal solutions are still finding their ways to prevent Indigenous cultural heritage from misappropriation, the inadequacy of the existing legal solutions remains a problem. There are mainly two strands of thought in relation to this issue: first is the scope of legal application. Few legislative options could cover a comprehensive system of Indigenous cultural expressions, which embody Indigenous knowledge, beliefs, and traditional practices ( Janke, “Protecting” 19). As mentioned previously, Indigenous cultural and intellectual property is not readily reconcilable with the legal requirements under the current copyright law. Aboriginal people may find it difficult to bring legal actions to protect their interests. Second, in response to the first concern, legal scholars and Indigenous activists have proposed some radical mechanisms for legal prevention of cultural appropriation. But concerns arise because the sweeping legal demands may not achieve the intended results, either. For one thing, aggressive protective restrictions could possibly imperil artistic freedom for cultural creation and increase the tension between Indigenous interests and public access to knowledge (Brown, “Copyrighted” 198). For another, the high costs of legal proceedings could pose a great impediment for materially deprived Indigenous groups to safeguard their interests in court (Brown, “Copyrighted” 204–5). The radical approach runs the risk of controlling and alienating Aboriginal cultural expressions from public intellectual engagement and recognition. The “blanket” protection may ultimately turn out to be “new forms of silencing and surveillance in the name of cultural protection” (Brown, Who 8). Therefore, these two contradictory legal arguments in effect expose the complexity of using legal 14

In December 2000 the Moral Rights Amendments to the Copyright Act was legislated, which can protect Indigenous works from inappropriate alteration and infringements of the work’s moral integrity. But it is designed to protect the moral rights of individual authors, whose work is already copyrighted, rather than to recognise Indigenous collective ownership and related rights. For details, see Australia Council 24–5.

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solutions to protect Indigenous cultural and intellectual property. This does not mean that legislation is not a viable option, but sound legislation in today’s commercial and digital realities entails a thorough consideration of Indigenous cultural traditions, the challenges confronting writers and the public, and the actual conditions of litigation to negotiate these intertwined relations. Nevertheless, as Brown cautions, it could be misleading to assume that the legislative practices of copyright and patents are alien to indigenous societies, because it is evident that the rules to regulate the use of knowledge and the exchanges of cultural/spiritual goods (i.e. knowledge, songs, skills, etc.) with payments exist in many traditional societies (Who 88). In other words, it is not that indigenous people do not have mechanisms to regulate the potential interests generated from their cultural knowledge; rather, indigenous exchange of knowledge is incompatible with Western legal practices which protect individual interests in original creation (Brown, Who 87–9). For Aboriginal Australians, their intellectual knowledge can be used as a form of cultural capital to engage in social exchanges and to expect reciprocal return. In effect, to protect Indigenous interests under the current situation, it has been proposed that Indigenous communities or groups reserve the right to demand compensation in honorary or monetary form, as a return for consultancy or editing traditional stories (see Australian Council 30–2). Although it is controversial to translate Indigenous cultural stories into a measurable value of information that is familiar to settler society, the compensation could be conceived not so much as an outcome of transaction but as a return gift. Torres sees compensation as “the legitimisation of the worth and integrity of the information being provided” (25). It legitimises the use of cultural heritage by Indigenous people as a tool of self-empowerment, which honours Indigenous rights and helps redress to a certain extent the uneven power and race relations. Compensation is “both a symbolic and a concrete form of recognition”, as Torres stresses the importance of maintaining a reciprocal relationship between non-Indigenous people and Indigenous knowledge providers (25). She advocates reciprocity to be an acknowledged code for Indigenous cultural production and knowledge exchange:

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Chapter 5 Indigenous adults were socialised from birth and aware of the concept of reciprocity and the responsibility for action that it entailed; they were governed by welldefined codes of behaviour, something that few Non-Indigenous people have ever grasped and/or felt obligated to carry through in their relationships with Indigenous Australians. (25)

Reciprocity demands an ethical understanding of Indigenous cultural value and a responsible action on the part of non-Indigenous Australians. This inherent responsibility rises from the continuing interrelatedness between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, and calls for reflection on and a re-envisioning of race relations for a shared future. Reciprocity is associated with responsibility in indigenous philosophical traditions, as Rauna Kuokkanen writes. Reciprocity “implies response-ability – that is, an ability to respond, to remain attuned to the world beyond oneself, as well as a willingness to recognise its existence through the giving of gifts” (Kuokkanen 39). The ethical codes of giving and reciprocating, rights and obligations, can therefore be a pragmatic guideline to protect Indigenous interests and their collective cultural heritage. Given the various constraints of the legal regulations, the morality of the gift is perhaps a non-legislative alternative for Indigenous cultural protection. In writing Aboriginal stories, reciprocity can be achieved through various means, such as acknowledging the origin of Aboriginal stories, collaborating with Aboriginal people in the creation of book manuscripts, sharing information and benefits, and if possible paying consultancy fees and royalties in honorary or monetary form. In exploring the ethical basis between Aboriginal knowledge holders and writers, this intellectual gift exchange negotiates different interests and hence promotes a continued open dialogue between the two parties. To conclude, the ethics of the gift is not utopian thinking about moral redress, or a homogenising tendency of overlooking the cultural and historical differences across which the gift is practised. Rather, a well-reciprocated gift can evoke a relational thinking and a responsible caring to address anxiety, guilt, and paranoia in Australian settler society. To resolve the fundamental issues of justice and reparation for the colonial past, Paul Patton illuminates on what ground the ethics of reciprocity serves contemporary Australian society: “the aim of such reparation is not to undo

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past wrongs but to go some way towards removing their consequences and re-establishing what would have been the case if those injustices had not been perpetrated” (88; see also Waldron 7–8). An ethical deployment of Indigenous cultural capital as a gift suggests a possibility of restoration and redressing injustices. The morality of reciprocity empowers Indigenous people and reproduces mutual recognition, acknowledgement, credibility, and honour in race relations. It thereby enables a transformative space of hope where an ethical basis for future cultural exchange and collaboration can be realised.

Conclusion

Resistance and Transformation in a Project of Hope This book has explored the formation, representation, and transmission of Australia’s Indigenous cultures as a form of cultural capital in post-Mabo children’s literature. Situated in the complexity of the Australian postcolonial context, the central concept of “Indigenous cultural capital” describes how Indigenous knowledge and cultural value venture into the public domain to further Indigenous interests in a wider Australian mainstream society. While engaging with the ambivalence of the various institutional mechanisms for effective accumulation and expansion, Indigenous cultural capital demonstrates its transformative force by taking advantage of these institutional means of legitimation and re-investing Indigenous perspectives in public discourse. Its active presence modifies institutional codes of recognition in a subtle but definite manner, hence directing the change of the ways in which cultural capital in general, particularly its operation towards Aboriginality, is formulated and redistributed. Indigenous cultural capital represents a strategy of power recognised by Ashcroft as “an interpolation which not only interjects and interrupts that [dominant] discourse but changes it in subtle ways” (Post-Colonial 14). These changes are not incurred through overt defiance of the dominant power or total rejection of the dominant culture, but through tactical operation to reassert Indigenous cultural value and to influence how Indigenous life and cultures are conceived in settler society. From this perspective, the transmission of Indigenous cultural capital helps address extant prejudice and enduring stereotypes. Considering the enabling forces in cultural and social reproduction, Bourdieu reminds us “to determine what the field is, where its limits lie, etc., and to determine what species of capital are active in it, within what limits, and so on” (Invitation 98–9). In the Australian context, Indigenous

208 Conclusion

cultural capital affirms the agency of Indigenous people in maintaining their cultural continuity. Incorporating Indigenous cultures into cultural capital, however, risks marginalising or diluting the Indigenous cultural resistance embodied in their storytelling and textuality. It is thus necessary to discern both constraining factors and possible openings as a tension in postcolonial projects, as Huggan suggests: Postcolonial cultural production is profoundly affected, but not totally governed, by commodification; it is frequently, but not invariably, subject to the fetishisation of cultural difference; it is increasingly, but by no means irredeemably, institutionalised in Western commercial and educational systems; its value is certainly shaped, but not rigidly determined, by its contact with the global market. (Postcolonial Exotic 27)

The notion of Indigenous cultural capital directs the attention from the binaries structured in the postcolonial critique – authentic/manufactured, self/other, local/global – to forms of resistance and transformation which take place within the fractures and fissures of dominant power relations. Aboriginal authorial agency operates, however effortfully, inside the marginal, interstitial and restricted space so as to get their cultural or political messages across to a wider Australian society. Meanwhile, the concept of Indigenous cultural capital allows for the accommodation of non-­Aboriginal efforts in postcolonial projects. Speaking of the politics of representing Aboriginality, Marcia Langton suggests the possibility of an ethical intersubjective and cross-racial exchange: “most Aboriginal people involved in the production of art forms believe that an ethical, postcolonial critique and practice among their non-Aboriginal colleagues is possible and achievable” (“Well, I Heard It on the Radio and I Saw It on the Television” 26). An ethical deployment of Indigenous cultural capital can be built upon a reciprocal relationship between Aboriginal knowledge holders and writers – both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal – developed through mutual respect and an understanding of the integrity and function of Indigenous cultural value. The endeavour of postcolonialism can therefore be turned into a project of hope. Hope is often linked with loss and pain and suggests an affirmative positivity as a response. Here, hope is not a utopian fantasy or a religious faith. Associated with burden and pitfalls, hope in the postcolonial

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context can be a critical optimism which entails a “relational mode of thinking” (Bourdieu, Invitation 96–7). It re-orients the instituting power of recognition in mainstream discourse and presents Indigenous cultures and histories to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous young Australians. In the prologue to Maybe Tomorrow – a title full of sorrow and hope – Boori Pryor writes of ways of fighting and surviving in a changing society: “The old people used to fight … with spears. Then my parents fought to say alive on the reserves. … I’m fighting in a different way” (n.pag.). His motto “play the whiteman’s game and stay black” suggests a relational engagement in contemporary Australia (back cover). The field of postcolonialism is never free of difficulties, tensions and debate. Hope addresses such ongoing struggling as well as negotiation between colonised and colonisers in the postcolonial context. In a sense, an unresolved and yet unfading hope for justice has etched onto Aboriginal identify and transformed the way in which Aboriginality is represented. As much as projecting in a futuristic sense, hope can also be traced retrospectively in memories and traditions. Narratives or stories for child readers nurture, inspire and disseminate hope. By recognising the value of Indigenous cultural heritage, Indigenous cultural capital in postcolonial narratives of children’s literature enacts a hope of empowering Indigenous people and reconfiguring race relations toward equality and justice. I would like to conclude with Alexis Wright’s evocation of hope in Carpentaria (2006), which suggests stories embody a hopeful vision, even for those in a hopeless situation: One evening in the driest grasses in the world, a child who was no stranger to her people asked if anyone could find hope. The people of parable and prophecy pondered what was hopeless and finally declared they no longer knew what hope was. The clocks, tick-a-ty tock, looked as though they might run out of time. Luckily, the ghosts in the memories of the old folk were listening, and said anyone can find hope in the stories: the big stories and the little stories and the ones in between. So … (12)

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——. The Rocks of Honey. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1960. Print. ——. “When Cultures Meet.” The Wrightson List. By Peter and Patricia Wrightson.

Milsons Point, NSW: Random, 1998. ix–xxxv. Print. Yalata Aboriginal Community, and Christobel Mattingley. Maralinga: The Anangu Story. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2009. Print. Yan, Yunxiang. The Flow of Gifts: Reciprocity and Social Networks in a Chinese Village. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. Print. Zournazi, Mary. Hope: New Philosophies for Change. New York: Routledge, 2003. Print.

Index

Aboriginal authorial authority  28, 138, 148 cultural protocols  26, 138, 142, 143, 182–91, 195 custodianship 47 empowerment  11, 16, 21, 22, 24, 25, 92, 203 English  127, 165–8 identity  3, 39, 69, 70, 71, 90, 93, 137, 140, 143, 147 kinship  47–8, 136, 142, 143, 157n.8 knowledge holders  29, 177, 181–2, 188, 189, 192, 194, 195, 200, 204, 208 land rights  5, 10, 26, 34, 49, 50, 60, 70, 109, 177n.6 Law  48, 49, 50, 57–8, 152, 181, 183, 200 life experiences  28, 132, 180, 182–3, 187 life writings  3, 27, 69, 136 literature  3, 9, 10, 109, 110, 147 sacred sites  41–2, 44, 45, 50–3 spirituality  41, 108, 111, 184, 185, 193, 198, 199 storytelling traditions  5, 27, 139, 143, 180, 186, 190, 199 studies  17, 155 see also Indigenous education acquisition  8, 13, 14, 57, 155, 166 amnesia  44, 50, 55, 67, 77, 81 see also forgetting apparatuses, of inclusion and exclusion  85, 96 see also selection

Ashcroft, Bill and Griffiths and Tiffin, PostColonial Studies  6, 7, 19 “Postcolonial Studies” 6 Post-Colonial Transformation  6, 7, 8, 11, 35–6, 38, 101, 148, 207 assimilation policy, the  70, 92, 96 Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA)  156, 156n.4, 166 Australianness  45, 123, 125, 126, 130 authenticity  3, 7, 8, 23n.6, 106, 184, 189 Bancroft, Bronwyn  131 Possum and Wattle 145–8 Barnes, Nancy Munyi’s Daughter  26, 86, 91–6 Barton, Charlotte A Mother’s Offering to Her Children  1, 122 binary oppositions  7, 12, 52, 182 Bird, Carmel The Stolen Children 75 Bourdieu, Pierre  8, 12, 16, 135 “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction” 13 Distinction  14n.4 The Field of Cultural Production  15, 99–100 “The Forms of Capital” 13–14, 20, 99, 151, 157n.8 Language and Symbolic Power  15, 116 and Loïc J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology  207

232 Index Outline of a Theory of Practice  17, 158 Bradford, Clare “Indigeneity and Children’s Literature” 159 “Oh How Different!” 183 “Reading Indigeneity” 144, 197 Reading Race  3, 5, 124, 126, 161, 184 Unsettling Narratives  6, 126, 185–6, 193 Brewster, Anne  6, 72, 89, 92–3, 201 Bringing Them Home report  4, 63, 69n.3, 72–9, 82–3, 90 see also Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Brown, Michael  201–3 Burney, Linda  130–2, 190 capital capitalist exploitation  24, 27 economic  13, 43, 120 forms of  13, 20, 120 social  13, 157 Western framework of  22 see also cultural capital; Indigenous cultural capital caring at Children’s Homes  70, 90 as writers’ position  29, 194–6, 198–9, 204 Carter, Paul  35, 36 Certeau, Michel de  21, 63 Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA)  27, 103, 107, 110, 115–34, 141 children’s book industry  102, 120 classes  13, 14, 158 colonialism  6, 90 commodification 84 see also marketing commodity  25, 79 competence, cultural  13, 14

consecration institutional codes of  27, 133 of place  51 power of  100, 114, 115, 127, 129 process of  119 as recognition  101, 117, 126, 128, 141 of writers and works  15, 100, 102, 124, 126, 135, 137 Constable, Kate  26, 29, 44, 192 Crow Country  26, 44–50, 192, 194, 195 consumption  22, 23, 27, 66 contact zone  7, 9, 11, 18, 25, 101 copyright issues of  29, 182, 200–3 page  144, 146 cross-curriculum priority  28, 151, 157n.7, 158 cultural capital in children’s literature  14–15, 16 in general  8, 12–18, 22, 23n.6, 24, 27, 35, 40, 64, 65, 67, 90, 91, 93, 99, 100, 103, 108, 112, 114, 119, 120–1, 127, 130, 134, 138, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 151, 157–8, 168, 180, 181, 188, 190, 203, 208 and Indigenous cultural capital 18–19 reconfiguration of  18, 25, 56, 65, 81, 96, 101, 102, 132, 134, 149, 169 re-orientation of  25, 29 reproduction of  22 see also Indigenous cultural capital Davie, Penelope  136, 138 decolonisation 33 dilemma of non-Aboriginal writers  29, 191 distinction as difference  185 logic of  14 value of  14, 15, 119, 141

233

Index dominance institutional 8 racialised  22, 93, 102 Drake-Brockman, H. 107, 123–4 Durack, Mary  106–8, 111 editors  10, 130, 131 non-Indigenous  136–8, 148 role of  73 Elcho Island Memorial  175–6 empathy  74, 195, 199 empty space  34–9 see also terra nullius entanglement  9, 18, 19, 20, 81, 120 exoticism  24, 140, 143 Eyre, Edward John  173–5, 196 forgetting act of  66 discourse of anti-forgetting  67, 78 as forgetfulness  33, 80, 96 mechanism of  63, 72, 79, 80 postcolonial 81 trope of  67, 77 Freeman, Robin  10, 136, 139, 148 Genette, Gérard  135, 146, 147 genres, limits of  26, 96 gifts connotation of  177–82 ethics of  29, 190, 196, 204 exchange of  28, 173, 175–6, 178, 180–1, 189n.12, 195–6, 204 flow of  180n.8 as givenness  179, 181, 193 see also self-interest; sociality Goldie, Terrie  23n.6 Goodall, Heather  45, 46, 48 Guillory, John  14, 151 guilt and paranoia  177, 180, 204 and shame  42, 43, 63, 76, 79, 94

Gwynne, Phillip  29 Deadly, Unna? 115, 186–90, 192 habitus  17, 157–8 Hage, Ghassan  14, 177, 180, 190, 195 hegemony colonial  8, 18 19, 81 and discourse  11, 18 Heiss, Anita  9, 10 Herman, Judith  77 “history wars” 80 Huggan, Graham  8, 15, 22–4, 25, 35, 83, 135, 208 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC)  63, 69n.3, 72–9, 82, 83, 86, 88, 90, 95 hybridisation 18 indebtedness  28, 174, 177–8 Indigenisation  2, 193 indigenous capitalism  20–1 Indigenous collective ownership  29, 182, 196, 200, 202 Indigenous cultural capital and book reviews  104, 108, 112, 113, 114 in conclusion  207–9 and gifts  177, 181, 182, 186, 189, 190, 192, 196, 200, 205 and institutional legitimation  100–2 introduction of  1, 4n.2, 16–19, 21–29 and paratexts  136, 141, 145, 148 and prizes  116, 127, 129, 130, 134 and representations of land and country  34, 40, 41–4, 47, 50, 52, 56–7, 60 and school curricula  151–2, 157, 159, 164, 165, 166, 168, 169

234 Index and the Stolen Generations narratives  64–7, 68, 69, 71, 72, 74, 76, 81, 84, 85, 86, 93, 96 Indigenous education  28, 152, 155–6 Indigenous intellectual property  26 Indigenous Literacy Foundation (ILF)  27, 104, 113 injustices, racial  4, 64, 72, 74, 78, 94, 165 interpolation  41, 101, 207 investiture 116 see also consecration Jacaranda Press  27, 104, 106, 108 Jones, Jennifer  136 Kartinyeri, Doris Kick the Tin  26, 86, 88, 91–3, 96 Kendall, Henry  163 knowledge and formation  29, 65, 66, 67 and transmission  9, 13, 89, 152 Langton, Marcia  5, 12, 22, 48, 208 legitimation institutional  15, 16, 22, 27, 28, 99–101, 129, 141, 145, 164 literary  27, 29, 100, 114, 127, 134, 135, 147 process of  99 see also recognition, institutional Lowe, Pat, and Jimmy Pike Jimmy and Pat Meet the Queen  26, 58–9 Lucashenko, Melissa  88, 132–3, 183 Mabo decision  4, 42, 57, 58 McCoy, Beth  137 McDonald, Meme  29, 115, 196–9 see also Pryor, Boori Monty Macleod, Mark  119, 121, 122, 123, 125, 128, 129n.24, 133

Magabala Books  27, 127, 129, 139, 141, 142, 144–5 Maralinga: The An̲angu Story  26, 38, 40n.4, 174n.4 marketing  10, 22, 24, 27, 119, 139 massacre sites  50–2, 54, 55, 57 Mauss, Marcel  175n.5, 177–9, 180n.8, 188–9 mechanism of evaluation  25, 100, 134, 138, 143 of remembering and forgetting  26, 66, 96 value-regulating 23 see also forgetting: mechanism of Meeks, Arone Raymond Enora and the Black Crane  27, 139–45 memories, politics of  89 Michaels, Eric  23n.6, 183, 201 Moloney, James  29, 191–2 Gracey  26, 44, 50–7 Morphy, Howard  175–7 Muecke, Stephen  9, 20–1, 71, 83, 85 naming 34–8 native title  4, 43, 48, 49, 57–60, 113, 114, 176 in Native Title Act  42, 57, 58, 60 Neil, Harrison  87, 157–8, 166 O’Conor, Juliet  2, 105, 106, 107, 108, 112–3, 160n.10, 161 O’Donoghue, Lowitja Lowitja  26, 86–91, 95 optimism  25, 29, 209 palimpsest  35, 38 Papunya School Book of Country and History  26, 40, 134 paratexts  16, 101, 135–49

Index as paratextual devices  27, 100, 102, 137–8 Parker, Kate Langloh Australian Legendary Tales  1, 106–7, 123–4, 183 Pascoe, Bruce  36, 46n.8 pastoralism 45 persuasion, rhetoric of  101 politics of reviewing  102, 104, 114 postcolonial narratives  5–6, 12, 25, 33, 44, 209 racism  42, 52 uncanny 43 postcolonialism  6–7, 22–3, 208–9 postcoloniality 22–3 post-Mabo era  4–5, 26, 42, 60, 63, 115 power and authority  99, 129 exercise of  77 of instituting  99, 120, 209 and privilege  13 relations  7, 13, 18, 20, 22, 74, 81, 90, 99, 101, 148, 182, 208 of selection  144 of surveillance  35 “practices of proximity” 9 Pratt, Mary Louise  7, 177 prestige cultural 118 distribution of  119 as honour  27, 141 see also consecration Pryor, Boori Monty  29, 196 Maybe Tomorrow  41, 197, 209 My Girragundji  115, 197n.13, 198–200 racialised ideology  3, 18, 19, 153 Read, Peter  63, 68, 70 reciprocity cycle of  178–80, 190, 193, 195

235 ethics of  29, 191, 200, 204 and obligation  178–9, 182, 200 recognition, institutional  100–2, 124, 141, 157 reconciliation discourse of  66, 78, 90, 93, 95 as project  88, 90 therapeutic paradigm of  76 reductionism, economic  14, 19 Reeves, Wilf, and Olga Miller Legends of Moonie Jarl, The  2, 27, 104–14 relationality 179 as relational thinking  189, 204, 209 remembrance  65, 66, 72, 74, 76, 79 reparation  67, 74, 87, 193, 204 repressive hypothesis  71–2 reproduction 13 resistance anti-colonial 137 within the domination  7 modes of  10 postcolonial  16, 19, 23, 148 tactical  22, 63 reticence  67, 68–9 revival, cultural  4, 24, 133 rewriting, historical  56–7 Reynolds, Henry  49, 55–6, 80 Rolls, Mitchell “The ‘Great Australian Silence’” 43, 56, 67, 68, 79, 80–1, 90, 95, “Painting the Dreaming White” 125n.22 “The Sacred Savage” 23n.6 “Why Didn’t You Listen” 56, 80–1 Rose, Deborah Bird  34, 37–8, 65, 89 Rose, Mark  67, 153 Roughsey, Elsie An Aboriginal Mother Tells of the Old and the New  181

236 Index Saxby, Maurice  110–12, 117, 122 scarcity  14, 67 School Readers  28, 159–61 Indij Readers  28, 159, 164–8 as Queensland School Readers  28, 159–64 selection apparatuses of  95, 96, 100 criteria of  120, 121, 126 and judgement  128, 131–2 self-interest  29, 188–9, 195 Shoemaker, Adam  3 silence  55–7, 69, 77, 80–1 as silent apartheid  151, 153–4, 158, 164, 169 sociality  179, 188–9 sovereignty  36, 57, 60 Spivak, Gayatri  83 Stanner, W. E. H. 55–6, 80 Stephens, John  164 Stolen Generations  3, 26, 63–8, 70–2, 74–7, 79–82, 84–7, 89, 91, 95–6, 133, 146 subjugation  19, 93, 94 survival, means of  69 terra nullius  4, 26, 36, 37, 42–3 Tjarany Roughtail  127, 129–30 transculturation 7 transformation conceptual  34, 165 as conversion between gift and debt 179 of educational structure  156 in paratextual space  135, 139 and resistance  16, 207–8

social 9 of subjective experience  92 vision of  50 see also cultural capital: reconfiguration of trauma as events  66, 76, 77, 84, 85, 89 as intense and chronic feeling  67, 69, 70, 74 as memories  71, 74, 90, 92, 95 in texts and stories  85, 96 Unaipon, David Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines 2n.1 value exchange  23, 118 formation  100, 135 production  15, 22, 24, 27, 118, 127 regimes of  15, 27, 101, 102, 120, 127 veracity  82n.9, 83–4 victims  6, 55, 78, 85, 95, 186 violence domestic  65, 167–8 frontier  50, 51, 55 and national history  57, 90 voyeurism 84–5 Williams, Raymond  11 Wright, Alexis Carpentaria  209 Wright, Judith  109 Wrightson, Patricia  2, 29, 110n.10, 125–6, 184–90, 192

AUSTRALIAN STUDIES: INTERDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES

Series Editor

Anne Brewster Associate Professor, University of New South Wales This interdisciplinary book series showcases dynamic, innovative research on contemporary and historical Australian culture. It aims to foster interventions in established debates on Australia as well as opening up new areas of enquiry that reflect the diversity of interests in the scholarly community. The series includes research in a range of fields across the humanities and social sciences, such as history, literature, media, philosophy, cultural studies, gender studies and politics. Proposals are encouraged in areas such as Indigenous studies, critical race and whiteness studies, women's studies, studies in colonialism and coloniality, multiculturalism, the experimental humanities and ecocriticism. Of particular interest is research that promotes the study of Australia in cross-cultural, transnational and comparative contexts. Cross-disciplinarity and new methodologies are welcomed. The series will feature the work of leading authors but also invites proposals from emerging scholars. Proposals for monographs and high-quality edited volumes are welcomed. Proposals and manuscripts considered for the series will be subject to rigorous peer review and editorial attention. The series is affiliated with the International Australian Studies Association (www.inasa.org).

Vol. 1 Geoff Rodoreda The Mabo Turn in Australian Fiction 276 pages. 2018. ISBN 978-1-78707-264-0 Vol. 2

Xu Daozhi Indigenous Cultural Capital: Postcolonial Narratives in Australian Children’s Literature 250 pages. 2018. ISBN 978-1-78707-077-6