Issues of Authorship and Authenticity in Non-Indigenous Representations of Australian Aboriginal Fictional Characters

White Writing Black: Issues of Authorship and Authenticity in Non-Indigenous representations of Australian Aboriginal Fictional Characters

Linda Miley

Master of Education

Creative Writing and Cultural Studies Creative Industries Faculty Queensland University of Technology

This creative work and the accompanying exegesis are presented as part of the requirements for the award of the Degree of Master of Arts (Research) 2006

White Writing Black: Issues of Authorship and Authenticity in Non-Indigenous representations of Australian Aboriginal Fictional Characters

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Statement of Original Authorship 3

Author’s Acknowledgements 4

Abstract 5

Exegesis 6

Bibliography 25

Statement of Original Authorship

The work contained in this thesis and creative work has not previously been submitted for

a degree or diploma at any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made.

Signed:

Date:

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my supervisor Vivienne Muller and my Associate supervisor Nike Bourke for their valuable feedback and support. I would also like to thank the people of the Cape York community for their patience and friendship.

4 Abstract

This creative practice-led thesis is in two parts – a novella entitled Leaning into the Light and an exegesis dealing with issues for creative writers who are non-Indigenous engaging with Indigenous characters and inter-cultural relationships. The novella is based on a woman’s tale of a cross cultural friendship and is set in a Queensland Cape York Aboriginal community over a period of fifteen years. Leaning into the Light is for the most part set in the late 1960s, and as such tracks some of the social and personal cost of colonisation through its depiction of Indigenous and non-Indigenous relationships within a Christian run mission. In short, Leaning into the Light creates an imaginary space of intercultural relationships that is nevertheless grounded in a particular experience of a ‘real’ place and time where Indigenous and non-Indigenous subjectivities collide and communicate.

The exegesis is principally concerned with issues of non-Indigenous representation of indigeneity, an area of enquiry and scholarship that is being increasingly theorized and debated in contemporary cultural and literary studies. In this field, two questions raised by Fee (in Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, 1995) are key concerns in the exegesis. How do we determine who is a member of the Aboriginal minority group, and can majority members speak for this minority? The intensification of interest around these issues follows a period of debate in the 1990s which in turn was spawned by the “unprecedented politicisation of {Australian} history” (Collins and Davis, 2004, p.5) following the important Mabo decision which overturned the “nation’s founding doctrine of terra nullius” (ibid, p.2). These debates questioned whether or not non-Aboriginal authors could legitimately include Aboriginal themes and characters in their work (Huggins, 1994; Wheatley, 1994, Griffiths, et al in Tiffin and Lawson, 1994), and covered important political and ethical considerations, at the heart of which were issues of representation and authenticity. Moreover, there were concerns about non-Indigenous authors competing for important symbolic and publishing space with Indigenous authors. In the writing of Leaning into the Light, these issues became pivotal to the representation of character and situation and as such constitute the key points of analysis in the exegesis.

Please refer to the hard copy of this thesis for the accompanying novella.

White Writing Black: Issues of Authorship and Authenticity in Non-Indigenous representations of Australian Aboriginal Fictional Characters

Introduction

Marcia Langton’s (1993) work on the politics of Aboriginal representation, ‘Well, I heard it on the Radio and I saw it on the Television…’ specifically addresses cultural interfacing with her view of Aboriginality as a social operation in the Durkenheim sense. She argues that Aboriginality is manifest through the interactions of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people engaging in intercultural dialogue, and is constantly redefined through the process of representation, imagination and interpretation (Langton, 1993, p.81). Given the historical dominance of representations of Aboriginal people by non- Aboriginal writers (settlers, explorers, authors of fiction, critical, social and cultural commentators), skepticism about the non-indigenous author’s perspective is understandable. However Langton suggest that the critical classification of Aboriginal people as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in cultural texts, an approach that has prevailed in the literature, is neither useful nor productive as a way forward; rather she contends that through inter-subjective interactions between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal experiences, new analytical and creative discourses might be formed.1 This exegesis addresses, from a creative writer practitioner’s perspective, issues that are central to Langton’s concerns about Aboriginality in textual representation – otherness, authenticity, the speaking voice, protocols for non-Indigenous writers – focusing on a range of contemporary fictional and theoretical texts, including Leaning into the Light, that engage in various ways with these concerns. White re-presentation of Australian Aboriginality Historically, only non-Aboriginal Australian authors were privileged in their thematic and character representations of Aboriginality in texts, and only white critics and

1 Critics and commentators use the terms ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘Indigenous’ interchangeably. Both terms are used in this exegesis to reflect this varying usage, and are prefaced by ‘Australian’ where it is deemed necessary for specific contextualization. Likewise with the use of the terms ‘other’ and ‘Other’ which are written variously with both a lower and upper case ‘o’ (not to be confused with Lacan’s psychoanalytic terms ‘other ‘and ‘Other’, where the upper and lower cases have significantly different referents).

6 academics mapped the representational and theoretical terrain. Healy’s book Literature and the Aborigine in Australia (1978) was one of the first to collate and analyse a number of texts by non-Aboriginal writers dealing with indigenous material to consider the “efforts of white Australian writers to come to grips with the Aborigine” (p.2). Healy’s analysis of the writings of authors as diverse as Thomas Keneally and Henry Kendall, works chronologically through the decades providing historical context for the events and characters depicted. His book concludes with a brief chapter on Aboriginal writers such as Kath Walker, Kevin Gilbert and Jack Davis and it notes that “contexts are emerging with which it will be possible to speak seriously” of this writing” (ibid, p.3). “Speaking seriously” about Indigenous Australian writing occurred sporadically until, some ten years after Healy’s book, Canadian Adam Shoemaker’s Black Words, White Page (1988) “emerged” to provide a contextual (but non-Indigenous) account. In his pioneering and political approach, Shoemaker claimed that despite the generally held belief that “Black” Australian writing did not really begin until the 1960s, the writing of David Unaipon counters this myth as he “produced a significant body of work starting in the 1920s” (in Hergenhan, 1988, p.36). Based on the writings of Edward Said (Orientalism, 1978) and Frantz Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks, 1952), the eighties and nineties in Australian literary-critical history witnessed the emergence of postcolonial theoretical frameworks2 to accommodate a more finessed analysis of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous writing dealing with indigenous themes and characters. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (1989) co-authored by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin set out some of the key terms and major discursive tenets of a postcolonial approach relevant to the Australian context. In recent years, control of the theoretical and literary critical paradigms governing Aboriginal representation has been tempered by both indigenous and non-indigenous debates over ownership and shaping of postcolonial theory and ideology (Muecke, 1992; Ashcroft, Griffiths, Tiffin, 1995; Narogin, 1997; Moreton-Robinson, 2004). Concerned about the colonising and abstract

2 Postcolonial criticism has many forms and intentions but in general terms it describes a process by which the critic/reader interrogates the universalism of a work exposing its Western cultural bias and thus “eroding the colonialist ideology by which the (colonised and their) past have been devalued” (Barry, 1995, p.192).

7 tendencies in a postcolonial theory energized by white critics, Indigenous Australian critic and academic Victor Hart writes:

Postcolonial studies are becoming a celebratory cover-up of a dangerous period in Aboriginal peoples’ lives and especially a cover-up on the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ relating to the genocide of Aboriginal peoples past and present. The possibilities of developing a dialogical approach to teaching and learning becomes encapsulated and circumscribed by its loyalty to post colonialist theory, not to real word situations. (Hart, 2003, p.14)

It can be said then that since the 1960s and the rise to prominence of Aboriginal authors, critics, academics and activists, increasing numbers of Indigenous Australians have defined and articulated their identity through various modes of representation, including fiction, life writing, film and television. Moreover there is a developing body of material generated by indigenous writers and academics that is defining the theoretical, conceptual and ethical parameters of the field of Indigenous representation, and paving the way for both non-Indigenous and Indigenous writers to engage fruitfully and creatively with indigenous concerns. Indigenous Australian critics such as Marcia Langton and Terri Janke have increasingly engaged with protocols, issues of intersubjectivity and ethical debates around who speaks for whom, especially in those texts written by non-Aboriginal writers about Aboriginal characters, relationships and themes. The speaking ‘white’ voice in the novella of this thesis, Leaning into the Light, is engaged fulsomely with a largely indigenous community, so one of the major issues this situation raises which is also of central concern in the critical mass of theory by both indigenous and non-indigenous writers and critics is the concept of the ‘other’. How does a white writer represent an ‘other’ around whom there is an entire history of cultural erasure?

It is not possible to consider the issues of representation of Aboriginal characters in Australian literature without reference to broader socially constructed ‘texts’ and discourses circulating in Australian culture. Muecke (1992, p.21) argues that Aboriginality is constructed in discourse, that is, publicly available ways of speaking and writing that are produced by ideological apparatuses such as colonial economies. Discourse in its cultural sense, refers to “the site where social forms of organization engage with systems of signs in their production of texts, thus reproducing or changing

8 the sets of meanings and values which make up a culture” (Hodge in Muecke, 1992, p.22). Narratives are another form of discourse which have the capacity to engage with, even shift, other, sometimes dominant discourses around issues of identity and relations of power in the social and symbolic order. Representation too is a complex concept with ideological, interpretive and audience issues at stake. For the creative practitioner constantly engaged in processes of aesthetic reflection,3 the dilemmas around representation are compounded in a situation where there is cultural sensitivity about content. In his comments about representations of the Orient, Said argues that:

In any instance of at least written language, there is no such thing as a delivered presence, but a re-presence, or a representation. The value, efficacy, strength, apparent veracity of a written statement about the Orient therefore relies very little, and cannot instrumentally depend, on the Orient as such. On the contrary, the written statement is a presence to the reader by virtue of its having excluded, displaced, made supererogatory any such real thing as "the Orient". (1978, p.21)

There is a global history of conflicting and changing discourses around the ‘representations’ of Indigenous identities and communities which this exegesis, because of its length and the nature of the creative project, can only briefly address. In the Australian context, many historical, social and political discourses of Aboriginality have taken place within a singular discursive regime of the colonial enterprise in order to sustain the foundation myth of settlement. It is important to remember that colonialism was not just a physical movement; it was also a textual one, as explorers’ and colonists’ diaries, reports and letters left a textual record expressive of unequal power relationships (Martinello, 1999). Hodge and Mishra (1999, p.26) believe that in order to reconcile themselves to the foundation myth of Australian settlement, white Australians have had to “annul, defuse, displace and negate the intractable conditions of the foundation event." In the past, this was achieved through a number of strategies. The first was the

3 The methodological orientation of this project was a creative-led practice incorporating a number of other methods. Practice-led research is based on research models known as reflection in action, collaborative inquiry and participant research; all of which deal with research situated within a professional practice (Schon, 1983). The underlying tenet of this type of inquiry is that professional practitioners possess knowledge that is personal and tacit. A practice-led research approach is based on the idea of creating new knowledge and improving practice through systematic reflection during and after professional/creative practice.

9 suppression of Aborigines from major conduits of white social discourse. This resulted in the elision of Aboriginal histories and literature. Furthermore, this suppression was not total, because it was necessary to ensure some representation of Aborigines was leaked to ‘confer legitimacy’ onto the foundation myth (Hodge and Mishra, 1999, p.27).

Nineteenth century literature by white writers dealing with Aboriginal themes often expressed a contradictory representation of Aboriginal people and their religious beliefs. The colonial formation at the core of Australia's identity has been responsible for informing the ways in which Aboriginal people have been represented – from childish, primitive, noble, to treacherous, cunning, dirty and savage (Moreton-Robinson, 2004). According to Bradford (2001), there was an ambivalent/ even conflicting set of discursive signifiers – on the one hand Indigenous Australians were portrayed as pagans or devil worshippers, on the other hand Aboriginal spirituality was considered something powerful (ibid). The representation of Indigenous sacred life is often conveyed through the trope of the Aboriginal elder with strong spiritual knowledge; however this spirituality was devalued because of the perceived power it conferred, so it was relegated to a level of primitiveness, and in contrast to the ‘advanced’ and organized religion and beliefs of non-Indigenous cultures (Bradford, 2001). The social texts of the time served to reinforce perceptions of the Aboriginal people as ‘Other’ and ‘Inferior’ and on the basis of this discriminatory categorization, Aboriginal people have subsequently endured genocide, mass incarceration, deportation to missions and the removal of generations dictated by government policy and legislation (Martinello, 1999). Bradford’s argument draws attention to the ways in which these events and circumstances have been recorded in texts through representations of Aboriginal people by non-Aboriginal people, but in this process have transformed Aboriginal reality into an 'account' where the Aboriginal subject becomes the object or the homogenized, non-differentiated ‘Other’ (Langton, 1993). 4

4 In recent times non-indigenous and unified ‘accounts’ of Aboriginal identity and culture have been contested with the publication of creative non-fiction pieces by indigenous authors such as Ruth Hegarty’s Is that you Ruthie? (1998), Joe McGuiness’s Son of Alyandabu: My Fight for Aboriginal Rights (1991) as well as the widely acclaimed Don’t Take Your Love to Town (1988) by Ruby Langford Ginibi, and Doris Pilkington’s Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence (1996). These texts illustrate the desire on the part of

10 The sense of ‘Other’ was fundamental to colonialism, where discourse was based on binary constructions of self/other, civilized/native, us/them. In this discursive framing, white remained the subject/self and Aboriginals were the objectified other. Doris Pilkington (Nugi Garimara) writes: “We know how the colonists with their contempt and superior attitudes, contributed to much of the bias, ethnocentricity and negative stereotyping in our history books” (Pilkington in Brewster, 2000, p.158). Such constructions and representations of the ‘Other’ have been deeply rooted in past cultural practices and have become strongly entrenched social myths (Pickering, 2001). A number of cultural theorists (Pickering, hooks, Bradford) have considered the representation of Indigenous characters in regard to the potent emotions they evoke, their capacity to be exoticised and eroticised by white writers intent on ethnic distancing. This process, they argue, is a way of rationalising and controlling what is regarded as not-self, and eschews any self-reflection. In other words the white self is an unproblematic positioning in such texts, against which the ‘Other’ must be accounted for and explained. Pickering comments on the forms this objectification and control assume/d in such representations. The ‘Other’, he writes, can be turned into

an object of happy assimilation, as a spectacle, and exhibit, a source of entertainment, or as fantasy. The Other can be drawn into fantasies of desire, longing, envy and seduction in the interests of compensating for some perceived deficiency of cultural identity or estrangement from inherited cultural values. (Pickering, 2001, p.49) bell hooks (1992) refers to this phenomena as the “commodification of Otherness” that perpetuates the myth that there is pleasure to be found in the racial difference. According to hooks, “fucking” was a way to confront the ‘Other’ who was considered to be "more worldly, sensual and sexual because they were different....the direct objective was not simply to sexually possess the Other; it was to be changed in some way by the encounter" (hooks, 1992, p.24). Representing the black person as a stereotypical object of fantasy and desire exacerbates the distance of the ‘Other’; by objectifying and reifying the black body to an erotic position, black people can be reduced to something more akin to animal than human. individual Australian Aboriginal individuals to tell their life stories, many of which deal with dispossession and discrimination, but from inside the minority culture.

Edward Said has famously theorised ‘Orientalism’ as a fascination with the culture of the colonized, in conjunction with the suppression of their capacity to speak or truly know it because of dominant forms of re-presentation (Hodge and Mishra, 1991, p.27). A similar phenomenon in Australian culture has been labelled "Aboriginalism" (Bradford, 2001). A core theme of this is that since the ‘Other’ cannot represent themselves, they must therefore be represented by others, who know more about them than they do. This position was strongly anticipated by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin White Masks (1952) in which he identified the paradigm of ‘Other’ or ‘Not-self’ to register the implication that asserting the “white self as subject in discourse is to leave the black Other as object” (Goldie, 1989, p.233). Bradford contends that one of the “effects of Aboriginalist discourse is an emphasis on the virtue of the white author or expert who mediates Aboriginality to a non-Aboriginal audience” (Bradford, 2001, p.116). Regardless of whether or not the non-Aboriginal author is sympathetic to the causes of Aboriginal Australia, the author is viewing the situation through the lens of a European perspective which remains unambiguous, even taken for granted.

Hodge and Mishra (1991) apply this Aboriginalist reading to a number of 20th century Australian literary texts representing Aboriginal characters and inter-racial relations including Katherine Susannah Pritchard’s Coonardo (1958) and Thomas Keneally’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972). Coonardoo is identified as a constructing a new foundation myth as it addresses complex issues of ownership in the frontier space, and while it goes some way to acknowledging the devastating effects of the colonial enterprise it draws back from allowing the inter-racial relationship between Hugh, a non- indigenous landowner and Coonardoo an indigenous woman, to flourish as a solution to the situation. In Keneally’s text, the character, Jimmie, identified as a “half-breed”, is excluded in important ways from his Aboriginality, and only the ‘pure’ Aborigines are represented as capable of understanding their own culture (Hodge and Mishra, 1991). Jimmie is punished for trespassing on white culture and white womanhood. Keneally and Pritchard provide a forked positioning in that they critique racist attitudes grounded in the colonial mentality while at the same time making it clear that the text cannot move

12 beyond this positioning because, in representing the time/space of the events, the historical ontology is dominated by white racial superiority. In both cases the ‘other’ is spoken for and about and is given limited subjectivity or it is filtered through the superior understandings of the omniscient narrators. These nuanced readings in the Hodge and Mishra text are in contrast to the more simplistic analyses offered by Healy (1978), and mark the progress as well as the problems present in charting the postcolonial representational terrain.

Other non-Indigenous Australian authors in more recent times have attempted to explore the devastating effects of colonialism on the Australian Aboriginal, not by trying to speak ‘for’ the other, but to make some sense of postcolonial realities. Instances of hybridity as well as cross-cultural encounters and exchanges have featured strongly in non-Indigenous literary representations, particularly in the post-Mabo period. Homi Bhabha sees hybridity as a valuable form of subversive opposition since it displaces and interrogates sites of discrimination (in Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, 1995). It is used to describe “newly composed, mixed or contradictory identities resulting from immigration, exile and migrancy. It entails a “double consciousness” (Bourke, 2005) and the possibility of occupying new inter-raced, inter-cultural spaces. David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon (1993) deals with the dilemma of how to represent difference and the encounter with and representation of the other, through the hybrid character of Gemmy Fairley (Randall, 2004). Gemmy’s sixteen years of living within an Aboriginal community, his encounters with alterity, and his eventual ‘rescue’ by white settlers, create a “double consciousness” which will not allow him to fully re-embrace his own white culture which in effect becomes a form of ‘other’. Thus Malouf uses hybridity in his novel to question standardised notions of Aboriginality and to problematise whiteness, something which it has in common with whiteness theory. In this respect the Patrick White’s novel A Fringe of Leaves (1976), a pre-Mabo text, anticipates something of this cultural shifting through its focus on the encounter with otherness. Moreover in his characterisation of Ellen Roxburgh and her experiences with aboriginality, White reveals his awareness that, like men, “all women are enmeshed in racialised power relations that have been historically

13 constituted through discourses and the material conditions that furnished and sustain them” (Moreton-Robinson, 2000, p.71).

Alex Miller’s 2003 novel Journey to the Stone Country is perhaps the text aligned most closely to Leaning into the Light, in that it is written within an increasingly aware cultural climate for writers seeking to explore Indigenous and non-Indigenous inter-cultural relationships in their creative work. Like Malouf’s novel, Journey to the Stone Country deals with inter-racial relationships and the legacies of colonization. When nominating this novel for the Miles Franklin award, which he eventually won, the judges praised Miller for his delicate handling of race relations:

Issues crucial to any reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians could be difficult territory for a novelist, but Miller handles them with skill and tact, ensuring that they come alive on the page (in Wyndham, 2003, p.3).

Certainly Miller demonstrates his dexterity in making the Jangga landscape of North Queensland a haunting backdrop for a number of encounters between Indigenous and non-Indigenous characters in the novel where "what has already been lost hollows out the people who stoically remain" (Pierce, 2004, p.310), but it is arguable whether the Aboriginal characters or the non-Aboriginal characters “come alive on the page”. Instead they remain somewhat two dimensional and seem to be mouthpieces for a range of views about race relations. Miller’s narrative bends under the weight of its well-intentioned polemic as it tries to cover wide-ranging issues on the social/political agenda in terms of Indigenous and non-Indigenous history and culture. Often Indigenous characters are reduced to familiar stereotypical positions in these debates. The Aboriginal character Arner for example arguably symbolises the frustrated and unfulfilled Aboriginal future; there is also a part Fijian Aboriginal character who, “never benefited from Land Council grants, unlike others who suddenly ‘discovered’ they was Murris after all” (p.329). The romantic partnership that develops between the main Aboriginal character Bo Rennie and the white female character Annabelle Beck is narrated by a third person omniscient perspective. This point of view tends to render Bo’s character through stock physical signifiers that recur throughout the book and depict his physicality (e.g. drawing on his

14 cigarette, sucking on his teeth p.43) without any inner monologue, while Annabelle is a somewhat stereotyped rendition of a sympathetic and well-intentioned white female. The result is a narrative overwhelmed by its attempts to be politically correct and pay its ethical and moral dues, while courageously seeking to forge into new areas in terms of the representations of inter-racial relationships. Miller’s work perhaps demonstrates how the creative practitioner’s awareness of debates around acceptable representations of the Indigenous ‘other’ and issues of authenticity of character can hijack the white writer’s creative flow.

Authenticity One of the more difficult undertakings in completing the creative work for this project was trying to ensure and convey an acceptable level of authenticity in character, setting, and dialogue.5 The notion of authenticity in the representation of Indigenous characters is currently under consideration in cultural and literary studies; it is being interrogated as a concept that can be potentially as damaging as earlier forms of representation. One reason for rejecting notions of ‘authentic’ Aboriginality is because of the homogenizing tendency in such labeling, a tendency implicit in earlier held beliefs of the Aborigine as a primitive or ‘noble savage’. Griffiths (in Ashton, Griffiths and Tiffin, 1985, p.238) has greater concerns that the concept conceals processes at a deeper level that may be about the “inscription of ourselves displaced over the Australian Aboriginal.” As Narogin (1997, p.183) alleges of the push for reconciliation, mainstream white readers want their Indigenous people to be either as similar to themselves as possible, or to be completely

5 Research of documents and relevant texts was necessary to provide a sense of verisimilitude to the time period and the setting of the novella: that is, the mission experience of Cape York, Queensland in the 1960s. Most of the historical accuracy for the creative work was derived from secondary resources such as Kylie Tennant’s Speak You so Gently (1959), a memoir of her visit to an Aboriginal community mission in the 1950s, an interview with Bunty Warby, the wife of a Mission Superintendent in the 1950s, and studies by David Thompson, a former clergyman from that community. A number of other minor details were garnered in casual conversation with community members over the years. Finally my own experience on the Cape York Aboriginal community, located as it was within a white Western perspective, energised the creation of my white female character, Elaine in the novella. Both the historical facts (the mission, its inhabitants, the social changes during the sixties) and theoretical perspectives (postcolonial theory, Indigenous and Non-Indigenous theories of representation) informed the writing process in the manner of creative led practice.

15 the ‘Other’ and black as possible. The impact of this, Narogin contends, may be limiting the full range of representations available to Aboriginal people and to writers Indigenous or otherwise. The idea of authenticity, then, has proven to be relative and context-bound.

In 1997, the question of authenticity of authorship arose when two non-Aboriginal Australians adopted an Aboriginal persona to publish a supposed autobiography entitled My Own Sweet Time (Rolls, 1999). This example of appropriation of Aboriginality was extreme and it raised questions in the literary community about what it means to be writing from a minority perspective in Australia. Because minority groups have a limited speaking and writing voice, whatever enters the public arena can be particularly influential, as Mycak argues: "Behind writing and the literary text as an object of theoretical musing stands writing and the literary text as a strategic tool, a discursive weapon that can disempower and wound real people living real lives” (Mycak, 2002, p.13). The issue is complicated in terms of the autonomy of the writer. Seeking authority for authenticity in imaginative work can be destructive and lead to the pressure to deceive (Sallis in Lynch, 2003), to a corruption of the aesthetic process. Not all appropriation is on such a scale as the above case. Acclaimed Australian poet Les Murray is dismissive of allegations that he appropriates an Aboriginal presence in his poetry through his connection to landscape and country. He suggests that if Aborigines “had more confidence in their own cultures, they wouldn’t regard them as threatened by the attempts of someone from outside them to learn and appreciate their wisdom” (Murray in Rolls, 1999, p.120).

A core dilemma in issues of authenticity in Indigenous representation is the notion of Aboriginality itself. The term 'Aboriginal' has been one of the most disputed in the country, and the most currently accepted definition is that of the High Court, which is primarily socially based (Langton,1993). Whilst it is not the purpose of this exegesis to propose any definitive answers to this difficult area, it is necessary to consider the questions – Who is Aboriginal? What does it mean to be Aboriginal? If there is not consensus amongst Aboriginal people, then how is a non-Aboriginal author to represent Aboriginality? The problem here is inherent in the questions, because to ask this is to

16 imply an essentialist definition of Aboriginality, and in the process necessitates the homogenising of very different experiences and interests (Martinello, 1999). Muecke (1992) however refines these questions and more closely identifies what has become a key element of this creative project, in his questioning/exploring how the image of an Aborigine is constructed in language.

Two commonly accepted academic definitions of Aboriginality are – Aboriginality as persistence, and Aboriginality as resistance (Martinello, 1999). Aboriginality as persistence bases identity on biological and cultural factors through cultural continuity (Martinello, 1999). Biological determinism is often argued against on the grounds of racial discrimination. The factors that contribute to cultural continuity are broader but still tend to essentialise Aboriginal characteristics, basing them on anthropological cultural markers such as adhering to the Dreaming or Aboriginal world view, having an intimate relationship with the land, basing social interactions on kinship and speaking more than one language, that may relate more to those living in remote communities (Martinello, 1999). Both of these interpretations of Aboriginality reinforce the sense of otherness that determines visibility and placement in historical narratives (Martinello, 1999). The concept of Aboriginal as resistance is “not only a specific set of ideological elements, but also a living set of cultural practices which are in dynamic interaction with white society, and the cultural practices that characterise it” (Martinello, 1999, p.166). This theory offers a number of advantages in that being non-essentialist, it is more inclusive in the construction of a ‘national Aboriginality’. Some of the concepts it supports include the view that it is possible to be progressive in the appropriation of non- Aboriginal objects and practices; that Aboriginality is not just one identity but a multiplicity of constructed and embraced identities which encompass both urban and western educated Aboriginals ; that those who identify as Aboriginal are at liberty to do so and that non-Aboriginal support and collaboration are inclusive components of a wider structure of meaning around intercultural relationships (Martinello, 1999).

Martinello’s final point is pertinent to the representation of Indigenous characters by non- Indigenous writers. The challenge, as Langton points out, is to no longer debate about

17 'good' and 'bad' representations but to move away from this dualistic position. As hooks (1992) states,

'good' representation is often a reaction against the white stereotypical representation. Rather, the debate should be about transforming the image, questioning the images that subvert, posing alternatives and recognising that it is not an issue of 'us' and 'them'. (hooks, 1992, p.4)

The authenticity 6debates had a strong impact on the writing of Leaning into the Light based on the author’s experiences living in a remote Queensland Aboriginal community. Behind the work of fiction, was the reality of a Cape York Anglican mission formed by the merging of a number of separate Aboriginal groups and then moved to a new site of Government operation in the late 1960s. Thea Astley similarly founded many of her fictions on historical events in North Queensland. Her 1996 novel The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow was based on an event on the Indigenous penal colony of Palm Island in 1930, when the white superintendent ran amok killing his family and burning buildings until he was shot by an Aboriginal member of the community (Dale, 1999). Dale questions the ability of fiction as a tool for shaping understandings of historical events or

6 Issues of authenticity in the writing of Leaning into the Light were also important in microelements such as dialogue. It was necessary that the dialogue of the Aboriginal characters at the mission should be Aboriginal English, to portray some level of authenticity. Where possible, the dialogue was checked with an Aboriginal speaker. This dilemma of dialogue did affect the amount of dialogue spoken by the Aboriginal characters, though it was undesirable that they would be minimalised as characters because of the language. Personal experience in Aboriginal communities had shown that speech was often non-verbal, involved many hand signals and language that Sharifian (2000) has described as ‘minimal discourse’. This minimal discourse refers to the “…pervasive use of elliptical utterances denoting and describing incomplete propositions and events” (Sharifan, 2000, p.130).

Author Nadia Wheatley also considers the practical dilemmas that face the non-Aboriginal writer who writes Aboriginal characters, in particular the use of authentic dialogue. She asks: “Should we attempt to use Aboriginal English in order to make the dialogue realistic; or - when it comes from a white writer - does this look like pidgin on the page?” (Wheatley, 1997, p.22). Non-Aboriginal authors writing Aboriginal characters can be cautioned by the inconsistent dialogue of Alex Millers’ male character Bo Rennie in Journey to the Stone Country. Although this character speaks in Standard Australian English, and not Aboriginal English, some sections of dialogue are incompatible at times. At one point, Bo describes his grandmother with the phrase, “She was wearing a becoming gown with pearls at her throat” (p.107).This is inconsistent with Bo’s more typical utterances of. “I knew you was gonna come back one day,” (p.24) and, “He was a good old fella, your dad” (p.42).

18 challenging colonial narratives. She suggest that Thea Astley’s novel forcefully demonstrate the

power and powerlessness of narrative to represent histories made tangible through body and place, the tragic incommensurability between story and event which means that even the most powerful (re)telling of a tale is in danger of underestimating historical consequence (Dale, 1999, p.29).

This is likewise illustrated in Rabbit-Proof Fenc, Philip Noyce’s “powerful (re)telling” of Doris Pilkington-Garimara’s story of the Stolen Generation, where the legacy of colonisation is powerfully evoked, but resolved, in the happy ending required of the ‘return home’ narrative (Collins and Davis, 2004). This representation distorts the real events that concluded Pilkington-Garimara’s life story as recorded in her novel Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (1996). But how should we consider this? On the one hand Noyce’s alterations of (her)story call into question the ethical dimensions around authenticity and appropriation; on the other the alterations accord with Martinello’s concept of Aboriginality as resistance, thus taking these debates to a different and certainly more complex inter-subjective level.

Who Speaks for Whom? Issues of Authorship In post-colonial theory, the question of representation can be considered a political phenomenon – who speaks for whom? The ‘structures’ of address here involve the politics of pronoun; the use of ‘you’ and ‘I’ or ‘us’ and ‘them’ (Muecke, 1992), and the rejection of notions of ‘otherness’. Not only did Indigenous people endure the social and cultural effects of living as 'other', their own identity as hooks argues, was further shaped by this attitude. As a result of being positioned 'other' and subsequently enduring the cultural and social effects of this position, these colonial discourses had the power to make black people themselves see and experience themselves as 'other' (hooks, 1992). Marcia Langton opens up these spaces with her perspectives on Aboriginality, rejecting notions of otherness because, as she argues, viewed and lived from the inside, a culture is felt as normative not deviant. Langton suggests that Aboriginality is a culturally negotiated term that occurs on many levels from the personal to the social.

19 Aboriginality arises from the subjective experience of both Aboriginal people and non-Aboriginal people who engage in any intercultural dialogue, whether in actual lived experience or through a mediated experience... (Langton, 1993, p.31).

Building on this inter-subjectivity, Langton (1993) identifies three main categories of 'Aboriginality’ in a contemporary model of representation. The first is the experience of the Aboriginal person interacting primarily with other Aboriginal people in their own culture and communities. The second is the cultural and textual construction of Aboriginality that comprises the stereotyping and mythologising by Anglo-Australians with little first hand experience; this includes inherited and imagined representations of Aboriginal people as ' stone age savages' or drunks. The final category in the construction of Aboriginal representation is one that occurs when Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people engage in dialogue, testing images of each other and adjusting their responses to find some comprehension in the interaction. Living in and visiting Aboriginal communities, and forming friendships with Aboriginal people have informed this author’s own experiences of Aboriginality, so this third category of Aboriginality has been the most relevant to the writing of Leaning into the Light. Although there is no one version of 'Aboriginality', clearly writing from within the Aboriginal culture and experience, an Aboriginal author will be in a better position to represent Aboriginal subjectivities (Bradford, 2001).

The growing field of whiteness theory, which further enlightens the invisibility of the white centre in Australian society, is useful in this area of white representation of indigenous and non-Indigenous relationships such as the ones depicted in Leaning into the Light. Australian indigenous author Moreton-Robinson makes a number of claims that need consideration in the light of the accompanying creative work and has been at the forefront of forging an awareness of critical whiteness theory in Australia. There are two interrelated assumptions concerned in the problematic of whiteness.

The first is that there is significant privilege and power associated with being (identified as) white. The second is that much of this white race privilege extends from the monopoly that whiteness has over the norm (Ganley, 2003, p.12-13).

20 As Leaning into the Light deals largely with a white woman’s friendship with an indigenous woman, and is a novel by a white middle-class author, it already, by these facts alone, occupies a position of “privilege and power”. However the novel also draws attention to this understanding in its portrait of a number of white missionary characters who fail to question their own racialised views. Moreton-Robinson argues that in the past, non-Aboriginal women generally precluded friendship with Aboriginal women and displayed a maternalism that maintained their position of superiority (Moreton-Robinson, 2000). This is demonstrated strongly in the novel in the character of the mission Boss’s wife, Martha, while the character of Elaine and the portrayal of her friendship with Bebel also to a large extent problematise whiteness. To claim that Leaning into the Light has intentionally conformed to an acceptable way of white writing about Indigenous material is, however, misleading. In attempting to render in fictional form the experiences that had foundation in the real, there was no guarantee that the representation would necessarily be subordinated to a conscious construction of correctness. However it can be claimed that issues of representation were pressing both at the conscious and unconscious levels of the creative act, as well as in the processes of reflection that marked the progress of the piece.

The question for the author intent on exploring and foraging for the stuff of their writing is that she/he risks trespassing on all kinds of territories and taboos. So preventing the non-Indigenous author writing on Aboriginal themes based on their own ethnic or cultural group is a form of censorship that denies the communication of ideas through art (Gray, 2000). There is little doubt that there is a double bind for those non-Indigenous authors willing to chance the perils of writing on Aboriginal themes or characters. If the tone of Aboriginal issues and characters is positive, there is the risk of being accused of sanitising and ‘whitewashing’ the issues for the comfort of white middle-class readership. If the tone is negative, there are accusations of ‘ghettoising’ and confirming that the Indigenous people cannot be responsible for themselves (Gray, 2000). With such difficulties of representation, it may become increasingly common for Australian authors to give issues of Aboriginality a wide berth in their creative works. Intentionally excluding areas of Aboriginality where they may naturally occur puts Australian

21 literature in danger of presenting a ‘white Australian monoculture’ by inadvertently excluding the ‘other’ (Wheatley, 1997). The Anglo-centric Australian culture portrays representations of whiteness through the popular media, producing the ideologies of national identity, mateship and individualism through television, novels, museums, newspapers and performing and visual arts (Moreton-Robinson, 2000). There needs to be a space made for more Aboriginal authors to extend the representations of Aboriginality in Australian culture, but conducive to Langton’s theory of inter-subjectivity, there must also be a place for the non-Indigenous author who has personal experiences with Aboriginal people and communities. One such instance of the difficulties of defending this position arose in the screening of the film Australian Rules, which was based on the novel Deadly Unna, written by non-Aboriginal author Phillip Gwynne and which in turn was founded on a real event. Although the book was highly acclaimed, and set as a study text in the South Australian secondary school curriculum, the film was criticised at its premiere. The media was quick to raise questions about the validity of white filmmakers representing this Aboriginal event, and Phillip Gywnne was forced to defend his position as author. Gwynne, who co-wrote the screenplay for the movie said it was his story about growing up in the area. Although the setting involved an Aboriginal community and Aboriginal characters and relationships, it centered on a young, white protagonist. Gwynne says, "I don't know if you can deny me the right to tell my story" (Maddox, 2002). "It is not a black story," he says. "It is a white story that intersects 100 per cent with black peoples' lives" (Ellingson, 2002, p.1).

Marcia Langton (1993) maintains that ethical, post-colonial critique and practice by non- Aboriginal people in the creation of art forms is achievable. Furthermore any assumption that Aboriginal people are able to make 'better' representations of being Aboriginal is based on the assumption of 'otherness' and assumes a ‘true’ representation of Aboriginality that gives no regard to cultural, historical, sexual and gender variations (Langton, 1993). As a non-Indigenous author writing about Indigenous characters and cultures, it is easy to forget that one is writing from within a privileged power position, so cognisance of protocols that Indigenous writers have put in place can provide culturally sensitive directives, while not necessarily guaranteeing the best outcome.

Protocols for Representing Australian Indigenous People Although the need for authenticity is academically debatable, to the artist, some level of ‘authenticity’ is necessary not only to give some credibility and substance to the work, but respect to the Aboriginal community. Protocols for literature have been written and promoted by government authorities in conjunction with Aboriginal legal advisors such as Terri Janke (2003). Authenticity is promoted in this way as an appropriate way to work with Indigenous communities and show respect.

‘Authenticity’ refers to the cultural source of Indigenous heritage material. Giving proper consideration to authenticity means respecting customary laws or cultural obligations and ensuring that the appropriate context is given to the cultural material. (Janke, 2002, p.10)

There is no longer any excuse for pleading ignorance with respect to issues around representations of Aboriginality in the Arts. In recent years there have been moves towards policy writing that address the protocols artists should employ when using Aboriginal themes and characters. Janke contends that having protocols in place can help in ensuring engagement with Indigenous cultural material, Indigenous people and their communities. These protocols can encourage interaction based on values of faith and respect (in Australian Film Commission, 2003, p.6). Whilst not legally binding, such protocols can become industry standard over time. The practical solutions for Australian authors are also based on mutual respect and responsibility. Key issues are not of censorship of the non-Indigenous author, rather copyright and community ownership (Wheatley, 1993). Wheatley (1997) proposes sensible planning and thought when including Aboriginal characters and themes in non-Aboriginal texts, not censorship or ‘thought-policing’, but respect and politeness. The use of methodology sensitive to Aboriginal individuals and communities and conduct that is respectful of these aspects are paramount.

There is also less likelihood of non-Aboriginal authors filtering Aboriginality through a white perspective if there is consultation with Aboriginal people (Bradford, 2001). The

23 reality is that the future of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal discourse lies in mutual obligation and respect. Aboriginal poet Jennifer Martiniello (in Heiss, 2002, p.200) says, For many issues there is also a white story, not just a black story - after all, we didn't create the last 200 years of crap all by ourselves. So long as white writers are aware there are boundaries they cannot cross when they are writing, and where or what the appropriate protocols are for dealing with Aboriginal people, their stories and their communities, then their work may be approved.

Conclusion Through analytical engagement with a number of contemporary theories of Aboriginality and with fictional works by non-Indigenous authors dealing with Indigenous characters and themes, this exegesis has addressed key issues such as authenticity, otherness and ethical dilemmas around who speaks for whom. These issues arose naturally out of the writing project itself, and informed the ongoing processes of writing, editing and re- writing Leaning into the Light. They include the perceived representation of the ‘other’ in our post-modern, post-colonial society; the representation of a culture of which one has only a superficial understanding in any form; the large risk of attempting to write dialogue in a language that is not the author’s ‘native tongue’, and the clear and present danger of reinforcing stereotypes of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous identity. These concerns are as much a part of the processes of self-reflexive artistic practice as they are part of the processes of inter-subjectivity that Langton identifies as being at the core of representation and the defining of otherness.

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