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

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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 1 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 2 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: 3 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. 5 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
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