11 Section One—Mudrooroo: Wild Cat Trilogy and ‘Finish’ In Mudrooroo: A Critical Study, Adam Shoemaker claims: ‘It is hard to believe that the Black Australian novel has been so dominated by one individual.’4 A dictum of this magnitude might seem hyperbolic, yet the proof is well-documented. Mudrooroo has written several novels, two sequences being series, as well as nonfictional texts, and poetry and he has lectured on Aboriginal concerns, over a forty years span. The start was 1965, which, politically was not the most advantageous time for one then denoted as an Aborigine. Wild Cat Falling is Mudrooroo’s first novel and addresses the effects of incarceration of young Aboriginals in Australia’s welfare institutions and prison system. The book was published in 1965, just two years prior to the Australian Constitutional Referendum of 1967, until which time Aboriginal people were not recognized as full citizens of Australia under the law.5 This history (and clash against it) are central to Mudrooroo’s writing. Writing from the Fringe states ‘Aboriginal Literature begins as a cry from the heart directed at the whiteman.’6 His fiction incorporates this same anguish. Further, having such emotion is seen by Harold Bloom as an indication of canonical consideration. ‘An authentic canonical writer may or may not internalize her or his work’s anxiety, but that scarcely matters: the strongly achieved work is the anxiety.’7 Bloom is not saying oddities or controversy concerning the writer is important. Instead, it is what the work produces. Wild Cat Falling (1965), Doin Wildcat: A Novel Koori Script (1988) and Wildcat Screaming (1992), chronicles the chaotic and anxious events of a sometimes nameless, sometimes incarcerated Aboriginal narrator’s life. Prison, in various forms, is his song circle, 4 Adam Shoemaker, Mudrooroo: A Critical Study (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1993) 1. 5 Maureen Clark, ‘Reality Rights in the Wildcat Trilogy,’ Mongrel Signatures: Reflections on the Works of Mudrooroo, ed. Annalisa Oboe (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003) 45. 6 Mudrooroo, Writing from the Fringe: A Study of Modern Aboriginal Literature (Sydney: Hyland House, 1990) 1. 7 Harold Bloom, preface, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, by Bloom, (Harcourt Brace and Company, 1994) 8. 12 beginning with the narrator leaving gaol. ‘Today the end and the gates will swing to eject me, alone and so-called free. Another dept paid to society and I never owed it a thing.’8 Though sounding rebellious, incarceration has damaged him as he has embraced a certain degree of defeat. ‘For me Fremantle jail has been a refuge of a sort. They have accepted me here as I have accepted hopelessness and futility.’9 Mudrooroo, obviously, understands this mindset, yet transcends its boundaries, for, as has been observed, ‘the concepts of place, space and the real are central to the textual world of Mudrooroo, but they are not denoting specificities.’10 By doing so, he undermines the tenets which have operated to supplant the voices of Aboriginal people. Accordingly, he tells the story of that Other. In Wild Cat Falling, the nameless narrator has a reoccurring, metaphorical nightmare. Later he learns it is not that, but the remnants of an ancient Aboriginal dream. However, since he is separated from Aboriginal cosmology, it has become a haunting, until the explanation is given by an uncle. This elder re-arranges the nightmare, detailing its significance as a means of escaping (Western) limitations. The effect of this knowledge is positive. ‘The old voice trails on, but now I have remembered the dream. It has been in some secret part of my mind to which he has given me the key.’11 Though self-discovery is a positive, overall, the work is still contrarian. The subject matter and approach are Aboriginally based, yet paradoxically so, for the loner style of the work is shaped to fit nicely into Western sensibilities and literary expectations. Regardless, Mudrooroo writes about this Other intimately, and having been incarcerated himself, truly sees the whole world as antagonistic. He is thus a being who is angry and powerless against Western cultural hegemony (later, missionary zeal, and political/sexual power are also 8 Mudrooroo, Wild Cat Falling (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1965) 3. 9 Mudrooroo, Wild Cat Falling 3. 10 Clare Archer-Lean, ‘Place, Space and Tradition in the Writings of Mudrooroo,’ Mongrel Signatures: Reflections on the Work of Mudrooroo, ed. Annalisa Oboe (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003) 203. 11 Mudrooroo, Wild Cat Falling 127. 13 combatants). These tensions are major themes in his fiction and non-fiction. They can also be seen in his life. What can be gleamed from Mudrooroo’s public racial background and identity is that, even as a young man, he saw himself as a literary voice for the disenfranchised. As Shoemaker writes, his debut as an author occurred not in 1965, when Wild Cat Falling was released, but five years earlier, in a brief piece titled ‘Finish’, printed in the literary journal Westerly.12 The voice in ‘Finish’ is very consistent with that in Wild Cat Falling. ‘So the sentence was up, the last stinking minute; or nearly the last minute.’13 This short sketch of a hopeless ex-convict as a narrator is the palimpsest for the Wild Cat series. Curiously, he does not call himself an Aborigine; thus he could be an Everyman, though other (distinctive) component motifs are present. One element present in ‘Finish,’ as in several of Mudrooroo’s works, is the role of Christianity as a vehicle to control (the powerless/natives). Colonisation had to be justified by a Christian people which prided itself on a superior morality and culture. One way of doing this was by seeing a people in possession of a wanted land as being uncivilised, savages or even animals. British colonial expansion was not a blind immoral course of action, but a deliberate policy with an ever shifting ideology of justification behind it.14 Or, a useful crutch of sorts for convicts. ‘Like most criminals he [Jeff] professed a belief in God—everyone must have something to clutch to or they face void and madness.’15 But being receptive to the whims of the desperate, he also discusses the situational nature of Jeff’s life and religious fidelity. ‘Today Jeff was being released—did he thank God? No! All he could talk about 12 Shoemaker, Mudrooroo 9. 13 Colin Johnson, ‘Finish,’ Westerly 3 (1960): 30-31. 14 Mudrooroo, Fringe 7-8. 15 Johnson, ‘Finish,’ 30-31. 14 was getting drunk and having a girl.’16 Jeff’s relief seeks to refute the deadly force wrought by what some may well note as another form of oppression. Mudrooroo views Christian/missionary spheres as ‘institutionalized places of segregation, emblematic of the colonial endeavour to confine and control Aboriginal people and their means of cultural expression.’17 He then co-opts that control, showing the weaknesses and hypocrisy in Western institutions. There is also personal motivation, since he had been placed in a confining and abusive (religious) home for boys. The zeal in such locations, he feels, is pernicious, for they ‘have a long history in Australia of being physical places that demarcated limitations in Aboriginal freedom of movement, and mental places that regulated accepted cultural behaviour.’18 This can be seen in Wild Cat Screaming, the third novel that details Wild Cat’s life as an inmate; another demarcated space for the powerless. There he describes his younger experience at the Clontarf Christian Brothers’ Home with a pun, ‘As the Bible says: ‘Watch and prey lest you enter into temptation,’ and so they watched and caught us in temptation.’19 In this passage, Wild Cat discusses being young and pleasing himself, to wit he and another are caught by those who prey/pray then condemn, being called a ‘filthy little sinner.’20 As the abuse is intensified, the ‘interrogator’ changes his tactics from whipping him with a strap. ‘He throws me around the room and uses his fists and shoes.’21 The response is muted anger on the part of the narrator. ‘I’m filled with rage and pain and I’m silent with rage and hate.’22 When they are released, they do the act again, the only ‘revenge we can have against 16 Johnson, ‘Finish,’ 30-31. 17 Eva Rask Knudsen, ‘Mudrooroo's Encounters with the Missionaries,’ Mongrel Signatures: Reflections on the Works of Mudrooroo, ed. Annalisa Oboe (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003) 168. 18 Knudsen, ‘Mudrooroo's Encounters,’ 168. 19 Mudrooroo, Wildcat Screaming (1992; Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1993) 65. 20 Mudrooroo, Wildcat Screaming 66. 21 Mudrooroo, Wildcat Screaming 66. 22 Mudrooroo, Wildcat Screaming 66. 15 those prying eyes.’23 Such a display does show a rebellious spirit, but, sadly, it also tells the reader something about the sexual lives of most of Mudrooroo’ characters. Very few ever enjoy or are capable of intimacy. Yet although Mudrooroo honestly critiques the effects of Christian zeal on Aboriginal culture, he does not deny its hold. This enables him to situate male Aboriginal (impotency) fears (literal and figurative) within a model Christians and/or Westerners would understand. I comb my hair as best I can. It is in a crew-cut ordered by the chief warder. He must have read that bodgies wear their hair long and decided to do his bit in the fight against juvenile delinquency. Or maybe he remembered the Samson story.24 The reference appears again in Doin Wildcat, but written in Aboriginal vernacular. ‘Yuh know,’ I say to him, ‘yer air’s all wrong for the times. It was the mid ’fifties an we were into D.