First Nations literatures

Whittaker uses English as both an object of ridicule and a tool of empowerment. In subverting the conventional rules of usage, she makes it her own. In her hand, English does and says and tells a different story. Audre Lorde said that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. And they won’t. But Blak writers like Whittaker use these tools to carve out their own spaces to build other story – to re-story Country with the old stories, and to create new ones.

Too Much Lip is, of course, not the first novel to include family violence or to expose its colonial roots. There are, however, risks with telling stories like these. Non-Indigenous readers could fail to recognise the strength of culture to mitigate intergenerational trauma, and not understand its roots in colonial violence and systemic racism. Some readers might see the Salters through an over-used deficit model, or believe they have the solutions to ‘fix’ Indigenous families. Instead, the Salters’ story shows how ineffective governments have been in trying to patch up the wounds of colonisation through paternalistic and draconian approaches.

Smith’s biggest achievement in Wade in the Water is her effort to stay true to all the different music she heard through writing the book and to reflect that in the sound of this book. The book is a gathering, and a chorus.

Robert Wood is a recipient of a 2017 SRB-CA Emerging Critics Fellowship. This is the second of three essays by…

When Petrina said she was being treated like a dog she was using the figure of speech that is common to our cultures. It’s the slight on dogs that almost any one of us can carelessly slip into. We say it when we feel as low as a dog might seem to be, when we are utterly demoralised as dogs can appear to be. When we are as low as some drinkers can get. When we are a lowly camp dog, as distinct from a frisky and free dingo, for instance, a species that comes from the north Asian wolf. Being treated like a dog might also mean being treated with less respect than even camp dogs get. Some dogs have been made kin but they are also bad dogs – disobedient, disruptive, ungrateful, feral, even self-destructive in their reckless ways. They seem to beg for the kicks they get. Dogs that deserve their punishment because they flout the rules of sociability. Outcast dogs, dogs who turned on themselves and others. Drunken dogs, you might say, but dogs that are still kin. Dogs that create a hell of a lot of grief all round.

Terra Nullius is terra nullius, but not as we know it. It’s colonisation, this continent, time, place, Country, race – but not quite as we know it.

Taboo is an extraordinary testament to the new energies in Aboriginal storytelling that have emerged since the 1990s, the decade the Mabo decision overturned the legal fiction of terra nullius and recognised Aboriginal land claims in Australian law for the first time. As Scott said in 2012: ‘This is an Aboriginal nation, you know. It’s black country, the continent. Some people are starting to think about: can we graft a contemporary Australian community onto its Indigenous roots?’

Desert Writing brings to readers stories of desert communities and the individuals who form part of them that are not often featured in literature or media. Train lines have been built, and airports made but the places aren’t any closer; these are remote places – far away from Australia’s heavily populated coastal cities, far from major centres; and far from the imagination of the mainstream population. This distance is what makes these places so interesting, their pasts and futures significant.’

We circle, we move, we leave and return. The grass isn’t still. Nor the water. Nothing is static. Country extends over borders.

‘I think Indigenous writers kind of need each other. I feel that more and more, that sense of camaraderie and community. We challenge each other to write better. It is sometimes hard when you’re perhaps the only black writer on a festival or you’re put into a situation where you have to represent a whole community. That’s why we take strength from each other.’ SRB editor Catriona Menzies-Pike speaks with Ellen van Neerven.