First Nations literatures

Reading across Noel Pearson’s work, from his 1986 honours thesis on the ‘mission culture’ of his hometown of Hope Vale to this newest essay, A Rightful Place, there are notable consistencies. He is ultimately a romantic thinker, in the sense that he always aims to trace a course from disaster towards redemption, rather than mere remediation.

Birch’s fiction confronts the reader with rural and urban landscapes of abandonment, scenes of decay and decline. The Promise deals with late modernity’s wastelands and the lives our society is willing to lay to waste. The landscapes are sometimes those left behind after factory work has disappeared from established working class neighbourhoods.

The Swan Book bears all the hallmarks of Wright’s astonishing narrative powers: her linguistic dexterity, mashing words and phrases from high and low culture, from English, Aboriginal languages, French and Latin; her humour and scathing satire; her fierce political purpose; her genre bending; her virtuosic gift for interweaving stories on multiple levels, from the literal to the metaphoric, the folkloric and the mythic.

It seems to me that Lucashenko writes both with and against the perception that authentic Aboriginality is derived from the maintenance of land-based cultural practices and spiritual beliefs.