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Countries / Oceania

Australia

works
93
56 books · 37 films
period covered
1853–1998
language of writing
English

In Australia there are songs that are maps. The tracks that Aboriginal people call songlines in English cross the continent over hundreds of kilometres, and each section of the route corresponds to a portion of song: the melody follows the relief, the words name the waterholes, the rocks, the trees. A man who knows his song can cross a desert he has never seen, because the song tells him where to drink. Territory, narrative and law are there a single object.

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That system has been working for more than sixty thousand years, which makes Aboriginal cultures the oldest in continuous activity on the planet. There were around two hundred and fifty languages before 1788; some twenty remain that are passed on to children. What colonisation destroyed is not only a population, it is an oral library without a copy, attached to places to which its owners were denied access. Some narratives cannot in fact be published: knowledge of them is restricted by sex or by degree of initiation, and ethnographers of the early twentieth century circulated texts that the communities concerned today consider stolen.

White literature long built itself on another narrative, that of the bush, the convict and the bushranger, with its ballads and its outlaw heroes. It produced in 1943 the finest literary hoax of the century: two conservative poets invented a dead modernist poet, sent his verses to an avant-garde review which published them with enthusiasm, then revealed the joke, and the editor was prosecuted for obscenity. From the nineteen sixties, Aboriginal voices entered the written word: Oodgeroo Noonuccal in poetry, Jack Davis in the theatre, Doris Pilkington in life writing.

What awaits the reader is a country that writes two incompatible histories on the same ground. The novel that opens this page was published in 1901 by a young woman whose heroine voices her wish to write and her distrust of marriage.

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A way to begin

My Brilliant Career

Gillian Armstrong · 1979

A girl from the bush who dreams of writing, free of rights: the novel Gillian Armstrong brought to the screen in 1979.

The entry See the author

Sybylla Melvyn watches her father make one bad deal after another and the family end up on a poor farm near Goulburn. At her grandmother's she finds books, music and a rich neighbour, Harold Beecham, who courts her; later placed as a governess with a coarse family, she dreams of writing and distrusts the conventions of marriage.

Timeline

  1. -58000Aboriginal culturesOne of the oldest narrative traditions in the world, long denied.
  2. 1890–1901Literary nationalismThe bush, the convict, egalitarianism. Australia tells itself as it federates.
  3. 1970–1990Cinema revivalWeir, Miller, Campion. An industry reborn from nothing.

Reading keys

1Names and kinship
  • Aboriginal people name themselves by their people and their country: one is Noongar, Yolngu, Arrernte, and the word "country" designates a territory for which one is responsible, not a property.
  • Classificatory kinship systems distribute everyone into sections that determine whom one may marry, and a word like "brother" covers a wide group.
  • One avoids pronouncing the name of a dead person during a period of mourning, and some people temporarily change their name for that reason. The media give a warning before showing the image of a deceased person.
  • The British-origin names of white authors may mask Aboriginal ancestry, long concealed in order to escape the child removal policies.
2What is said and unsaid
  • The Stolen Generations, Aboriginal children removed from their families until the nineteen seventies, are the central subject of Aboriginal literature and a public dispute.
  • The massacres of the colonial period and the absence of a treaty, unlike in New Zealand, are raw subjects.
  • Certain knowledge is restricted: men only, women only, or initiates. A narrative may break off for that reason, and publishing it would be a fault.
  • The protocol of acknowledgement of country, pronounced before any public meeting, is an established practice and not a politeness.
3Religion and the unseen
  • The Dreaming is not a dream but an order of the world: the time of the beings who shaped the landscape, and which remains active in the places.
  • Sacred sites are precise places whose destruction is experienced as a murder, and several court cases follow from that.
  • Christianity is in the majority among Australians of European origin and widely adopted by Aboriginal people, often at the same time as the Dreaming.
  • The tjurunga, a sacred object containing the essence of an ancestor, is not to be shown, and its reproduction in older books is today contested.
4Colours, rites, mourning, feasts
  • Aboriginal mourning, sorry business, mobilises the extended family for weeks, with prohibitions of name, of place and of image.
  • Red ochre and the white of kaolin are the colours of ceremonies, applied to the body.
  • 26 January, the national holiday, is called Invasion Day or Day of Mourning by part of the Aboriginal population, and the date is contested.
  • The smoking ceremony, in which leaves are burnt to purify a place or people, opens official events.
5Shared references
  • The narratives of the Dreaming, with the Rainbow Serpent who dug the rivers, and the emergence of the ancestors from the earth, form the common Aboriginal stock.
  • The collections published in 1896 and 1898 by a woman settled in the bush, with the Euahlayi narratives, are the oldest accessible collections, to be read with a critical note on their vocabulary.
  • Ned Kelly, an outlaw hanged in 1880 with his sheet-metal armour, is the national hero of white Australians and the world's first feature film was devoted to him in 1906.
  • The bush and its figures, the shearer, the swagman, the convict, constitute a reserve of images for white literature.
6Misreadings to avoid
  • The Dreaming is not a mythology in the past: it is an active legal and territorial system, invoked before the courts.
  • Aboriginal narratives published in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were often published without authorisation, and some are today withdrawn at the request of the communities.
  • Australia has never signed a treaty with its first peoples, which distinguishes it from New Zealand and explains the nature of its debates.
  • Written Aboriginal literature is recent but it continues an infinitely older tradition, and reading it as an emergence is inaccurate.

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