Clare Bradford

Australian Aboriginal cultures are among the most ancient in the world, stretching back over more than sixty millennia. But it should not be supposed that these cultures maintain themselves merely by reinvoking ancient traditions and textual practices; rather, it is clear that they have always engaged in processes of adaptation and change within a rich and complex set of beliefs and practices. The colonisation of Australia has constituted the most extreme test of this regenerative capacity, and has been responsible for the loss and destruction of vast repertoires of language, narrative and ritual. Nevertheless, Aboriginal people were never merely the passive and helpless objects of colonial rule. Instead, the history of engagement between Aborigines and Western culture since 1788 shows that Aboriginal people have always selected, used and subverted aspects of Western textuality within their own textual practices.

This paper considers how processes of recuperation and renewal of Aboriginal cultures manifest in a group of texts published in 2000. Several of these texts are the work of young Aborigines: Goanna Jumps High, a book produced by students at a remote school in northern Queensland and including illustrations created by the children in conjunction with the white illustrator Narelle Oliver; and a collection of six picture books, under the general title ‘Once upon a Koori time’, published by tertiary students from Mildura in northern Victoria. The other text I consider is Pat Lowe and Jimmy Pike’s Desert Cowboy, a first-contact narrative focalised through the perspective of a young Aboriginal boy coming out of the Great Sandy Desert to live and work in pastoral stations during the 1950s. These texts both maintain traditional genres and narrative strategies, and engage in a politics of renewal. For instance, practices of collaborative and shared production are endemic to Aboriginal narrative practice, in tellings of stories of the Dreaming, in genres relating to the category of trustori, and in the cluster of narratives known as devilstori. Such collaborative practices are signalled in the peritexts of Desert Cowboy and the ‘Once upon a Koori time’ texts, as well as in instances of authorial presence in Goanna Jumps High.

Aboriginal-produced texts offer indigenous children the experience of narrative subjectivity by locating stories within Aboriginal culture; simultaneously, by representing Aboriginality to non-Aboriginal children, they address the racist discourses still present in Australian culture. More broadly and in relation to the national debate over reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous Australian prevalent in the new millennium, these texts contribute to processes of decolonisation through their recuperation of Aboriginal cultures and their contribution towards a rethinking of Australian cultural ideas.

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