Grossman, Michele (2006) When they write what we read: Unsettling Indigenous Australian life-writing. Australian Humanities Review, 39/40. ISSN 1325-8338

Abstract

Indigenous Australian writing has, since its emergence, been both constituted by and resistant to paradigms of Western, literacy-based formations of knowledge and representation. Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have been written into the historical and cultural record of the West since the initial encounters between settlers and indigenous peoples in post-contact Australia; as with other Indigenous peoples across the globe, this process has been 'inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism' (Smith 1999: 1). The record is an exceedingly dense one. Documentary representations (literary and visual) of Aboriginal peoples in what is now Australia appear as early as 1606 (Mulvaney 1990: 1-45) and persist over centuries in the diaries, letters, log books, court records, memoirs, fictions and reports of colonial administrators, missionaries, travellers, explorers, squatters, policemen, ethnographers and anthropologists.

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