AustLit

'Alexis Wright's critically acclaimed third novel, The Swan Book (2013), has been analyzed profusely by scholars around the world. No matter how manifold these interpretative nets may be, they always refer to the character Oblivion Ethyl(ene), aka Oblivia. What is particularly telling in that regard is that Oblivia as the novel's protagonist and focalizer is a speechless child. As the article shows, Wright's so-called total novel constructs Oblivia and the virus in her brain as the novel's narrator(s), enabling her to fill her speechless world with words and meaning. Hence, as a mute narrator, Oblivia becomes one of the most unreliable but equally one of the most honest, life-affirming storytellers in contemporary fiction. The universe of her unspoken words reveals Oblivia's ability to communicate with the nonhuman and other-than-human, offering readers who are receptive a story about what it means to be posthuman in a world that defies posthumanism.' (Publication abstract)

'Claire G. Coleman’s science fiction novel The Old Lie (2019) evokes the blemished chapters of Australia’s history as the basis of a dystopian futuristic Earth. By using the metaphor of a secular apocalypse (Weaver) wrapped in the form of a space opera, she interrogates historical colonialism on a much larger scale to bring to the fore the distinctive Indigenous experience of Australia’s terra nullius and its horrific offshoots: the Stolen Generations, nuclear tests on Aboriginal land and the treatment of Indigenous war veteran, but this time experienced by the people of the futuristic Earth. Following a brief introduction of the concept of the “Native Apocalypse” (Dillon) in the framework of Indigenous futurism, the paper discusses Coleman’s innovative use of space opera embedded in Wilfred Owen’s famous WWI poem “Dulce et Decorum Est”. The analysis focuses on four allegedly separate stories in the novel which eventually interweave into a single narrative about “the old lie”. In keeping with the twenty-first-century Indigenous futurism, Coleman’s novel does not provide easy answers. Instead, the end brings the reader to the beginning of the novel in the same state of disillusionment as Owen’s lyrical subject.

' (Publication abstract)

Uppinder Mehan concludes the 2004 collection of postcolonial science fiction and Fantasy, So Long Been Dreaming , with these final remarks on the future of postcolonial writing: Postcolonial writing has for the most part been intensely focused on examining contemporary reality as a legacy of a crippling colonial past but rarely has it pondered that strange land of the future. Visions of the future imagine how life might be otherwise. If we do not imagine our futures, postcolonial people risk being condemned to be spoken about and for again.

Postcolonial writers have given contemporary literature some of its most notable fiction about the realities of conqueror and conquered, yet we’ve rarely created stories that imagine how life might be otherwise. So many of us have written insightfully about our pasts and presents; perhaps the time is ripe for us to begin creatively addressing our futures. (“Final Thoughts” 270) (Introduction)
 

'By far the best-known Aboriginal author covered in this study is Alexis Wright. As indicated in the Introduction, Wright is, alongside Kim Scott, the most frequently discussed Aboriginal author in and outside Australia. One reason for this remarkable global interest lies in the fact that her novel Carpentaria won the 2007 Miles Franklin Literary Award; another is that her other novels have reached international English-speaking and non-English speaking markets.'  (Introduction)

'Sam Watson is a well-known activist, lecturer, poet, novelist, playwright and film producer from the Birri-Gubba and Munaldjali nations. He belongs to the generation of Aboriginal activists and spokespeople who paved the way for future generations, with his active engagement in 1960s political activism against the White Australia Policy, the 1967 Referendum, the Gurindji land rights struggle, and more recently, advancing Aboriginal access to legal, medical and housing services. Amidst these political and cultural engagements, Watson wrote The Kadaitcha Sung . The novel was published in 1990 and generated a cornucopia of responses. As a “pre Master-of-the- Ghost-Dreaming ” novel, The Kadaitcha Sung was an Aboriginal literary novum, as there was nothing to prepare the reader for such a hybridity of genres used to speak bluntly about colonisation. Even when Mudrooroo’s Master appeared a year later, in 1991, the magical realist work was an easy read compared to Watson’s The Kadaitcha Sung . This contributed to one of the novel’s distinctive aspects: even though it has long since been out of print, it is still being discussed by new generations of scholars. No other pre twenty-first-century Aboriginal novel has attracted attention for so long.'

'Archie Weller’s Land of the Golden Clouds (1998) might have become a landmark novel. Van Ikin wrote in his early review of the work that it “could go ballistic. Not just in Australia, either: there are elements of Land of the Golden Clouds that have the potential to strike a chord of excitement right across the globe” (“Feet into fantasy” 10), because Weller’s novel adds a contemporary spin to the conventions laid down by Tolkien and his successors. Katharine England ended her review of the novel with the sentiment that it was “another Archie Weller landmark in Australian and Aboriginal writing” (42). However, instead of becoming a landmark work, the novel was soon forgotten. However, instead of becoming a landmark work, the novel was soon forgotten. Chapter 1 discusses how the “spectres” started “haunting” Australia, and how extratextual phenomena provided answers as to whether or not some works should be considered Aboriginal. This phenomenon went into overdrive in 1990s Australia when a series of writers entered the limelight for their culturally incorrect appropriation of Aboriginal identity, which they used to create works of art, most notably Aboriginal writing. The publicly exposed authors who abused Aboriginal and other ethnic identities were initially put in the same box of frauds, and Australian media and academia ostracised them without paying much attention to their differences. Indeed, the number of literary-cultural hoaxes in 1990s Australia was staggering, and it is no wonder they all received the same negative response. No other western-style democracy with indigenous peoples recorded such a situation in the late twentieth century. The idea that Aboriginal oral narratives, Aboriginal art in general and Aboriginal noms de plume could still be appropriated so easily in a multicultural country that wanted to put its colonial past behind it just added to the already historically and politically charged relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians. However, the subsequent careers of the “cultural hoaxers” reveal that the reasons behind their appropriations and the socio-historical context from which they appeared were quite different.'  (Introduction)

'Ellen van Neerven (also known as Ellen van Neerven-Currie) is a young author of Mununjali (Yugambeh) descent (Scenic Rim region, South-East Queensland) with a Dutch father. She is the author of the collection Heat and Light (2014), which won the 2013 David Unaipon Award. Before discussing her SF novella “Water”, which resembles Willmot’s Below the Line in terms of genre, it is worth saying a few words about this young Aboriginal literary voice. In comparison to the career trajectories of earlier generations of Aboriginal writers such as Eric Willmot, Sam Watson, and Alexis Wright – to mention just those discussed in this book – van Neerven’s career may itself seem science fictional. She graduated in 2010 with a degree in Fine Arts majoring in Creative Writing Production, following which she earned a mentorship with the black&write! project. As previously mentioned, this important project launched by the State Library of Queensland in 2010 is meant to mentor new generations of Aboriginal writers and editors. After graduating from this project, van Neerven became a black&write! editor. In 2014 she also produced the first digital anthology of Aboriginal writing, Writing Black: New Indigenous Writing from Australia , which is available to download on iTunes, meaning that her intended readers belong to the digitally savvy generation. As a legitimate new literary star, van Neerven participates in panel discussions at top international universities. As a young writer of the digital generation, she is very much present in the virtual world, making her just a “click away” for anyone who is interested in getting to know this young, yet surprisingly mature storyteller.' (Introduction)

'Even before the publication of Below the Line in 1991, Eric Willmot was a well-established Aboriginal writer, teacher and scholar who held important positions in higher education. 1 Willmot’s adult life is in stark contrast to his childhood, during which his family moved around Queensland and the Northern Territory. Willmot gave up his education after primary school and spent his teenage years as a drover and horse breaker, but a serious rodeo accident at the age of eighteen put an end to this career, and made Willmot return to schooling (Willmot, Australia n.p.). With degrees in mathematics and education, Willmot taught in New South Wales, Victoria and Papua New Guinea. He spent the 1970s and 1980s actively engaged in Aboriginal education and teacher training (Willmot, Australia n.p.), through a series of educational programmes for advancing Aboriginal education. In 1984 he was awarded the Order of Australia for his services to education and Aboriginal studies. Apart from being an educator and a scholar, Willmot is also an inventor and a holder of many patents. In 1981 he received the Australian Inventor of the Year Award as well as the Gold Medal Award for mechanical engineering at the International Exposition of New Technology in Geneva (Willmot, Dilemma n.p.). Before Below the Line , Willmot wrote the influential Bicentennial novel Pemulwuy: The Rainbow Warrior (1987), which received accolades from the press and launched Willmot’s lifelong project to promote the previously neglected Eora warrior Pemulwuy. 2 Willmot was such a prominent public figure in the 1980s that he was asked to deliver a Boyer Lecture in 1986. 3 This lecture, Australia: The Last Experiment , is as influential today as it was thirty years ago. However, in the year that saw the publication of Pemulwuy , Willmot’s Aboriginality was challenged in a letter sent by his mother and sister to Brisbane Sunday Mail (1 Nov. 1987), in which they stated that Willmot’s family had no Aboriginal ancestry. Willmot responded to the newspapers maintaining that he had some vague idea who sent the letter, and that his solicitors would inspect the issue. 4 However, this newspaper article had no damaging effect at all on Willmot’s career as an Aboriginal writer and educator. The reception of Pemulwuy has not changed, and Willmot has not been “ousted” from any subsequent publications discussing Aboriginal writing. For instance, Penny Van Toorn’s contribution in The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature (2000) mentions Willmot’s Pemulwuy as an important Aboriginal Bicentenary novel (39), while her subheading “Contested identities” lists the usual 1990s literary hoaxes without implicating Willmot. Likewise, Anita Heiss’ influential study Dhuuluu-Yala (2003) lists both Pemulwuy and Below the Line as Aboriginal works (228 and 232, respectively). Willmot is also included in the 2008 Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature , edited by Anita Heiss and Peter Minter.'  (Introduction)

'Doris Bachmann-Medick maintains that the period since the 1970s has seen a series of “cultural turns”, that is, theoretical and cultural reorientations, which have “shifted perspectives, introduced new focuses and, as a result, opened previously unexamined cross-disciplinary fields of inquiry” (1). One such turn is the constitution of the postcolonial theory of culture, which has “shed light on the power of hegemonic cultures to shape discourse while illuminating the increasingly autonomous self-representation of previously marginalized societies, ethnic groups and literatures” (Bachmann-Medick 132).'  (Introduction)

'In the opening pages of The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1973), Todorov evokes the image of a tiger to draw a parallel between changes in the biological and literary “species”:

Being familiar with the species tiger, we can deduce from it the properties of each individual tiger; the birth of a new tiger does not modify the species in its definition. […] The same is not the case in the realm of art or of science. Here evolution operates with an altogether different rhythm: every work modifies the sum of possible works, each new example alters the species. (6)'  (Introduction)

'It is somewhat ironic to start a study that focuses on the literary fantastic, moreover the Aboriginal literary fantastic and its science fictional genre, with the well-known words of the “father” of the Australian realist tradition. Even though these lines shall be evoked at the end of this book for a different reason, suffice it to say that Lawson directed the poem “The Uncultured Rhymer to His Cultured Critics” at his friend, John Le Gay Brereton, who commented negatively on Lawson’s poetics. As the wheel of literary fortune would have it, Lawson’s career foundered soon after 1900 with the impending collapse of cultural nationalism. However, with or without Lawson, realism in Australia was there to stay.' (Introduction)

'This is the first study that brings together the theory of the fantastic with the vibrant corpus of Australian Aboriginal fiction on futurities. Selected works by Ellen van Neerven, Sam Watson, Archie Weller, Eric Willmot and Alexis Wright are analysed as fictional prose texts that construct alternative future worlds. They offer a distinctive contribution to the relatively new field of non-mainstream science fiction that has entered the critical domain of late, often under the title of postcolonial science fiction. The structures of these alternative worlds reveal a relationship - sometimes straightforward, sometimes more complex - with the established paradigms of the genre. The novelty of their stories comes from the authors' cultural memory and experience of having survived the «end of the world» brought about by colonisation. Their answers to our futurity contain different novums that debunk the myth of progress in order to raise the issue of a future without a human face.' (Publication summary)