aboriginal studies
CONTESTED SITE
Cassandra Pybus
Mudrooroo
Milli Milli Wangka:
The Indigenous Literature of Australia
Hyland House $24.95pb, 233pp
1 86447 014 3
THIS NEW BOOK from Mudrooroo is actually an update of his path-breaking critical study, Writing From The Fringe, published in 1991. As the new name implies, this book represents a major shift in Mudrooroo's perspective. He is now arguing for a discreet category of Australian literature --indigenous writing -- which has its own reality and its own unique forms, what he calls 'maban reality'.
I read his book last month in between sittings of the Federal Court which was hearing a complex case under the ATSIC Act. For that reason I find it hard to separate my response to the book from the circumstances of that court case. Let me explain.
The case was bought by two members of the Flinders Island Aboriginal community, supported by the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, against eleven people who had stood for the last ATSIC election. It was alleged that these people were not entitled to stand for ATSIC because they were not Aborigines. For nearly two weeks the court heard evidence to establish whether or not the defendants could claim descent from an Aboriginal person and whether they were accepted by a recognised Aboriginal community. The matter hinged on what represented evidence of Aboriginality. Each of the defendants presented an autobiographical narrative. In most cases it was the same story with minor variations. They said that while they had always lived in European society and not identified with the established Aboriginal community, they had always known they were Aboriginal within their own extended families, but they had kept it secret because of the stigma. They claimed to trace their descent from unknown tribal Aboriginal women (invariably called Mary in their telling) who had been taken into white settler families and 'raised as their own' sometime between the 1830s and 1840s. Against detailed historical evidence which could provide no possible corroboration for this narrative, in general or in its particulars, the defendants set their oral tradition. 'In our family we have always known we were Aboriginal', they said, one after the other.
The position of the petitioners and the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre is this: if the defendants have no proof of their Aboriginal descent; if they are so far removed from their putative Aboriginal ancestor that they do not even know her name; if they have retained no stories nor artifacts nor fragments of language; if they have never lived within an Aboriginal community and are unknown to the established community: how can they be said to be Aboriginal? The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre says emphatically that they are not -- and nor are at least half of the 13,000 people in Tasmania who now claim Aboriginality. The women from Flinders Island say they fear their community, which has struggled for 150 years to survive, is now being swamped by people who are Aboriginal because they have ticked that box on a government form.
One of the many fascinating elements of this case was the way in which the defendants, whose family's life experience since the 1830s had been that of the European settler society, posited the alternative oral tradition against the documentary evidence, which they characterised as the ideological construct of the dominant European culture. It was very much like the distinction Mudrooroo has at the heart of his book between the 'maban reality' of the dispossessed indigenous culture and the 'scientific reality' of the usurping culture. As he says:
In one of the essays in Milli Milli Wangka (is this title a maban joke, I wonder) Mudrooroo answers Liverani by insisting that the issue is not Gibini's identity but the reviewer's failure to appreciate the kind of book she had written.When sitting with my people and talking about our writing, there are two stands which emerge in our yarns, one is the urge to tell our history as it is, not relying on those documents of the past which are after all the records of the colonisers who had other animals to hunt and other plants to gather from a place other than Australia, and the other is the magic of our Dreaming, of our own genres and ways of speaking...if we believe in ourselves we must continue to struggle to define our reality and to live in this land of ours which over thousands of years we sang into culture and spread a tapestry of language over its living reality.
The desire for an indigenous reality has spawned the genre of maban reality -- still an incipient written form, although Mudrooroo cites his own work as well as Sam Watson's Kadaitcha Sung -- which, he says,
is political in that it seeks to establish an Indigenous reality which is counter to the dominant natural reality of the invaders, a so-called natural reality which permeates just about very genre of endeavour and constructs narratives such as history which serve to establish and maintain the dominance of those in power.
Reading Mudrooroo at the same time as I was musing about the intriguing possibilities of the Federal court case made me uneasy about the kind of claims he was making for indigenous literature. Not the least reason was that one of the defendants in this case was, with her sister, the author of a book recently awarded the David Unaipon Award by a panel of Aboriginal writers chaired by Mudrooroo, subsequently published by UQP in their Black Writers series. According to the local newspaper, she has also been invited to a conference of indigenous writers in America. Let me say that I have always been bothered about this book because I knew its authors were not accepted by the Aboriginal community in Tasmania and because the book is a poorly rendered European narrative about life on the northwest coast of Tasmania which does not have any Aboriginal content. I could not see why Mudrooroo and his fellow judges thought it had merit as indigenous writing. Thinking about it I was reminded of a notorious review of Ruby Langford Ginibi's Real Deadly , in the Weekend Australian in March 1992, by Mary Rose Liverani who said 'if a white had written this manuscript it would have gone straight onto the reject pile'. She went further, suggesting that by publishing such tripe because its author was Aboriginal, A&R had opened Pandora's box: 'What if those armies of unpublished writers clamouring to be heard start claiming Aboriginal ancestry?' Liverani was very justly condemned for her insensitivity and her culturally limited notions of good writing; nevertheless she turned out to be prescient in her concern about Pandora's box.