Aboriginal literature is a growing field with a rapidly expanding global audience. The book represents a range of writers; it includes highly acclaimed Aboriginal writers whose works are widely recognised (Kim Scott, Doris Pilkington Garimara, Melissa Lucashenko) and other writers whose works are on the ascendancy (Romaine Moreton and Jeanine Leane). This book contributes to the understanding of Aboriginal literature and of how these writers developed as writers. See www.cambriapress.com/books/9781604979114.cfm for reviews, author bio, and more book information on this Cambria Press publication. "This book is an essential resource for anyone with more than a passing interest in Aboriginal writing and Australian literature." - Philip Morrissey, Head of Australian Indigenous Studies, University of Melbourne

This volume explores the subterfuges, strategies, and choices that Australian women writers have navigated in order to challenge patriarchal stereotypes and assert themselves as writers of substance. Contextualized within the pioneering efforts of white, Aboriginal, and immigrant Australian women in initiating an alternative literary tradition, the text captures a wide range of multiracial Australian women authors’ insightful reflections on crucial issues such as war and silent mourning, emergence of a Australian national heroine, racial purity and Aboriginal motherhood, communism and activism, feminist rivalry, sexual transgressions, autobiography and art of letter writing, city space and female subjectivity, lesbianism, gender implications of spatial categories, placement and displacement, dwelling and travel, location and dislocation and female body politics. Claiming Space for Australian Women’s Writing tracks Australian women authors’ varied journeys across cultural, political and racial borders in the canter of contemporary political discourse.

More than any other event in Australia’s legal, political and cultural history, the High Court of Australia’s 1992 Mabo decision challenged previous ways of thinking about land, identity, belonging, the nation and history. Now, more than a quarter of a century after Mabo, this book examines the broader impacts of this landmark legal decision on various forms of Australian culture and cultural practice. How is Australia’s post-Mabo imaginary being reflected, refracted and articulated in contemporary film, fiction, poetry, biography and other forms of cultural expression? To what extent has the discussion and practice of history, linguistics, anthropology and other branches of the humanities been challenged or transformed by Mabo? While the judges in Mabo recognised native title, they also denied Indigenous people sovereignty over the continent: how is First Nations sovereignty being articulated and creatively imagined in more recent post-Mabo discourse? This interdisciplinary book, offering a transnational perspective via scholars based in Australia, continental Europe and the UK, provides an overview of the diverse impact and discursive influence of Mabo on fields of artistic endeavour and cultural practice in Australia today.

This is the first sustained study of the formal particularities of works by Bruce Pascoe, Kim Scott, Tara June Winch, and Alexis Wright. Drawing on a rich theoretical framework that includes approaches to relationality by Aboriginal thinkers, Edouard Glissant, and Jean-Luc Nancy, and recent work in New Formalism and narrative theory, the book illustrates how they use a broad range of narrative techniques to mediate, negotiate, and temporarily create networks of relations that interlink all elements of the universe. Through this focus on relationality, Aboriginal writing gains both local and global significance. Locally, these narratives assert Indigenous sovereignty by staging an unbroken interrelatedness of people and their land. Globally, they intervene into current discourses about humanity’s relationship with the natural environment, urging readers to acknowledge our interrelatedness with and dependence on the land that sustains us.

A wave of life stories and autobiographical narratives by Aboriginal women began in the late 1970s and gained momentum a decade later with the publication of Sally Morgan’s My Place (1987), which became a bestseller. While some of the books of the first wave focused mainly (if not exclusively) on the author, Aboriginal women’s life stories widened over time to include transgenerational histories of the family. Reading Aboriginal Women’s Life Stories is an important discussion of books that have shaped our understanding of contemporary Indigenous Australian literature. Anne Brewster provides an in-depth textual analysis of three key titles and situates them in relation to concepts of history, race, gender, family, storytelling and Aboriginality in modern Australia. “Looking back, we can recognise now what an extraordinary phenomenon these life stories are, and how they have changed understandings of Aboriginality and writing … The return of this classic book in a new edition is a welcome reminder that Anne Brewster’s careful, deeply respectful and informed approach to these writings is as necessary now as it ever was.” —Professor Gillian Whitlock FAHA

This is the first book to examine how Australian fiction writers draw on family histories to reckon with the nation’s colonial past. Located at the intersection of literature, history, and sociology, it explores the relationships between family storytelling, memory, and postcolonial identity. With attention to the political potential of family histories, Reckoning with the Past argues that authors’ often autobiographical works enable us to uncover, confront, and revise national mythologies. An important contribution to the emerging global conversation about multidirectional memory and the need to attend to the effects of colonisation, this book will appeal to an interdisciplinary field of scholarly readers.

Wiradjuri woman, Anita Heiss, is arguably one of the first Aboriginal Australian authors of popular fiction. A focus on the political characterises her chick lit; and her identity as an author is both supplemented and complemented by her roles as an academic, activist and public intellectual. Heiss has discussed genre as a means of targeting audiences that may be less engaged with Indigenous affairs, and positions her novels as educative but not didactic. Her readership is constituted by committed readers of romance and chick lit as well as politically engaged readers that are attracted to Heiss' dual authorial persona; and, both groups bring radically distinct expectations to bear on these texts. Through analysis of online reviews and surveys conducted with users of the book reviewing website Goodreads, I complicate the understanding of genre as a cogent interpretative frame, and deploy this discussion to explore the social significance of Heiss' literature.