Lost is the way to the skyland. Our souls wander forlornly in the land of ghosts. Our spirits become their play things; our bodies their food, to be ripped apart, and our gnawed bones are scattered. We are in despair; we are sickening unto death; we call to be healed. Anxiously we wait for our mapan, the Master of the Ghost Dreaming to deliver us. In the first years of the 19th century a small Aboriginal tribe reels under the threat of white invasion of their ancestral lands. Fada, a missionary from London, is attempting to impose a Christian God over their ancient beliefs. Fada and his wife Mada bring with them disease and despair, along with a message of hope - the result of their own Cockney dreaming. This novel by Mudrooroo, author of the acclaimed Wild Cat Falling, is a story of survival - physical, metaphysical and magical. It is also the story of Jangamuttuk, the custodian of the Ghost Dreaming, and his shamanistic efforts to will his tribe back to its own promised land. This is the first of the completed quartet known as his Vampyre Novels...

In the first years of the 19th century a small Aboriginal tribe reels under the threat of white invasion of their ancestral lands. Fada, a missionary from London, is attempting to impose a Christian God over their ancient beliefs. Fada and his wife Mada bring with them disease and despair, along with a message of hope - the result of their own Cockney dreaming. This novel by Mudrooroo Nyoongah (Colin Johnson), author of the acclaimed Wild Cat Falling, is a story of survival - physical, metaphysical and magical. It is also the story of Jangamuttuk, the custodian of the Ghost Dreaming, and his shamanistic efforts to will his tribe back to its own promised land.

In Aboriginal and Māori literature, the circle and the spiral are the symbolic metaphors for a never-ending journey of discovery and rediscovery. The journey itself, with its indigenous perspectives and sense of orientation, is the most significant act of cultural recuperation. The present study outlines the fields of indigenous writing in Australia and New Zealand in the crucial period between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s - particularly eventful years in which postcolonial theory attempted to 'centre the margins' and indigenous writers were keen to escape the particular centering offered in search of other positions more in tune with their creative sensibilities. Indigenous writing relinquished its narrative preference for social realism in favour of traversing old territory in new spiritual ways; roots converted into routes. Standard postcolonial readings of indigenous texts often overwrite the 'difference' they seek to locate because critical orthodoxy predetermines what 'difference' can be. Critical evaluations still tend to eclipse the ontological grounds of Aboriginal and Māori traditions and specific ways of moving through and behaving in cultural landscapes and social contexts. Hence the corrective applied in Circles and Spirals - to look for locally and culturally specific tracks and traces that lead in other directions than those catalogued by postcolonial convention. This agenda is pursued by means of searching enquiries into the historical, anthropological, political and cultural determinants of the present state of Aboriginal and Māori writing (principally fiction). Independent yet interrelated exemplary analyses of works by Keri Hulme and Patricia Grace and Mudrooroo and Sam Watson (Australia) provided the 'thick description' that illuminates the author's central theses, with comparative side-glances at Witi Ihimaera, Heretaunga Pat Baker and Alan Duff (New Zealand) and Archie Weller and Sally Morgan (Australia).

ARATJARA is the first collection of essays on Australian Aboriginal culture published and edited from Germany. A group of internationally renowned scholars and specialists in their fields have contributed original essays on political and cultural aspects of Aboriginal life today. These various essays treat the struggle of Aboriginal peoples for land rights, their music, and their achievements in theatre, in literature and in the creation of Aboriginal literary discourses, as well as Aboriginal film and television productions and the representation of Australia's indigenous peoples in the white media. Among Aboriginal writers who have contributed to ARATJARA are the politician Neville T. Bonner, the dramatist Bob Maza, the story-teller David Mowaljarlai and the poet Lionel Fogarty, who has been called the most authentic Aboriginal voice among writers using English as their medium of creative expression. The volume is dedicated to Oodgeroo (formerly Kath Walker, 1920-1993), one of the foremost Aboriginal political and cultural personalities, and also contains a number of poems by Lionel Fogarty.

"Mudrooroo: A Likely Story reads the fiction of one of Australia's most controversial and enigmatic literary figures against the backdrop of the likelihood that he assumed an Aboriginal identity to which he was not entitled. As he is neither black nor white, Colin Johnson (a.k.a. Mudrooroo) writes on issues of identity and belonging from the position of an outsider. The book argues that the experimental nature of Johnson's creative body of work coupled with the complexities of his 'in-between' status, mean that both the man and his writing evade neat categorisation within mainstream literary criticism. Also examined here is how the denial of his white mother impacts upon the gender politics of Johnson's fiction in a way that opens up exciting new possibilities for critical comment and textual analysis."--Back cover.