Writing the Childhood Self: Australian Aboriginal Autobiographies, Memoirs, and Testimonies

There is no one to teach me the songs that bring the Moon
Bird, the fish or any other thing that makes me what I am.
No old woman to mend my spirit by preaching my culture to me--
No old man with the knowledge to paint my being.
The spectre of the past is what dwells within--
I search my memory of early days to try to make my presence real, significant, whole.
I use my childhood memories of places, people and words to re-create my identity.

--West

Australian Aboriginal writers are dealing with two centuries of cultural loss by calling sharply on childhood memories in order to restore, to use the poet Errol West's words, a sense of reality, significance, wholeness. When the ghost of childhood, and childhoods, past is a "spectre," that recuperation must be haunting as well as healing. It cannot be otherwise. In the past twenty years, there has been a surge in the publication of Aboriginal writings that resist "white noise" (Tom Griffiths 8), white tellings of black history and experience. Strategically, these reclaim and tell the body of oral "Dreaming" stories after decades of white appropriation, especially in the field of children's literature (Gareth Griffiths 73-74), and take back the realm of fictional representation of Aboriginal history and experience. In 1997, I wrote these words in a book published in 1999:

Too often, now, Aboriginal narratives and cultural identities are recuperated for non-Aboriginal redemptive purposes. And this recuperation is too often at the expense of Aboriginal bodies and spirits and land. We should be ashamed of ourselves for making of Aboriginality another kind of terra nullius. The recuperation of Aboriginal memories, not relegated to the ahistorical arena of myth but historicised and politicised, is waiting. At the tag end of the twentieth century, those stories are only just being told by Aboriginal writers to an adult audience, and some few to a child audience. (Scutter 194)

As I write this in 2000, only three years on, it is remarkable to be able to consider a new body of Aboriginal literature dedicated to a child and teenage audience. The strongest growth has been in the genre of autobiography, testimony, and memoir, much of it full of social and political protest, highly critical of colonization, and resisting white assumptions about culture, the family, and childhood. The dominant themes of this new Aboriginal literature have been, according to the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, "the spiritual and physical alienation and deprivation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people throughout colonial and modern times, the search for identity, the insistence on basic human rights for present-day Aborigines, the demand for land rights and the assertion of Aboriginal sovereignty" (Wilde, Hooton, and Andrews 9).

These themes are broached in insistently politicized contexts. It is a truism that all literature is political, in that it inevitably represents discourses and hierarchies of power. According to the editors of Paperbark, an Aboriginal anthology, "Aboriginal writing . . . has never been divorced from the Aboriginal struggle for economic freedom, legal recognition and reform of basic living conditions. . . . It asserts [that] literature is one of the ways of getting political things done" (cited in Wilde, Hooton, and Andrews 17). Aboriginal writings have taken up a particularly forceful rhetoric to do with the political imperatives of race, gender, and class because the issues are so urgent: regarded officially as a dying race by Australian governments up until the 1970s, Aborigines confront not just the loss of their culture and their land, but the loss of their children.

Aboriginal children are dying in utterly disproportionate numbers through the longtime causes of poor infant and child hygiene and living conditions, endemic substance abuse, suicide brought on by lack of hope living in a fringe culture with inadequate schooling and low adult employment, official nonrecognition of Aboriginal culture and languages, and the damage to cultural...