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Notes to chapter 4 on pages 240–42. 97 We know the past affects the future, but can the present change the past? And is it always clear what is real and what is not? —Felice Holman, Real 4 Telling the Past The prevalence of historical novels in settler culture children ’s literature underlines the ideological work that these texts carry out as they seek to explain and interpret national histories—histories that involve invasion, conquest, violence, and assimilation. More than any other category of settler culture texts, historical fiction is caught between opposing and sometimes incompatible imperatives, since it seeks to position child readers as citizens of nations even as narratives located in colonial settings necessarily advert to the violent dispossession and struggle that characterize the origins of settler societies. It is not only in historical fiction that texts deal with the past. In chapter 8, I discuss texts that deploy allegorical and metaphorical modes to interrogate not only imperial history but also the ideology that informs it, an ideology characterized by Bill Ashcroft as “sequentiality, inevitability , purpose, authority; a teleology that is divinely ordained.”1 Historical fiction is not history, despite the fact that the peritextual materials included in many novels (such as maps, timelines, authors’ notes) claim varying degrees of historicity for the events and characters they represent , and despite their deployment of realist narrative modes. Rather, historical novels select, order, and shape events to serve the purposes of their narratives ; and historical fiction no less than other genres is informed by deep-seated cultural habits and practices. It is not the case that there exists a body of empirically derived “historical facts” of colonization that can be unproblematically portrayed in fiction, or that historical novels for children can be evaluated in terms of their adherence to historical actuality. Said’s comment about truth and representation is apt here: “… the real issue is whether there can be a true representation of anything, or whether any and all representations, because they are representations, are embedded first in the language and then in the culture, institutions and political ambience of the representer. If the latter alternative is the correct one (as I believe it is), then we must be prepared to accept the fact that a representation is eo ipso implicated, intertwined, embedded, interwoven with a great many other things besides the ‘truth,’ which is itself a representation.”2 Moreover, when historical events and characters are introduced into fictive narratives, they are construed in ways that accord with the directions and ideologies of these narratives, rather than with any “objective” body of historical knowledge, since they are framed by the conventions and practices of fiction, and not those of history. While historical fiction is not history, the production and reception of historical fiction always responds to and engages with shifts and developments in how “history” is understood. Since the 1970s, the emancipatory drive of postcolonial studies has had a marked effect on the discipline of history . Leela Gandhi notes that, whereas Europe was formerly the subject and centre of national and international histories, “postcolonial historiography declares its intention to fragment or interpellate this account with the voices of all those unaccounted for ‘others’ who have been silenced and domesticated under the sign of Europe.”3 Many historians, Indigenous and non-Indigenous , have undertaken revisionist projects that seek not merely to view colonial events through Indigenous perspectives (often by calling on the oral histories and narrative traditions of colonized peoples),4 but—more radically —to engage with Indigenous epistemologies and theories of history, which often depart in fundamental ways from Western traditions. To describe what I refer to as Indigenous historiography, I turn now to the work of Japanese scholar Minoru Hokari, who in a series of essays describes his encounters with Gurindji historians in the Northern Territory of Australia . Gurindji epistemologies are attuned to particular places and traditions , and I discuss them not to produce generalizations about Indigenous views of history, but to focus on an exemplary instance of cultural difference . Hokari visited the Northern Territory to gather oral histories, learning Gurindji history from an elder, Jimmy Manngayarri (Old Jimmy), who used sand drawings to teach him how colonial events were explained within Gurindji traditions. Many of these narratives relate to Jurntakal, a snake that during the Dreaming emerged from the earth and travelled through country, creating humans and establishing law (the proper relations between humans and country, as well as between one clan and another). Jurntakal’s progress...

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