Postcolonial vampires in the Indigenous imagination: Philip McLaren and Drew Hayden Taylor

I first became interested in literature\u27s vampires as a means to readdress historical representations of colonial encounter when analysing the novels of Australian resistance writer Mudrooroo Nyoongah (aka Colin Johnson, Mudrooroo Narogin, Mudrooroo). Traces of the eternal night wanderer appear in a raft of variations throughout Mudrooroo\u27s body of work, culminating in his trilogy The Undying (1998), Underground (1999) and The Promised Land (2000). The author\u27s first fully developed representation of the vampire as an invading power which rules by coercion without thought for the common good is introduced in The Undying as a white female colonizer named Amelia Frazer (see clark 2006). As I ihave written elsewhere, Mudrooroo\u27s Amelia is a strangely fixed earthy traveller who hunts for her prey across the lenght and breadth of Australia\u27s early colonial landscape. Her horrendous acts of penetration and murder can be read as cruel metaphors for indigenous dispossession, displacement and imposed cultural enfeeblement that are the hallmarks of the colonial enterprise