“Philip McLaren and the Indigenous-Australian Crime Novel”

This paper locates the postcolonial crime novel as a space for disenfranchised groups to write back to the marginalisation inherent in the process of colonisation, and explores the example of Australia. From its inception in the mid-19th century, Australian crime fiction reflected upon the challenging harshness and otherness of the Australian experience for the free and convict settler, expelled from the metropole. It created a series of popular subgenres derived from the convict narrative proper, while more ‘standard’ modes of crime fiction, popularised in and through British and American crime fiction, were late to develop. Whereas Australian crime fiction has given expression to the white experience of the continent in manifold ways, up until recently it made no room for Indigenous voices – with the exception of the classic Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte series written by the prolific Arthur Upfield in the first half of the 20th century. For the longest time, this absence reflected the dispossession, dispersal and disenfranchisement of the colonised Indigenous peoples at large; there were neither Aboriginal voices nor Aboriginal authors, which made the textual space of the Australian crime novel a discursive terra nullius. This paper will look at the only Indigenous-Australian author to date with a substantial body of work in crime fiction, Philip McLaren, and elucidate how his four crime novels break new ground in Australian crime fiction by embedding themselves within a political framework of Aboriginal resilience and resistance to neo/colonialism. Written as of the 1990s, McLaren’s oeuvre is eclectic in that it does not respond to traditional formats of Australian crime fiction, shifts between generic subtypes and makes incursions into other genres. The paper concludes that McLaren’s oeuvre has not been conceived of as the work of a crime writer per se, but rather that its form and content are deeply informed by the racist violence and oppression that still affects Indigenous-Australian society today, the expression of which the crime novel is particularly well geared to

Tempted by The Tempest: Derek Jarman’s Gay Play with Shakespearean Romance

[Abstract] This paper reassesses Derek Jarman’s film The Tempest (UK 1979) against recent developments in film adaptation theory in order to reach conclusions about its controversial handling of the Shakespearean source material. After locating the film’s lack of general critical acclaim in the practice of traditional fidelity criticism, current concepts of film adaptation theory are applied to the film’s content and structure, placing it in the cultural context of British counterculture in the 1970s. Jarman’s Tempest is analysed by discussing the film’s three male protagonists in terms of gender, considering its director’s choices of characterisation and plot against the backdrop of queer politics. Moving from Caliban’s characterisation as non-racialised, non-threatening and essentially human on Jarman’s queer agenda, Caliban and Ariel are contrasted as conflictive sexual tendencies within their master Prospero, interiorising the film’s action in the latter’s mind as an allegory of the release of homo-erotic desire. As a result, Jarman’s rewriting of the original is seen as a subversive deconstruction in service of his gay politics and an independent piece of art

Postcolonial Rewritings of Bram Stoker´s Dracula: Mudrooroo’s Vampire Trilogy

Indigenous-Australian fiction has experimented with subgenres of the Fantastic in various ways to secure an empowering location from which to address post/colonial dispossession. In the mid-1990s, the Australian writer and critic Mudrooroo, formerly known as Colin Johnson, proposed Maban Reality as a genre denomination for fiction which introduces the reader to the powerful and empowering universe of the Aboriginal maban or shaman, also known as the Dreaming. Mudrooroo’s coining of Maban Reality was a way of establishing an Australian variant of Magic Realism which defied a European epistemology of the universe, engaging and enabling Dreamtime spirituality as a solid pillar of Aboriginal reality. Mudrooroo had already experimented with a postcolonial reversal of the Gothic, a dark version of the Fantastic, in the first of his Tasmanian quintet, Dr Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World (1983), but left its gloomy resignation to a dire Indigenous fate under colonial rule behind for the upbeat Master of the Ghost Dreaming (1993). Yet, as the result of a deep personal crisis—believed not to have an Aboriginal bloodline, in the mid-1990s he was barred from the tribal affiliation he had long claimed—Mudrooroo resorted to the gloominess of the postcolonial Gothic again in a vampire trilogy to reflect on the devastating impact of colonisation on Australian identity at large. This essay comments on the ways in which he has reflected on the present state of Australianness by rewriting Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Echoes of a not so mythical past: Memories of race in Elizabeth Jolley's The Well

Critical discussion of Elizabeth Jolley's The Well (1986) has largely focused on issues of gender, but little has been said about the racial inscription of the novel. This lack is especially relevant when criticism, despite praising the author's experimentation with narrative technique and genre, tends to voice dissatisfaction with the novel's conclusion in medias res, which never solves the tension between a presumed return to the patriarchal norm and the voicing of liberating alternatives. This paper proposes a postcolonial perspective so as to come to terms with this dilemma, and argues that the text signals the impossibility of suppressing the Native from the contemporary Australian land and textscape, whose Gothic articulation in the uncanny shape of the male well-dweller haunts the novel's engagement with female empowerment. The female protagonist may only start overcoming a crippling gender discourse in the White postcolonial pastoralist setting by inscribing herself into 'Australianness'. Reconciling her body with the land is significantly staged in terms of an Aboriginal cosmogony, as it is a 'walkabout' that allows Hester to start controlling her body and story. Thus, The Well may be understood to be inconclusive because it struggles to map gender across race at a time of Aboriginal-exclusive multiculturalism. Written in the mid 1980s, it announces a point of inflection in thinking about nativenonnative relationships which would soon lead to attempts at 'Reconciliation' by mainstream Australia

Postcolonial rewritings of Bram Stoker´s Dracula: Mudrooro's vampire trilogy

Indigenous-Australian fiction has experimented with subgenres of the Fantastic in various ways to secure an empowering location from which to address post/colonial dispossession. In the mid-1990s, the Australian writer and critic Mudrooroo, formerly known as Colin Johnson, proposed Maban Reality as a genre denomination for fiction which introduces the reader to the powerful and empowering universe of the Aboriginal maban or shaman, also known as the Dreaming. Mudrooroo's coining of Maban Reality was a way of establishing an Australian variant of Magic Realism which defied a European epistemology of the universe, engaging and enabling Dreamtime spirituality as a solid pillar of Aboriginal reality. Mudrooroo had already experimented with a postcolonial reversal of the Gothic, a dark version of the Fantastic, in the first of his Tasmanian quintet, Dr Wooreddy's Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World (1983), but left its gloomy resignation to a dire Indigenous fate under colonial rule behind for the upbeat Master of the Ghost Dreaming (1993). Yet, as the result of a deep personal crisis¿believed not to have an Aboriginal bloodline, in the mid-1990s he was barred from the tribal affiliation he had long claimed¿Mudrooroo resorted to the gloominess of the postcolonial Gothic again in a vampire trilogy to reflect on the devastating impact of colonisation on Australian identity at large. This essay comments on the ways in which he has reflected on the present state of Australianness by rewriting Bram Stoker's Dracula

Sung by an Indigenous Siren: Epic and Epistemology in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria

One of Australia’s most distinguished Indigenous authors, Alexis Wright, stages the fleeting presence of a popular character of Northern European folklore, the mermaid, in an awarded novel of epic proportions. The mermaid is not a haphazard appearance in this Antipodean narrative, but one of the multiple, cross-cultural ways in which Carpentaria, first published in 2006, invites the reader to reflect upon the ongoing tensions between the disenfranchised Indigenous minority and the empowered non-Indigenous mainstream, and their serious lack of communication due to the antagonistic character of their respective universes, one rooted in a capitalist paradigm of ruthless economic exploitation and the other in a holistic, environmentalist one of country. This essay addresses how Carpentaria, by writing across Indigenous and European genres and epistemologies, makes a call for the deconstruction of colonial discourse, for an invigorating Indigenous inscription into country, and for intellectual sovereignty as the condition sine-qua-non for the Indigenous community to move forward

Postcolonizing the Australian Corpus: Indigeneity in the Fiction of Alexis Wright, Kim Scott, Sally Morgan, and Mudrooroo

This study of Indigenous-Australian literature has its seeds in a concern with the uncanniness embedded in multicultural developments in contemporary Western societies and how this affects identity formation. As such, the manifestation of the uncanny allows us to look into how postcoloniality and postmodernity link up. These are times when European identity is in flux, but there have been others. In a well-known essay published in 1919, Sigmund Freud reflected on the decline of Empire and on the Great War that had been questioning Europe’s modernity, and analyzed the existential anxiety of the period in terms of the uncanny: a disquieting, even frightening sensation rooted in the familiar becoming strange