José-Carlos Redondo-Olmedilla reviews A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature, edited by Belinda Wheeler

REDONDO-OLMEDILLA, JOSE-CARLOS

English

Wilfrid Laurier University

The GooseVolume 14 | No. 1 Article 398-25-2015A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literatureedited by Belinda WheelerJOSE-CARLOS REDONDO-OLMEDILLAUniversidad de AlmeriaPart of the Australian Studies Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, Critical andCultural Studies Commons, Literature in English, North America Commons, Nature and SocietyRelations Commons, Other English Language and Literature Commons, Other Languages,Societies, and Cultures Commons, and the Place and Environment CommonsFollow this and additional works at / Suivez-nous ainsi que d’autres travaux et œuvres:https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegooseThis article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Goose by anauthorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.Cet article vous est accessible gratuitement et en libre accès grâce à Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Le texte a été approuvé pour faire partie intégrantede la revue The Goose par un rédacteur autorisé de Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Pour de plus amples informations, contactezscholarscommons@wlu.ca.Recommended Citation / Citation recommandéeREDONDO-OLMEDILLA, JOSE-CARLOS. "A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature edited by Belinda Wheeler." TheGoose, vol. 14 , no. 1 , article 39, 2015,https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol14/iss1/39.A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature edited by BELINDA WHEELER Camden House, 2013 £50.00  Reviewed by JOSÉ-CARLOS REDONDO-OLMEDILLA  This rich presentation of Australian Aboriginal Literature offers a kind of accomplished comprehensive approach for connoisseurs and newcomers alike. It is an attempt to de-marginalize this cultural production and to make it more axial and core-like. In this sense the text behaves like a true opus magnus as it tries to articulate Aboriginal life and aspirations through contemporary productions. The foreword by Nicholas Jose reinstates and reinforces “Aboriginal creative expression in its capacity to cross boundaries” and presents the different array of materials set in the book as “collaborative interfaces” (VIII). It presents a new longing, recognizing that the study of Australian literature must start with Aboriginal literature. In the well-structured introduction, Belinda Wheeler tackles the exciting issue of the canon. She pays attention to the important notion of the canon’s suppleness, but given equal space to issues of cultural reconciliation and how literature and culture can be interpreted as a loss waiting to be recovered, suggesting how writing might be deciphered as “a vehicle to overcome past injustices and start a healing process” (6). In his chapter “Indigenous Life Writing: Rethinking Poetics and Practice,” Michael R. Griffiths recalls how westerners have taxonomized distinctions such as poēsis (making art) and praxis (ways of acting in the world and in the community) or the not so widely known distinction between the two words that the ancient Greeks had for life: bios, the form of socially conditioned, collective and individuated life, and zoē, signifying the simple fact of living. This way of thinking has biased our interpretation of art and life. It is because of this that Griffiths contests and delegitimizes this vision. For him, Aboriginal life writing interprets bios in a more integrative way: it is both collective and individual and has more to do with “making life from and through community connections” (18), or it is neither and so challenges both bios and zoē. Griffiths demonstrates how Aboriginal life writing defies a “biopolitical notion of life” that was imported from the colonies by maintaining a concept of “kinship and belonging vested in country” (20). In the second chapter, “Australian Aboriginal Life Writers and Their Editors: Cross-Cultural Collaboration, Authorial Intention, and the Impact of Editorial Choices,” Jennifer Jones traces the evolution of Aboriginal life writing as an accessible genre that “accommodates varying degrees of literacy” (36). One wonders if the editorial responses presented in the study, are more interested in presenting a romanticized version of the Aboriginal past as it is obvious that the approach taken by the different editors prioritizes some materials. Chapter 3, “Contemporary Life Writing: Inscribing Double Voice in Intergeneracional Collaborative Life-Writing Projects,” by Martina Horakova, reevaluates the prominence of subjectivity shifting and double voice in some Aboriginal autobiographies. This writing experience shows and teaches us that intergenerational Indigenous life writing, by enacting dual-voice narratives, presents a dissident character. But beware, this is not the kind of “Empire writes back” dissidence—it is beyond that, sometimes giving hybridized images 1REDONDO-OLMEDILLA: A Companion to Australian Aboriginal LiteraturePublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2015where we can find Aboriginal motherhood with modern urban experiences. Chapter 4, “European Translations of Australian Aboriginal Texts,” co-written by Danica Čerče and Oliver Haag, analyzes the European reception of Aboriginal Literature. The authors work on German, Italian, Dutch, and Slovene translations of two texts to explore how teamwork from editors, authors, and publishing houses imperative for the authenticity of translated texts. It was André Lefevere in his work Translating Literature: Practice and Theory in a Comparative Literature Context who expressed the view that translators mediate between literary traditions, and that they do so with some goal in mind other than simply making the original available in a neutral, objective way. Čerče and Haag refresh some good old ideas and project them to the translation of Aboriginal Literature, aiming for a balance between comprehensibility and foreignness. Extending care to poetry and song is dealt with in “Tracing a Trajectory from Songpoetry to Contemporary Aboriginal Poetry,” by Stuart Cooke. This chapter presents the basics of Aboriginal Songpoetry and adds core information on contemporary Aboriginal poetry. Cooke argues that “[l]iterary critics have seldom rigorously engaged with oral Aboriginal poetry, thereby failing to acknowledge the extensive Indigenous cultural heritage of contemporary Aboriginal writers” (89), even in spite of the fact that poets like Lionel Fogarty, Samuel Wagan Watson or Ali Cobby Eckerman have demonstrated exceptional poetic talent in recent times. Cooke’s study aims to link the poet’s voice with the written work, orality with written expression, and the performative quality of orality with the lived potentiality of the written text. “Rites/Rights/Writes of Passage: Identity Construction in Australian Aboriginal Young Adult Fiction,” by Jeanine Leane centers on the kind of transmigration that features in the change from adolescence to adulthood, through the work of three young fiction writers: John Muk Muk Burke, Melissa Lucashenko, and Tara June Winch. The two following essays, Paula Anca Farca’s “Humour in Contemporary Aboriginal Adult Fiction” and Katrin Althans’s “White Shadows: The Gothic Tradition in Australian Aboriginal Literature” are interesting representations of extended dialogues between these two facets of life, sometimes as counter-discursive spaces, but inextricably attached to the life, craft, and experience of Aboriginal peoples. In “Bold, Black, and Brilliant: Aboriginal Australian Drama,” Maryrose Casey shows how drama still fills important functions in society, and how Aboriginal writers “faced a number of obstacles to break [the] silence” of Aboriginal voices in the Austrailian drama scene (156). Playwrights have a responsibility to represent a people and a history, but the prejudice to racialize and stereotype groups of people to conform to audience expectations can also be a real risk that writers must work hard to overcome. The penultimate chapter “The ‘Stolen Generations” in Feature Film: The Approach of Aboriginal Director Rachel Perkins and Others,” by Theodore F. Sheckels, illustrates the link (and some missing links) between Aboriginality and Australian cinema. The chapter takes stock of the complexity and richness of Aboriginal directors, especially focused on Rachel Perkins and Tracey Moffett. Sheckles argues that comparisons of the traditional Australian white Hollywood-like feature film with its Aboriginal counterpart illustrate striking aesthetic and political differences, but also 2The Goose, Vol. 14, No. 1 [2015], Art. 39https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol14/iss1/39differences in the directness of the films. If Hollywood films are direct when offering a narrative, “indirection”—a label given by T. F. Sheckels herself—is key to understanding Aboriginal film narratives. The essay that closes the book “A History of popular Indigenous Music,” by Andrew King, not only traces Indigenous music “across Australia for a wide range of audiences” (188), but reflects the kind of negotiation of changing degrees of “non-Indigenous criticism, patronage, and recognition” (187) explored throughout the text.  On the one hand, the book’s validity lies on its ranging over the present world context, one characterized by a maze of cultural diversity and by the global range of cultural production without ignoring the “refraction principle” of Australian Literature (Redondo-Olmedilla 41). On the other hand, the book reinforces and expands the canon of that momentous work, The Anthology of Australian Aboriginal Literature (2008) edited by Anita Heiss, Peter Minter, and Nicolas Jose. The added element is the new context and the continuous sense of abridgment with many cultural genres. A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature presents the value of analyzing kinship and the type of relationship between the oral traditions, rituals, and artwork of Australian Aboriginals and the westernized melange culture of our time. This is a book about indigenous culture, but it is also a book about cultural mating and fecundity, transgenerational collaboration, multiple voices echoing in our time, and the value of the collaborative inpulse.  The contributors to this volume are “an international group of scholars” (2) including a number of fresh new voices in the field. But this freshness of scholarship is an asset and allows the text to address themes without atavistic fears. The book taps into new trends in Literary Studies and, at times, goes one step further than postcolonial studies and well into transnational literary postcolonialism. The Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature is not old style “self-punishing” postcolonial studies, but rather an analysis that goes beyond the level of nation and gathers momentum for a cultural continuum to be explored and rediscovered. One criticism that could be made of the book is that it would benefit greatly from a digest of some maps, pictures, or other artistic material to balance and complement the rich and densely populated information in the book. The Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature is a work where Aboriginal culture is a catalyzing and refreshing ecological and ethical process. For many, Australian Aboriginal Literature may be a new field in academic study but this collection recollects and abounds in ideas and experiences that are real knowledge conduits across time, and presents core knowledge for the future primitive/primitive future that is/will always be here. Our warmest welcome for this new presentation of an ancestral staple—it is a huge achievement.  Works Cited  Gardiner, Stephen M. “A Perfect Moral Storm: Climate Change, Intergenerational Ethics and the Problem of Moral Corruption.” Environmental Values (2006) 15: 397–413. Heiss, Anita, Peter Minter, and Nicholas Jose. (eds.) Macquarie Pen Anthology of Aboriginal Literature. Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 2008. Print Lefevere, André. Translating Literature: 3REDONDO-OLMEDILLA: A Companion to Australian Aboriginal LiteraturePublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2015Practice and Theory in a Comparative Literature Context. New York: MLA, 1992. Print. Redondo-Olmedilla, José-Carlos 2006: “Mapping Australian Literature: The Refraction Principle.” In Explorations in Australian Literature. Eds. Jaydeep Sarandi and Binod Mishra. New Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 2006. 34-41. Print.      JOSÉ-CARLOS REDONDO-OLMEDILLA is associate professor at the Department of  Philology (English Studies) in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Almería (Spain) and professor-tutor at the National University of Distance Education (UNED). He holds a Ph. D in English Studies and another Ph. D in Arts and Humanities. His research interests and publications focus on comparative and cultural issues. He is working currently on new literatures in English and Spanish as well as issues involving globalization, the environment and cultural flows.    4The Goose, Vol. 14, No. 1 [2015], Art. 39https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol14/iss1/39

A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature edited by Belinda Wheeler

Scholars Commons

The Goose
Volume 14 | No. 1 Article 39
8-25-2015
A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature
edited by Belinda Wheeler
JOSE-CARLOS REDONDO-OLMEDILLA
Universidad de Almeria
Part of the Australian Studies Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, Critical and
Cultural Studies Commons, Literature in English, North America Commons, Nature and Society
Relations Commons, Other English Language and Literature Commons, Other Languages,
Societies, and Cultures Commons, and the Place and Environment Commons
Follow this and additional works at / Suivez-nous ainsi que d’autres travaux et œuvres:
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose
This article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Goose by an
authorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.
Cet article vous est accessible gratuitement et en libre accès grâce à Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Le texte a été approuvé pour faire partie intégrante
de la revue The Goose par un rédacteur autorisé de Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Pour de plus amples informations, contactez
scholarscommons@wlu.ca.
Recommended Citation / Citation recommandée
REDONDO-OLMEDILLA, JOSE-CARLOS. "A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature edited by Belinda Wheeler." The
Goose, vol. 14 , no. 1 , article 39, 2015,
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol14/iss1/39.
A Companion to Australian Aboriginal 
Literature edited by BELINDA WHEELER 
Camden House, 2013 £50.00 
 
Reviewed by JOSÉ-CARLOS REDONDO-
OLMEDILLA 
 
This rich presentation of Australian 
Aboriginal Literature offers a kind of 
accomplished comprehensive approach 
for connoisseurs and newcomers alike. It 
is an attempt to de-marginalize this 
cultural production and to make it more 
axial and core-like. In this sense the text 
behaves like a true opus magnus as it tries 
to articulate Aboriginal life and aspirations 
through contemporary productions. The 
foreword by Nicholas Jose reinstates and 
reinforces “Aboriginal creative expression 
in its capacity to cross boundaries” and 
presents the different array of materials 
set in the book as “collaborative 
interfaces” (VIII). It presents a new 
longing, recognizing that the study of 
Australian literature must start with 
Aboriginal literature. 
In the well-structured introduction, 
Belinda Wheeler tackles the exciting issue 
of the canon. She pays attention to the 
important notion of the canon’s 
suppleness, but given equal space to 
issues of cultural reconciliation and how 
literature and culture can be interpreted 
as a loss waiting to be recovered, 
suggesting how writing might be 
deciphered as “a vehicle to overcome past 
injustices and start a healing process” (6). 
In his chapter “Indigenous Life 
Writing: Rethinking Poetics and Practice,” 
Michael R. Griffiths recalls how 
westerners have taxonomized distinctions 
such as poēsis (making art) and praxis 
(ways of acting in the world and in the 
community) or the not so widely known 
distinction between the two words that 
the ancient Greeks had for life: bios, the 
form of socially conditioned, collective 
and individuated life, and zoē, signifying 
the simple fact of living. This way of 
thinking has biased our interpretation of 
art and life. It is because of this that 
Griffiths contests and delegitimizes this 
vision. For him, Aboriginal life writing 
interprets bios in a more integrative way: 
it is both collective and individual and has 
more to do with “making life from and 
through community connections” (18), or 
it is neither and so challenges both bios 
and zoē. Griffiths demonstrates how 
Aboriginal life writing defies a “biopolitical 
notion of life” that was imported from the 
colonies by maintaining a concept of 
“kinship and belonging vested in country” 
(20). 
In the second chapter, “Australian 
Aboriginal Life Writers and Their Editors: 
Cross-Cultural Collaboration, Authorial 
Intention, and the Impact of Editorial 
Choices,” Jennifer Jones traces the 
evolution of Aboriginal life writing as an 
accessible genre that “accommodates 
varying degrees of literacy” (36). One 
wonders if the editorial responses 
presented in the study, are more 
interested in presenting a romanticized 
version of the Aboriginal past as it is 
obvious that the approach taken by the 
different editors prioritizes some 
materials. 
Chapter 3, “Contemporary Life 
Writing: Inscribing Double Voice in 
Intergeneracional Collaborative Life-
Writing Projects,” by Martina Horakova, 
reevaluates the prominence of 
subjectivity shifting and double voice in 
some Aboriginal autobiographies. This 
writing experience shows and teaches us 
that intergenerational Indigenous life 
writing, by enacting dual-voice narratives, 
presents a dissident character. But 
beware, this is not the kind of “Empire 
writes back” dissidence—it is beyond that, 
sometimes giving hybridized images 
1
REDONDO-OLMEDILLA: A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature
Published by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2015
where we can find Aboriginal motherhood 
with modern urban experiences. 
Chapter 4, “European Translations 
of Australian Aboriginal Texts,” co-written 
by Danica Čerče and Oliver Haag, analyzes 
the European reception of Aboriginal 
Literature. The authors work on German, 
Italian, Dutch, and Slovene translations of 
two texts to explore how teamwork from 
editors, authors, and publishing houses 
imperative for the authenticity of 
translated texts. It was André Lefevere in 
his work Translating Literature: Practice 
and Theory in a Comparative Literature 
Context who expressed the view that 
translators mediate between literary 
traditions, and that they do so with some 
goal in mind other than simply making the 
original available in a neutral, objective 
way. Čerče and Haag refresh some good 
old ideas and project them to the 
translation of Aboriginal Literature, aiming 
for a balance between comprehensibility 
and foreignness. 
Extending care to poetry and song 
is dealt with in “Tracing a Trajectory from 
Songpoetry to Contemporary Aboriginal 
Poetry,” by Stuart Cooke. This chapter 
presents the basics of Aboriginal 
Songpoetry and adds core information on 
contemporary Aboriginal poetry. Cooke 
argues that “[l]iterary critics have seldom 
rigorously engaged with oral Aboriginal 
poetry, thereby failing to acknowledge the 
extensive Indigenous cultural heritage of 
contemporary Aboriginal writers” (89), 
even in spite of the fact that poets like 
Lionel Fogarty, Samuel Wagan Watson or 
Ali Cobby Eckerman have demonstrated 
exceptional poetic talent in recent times. 
Cooke’s study aims to link the poet’s voice 
with the written work, orality with written 
expression, and the performative quality 
of orality with the lived potentiality of the 
written text. 
“Rites/Rights/Writes of Passage: 
Identity Construction in Australian 
Aboriginal Young Adult Fiction,” by 
Jeanine Leane centers on the kind of 
transmigration that features in the change 
from adolescence to adulthood, through 
the work of three young fiction writers: 
John Muk Muk Burke, Melissa 
Lucashenko, and Tara June Winch. The 
two following essays, Paula Anca Farca’s 
“Humour in Contemporary Aboriginal 
Adult Fiction” and Katrin Althans’s “White 
Shadows: The Gothic Tradition in 
Australian Aboriginal Literature” are 
interesting representations of extended 
dialogues between these two facets of 
life, sometimes as counter-discursive 
spaces, but inextricably attached to the 
life, craft, and experience of Aboriginal 
peoples. 
In “Bold, Black, and Brilliant: 
Aboriginal Australian Drama,” Maryrose 
Casey shows how drama still fills 
important functions in society, and how 
Aboriginal writers “faced a number of 
obstacles to break [the] silence” of 
Aboriginal voices in the Austrailian drama 
scene (156). Playwrights have a 
responsibility to represent a people and a 
history, but the prejudice to racialize and 
stereotype groups of people to conform 
to audience expectations can also be a 
real risk that writers must work hard to 
overcome. 
The penultimate chapter “The 
‘Stolen Generations” in Feature Film: The 
Approach of Aboriginal Director Rachel 
Perkins and Others,” by Theodore F. 
Sheckels, illustrates the link (and some 
missing links) between Aboriginality and 
Australian cinema. The chapter takes 
stock of the complexity and richness of 
Aboriginal directors, especially focused on 
Rachel Perkins and Tracey Moffett. 
Sheckles argues that comparisons of the 
traditional Australian white Hollywood-
like feature film with its Aboriginal 
counterpart illustrate striking aesthetic 
and political differences, but also 
2
The Goose, Vol. 14, No. 1 [2015], Art. 39
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol14/iss1/39
differences in the directness of the films. 
If Hollywood films are direct when 
offering a narrative, “indirection”—a label 
given by T. F. Sheckels herself—is key to 
understanding Aboriginal film narratives. 
The essay that closes the book “A 
History of popular Indigenous Music,” by 
Andrew King, not only traces Indigenous 
music “across Australia for a wide range 
of audiences” (188), but reflects the kind 
of negotiation of changing degrees of 
“non-Indigenous criticism, patronage, and 
recognition” (187) explored throughout 
the text.  
On the one hand, the book’s 
validity lies on its ranging over the present 
world context, one characterized by a 
maze of cultural diversity and by the 
global range of cultural production 
without ignoring the “refraction principle” 
of Australian Literature (Redondo-
Olmedilla 41). On the other hand, the 
book reinforces and expands the canon of 
that momentous work, The Anthology of 
Australian Aboriginal Literature (2008) 
edited by Anita Heiss, Peter Minter, and 
Nicolas Jose. The added element is the 
new context and the continuous sense of 
abridgment with many cultural genres. A 
Companion to Australian Aboriginal 
Literature presents the value of analyzing 
kinship and the type of relationship 
between the oral traditions, rituals, and 
artwork of Australian Aboriginals and the 
westernized melange culture of our time. 
This is a book about indigenous culture, 
but it is also a book about cultural mating 
and fecundity, transgenerational 
collaboration, multiple voices echoing in 
our time, and the value of the 
collaborative inpulse.  
The contributors to this volume 
are “an international group of scholars” 
(2) including a number of fresh new voices 
in the field. But this freshness of 
scholarship is an asset and allows the text 
to address themes without atavistic fears. 
The book taps into new trends in Literary 
Studies and, at times, goes one step 
further than postcolonial studies and well 
into transnational literary postcolonialism. 
The Companion to Australian Aboriginal 
Literature is not old style “self-punishing” 
postcolonial studies, but rather an 
analysis that goes beyond the level of 
nation and gathers momentum for a 
cultural continuum to be explored and 
rediscovered. 
One criticism that could be made 
of the book is that it would benefit greatly 
from a digest of some maps, pictures, or 
other artistic material to balance and 
complement the rich and densely 
populated information in the book. 
The Companion to Australian 
Aboriginal Literature is a work where 
Aboriginal culture is a catalyzing and 
refreshing ecological and ethical process. 
For many, Australian Aboriginal Literature 
may be a new field in academic study but 
this collection recollects and abounds in 
ideas and experiences that are real 
knowledge conduits across time, and 
presents core knowledge for the future 
primitive/primitive future that is/will 
always be here. Our warmest welcome for 
this new presentation of an ancestral 
staple—it is a huge achievement. 
 
Works Cited 
 
Gardiner, Stephen M. “A Perfect Moral 
Storm: Climate Change, 
Intergenerational Ethics and the 
Problem of Moral Corruption.” 
Environmental Values (2006) 15: 
397–413. 
Heiss, Anita, Peter Minter, and Nicholas 
Jose. (eds.) Macquarie Pen 
Anthology of Aboriginal Literature. 
Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 
2008. Print 
Lefevere, André. Translating Literature: 
3
REDONDO-OLMEDILLA: A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature
Published by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2015
Practice and Theory in a 
Comparative Literature Context. 
New York: MLA, 1992. Print. 
Redondo-Olmedilla, José-Carlos 2006: 
“Mapping Australian Literature: 
The Refraction Principle.” In 
Explorations in Australian 
Literature. Eds. Jaydeep Sarandi 
and Binod Mishra. New Delhi: 
Sarup & Sons, 2006. 34-41. Print.  
 
 
 
 
JOSÉ-CARLOS REDONDO-OLMEDILLA is 
associate professor at the Department of  
Philology (English Studies) in the Faculty 
of Humanities at the University of Almería 
(Spain) and professor-tutor at the 
National University of Distance Education 
(UNED). He holds a Ph. D in English 
Studies and another Ph. D in Arts and 
Humanities. His research interests and 
publications focus on comparative and 
cultural issues. He is working currently on 
new literatures in English and Spanish as 
well as issues involving globalization, the 
environment and cultural flows. 
 
 
 
4
The Goose, Vol. 14, No. 1 [2015], Art. 39
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol14/iss1/39


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A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature edited by Belinda Wheeler

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