Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writings By Indigenous Australians

By Michele Grossman

Written by established and emerging Indigenous intellectuals from a variety of positions, perspectives and places, these essays generate new ways of seeing and understanding Indigenous Australian history, culture, identity and knowledge in both national and global contexts. From museums to Mabo, anthropology to art, feminism to film, land rights to literature, the essays collected here offer provocative insights and compelling arguments around the historical and contemporary issues confronting Indigenous Australians today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Oct 16, 2012
• ISBN: 9780522853025

Book preview

Blacklines

Blacklines

Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians

Introduced by Ian Anderson,

Michele Grossman, Marcia Langton

and Aileen Moreton-Robinson

Michele Grossman, Coordinating Editor

Contents

Contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction

After Aboriginalism: power, knowledge and Indigenous Australian critical writing

Michele Grossman

Part I Critical discourses: identities, histories, knowledges

Introduction: the Aboriginal critique of colonial knowing

Ian Anderson

1  The end in the beginning: re(de)finding Aboriginality

Michael Dodson

2  Black bit, white bit

Ian Anderson

3  Aboriginality and corporatism

Philip Morrissey

4  Always was always will be

Jackie Huggins

5  Tiddas talkin’ up to the white woman: when Huggins et al. took on Bell

Aileen Moreton-Robinson

Part II Imaging Indigeneity: art, aesthetics, representations

Introduction: culture wars

Marcia Langton

6  Language and lasers

Lin Onus

7  Seeing and seaming: contemporary Aboriginal art

Hetti Perkins

8  The presentation and interpretation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art: the Yiribana Gallery in focus

Margo Neale

9  Aboriginal art and film: the politics of representation

Marcia Langton

Part III Knowledge in action: politics, policies, practices

Introduction: resistance, recovery and revitalisation

Aileen Moreton-Robinson

10  Better

Martin Nakata

11  ‘Nothing has changed’: the making and unmaking of Koori culture

Tony Birch

12   Australia’s Indigenous languages

Jeanie Bell

13 Overturning the doctrine: Indigenous peoples and wilderness–being Aboriginal in the environmental movement

Fabienne Bayet-Charlton

14 Wandering Girl: who defines ‘authenticity’ in Aboriginal literature?

Sonja Kurtzer

Afterword

Moving, remembering, singing our place

Philip Morrissey

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Contributors

Ian ANDERSON is Associate Professor and Director of the VicHealth Koori Health Research and Community Development Unit at the Centre for the Study of Health and Society, University of Melbourne. He has researched and published widely on a range of issues dealing with Aboriginal health, identity, culture and history.

Fabienne BAYET-CHARLTON lives in the Adelaide Hills with her husband and two children. She holds a degree in Aboriginal and Island Affairs Administration, which has led her to work at the Native Title Unit, the Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement, the University of South Australia and the University of Adelaide. She has published a number of written pieces dealing with Indigenous issues, including her first novel, Finding Ullagundahi Island (Allen & Unwin, 2002), which explores her Aboriginal identity, family history and cultural dispossession. She is currently working on her second novel.

Jeanie BELL is a linguist, educator and activist based in Brisbane. She is the author of Talking About Celia: Community and Family Memories of Celia Smith (University of Queensland Press, 1997).

Tony BIRCH is a lecturer in the Department of English with Cultural Studies, University of Melbourne. He has a PhD in History and a Master of Arts in Creative Writing. He has published and taught in the areas of Australian urban and social history, ‘contact’ histories between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Australia, and the contested meanings of ‘heritage’ and ‘landscape’. He is a published poet and fiction writer.

Michael DODSON is Chair of the Australian National University’s Institute for Indigenous Australia. He is Chairman of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies in Canberra. Professor Dodson was Australia’s first Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner with the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission 1993–98, and served as counsel assisting the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody 1988–90. He contributed for more than a decade to the crafting of the Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples for the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

Michele GROSSMAN is a senior lecturer in literary and cultural studies and head of graduate studies in the Faculty of Arts at Victoria University, Melbourne, and was a senior visiting fellow at the University of Melbourne in 2002. Her research focuses primarily on Indigenous Australian writing, representation and culture. Her work has appeared in Cultural Studies, Meanjin, Hecate, Postcolonial Studies, Women’s Writing, Meridian, Australian Women’s Book Review and Thamyris.

Jackie HUGGINS is a historian and Deputy Director of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit at the University of Queensland. She is Co-Chair of Reconciliation Australia, the former Chair of the Queensland Domestic Violence Council, and has been a member of the National Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, the AIATSIS Council, and Co-Commissioner for Queensland for the Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal Children. She has published a wide range of essays and studies dealing with Indigenous history and identity. She is the author of Sistergirl (University of Queensland Press, 1998), and co-author, with Rita Huggins, of the critically acclaimed biography Auntie Rita (Aboriginal Studies Press, 1994).

Sonja KURTZER is an Indigenous woman of Kokatha/Mirning descent from the far west coast of South Australia. She has worked extensively in university Indigenous education programs. She is currently undertaking studies toward a PhD in the department of Social Inquiry at Adelaide University. She has published in national and international journals, and is interested in issues of cultural and racial identity.

Marcia LANGTON holds the Foundation Chair of Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne, and was previously the Ranger Chair of Aboriginal Studies at Northern Territory University, where the she co-founded the Centre for Indigenous Natural and Cultural Resource Management. She has many years of experience as an anthropologist working in Indigenous affairs with land councils, the Queensland government, commissions and universities and has published extensively on Aboriginal issues including land, resource and social impact issues, Indigenous dispute processing, policing and substance abuse, gender, art, film and cultural studies. Professor Langton’s publications include ‘Well, I heard it on the radio and I saw it on the television …’: an essay for the Australian Film Commission on the politics and aesthetics of filmmaking by and about Aboriginal people and things (Australian Film Commission, 1993) and Burning Questions: Emerging Environmental Issues for Indigenous Peoples in Northern Australia (Centre for Indigenous Natural and Cultural Resource Management, Northern Territory University, 1998).

Aileen MORETON-ROBINSON is a postdoctoral fellow located in the Australian Studies Centre, University of Queensland. Previously she was Convenor of Indigenous Studies at the School of Humanities, Griffith University and taught Women’s Studies at Flinders University. Dr Moreton-Robinson has been involved in the struggle for Indigenous rights at local, state and national levels, and has worked for a number of Indigenous organisations. She is the author of Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism (University of Queensland Press, 2000). Her publications in the area of native title, whiteness, race and feminism have appeared in anthologies and journals in Australia and overseas.

Philip MORRISSEY is a lecturer in the Department of English with Cultural Studies, University of Melbourne. He is an Aboriginal man who has occupied a wide range of influential positions in Aboriginal arts and cultural administration over the last seventeen years, including executive, managerial and directorial positions. He was awarded the Order of Australia medal in 1989 and has published in a range of journals including Postcolonial Studies, Meanjin, RePublica, The UTS Review, Meridian, and Australian Book Review. He is co-author of a forthcoming book with Stephen Muecke on Aboriginal philosophy (University of New South Wales Press).

Martin NAKATA is Associate Professor and Director of the Aboriginal Research Institute at the University of South Australia, and founder of the Indigenous On-Line Network. Dr Nakata is an expert in Torres Strait Islander education policy and history.

Margo NEALE is Head, Gallery of Aboriginal Australia, National Museum of Australia, Canberra. She has previously been a curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art at the Queensland Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. She is co-editor, with Sylvia Kleinert, of the Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture (Oxford University Press, 2000).

Lin ONUS (1948–96) was one of Australia’s most respected and recognised urban artists, and the first urban Koori artist ever to have a major touring retrospective exhibition, beginning in Sydney in 2000. His works are now exhibited in every major gallery in Australia and in major overseas collections in Canada, the United States, Germany, New Zealand, Japan, Finland and Spain, and he was the recipient of many prizes for community service and services to the arts.

Hetti PERKINS is a member of the Eastern Arrernte and Kalkadoon communities. Currently the Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, she has worked with Indigenous visual art for over fifteen years. In recent years she has curated Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius at the Art Gallery of New South Wales for the Sydney 2000 Olympic Arts Festival and co-curated fluent, Australia‘s representation at the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997. Hetti was a member of the International Selection Committee for the 2000 Biennale of Sydney and the Selection Panel for Australia’s representation at the 2003 Venice Biennale. She was previously Curator at Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative in Sydney and has also worked for Aboriginal Arts Australia. A past board member of Bangarra Dance Theatre, Hetti was also a member of the Visual Arts and Crafts Board of the Australia Council and is presently Co-Chair of the Indigenous Arts Reference Group and a member of the Visual Arts and Crafts Committee of the New South Wales Ministry for the Arts.

Acknowledgements

My first and heartfelt thanks go to those who have laboured unstintingly on the material aspects of production during the complex life-span of this project. For initial typing and text formatting, I am grateful to Doreen Doherty, Pauline Smith, Felicity Morris (who also contributed to project management) and Sharon Humphreys. For prompt and professional research assistance and project management at an early stage of the project, I am grateful to Kate Cregan and Cheryl Earnshaw. I am especially indebted for research assistance in the latter stages to Irene Bilney, whose thoroughness, diligence and unrelenting commitment to tracking down information that simply did not want to be found make her a formidably bright star in the firmament of research assistants. Thanks too to Lisa Palmer and Ian Syson for last-minute assistance with some hard-to-find references. The organisational and manuscript preparation skills of Elizabeth Arkles transformed a trembling tower of disks and papers into a professional end product.

Blacklines has been enduringly shaped by the contributions of several people. I wish to acknowledge the contribution made by Denise Cuthbert at Monash University. Denise initially served as a co-editor of Blacklines, and she brought her own strengths to the shared venture of this project in its early stages. Sadly, unanticipated personal circumstances prevented Denise from fulfilling her editorial role. One or two other colleagues, who have chosen to remain anonymous, made very substantial and abiding intellectual and professional contributions along similar lines to the development of this volume. I herein respect their desire for anonymity, and record my debt of gratitude to them accordingly. I am indebted to Alison Ravenscroft for her suggestion in relation to the essays that introduce each section of Blacklines. Stephen Muecke’s comments at proposal stage and later were unflaggingly insightful, helpful and focused.

Generous feedback on aspects of the collection was provided at various points by Ian Anderson, Bronwyn Cran, Jackie Huggins, Marcia Langton, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Stephen Muecke, Julie Stephens and Patrick Wolfe, and the final version has been enriched by their constructive comments and criticisms. My deepest gratitude goes to the contributors whose essays make Blacklines what it is, and whose outstanding work has been matched by cooperation and understanding during the volume’s travels from manuscript to publication.

At Melbourne University Press, Teresa Pitt was a dream publisher, and her expertise, professionalism, passion and commitment have left an indelible imprint on this book. Melissa Faulkner demonstrated a cheerful capacity for dealing expertly and efficiently with an alarming number of queries and quagmires. Thanks also to Lee White for her efficient and meticulous copy-editing, and to Louise Adler, who became publisher and CEO at MUP during production, for her warm and enthusiastic professional support of the book in its final stages. I am also very grateful to Jo Onus and the Lin Onus Estate for permission to reproduce Lin Onus’s Ginger and my third wife approach the roundabout on the cover of Blacklines, and to Mark Davis for his striking cover design.

Without committed institutional support, Blacklines would never have seen the light of day. I am very grateful to Victoria University for its generous financial and in-kind sponsorship of this book, especially to Robert Pascoe, Helen Borland, Phillip Deery, Ron Adams and Vaughan Beck.

Various kinds of support during the preparation of this book were offered by my colleagues on the journal Postcolonial Studies: Stephen Cairns, Phillip Darby, Michael Dutton, Leela Gandhi, Amanda Macdonald, Sanjay Seth, Vanita Seth and Tim Watson; by Paul Adams, Helen Borland, Bronwyn Cran, Katie Hughes, Karen Jackson, Joyce McKenzie, Jeannie Rea, Julie Stephens, Jane Trewin and Russell Wright at Victoria University; Lynette Russell, Pauline Nestor and Zane Ma Rhea at Monash University; Anita Heiss at the Australia Council; the wonderful members of Pu-R-L; and, at the NTEU-VU Branch, Eve Anderson, Shirley Winton, Greg Baxter and Marian Burford. Deep personal thanks to Ian Anderson, Barbara Champion, Marcia Langton, Rose Lucas, Amanda Macdonald, Julie Stephens, Michelle Towstoless and Patrick Wolfe for being the staunchest of friends when it mattered most. My partner, Derek Ross, endured uncomplainingly the vagaries and vagrancies induced by this project, and I have cherished his humour, his love, his kindness and his boundless capacity to surprise and delight on a daily basis, as indeed I cherish him.

Some of these essays were first published in original or amended form in the following publications, and I am grateful to the authors and copyright holders listed below for permission to reproduce this work here: Ian Anderson, ‘Black bit, white bit’, RePublica 1, 1994, pp. 113–22, courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers; Fabienne Bayet, ‘Overturning the doctrine: Indigenous people and wilderness—being Aboriginal in the environmental movement’, Social Alternatives 13.2, July 1994, pp. 27–32, courtesy of Social Alternatives; Jeanie Bell, ‘Australia’s Indigenous languages’, Voices from the Land: 1993 Boyer Lectures, ABC Books, Sydney, 1994, pp. 45–61, courtesy of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation; Tony Birch, ‘Nothing has changed: the making and unmaking of Koori culture’, Meanjin 51.2, 1992, pp. 229–46, courtesy of the Meanjin Company Ltd in association with the Australian Centre, University of Melbourne; Michael Dodson, ‘The end in the beginning: re(de)finding Aboriginality’, Australian Aboriginal Studies 1, 1994, pp. 2–13, courtesy of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Canberra; Jackie Huggins, ‘Always was always will be’, Australian Historical Studies 25.100, 1993, pp. 459–64, courtesy of Australian Historical Studies, Department of History, University of Melbourne; Sonja Kurtzer, ‘Wandering Girl: Who defines authenticity in Aboriginal Literature?’, Southerly 58.2, Winter 1998, pp. 20–9, courtesy of the Australian English Association, Sydney; Marcia Langton, ‘Aboriginal art and film: the politics of representation’, Race & Class 35. 4, 1994, pp. 89–106, courtesy of the Institute of Race Relations and Sage Publications, London; Aileen Moreton-Robinson, ‘Tiddas talkin’ up to the white woman: when Huggins et al. took on Bell’, Conference Proceedings: Winds of Change: Women and the Culture of Universities, University of Technology, Sydney, 1999, courtesy of University of Technology, Sydney; Philip Morrissey, ‘Aboriginality and corporatism’, Postcolonial Studies 1.1, 1998, pp. 101–8, courtesy of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies, North Melbourne; Martin Nakata, ‘Better’, RePublica 1, 1994, pp. 61–74, courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers; Margo Neale, ‘The presentation and interpretation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art: the Yiribana Gallery in focus’, Periphery 25, May 1995, pp. 11–14, courtesy of Periphery Inc., New South Wales; Lin Onus, ‘Language and lasers’, Art Monthly Australia (Special Supplement: The Land, the City: The Emergence of Urban Aboriginal Art), 1990, pp. 14–19, courtesy of Jo Onus/The Lin Onus Estate and Art Monthly Australia/Australian National University; Hetti Perkins, ‘Seeing and seaming: contemporary Aboriginal art’, Art Monthly Australia 66, 1994, pp. 22–5, courtesy of Art Monthly Australia/Australian National University.

Introduction

After Aboriginalism: power, knowledge and Indigenous Australian critical writing

¹

Michele Grossman

‘Recalling [Ralph] Ellison, we may be invisible, but we are not blind.’²

SINCE THE EARLY 1980s, the burgeoning interest in and publication of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writing across a number of genres—notably life-writing and oral histories, autobiography and memoir, prose fiction, poetry, drama and children’s literature—has become increasingly well-established. The strength and expansion of Indigenous Australian contributions in these genres has permanently transformed the Australian and international cultural landscape, and contemporary readers can now make themselves familiar with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander imaginative, historical and personal writing in ways that were impossible a generation ago. The rise of Indigenous Australian publications in these genres has been accompanied, however, by comparatively limited attention and exposure for modes of Indigenous Australian writing less aligned with creative and personal expression and more informed by intellectual and theoretical analysis and critique.

This has not always been the case. The modern history of Indigenous Australian writing is widely held to have begun in 1964, with the publication of Kath Walker’s first collection of poetry, We Are Going³ (although a compelling case exists for revising this history to begin with David Unaipon, a Ngarrindjeri activist, preacher and inventor who began writing and publishing in the 1920s).⁴ Walker’s poems of the 1960s and 1970s in particular challenge easy or complacent distinctions between the ‘creative’ and the ‘critical’, and her writing during this period can be situated within the context of what Barbara Harlow terms ‘resistance literature’,⁵ that is, creative and aesthetic genres animated by the imperatives of radical critique, political action and social change. Walker (who subsequently adopted the name Oodgeroo Noonuccal) continued to command a prominent place as an Aboriginal poet and activist over the next two decades. Her poetry and essays were joined by the publications of several other Black Australian poets, novelists, essayists, short-story writers and autobiographers in the 1970s and 1980s,⁶ work that served collectively to affirm bell hooks’s observation that for the hitherto marginalised, writing is never ‘solely an expression of creative power, it is an act of resistance, a political gesture that challenges the politics of domination that would render us nameless and voiceless’.⁷

The period 1987–90, however, marked a crucial turning point in the uptake of Indigenous Australian writing and publishing. Magabala Books, the first Australian press devoted exclusively to publishing work by Indigenous Australians, was established in Broome in 1987, bringing out Glenyse Ward’s autobiographical Wandering Girl as its first publication in that year. Also in 1987, Fremantle Arts Centre Press published Sally Morgan’s My Place, a hugely successful narrative of family history and autobiography, and Penguin Books followed in 1988 with Ruby Langford’s⁸ Don’t Take Your Love to Town, a searingly moving and witty account of Langford Ginibi’s life that occasioned critical and popular controversy as it made its way on to bestseller and then secondary school and university booklists. A significant number of Indigenous Australian autobiographical and life-writing texts followed throughout the 1990s and into the present,⁹ consolidating the profile of Indigenous Australian contributions in these genres and directing readers toward a more nuanced and textured appraisal of the shared histories, regional differences and gendered specificities of Indigenous Australian lives and strategies of narrative self-representation. But it was the appearance in 1990 of Paperbark: A Collection of Black Australian Writings¹⁰ that served as a particular kind of watershed in the publication of Australian Indigenous texts. Energetic, passionate and explicitly polemic in intent, the anthology offered—and in some cases demanded—a newly focused, newly radicalised mode of reading and valuing varieties of Black Australian writing. Published two years after the Australian Bicentenary celebrations in 1988—an event counter-observed publicly by a great many Indigenous Australians as Invasion Day—Paperbark reinvigorated the need to examine and redress the ways in which Indigenous Australian voices, particularly literary and polemical voices, had been systematically excluded, marginalised or dismissed within the broader culture of the Australian written word.

In general, the kind of work that fuelled the publishing arm of what is sometimes called the Aboriginal Renaissance¹¹ of the late 1980s and early 1990s has been critically important in a number of ways. First, it has compelled readers, amongst other things, to revisit the received narratives of colonially-driven national history and identity that have governed non-Indigenous understandings of, and relationships with, Aboriginal peoples since contact. Second, it has been crucial in forging a reconsideration of the kinds of resistance such work offers to the continuing hegemony of institutionally-sanctioned discourses of Aboriginality, both past and present. Finally, it has cultivated and sustained for non-Indigenous Australian readers in particular a heightened awareness of the diverse interests of Indigenous Australian writers working within and across a range of situated knowledges, communities and perspectives. In these respects, Indigenous Australian writing over the last twenty years has had a profound impact on the range and register of interventions in what Marcia Langton calls the intersubjective realm of cross-cultural discourses of ‘Aboriginality’.¹²

A number of more recent anthologies¹³ have continued to update and extend the range of Indigenous Australian writing being published in these genres, and to introduce such work to new transnational audiences. The publication of one such anthology in 1998,¹⁴ however, led me to wonder about the continuing absence of a collection of Indigenous Australian writing that engaged with modes of cultural inquiry and intervention beyond those genres identified primarily with creative or aesthetic production. Where, for example, was the book that made available at least a portion of the theoretically informed and critically focused writing produced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander intellectuals? How visible or not was the published presence of Indigenous Australian critique aimed at discomfiting the well-worn paradigms by which ‘Aboriginal Australia’ has come to be known by generations of non-Indigenous readers? And what implications did this continuing absence have for the project of re-orienting both Indigenous and non-Indigenous readers toward new engagements with Indigenous ideas, politics, and representations?

This gap in the landscape of Indigenous Australian publications struck me as both curious and disturbing. As Ian Anderson notes in his introduction to Part I,

The written text has been employed by Indigenous Australians as a mode of political and cultural self-representation from quite early in colonial history—it is not a new phenomenon. Contemporary Aboriginal critical writing [thus] has its historical foundations in a much longer history of Aboriginal political and cultural critique.¹⁵

As Anderson goes on to remark, the written text has been mobilised by Indigenous Australians as a tool of political intervention since 1847, with the presentation of a petition to the Secretary of State for the Colonies by eight Tasmanian Aborigines.¹⁶ A similar point, albeit with a different generic focus, is made by Michael Rose in For the Record: 160 Years of Aboriginal Print Journalism,¹⁷ a collection of Indigenous Australian chronicle, reportage, opinion and analysis published between 1837 and 1995 in both mainstream and Aboriginal-based publications. Rose observes, however, that despite the long history of Aboriginal print journalism, the majority of readers continue to think of ‘Aboriginal writing’ as something that exists ‘primarily … in the realm of what White culture calls creative writing: poetry, short stories, novels and plays’.¹⁸

The tensions produced by the relative privileging of Indigenous creative and aesthetic cultural production, and the concomitant marginalisation of Indigenous critical analysis and interpretation, have frequently worked to sustain the hegemonic influence of non-Indigenous critiques in the realm of Indigenous affairs, an influence often (though not always) aligned with what are commonly termed ‘Aboriginalist’ perspectives and practices.¹⁹ Thus it was possible in 1993 for Stephen Muecke to ask ‘Where are the Aboriginal intellectuals?’²⁰ as a way of highlighting the problematic effects of what he termed the ‘prison-house’ of a contemporary Aboriginality defined purely as ‘cultural’ in ways that simultaneously mystified Aboriginal identities and reduced them to moral or political instrumentalities. One troubling effect of the trend identified by Muecke has been the discursive construction of Indigenous Australians as long on cultural and ‘spiritual’ capital, but markedly short on intellectual and critical capital. This in turn has helped to maintain a discursive space in which non-Indigenous intellectuals have historically had relatively free rein in making their own critical interventions across a range of Indigenous Australian matters, without the obligation of engaging with the scholarship, arguments or analyses of Indigenous Australian intellectuals themselves.

The origins of that free rei(g)n, as Mick Dodson reminds us, are located not only in the colonial history of Australia more generally, but in the specific legacy of British imperialism and its intellectual tributaries. ‘Since first contact’, writes Dodson, ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been the objects of a continual flow of commentary and classification’²¹ produced by settlers, administrators, anthropologists, archaeologists, historians and others. Such work frequently sought to use Aborigines in an evidentiary manner: to prove or disprove various theories, to legitimate or invalidate various policies, and to investigate or sanction the nature of the changes wrought by encounter with Europeans. This kind of commentary has frequently combined with a persistent European commitment to the idea that the primary ‘use-value’ of Aboriginal culture was to delineate the scientific, social and cultural features of primitivity; it has also combined, at times, with more pragmatic, less theoretical anxieties about the political threat posed by a literate Indigenous Australian polity.

Against this historical background, the problems posed for Indigenous Australian writers in any period who have attempted to work against the grain of prevailing ideas about ‘Aboriginal writing’ have been formidable. Foremost amongst these has been the construction of Indigenous Australian critical writing as a field that is, at worst, virtually non-existent and at best, both highly specialised and highly marginalised. The outcome, whether intended or not, has been to render Indigenous critical scholarship and commentary as limited, simplistically oppositional or unproblematically consensus-building, and thus less threatening to dominant academic and institutional hegemonies. To ‘resist translation into the languages and categories of the dominant culture’, as Dodson puts it, is thus a project that involves the deployment of a complex repertoire of Indigenous critical strategies and articulations, ‘at times ancient, at times subversive, at times oppositional, at times secret, at times shifting,’²² as a means of challenging the erasures and bracketings that have too frequently characterised the reception of such work by broader critical and theoretical mobilisations.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the answer to Stephen Muecke’s rhetorical question—‘where are the Aboriginal intellectuals?’—is of course that they are everywhere, as the welter of specialist publications and databases dealing with Indigenous Australian affairs attests. Nevertheless, while distinguished critical work by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander academics, intellectuals, professionals and activists has long circulated in the public sphere, particularly over the last 15 years or so, very little of it has been broadly accessible in the form of widely published or easily available texts. There are exceptions to this, of course. For example, Marcia Langton’s ‘Well, I heard it on the radio and I saw it on the television …’: an essay for the Australian Film Commission on the politics and aesthetics of filmmaking by and about Aboriginal people and things, published in 1993, has since become a widely read and cited foundational text of Indigenous Australian cultural critique. Langton’s deconstruction of the cultural rhetorics implicit in the grammar of Australian filmmaking concerned with Aboriginality has produced an enduringly altered critical consciousness regarding the politics and effects of practices related to Indigenous Australian cultural production and representation. More recently, Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism has blazed new trails in its analysis of critical blindnesses regarding discourses of ‘whiteness’, and the implications of this for constructions and articulations of the ‘Indigenous’ by non-Indigenous feminist academics and theorists. And a number of ground-breaking essays by Indigenous Australian scholars and professionals in the Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture²³ have also had a notable impact on the rules of critical engagement governing the production and representation of Indigenous knowledges and perspectives.

Despite these exceptions, however, much Indigenous Australian critical writing has largely been confined to making its appearance in the form of academic journal essays, occasional papers, published lectures and articles in a variety of specialist or ephemeral publications. This can be accounted for in part by the social and political dynamics that have governed the contemporary production of some Indigenous Australian criticism; as Philip Morrissey observes in the essay that closes this volume, one of the distinctive and exciting features of contemporary Indigenous critical writing is its ‘connection with the social world’. This connection has often dictated the appearance of such writing either in forums aimed at having an immediate and concrete impact on public consciousness, or in publications that speak to a knowledgeable but numerically slight audience of academics, bureaucrats, policy analysts and opinion-makers. Where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander critical writing has appeared in books in the form of anthologies or collections, it has usually been published alongside, or as a counterpoint to, non-Indigenous criticism dealing with particular thematic, disciplinary or theoretical concerns, such as native title, the Mabo decision, national identity, and perspectives on race. This kind of critical framing, despite its worthiness in other regards, has limited the kinds of dialogues and—crucially—the debates that emerge when the perspectives and analyses of Indigenous Australian intellectuals are encountered as a critical mass, rather than as a token, minority or peripheral presence amongst a wealth of non-Indigenous critical voices.

Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians is a response to these issues on a number of fronts. The collection aims to do several things: to introduce readers to new and recent criticism by Indigenous Australians; to offer new encounters with and contexts for better-known pieces of Indigenous Australian critical writing; to focus attention and debate on how such critically engaged work contributes to and challenges broader formations surrounding transnational Indigenous identities, cultures and histories; and, perhaps most importantly, to provide a starting point for readers interested in learning more about Indigenous Australian critical perspectives, as well as stimulating and extending the thinking of those already familiar with the field. In making more accessible to readers some of the debates, themes, controversies and milestones that mark Indigenous Australian critical interventions, the volume makes visible a critical space in which Indigenous Australians position themselves not as passive ‘witnesses’ of, but active agents in, the conceptualisation and analysis of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history and culture. It is also a space in which Indigenous Australian criticism emerges as a discursive formation in its own right, rather than in the liberal guise—well-intentioned, perhaps, but politically and ethically damaging—of an authenticating prop wheeled out in support of the enthusiastic interventions of non-Indigenous critique.

Most of all, Blacklines seeks to make visible the presence of an Indigenous critical space that co-exists with that of a culturally informed, politically charged critical community. A critical community, particularly one that is intersubjectively lived and constituted, is not the same as a ‘field’ or a ‘discipline’; its intellectual imperatives are distinct, as are its cultural and political coordinates. ‘Community’ should not be taken here, however, to gesture toward unsophisticated assumptions of pervasive unity and purpose; the critical community that emerges across these essays is marked by principled difference and debate as much as by committed dialogue and inquiry.

The politics of visibility that this concept of ‘critical community’ speaks to are articulated in various ways by a number of the contributors whose work appears in these pages. Marcia Langton observes that ‘the easiest and most natural form of racism in representation is the act of making