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2008 was the year of the 220th anniversary of permanent white settlement in Australia - a year of celebration, but not for all citizens. The iconography of Australia packaged for the tourist industry is full of Aboriginal motifs, but the ongoing debate about frontier conflict, violence, dispossession and different interpretations of Indigenous rights and history shows the undiminished importance and force of those topics for Australian society. But which literary answers do Aboriginal and white authors give to these issues and in which way do their interpretations differ from the tradition of colonial politics, historiography and anthropology, which has interpreted frontier conflict in terms of stereotypical categorizations of civilization and savagery for nearly two centuries? Nina Liewald explores the potential of contemporary Australian novels to question colonial dichotomies and bridge cultural divides and contextualizes them within a literary and cultural framework. Detailed narratological analyses give an insight into the way colonial stereotypes about religion, sexuality, violence, language and orality are represented, questioned or inverted. The so-called Australian "History Wars" - a fundamental controversy about the interpretation of Australian history and Aboriginal rights that fuelled political debates from Paul Keating to John Howard - serve as an important reference point for the novels under discussion and show the undiminished explosiveness of the topic.
List of contents
1 Introduction
2 The question of perspective: Reworking narratives of settlement from different angles
2.1 'The vision of the victors': William Thornhill in The Secret River by Kate Grenville
2.2 'The vision of the vanquished': Wooreddy in Doctor Wooreddy's Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World by Mudrooroo
2.3 The two protagonists and their 'vision' of life and the Other
3 Central dichotomies and their application in the novels
3.1 'The dark side of the dream': race, violence, sexuality, religion and the construction of the concepts of civilisation and savagery
3.2 The power of naming the 'blank spaces of the earth': the political significance of language, literacy and
3.3 A stone age culture doomed to die out?
Anthropological classifications of Aboriginal culture
and subject-object distinctions
4 'He who controls the present, controls the past He who controls the past, controls the future' The novels in historical context: motives for 'writing back to the historical record'
4.1 Doctor Wooreddy and The Secret River in the context of the 'History Wars'
4.2 Which truth is there to discover? The authors' perspective and notions of 'authenticity' and 'identity'
Conclusion
Bibliography
Deutsche Zusammenfassung
