In the pursuit of both political and creative objectives, there exists a wide range of differing Aboriginal voices, expressing varying life experiences and expectations, and defying description as a homogeneous culture or ideology. Whilst it may be convenient for industries such as academia, media and tourism to give an impression of one Aboriginal nation or culture or voice, it does not exist, nor should it be expected to exist any more than in any other grouping of cultures and communities.
Their literature is composite and federalist, with specific components ‘owned’ by different groups, speaking different languages and living in different places.
(Hodge and Mishra, 1991: 107)
Hodge and Mishra describe the overall strategies of modern Aboriginal literature as attempts to re-establish traditions and to find an independent voice for Aboriginal literatures.
Many Aboriginal groups in northern and central Australia are trying to re-establish traditional ways of life, as close to their traditional territories as is now possible. The acrylic art of the Western Desert peoples and the maintenance of traditional languages are important to this strategy. But for many Aborigines in the south the route back has been disrupted, so that the direct link with a specific piece of country is no longer viable ... the achievements of the Western Desert artists are inspiring but unavailable. Yet each of these distinct strands of Aboriginal art is equally Aboriginal, equally crucial to all Aborigines, since one establishes the Aboriginal base, while the other opens up the transformational freedom that is equally important to all Aborigines, wherever they are placed (1991: 93)
Just as Charles Harpur's landscape poetry reinforced his political and economic beliefs as a landowner and part of the Free Selection Movement, many Aboriginal communities have realised the importance of their stories and songs in reinforcing claims for title over, or access to, traditional lands.
This has meant that modern poets have become more explicit about the connections between community and place. Older oral literature often takes this as given; an unspoken, but central, preoccupation. A community’s place could be assumed; it was only the reasons for the differing laws and stories that had to be explained. Outside the occasional inter-clan demarcation dispute, the external legal imperatives that now exist were not at issue. The political milieu of colonisation has engendered a different approach.
Other modern writers have realised the importance of bringing ancestral stories and songs to the broader political arena of community education, social justice strategies and political change. Some have consciously chosen to concentrate on writing about land, or in forms which are linked with traditional oral forms. For Aboriginal writers displaced or disconnected from their lands and communities, in particular, this can be a means of drawing attention to, and resolving, the deep-seated connection between land and the Aboriginal past, present and future.
For some poets, including Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Jack Davis, this has meant focusing on writing in English, in order to convey their message to non-Aboriginal readers (and critics) in Australia and internationally. These poets have attempted to forge a representative voice for Aboriginal people, one which can be heard and recognised readily by both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal readers.
As Kevin Gilbert explained in his Introduction to Because A White Man’ll Never Do It:
I have also written this book in order to bring white Australia to some greater compassion through understanding and to enlighten it to its responsibilities in the areas of land and compensation for Aborigines.
(Gilbert, 1973)
Similar beliefs underlie the writing of Jack Davis, who has long been involved in Aboriginal organisations nationally and in Western Australia, including the Aboriginal Advancement Council.
I think that the reason we have this bitterness towards white society is because as long as white settlement has been in WA, which is what I am concerned about mainly, because I live here, the maltreatment and mistakes have been going on; and they are still going on. We are one of the most affluent countries in the world and we have one of the highest living standards, yet we have the highest mortality rate in the world in regards to our indigenous people. This shows that there is something radically wrong with white administration in regard to the aboriginal population ... and I firmly believe that people who can write, whether they are white or coloured, no matter what type of Australian they are, should do so about these matters.
(Davis, 1970, viii)
However, Mudrooroo claims that this approach has meant the development of Aboriginal writing as a “fringe” literature, not accepted by the mainstream European literary establishment, but also not necessarily directed at the Aboriginal community.
His book, Writing from the Fringe, begins:
Aboriginal literature begins as a cry from the heart directed at the whiteman. It is a cry for justice and an asking to be understood. (1991: 1)
Mudrooroo is not placing the blame for the marginalisation of Aboriginal literature upon these poets, but rather disagrees with their strategy of aiming their work at a non-Aboriginal readership. This, he believes, perpetuated the negative ways in which the European-centred literary mainstream approached early Aboriginal writing in English.
While this may well be true in terms of critical appraisal and access to publishers, poetry such as that of Oodgeroo and Davis was quite clearly not “fringe” in other respects, as it can now be perceived quite clearly as being part of that Nomadic syntax identified by Hodge and Mishra (see 2.6).
It must also be acknowledged that Oodgeroo and several of her contemporaries did manage to find publishers, and were widely accepted by the broader reading public. One might ask, however, how many other talented poets who hoped for public acceptance were denied access to it by an unsympathetic publishing industry (compounding the effects of lower levels of access to education, finance and cultural support experienced by Aboriginal people in this country). The situation has changed only recently under the influence of flourishing Aboriginal-owned publishing houses, and public demand for best sellers such as Sally Morgan’s My Place. Some poets have made choices about the strategies they were to follow: others have had their choices limited by circumstance.
The difference in political strategy highlights the various ways in which Aboriginal writers have chosen to convey their message. In a discussion documented in Aboriginal Writing Today, Cliff Watego examines (in reply to a comment from Mudrooroo) the differing strategies that are possible even within the broader aim of appealing to a white audience:
One thing you said about protest poetry, when you call it a limiting factor. It’s not just a single thing. Kath sees it from one point of view, Kevin sees it from another… It’s not ‘just protest poetry’. Kath Walker is writing from a Utopian socialist point of view. It shows hope for the future, that in the future we'll get there by uniting together, the black man and the white man uniting together. Kevin Gilbert is saying that this is rubbish. It’s the black men who suffer. So get up and prove to the white men that we can make it on our own… That’s to me a sort of direct denial of some of Kath’s stuff that she says. But it’s not a limiting factor. To emphasise this protest tradition, or what they want to call protest poetry, it’s unfair, because it’s made up of all different aspects, different viewpoints, as the poets or the writers know themselves.
(Davis and Hodge, 1985: 87)
Chosen literary strategies are obviously not static. In most cases, the poets themselves, including Davis and Oodgeroo, have changed strategies several times over the course of their lives, changing roles, from writers to activists to educators, or perhaps developing new styles or forms, or aiming at differing readers.
However, their words are still often constrained by their literary and cultural context, and by the use of a language that is not able to reflect many of their concepts.
Fringe writing is, theoretically speaking, trapped in a paradox; its aesthetics are ancient as it draws on the oral traditions of a pre-European Australia, yet it is textualised in a print culture, in a non-indigenous language (English), and in genres (European) that are not readily reconcilable with Aboriginality.
(Knundsen, 1991: 32)
Younger poets such as Lionel Fogarty have attempted to forge a totally different approach, using structures which challenge non-Aboriginal readers and using the English language in ways which change it into a force that can be used by Aboriginal people, so that “ ... the critical assumptions of Europe break down. Critics are forced to either condemn outright, or attempt to arrive at some understanding by utilising their theory, and to modify it to arrive at new ways of seeing and understanding”. (Mudrooroo, 1990: 50)
A further aim of many Aboriginal writers is to challenge white accounts of history, and to rewrite missing aspects of modern Australian history. This may involve the inclusion of Aboriginal perspectives on particular events or stories, or may require completely alternative histories to be written. An example of this would be writing about massacres or forced resettlements, or even about Aboriginal warriors involved in warfare against white invaders (when commonly accepted white history tells us that Aborigines disappeared because they couldn't cope with European illness or alcohol). Both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal writers have pursued this aim through fiction, poetry, and biography as well as poetry. Eric Willmot's novel, Pemulwuy, The Rainbow Warrior (1988) is a recent example of a painstaking re-construction of Aboriginal history since colonisation, while the best known, and probably most controversial, novel is Thomas Keneally's The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith.
There has been some debate within the Aboriginal communities as to whether or not poets should describe the negative aspects of modern Aboriginal life. Writers such as Gilbert have attempted to convey the reality of many existing Aboriginal communities, including descriptions of the impact of racism, poverty, lack of services, sickness, violence and alcoholism.
Other poets, such as Oodgeroo, have focused on the more positive features of traditional and contemporary communities, whilst also damning discrimination and racism on the part of white Australia, although more often through the use of metaphor, such as their respective gum trees.
Another strain of current Aboriginal writing in English, and possibly the most popularly read, is that which tells the author's own story or that of his or her immediate family. Writers of autobiography and fiction, such as Sally Morgan and Glenyse Ward, have become extremely popular with both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal readers. The general aim of their work is to convey their own lives and the discrimination and racism faced by Aboriginal people generally, but also to promote the positive aspects of Aboriginal life to reinforce their demands for equal opportunity.
This is often seen by critics such as Mudrooroo as a more gentle and almost assimilationist approach than outright demands for land rights and compensation, or political and economic equality. Again, though, many of these works are by women writers, and it is only too easy for them to be dismissed as soft, or more concerned with so-called women’s interests such as family than hard-edged political issues. In a way, such dismissals smack of the critical response to the early work of Oodgeroo.
Glenyse Ward sees her writing as a valid political strategy, of long-term significance, rejecting the “bitter” approach which Oodgeroo and Davis describe above:
I think that the only way I'm going to get through to other people is through literature, through books. I think I'll get the message across that way better than being hard about it. I don't think a lot of people realise that there's a whole lot of history involving real sadness—a lot of broken families, a lot of families spilt up.
(Hanigan, 1993)
In recent years, the act of story-telling, whether through children’s books, or autobiography, or the singing of traditional songs, has returned to its role of placing communities and individuals in relation to their land.
As we have seen (in 3.1), during the Native Title debates of the 1990s, the legal, political and economic relationships between communities and land have become more apparent and possibly more complex. Similarly, we can recognise the importance placed on land and land ownership in much of the poetry written by Aboriginal poets since the publication of We Are Going, and the role played by those poets in the social movements which resulted in, amongst other things, the landmark legal decisions of the past few years.
Land and rights to the land are linked within the politics of the Aboriginal community, to the redress of perceived injustices past and present, and also to the provision of (at least) adequate living conditions for people in urban and rural Aboriginal communities. That preoccupation with issues of justice around land ownership is not shared by most white poets, who are more likely to feel themselves free to view and describe the landscape within an aesthetic, rather than a political, framework.
For many Aboriginal poets, the politics of land and community that informs their work is practical, far-reaching, and intrinsic to their lives and their poetry.