What does it mean to “write of life”? And how does Aboriginal writing position itself in relation to the politics of life itself? The opening stanza to Jack Davis's poem about sixteen-year-old John Pat, brutally beaten by police in 1983, troubles the relation between the Aboriginal custom of not speaking the name of the dead and the necessary task of memorializing such trauma. One way to read the stanza is to identify the pious as a double category: the pious may be those whites who insist Davis “forget the past”; yet, paradoxically, the pious may equally refer to those voices of tradition from within the Aboriginal community that insist upon maintaining the taboo against speaking the name of the dead. John Pat's death is a tragedy, like that of so many Aboriginal victims of Australia's (post)colonial inheritance of trauma and continued structural violence and systematic dispossession. Speaking Pat's name is not only tragic because of his death in police custody, on “a concrete floor / a cell door,” but also because of Davis's necessary compulsion to continue to speak his name and thereby break a traditional taboo.

The discussion of a Gothic tradition in Australian Aboriginal literature is highly controversial. First, there is the debate over the European origin and colonial legacies of the Gothic; second, there is the exploitation of Aboriginal culture in (Western) Gothic fiction; third, there is the argument that Aboriginal cultural beliefs should not be mistaken for the Gothic. Concerning the European origin of and the abuse of Aboriginal customs in Gothic fiction, one can say that Aboriginal authors engage critically with the Gothic and enter into a state of creative resistance. Combined with elements of Aboriginal tradition and culture, the European Gothic in this creative resistance mutates into an Aboriginal Gothic as a way to negotiate issues of Aboriginal cultural strength and identity. Ranging from the reversal of colonial binaries to the Gothic realities of everyday life, contemporary Aboriginal literature emphasizes the subversive and transgressive qualities that lie at the heart of the Gothic. To understand the uneasy relationship of Australian Aboriginal literature with the Gothic, it is necessary to first explore the Gothic's place in literary and cultural history. Let us therefore start with an overview of the Gothic and the shadows it brings.

The genre of Australian Indigenous life writing has, particularly in the 1990s, proliferated into a large critical field that, mirroring the quantity, popularity, and diversity of published life stories, examines various aspects of these narratives. One of these aspects is the nature of collaboration among participants, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, in the process of eliciting, recording, writing, editing, and publishing such accounts. A number of scholarly studies have examined the complexities of this process and noted the long and notorious history of editorial intervention in the production of mostly orally transmitted life stories, an intervention that frequently led to some degree of misrepresenting Indigenous voices and cultural values (Jacklin, “Critical,” 56). From earlier “as-told-to” autobiographies to variously negotiated and complex collaborative oral history projects integrating multiple voices, the issues of power relations, authority, authenticity, representation, accommodation, and resistance come to the surface in any attempt to examine the mechanics of producing Indigenous life writing. One may wonder about the motives for paying such close attention to the ways in which Indigenous life stories are produced. Not surprisingly, this has to do with the genre itself: it has been widely acknowledged that Indigenous life writing has become an important vehicle for retrieving previously repressed histories of colonial violence, forced assimilation, and state intervention, and, therefore, it has been identified as a site of resistance (Brewster, Reading, 2–3; Nettlebeck, 43; Grossman, 174).

Performance, as an embodied encounter, between people of different cultures occupies a crucial position within the processes of recognition and misrecognition of the other. In the context of colonized peoples, dramas written for performance in effect act as a map for representations and communication. In Australia, performance has been a pivotal point of encounter between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. Historical aboriginal cultures are probably the most performance based in the world. Explicitly choreographed performances marked every aspect of social, political, and spiritual life, ranging from judicial, religious, diplomatic, and pedagogical practices to hundreds of genres of performances for entertainment. These performances combined dialogue, poetry, mime, song, dance, musical accompaniment, and visual art. As a central and striking feature of Aboriginal cultures, these practices were a crucial point of cross-cultural exchange from the first European colonial settlements in the late eighteenth century.

Throughout the nineteenth century Aboriginal people created and performed shows for the European settlers for a variety of reasons, including proclaiming Aboriginal sovereignty of the land, communicating their culture to the settlers, and engaging with the settler economy. Examples of the creation and performance of these shows are numerous. In his 1865 publication, The Aborigines of Australia, Gideon Lang recounted a performance text from the early 1840s (28–29). Lang, a settler who migrated to Australia in 1841, brought together various accounts of a diplomatic event that occurred in Queensland: Bussamarai, a leader of the Mandandanji people, invited the leading settlers to watch a performance that was intended to communicate their fate if they did not leave the area.

Depictions of race and gender stereotypes abound in various areas of Australian Aboriginal literature. This literature usually addresses the writers' responses to the injustice done to Aboriginal people by whites and the blatant racism that creeps into Australian society even today. Given the seriousness of these depictions, Aboriginal writers have seldom employed humor, making it a rather unexplored field in Aboriginal literature and criticism. Recently, though, an increasing number of Aboriginal authors have addressed issues of social injustice and racism by creating humorous situations that help readers recognize white Australians' immoral behavior. Memoirs by Kenny Laughton (Not Quite Men, No Longer Boys [1999]), Robert Lowe (The Mish [2002]), and Mabel Edmund (No Regrets [1995]), novels by Mudrooroo (Doctor Wooreddy's Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World [1999], Doin Wildcat [1988]), poetry by Samuel Wagan Watson (Of Muse, Meandering, and Midnight [2012]), and plays by Kevin Gilbert (The Cherry Pickers [1988]) and Jack Davis (No Sugar [1986], The Dreamers [1996]) are some of the genres in which Aboriginal authors have used humor. Leon Rappoport, a critic who writes on humor and stereotypes, praises those who address “sexual, racial, and other forbidden topics … by situating them in the context of humor, [because] the tensions that are aroused can be released as laughter” (50). Triggering an instant and natural reaction from readers, humor attracts a wide variety of audiences to Aboriginal literature because it presents the absurd and vicious nature of stereotypes, teaches lessons about the creativity of Aboriginal people, and suggests that hope and optimism characterize Aboriginal life.

Aboriginal poetry enjoyed a tremendously rapid evolution during the latter half of the twentieth century. In 1964, Oodgeroo Noonuccal published We Are Going, the first book of poetry by an Aboriginal author. Since the 1970s, poetry has been at the forefront of Aboriginal political expression. poets like Noonuccal, Kevin Gilbert, and Lionel Fogarty have used the medium to forge new possibilities for the expression of contemporary Aboriginal thought. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, established poets like Fogarty and emerging talents like Samuel Wagan Watson and Ali Cobby Eckermann are some of the most widely read and exciting poets in Australia. However, while these poets are gaining increased attention, their position within Western critical discourse remains somewhat awkward. Literary critics have seldom rigorously engaged with oral Aboriginal poetry, thereby failing to acknowledge the extensive indigenous cultural heritage of contemporary Aboriginal writers. instead, musicologists and anthropologists have been left to research oral Aboriginal poetics, but within an empirical framework that generally denudes the songpoems of their poetic qualities. Consequently, there is an enormous lacuna in Australian literary studies about the relationship of contemporary Aboriginal poetry to traditional forms of songpoetry. This relates to a larger, more willful ignorance of the relationship between the voice of the poet and the text that is printed on the page. I will argue in this essay that to separate these two modalities is to deny the importance of much of the Aboriginal poetic tradition.

When Mary Ann Hughes complained in 1998 that critics were preoccupied with the process of editorial collaboration that shaped Australian Aboriginal texts, she argued that this focus led to the neglect of the literary merit of the work. While the collaboration of mainstream writers with editors primarily went unremarked, “in the case of an Aboriginal writer, the role of the editor in constructing the work is the issue which most readily springs to the fore” (56). Hughes remarked upon the then decade-long critical determination to materialize the traditionally invisible craft of editing. This critical preoccupation ran parallel with the second wave of Aboriginal life writing (Brewster, 44), which witnessed the transformation of Aboriginal publishing from marginal to mainstream, reaching beyond the local to global audiences (Haag, 12). The exponential increase in the publication of Aboriginal life writing was accompanied by the politicization of publication processes, including coproduction, that have conventionally been kept from public view.

Sally Morgan's best-selling life narrative My Place (1987), a watershed in Australian Aboriginal publishing, also prompted critical interest in the politics of collaboration. Australian critics responded with skepticism to the mass-market appeal of this multivoiced life story, which capitalized on burgeoning interest in Aboriginal affairs fostered by the celebration of the bicentenary of white settlement in Australia. Aboriginal scholars found a “soft analysis” (Huggins and Tarrago, 143) of the colonial past that allowed for a “catharsis” of white settler guilt (Langton, 31).