Taking Kerry Reed-Gilbert’s anthology The Strength of Us as Women: Black Women Speak (2000) as touchstone, the chapter undertakes a conversation between two Aboriginal women poets from Narungga and Wiradjuri standpoints about the transformative power of Indigenous poetry and its significant contribution to literature in the world. Offering an alternative to the essay, the authors discuss embodied engagements with the colonial archive and the theme of relationality that informs so much of Aboriginal writing. The chapter considers the potential of poetry to be both an affective tool and literary intervention. It outlines the methods of Gathering and Archival-Poetic praxis as ways to explore the counter-narrative potential of poetry. In considering the role of memory work and memory-making, the authors also discuss blood memory and body memory.

First Nations Australian literature has often been the object of incomprehension and derogation by settler critics – something a deeper perspective of “presencing” can overcome. This chapter takes a decolonial perspective and highlights the self-assertion of First Nations writers against invidious characterization, such as that received by the poetic work of Oodgeroo Noonuccal in the 1960s. It demonstrates how nonIndigenous readers can approach texts by First Nations authors not as “tourists” but as “invited guests.”

IN HIS REVIEW of a seminal collection of established and emerging Aboriginal writers, Paperbark: A Collection of Black Australian Writing (1990), the literary critic David Headon predicted that the 1990s would be “a hectic and bountiful decade” for Australian Aboriginal literature. Headon's prediction was realized. The 1990s and 2000s witnessed increased Aboriginal resistance and activism and evidence of new energies within Aboriginal literature. Australia entered the new millennium with racial issues still unresolved. Through the Centenary of Federation (1901–2001), the History Wars (1980s–2000s), the 2007 Northern Territory Intervention, the election of the Rudd government in 2008, and the prime minister's “National Apology to the Stolen Generations” in 2008, Aboriginal writing has continued to grow in genre and geography.

Belinda Wheeler noted in the introduction to A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature (2013) that from its nascent beginnings in the 1920s there is an emerging and growing canon in Aboriginal literature. This body of writing extends beyond the literary sphere—it is a cultural project that writes beneath, across, and above the nation—and its presence has intervened significantly in the literary and cultural history of Australia.

Prominent within this canon is the Noongar writer and scholar Kim Scott. Scott's ancestral country is the southwestern corner of Western Australia between the Gairdner River and Cape Arid. His clan is Wirlomin. Since the mid-nineties Scott's clan has spoken through his poetry, short stories, novels, children's literature, language books, and scholarly works—some of which have received wide critical acclaim in Australia and abroad. This volume brings together an impressive collection of Australian and international scholars in discussions of Scott's works regionally, nationally, and internationally.

Australia is a modern nation that comprises many Aboriginal countries. The term country is used by Aboriginal people to describe family origins and continued relationships to a particular place. Country means more than just land. It is local, but it stretches toward something larger. Country is a state of mind in that it includes the memories of a people in a particular place past and present, but it also connects to tangibles such as lands, waters, and the lives they sustain.

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.