Australian Colonisation and the Complicated Relationship between Literature and Representation
- Zenith Van Verhaal
- Jun 10, 2023
- 5 min read
Imagine you’re looking at a book. It claims to be about someone like you, to tell a story like yours. The book is praised as true representation of your people, and made several bestseller lists. It was nominated for multiple awards. Excited to investigate the hype, you open the book and start reading. Slowly, your excitement becomes disquiet, and disquiet becomes unease, until you have to put the book down, unable to read further. The way your people are portrayed, the stereotypes and story tropes used are so uncomfortable, so inaccurate and offensive that you eventually lose all hope that the book will get better.
For Australian Indigenous people, this is likely to often be their experience when consuming media. Already, Australian-made media is quite rare, even in Australia, since so much is imported from the UK and, even more so, the United States, but even among the few shows, movies and books that get created, most are written almost entirely by white people. Screen Australia published a report in June 2010, which found that, “in total, 32 features have been made since 1970 with an Indigenous Australian as director, producer, writer or director of photography”[1], and in reporting, The Conversation reported that “only 20% of authors [of opinion pieces] had an Indigenous background”[2]. However, just because an Indigenous person was involved in creating a specific piece of media doesn’t mean that book or film or show is good representation of Indigenous people, and certainly not Indigenous people as a whole. As Marcia Langton points out, “there is a naive belief that Aboriginal people will make ‘better’ representations of us simply because, it is argued, being Aboriginal gives a ‘greater’ understanding. This belief is based on… the assumption is that all Aborigines are alike and equally understand each other, without regard to cultural variation, history, gender, sexual preference and so on. It is a demand for censorship: there is a ‘right’ way to be Aboriginal, and any Aboriginal film or video producer will necessarily make a ‘true’ representation of ‘Aboriginality’”[3]. Just like among any other people group, there are so many other factors that contribute to an Indigenous person’s identity that one Indigenous cannot reasonably be expected to speak for and represent all Indigenous Australians. “It is estimated that over 500 language groups held title to land prior to colonization”[4].
Now, this is an awkward topic for me to write about. I’m not Indigenous. I’m not even a person of colour. I’m a white person whose grandparents moved from the Netherlands to Australia in the 60’s. I’ve not known many Indigenous people, and I’ve not talked to them about being Indigenous. This think-piece is my attempt to consider the issue in an educated way—from an admittedly outside perspective. I have some tangentially-related experience with representation issues as a queer person, enough to give me a healthy respect and sympathy for people of colour and the struggles they face, but that is nowhere near close to the same thing as racial discrimination and mis/malicious representation.
Colonisation has been a long process, beginning when “the first wave of invading white British immigrants landed on our shores in 1788. They claimed the land under the legal fiction of Terra Nullius—land belonging to no one—and systematically dispossessed, murdered, raped and incarcerated the original owners on cattle stations, missions and reserves”[4]. This has led to two conceptions of “belonging, home and place”[4] in Australia; that of “the non-Indigenous subject—colonizer/migrant—is based on the dispossession of the original owners of the land and the denial of our rights under international customary law”[4], and that of Indigenous people’s which “is derived from an ontological relationship to country derived from the Dreaming… During the dreaming, ancestral beings created the land and life and they are tied to particular tracks of country… The ancestral beings created animals, plants, humans and the physio-graphic features of the country associated with them”[4]. Both conceptions are a result of colonisation, and are still relevant because it “remains at the centre of Australian society”[4]. There is no escaping it; colonisation informs how both non-Indigenous and Indigenous people perceive Australia and their place in it.
Interrogating the way that media portrays certain peoples, themes and issues is important, since, as Clare Bradford puts it, “language is the primary mode through which colonizers and colonized encountered one another, and it is the principal means whereby relations of power are challenged and altered”[5]. It is also the way that attitudes and histories and prejudices are shaped and preserved for eternity. Once something has been written down, it is almost unchangeable, and it takes a lot of effort for anyone to prove it wrong or argue with it. Perhaps more importantly, once something is written down it is published or produced or acted, and from there it enters the public consciousness. Any misconceptions and deliberate misconstruing about anyone will be accepted as truth and take enormous effort to correct. Even for those who are not deliberately writing about themes of colonisation will still have some ideas and issues present. “As Graham Huggan notes, it is not the case that “all post-colonial writing is ‘about’ colonialism”; rather, “writers from formerly colonized countries are sensitive to the largely unwanted legacy of their colonial past”[5]. Colonialism is such a huge thing that takes over whole countries and peoples and leaves nothing untouched, and that makes it impossible for anyone remotely touched by a colonial past to not write, even tangentially, about themes of colonialism.
This has been a really interesting and uncomfortable piece to write. There’s something in me that feels wrong writing about these kinds of topics, especially in this kind of way, but I also know that it’s important for my own understanding. I am not writing about any of my own experiences or even those of anyone close to me, which makes mine a very precarious position. I am not trying to speak for any Indigenous people, only educate myself so that I can, at minimum, be more aware of my relationship to the country I live in, the people around me and the history of it all.
There are so many enduring effects of colonisation on the consciousness of Australians, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, and literature is both a perpetuation of it, and a representation of it. All authors, whether Indigenous or not (perhaps especially those who are not) should have an awareness of the effect colonisation has on various aspects of identification and relationships, both human and—in particular—non-human, when they are writing, so that these themes, which might ordinarily be implicit, can be expressed as intended, without unintentionally misleading or misrepresenting complex relationships.
Bibliography
[4] Moreton-Robinson A (2003) ‘I still call Australia Home: Indigenous Belonging and Place in a White Postcolonising Society’ in Ahmed S, Castada C, Fortier A. M., and Sheller M (eds) Uprootings/regroundings: questions of home and migration, Bloomsbury Publishing, Oxford, UK
[5] Bradford C (2007) Unsettling Narratives: Post Colonial Readings of Children’s Literature, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Canada
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