Aboriginality in Science Fiction

SF-TH Inc
Aboriginality in Science Fiction

Author(s): Brian Attebery
Source: Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Nov., 2005), pp. 385-404
Published by: SF-TH Inc
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4241374
Accessed: 19-10-2018 17:45 UTC
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/4241374?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
SF-TH Inc is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Science
Fiction Studies
This content downloaded from 200.27.72.243 on Fri, 19 Oct 2018 17:45:37 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
ABORIGINALITY IN SCIENCE FICTION 385
Brian Attebery
Aboriginality in Science Fiction
It is always hazardous to write across cultural boundaries, and when cultural

difference is accompanied by a history of abuse, the writer is certain to fall into
one trap or another. Non-Aboriginal writers from Australia have generated such
a collection of ignorant, patronizing, and demeaning texts about Aborigines that
some of the latter want to call a halt to any further attempts. As the novelist
Melissa Lucashenko says, "Who asked you to write about Aboriginal people?
If it wasn't Aboriginal people themselves, I suggest you go away and look at
your own lives instead of ours. We are tired of being the freak show of
Australian popular culture" (qtd. in Heiss 10).
Yet science fiction may be a special case. As the genre within which
concepts of the future are formulated and negotiated, sf can imply, by omittin
a particular group from its representations, that the days of that group are
numbered. Silence, too, can be a form of control, and the sin of omission, in
this case, worse than many possible sins of commission. Australian sf writers
have long struggled to incorporate native peoples and their traditional stories and
ways of life into distinctively Australian futures. The history of the struggle
suggests that good faith and a desire to learn, while not proof against error and
offensiveness, certainly make for more interesting fiction than does outright
prejudice. In addition, writers such as Frank Bryning and Terry Dowling, by
creating a space for Aboriginal characters and viewpoints within sf, can also be
read as inviting Aboriginal and other writers from non-European cultures to
contribute their own visions of Aboriginality, Australianness, and the future.
Science fiction is often concerned with the ways in which cultures interact,
most obviously in stories of first contact or interplanetary warfare. By allowing
writers to dramatize negotiations among radically differing world-views and
ways of life, the genre becomes what Mary Louise Pratt calls an "art of the
contact zone." A contact zone, according to Pratt, is a space "where cultures
meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetri-
cal relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths.... " (4).
If sf is the art, the zone in which it operates is the collectively imagined future,
a symbolic space where utopia, armageddon, and other powerful scenarios
compete.
Pratt's examples all represent one side of the contact: disadvantaged writers
staking a claim in dominant cultural forms. Her term might apply as well,
however, to writing in which voices of outsiders and downtrodden groups are
allowed to challenge the primary voice and point of view even though the author
belongs to the privileged group. This second application depends on Bakhtin's
idea that voices incorporated into a text remain, to some degree, autonomous,
rather than being whipped into conformity by the authorial will. This is the
perspective that sees novels such as Huckleberry Finn (1885) and Uncle Tom's
386 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 32 (2005)
Cabin (1852) as collaborations between their white authors and the black
speakers whose experiences and viewpoints have been imported into the larger
text. If there is any real cultural interaction within the science fiction of a
colonial nation such as Australia, most of it could only be in this Bakhtinian
sense, because until quite recently all of Australia's sf, including that dealing
with Aboriginal characters and issues, has been written by writers of European
descent. The recent emergence of science fiction by non-white writers such as
Archie Weller and Sam Watson provides a new perspective from which to
critique the earlier writing, sometimes quite harshly. Yet their fiction also
suggests that the earlier work, even the worst of it, helped to construct a contact
zone within which contemporary writers, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal,
can fruitfully explore issues of injustice, rationality, power, and differing
visions of the future.
The cultural grapplings that make science fiction a contact zone occur both
at the level of represented action and at that of narrative structure. Some science
fiction (like most fantasy) draws on themes and motifs from traditional magical
narratives such as myth and folktale, but it reframes those narrative elements
within novelistic representations of society and self. Well-known examples
include Samuel R. Delany's The Einstein Intersection (1967), patterned on the
Orpheus myth, and Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light (1967), in which advanced
technology allows an elite group to transform themselves into Hindu gods. But
it is not a simple matter to fuse myth and the novel, each of which carries
different assumptions about the ways in which time, society, and reality are
organized. Narrative techniques developed within the novel's realist tradition,
such as the direct representation of thoughts, place individualized characters and
their moral dilemmas at the center of the action. Oral traditional stories, by
contrast, are generally organized around figures who represent entire groups or
symbolize nonhuman forces. When sf draws upon traditional beliefs and stories,
then, it places them in radically different discursive contexts, as well as
juxtaposing them with advanced technologies and alien landscapes. An
essentially modem view of the world-scientific, psychological, historical,
materialistic-is thus pitted against a traditional, magical view. And each of
these world-views, along with the narrative structures that encapsulate it, comes
with a heavy burden of historical freight.
Some of the most aggressively modem societies are also those in which the
modern world-view arrived with European invaders, so that the clash between
viewpoints was enacted historically in the form of usurpation of land, formation
of race-based castes, violent suppression of traditional religions, and even
genocide. Australia, like New Zealand, the US, and Canada, is now a
prosperous, relatively peaceful, democratic, and scientifically advanced socie
Each of these former colonies, however, is haunted by past injustices and
ongoing conflicts with its native peoples. In the imaginations of the immigrant
majorities, these native groups became associated early on with wild landscape
and savagery. Even though the most disturbing savagery was often demonstrated
by the settlers themselves, such violent propensities were projected onto the
natives. Yet the landscape within which acts of violence have taken place could
be seen, paradoxically, as a lost paradise, and the brutish savages of pioneer

narratives could suddenly metamorphose into unfallen children of the wilder-
ness, as in James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking tales (the classic North
American example). Though the arid Australian continent was not as welcoming
as the forests and prairies of North America, the land and its people were
frequently transformed in immigrant writings into visions of Edenic innocence
and paradisal beauty.
In both America and Australia, the one native possession most envied by
European interlopers-other than the land itself-is the indigenous body of
stories. The keenest loss still felt by the newcomers is the disappearance of the
gods and spirits that once inhabited and enlivened the land. From Longfellow's
adoption of the Hiawatha legend to Australia's Jindyworobok movement of the
1930s, we can see writers of European ancestry redefiming themselves as local
by reinscribing native myths within their own literary traditions. Unfortunately,
the process of reinscription tends to involve pushing aside those whose claim to
the myths is stronger than one's own. While waxing sentimental over colorful
legends and noble rhetoric, both colonial societies actively engaged in removing
native populations and destroying their cultures.
All of this troubled history means that cultural interactions depicted within
sf are laden with longing and guilt. The indigenous Other becomes part of the
textual unconscious-always present but silenced and often transmuted into
symbolic form. Within Australian sf, Aboriginal characters stand variously for
the intractability of the Australian environment, dangers to be overcome, quaint
survivals from prehistory, and a spiritual awareness that modem humanity has
lost. Often there is no overt mention of earlier inhabitants. They only show up
indirectly in the form of place names and buried cultural references to
walkabouts or corroborees. Such absences are the fictional equivalent of the
longstanding legal principle of terra nullius, by which the Australian continent
was treated as if it had no ownership before white settlement. In the conscious-
ness of white Australians, actual Murri or Aranda people and their folkways
become a collective symbolic entity: not Aboriginals but Aboriginalism, an
abstraction that can too easily become a commodity.
Tracing the changing representations of Aboriginal characters and motifs,
we can divide the history of Australian science fiction and fantasy into three
periods. First came the Bad Old Days, from the 1890s all the way to the 1970s.
During the Bad Old Days, Aboriginal peoples were seen primarily as a
problem: holdovers, like the marsupials, from some earlier stage of evolution-
ary history, and, like the Tasmanian tiger, unlikely to survive the arrival of
more advanced competitors. Next was the Hopeful Moment, a brief period in
the 1970s when the emergence of Aboriginal writers such as Kath Walker
(Oodgeroo Noonuccal) and of an Aboriginal civil-rights movement signaled the
possibility of imaginative rapprochement between societies. Finally there is the
Troubled Now, a time when which there is no safe way for a non-Aboriginal
writer to tackle Aboriginal issues and yet when the discourse of sf offers a
number of innovative ways to reframe ideas of race and cultural difference.
The Bad Old Days. One of the first appearances of Aboriginal peoples within
a fantastic narrative is also one of the most outrageously racist. Austyn
Granville, author of The Fallen Race (1892), was not an Australian but an
American who spent time in Australia, so blame for the novel's views can be
spread between two societies. A general ignorance on the part of Americans
regarding Aboriginal life probably means that Granville acquired the specific
details of his racism, if not the impulse, from Australian acquaintances. His
romance appeared in 1892, at the height of a craze for exotic adventures
modeled after H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885) and She (1886-
87). Granville follows Haggard's formula faithfully (as the novel's original
introduction points out), to the extent of remodeling the Australian landscape to
provide a hidden forest kingdom deep within the outback. This kingdom is, of
course, ruled by a beautiful white queen who will be paired up with the novel's
adventurer-hero.
According to Robert Dixon, such adventure stories are attempts at narrating
colonialism. They transform the experiences of European exploiters into
"ripping yams" about mystery, masculine courage, and romantic fulfillment.
The white hero is allowed to go native temporarily: to immerse himself in other
cultures, become attuned to landscape, and engage in barbaric behavior, all the
while retaining an untouchable core of Englishness. The adventure makes a man
of him but leaves him with schoolboy virtues intact. The irony that Dixon points
out in Writing the Colonial Adventure (1995) is that colonial cultures such as
British Australia were most uncertain on precisely these issues. Could one be
simultaneously white and native, violent and innocent? In particular, the hero's
reformation depends on his induction into a native culture even while the plot
establishes that culture's inferiority.
In Granville's version of the Colonial romance, the hero ventures into the
outback with a group of other white explorers and a single native servant whom
he calls by the generic nickname Jacky-Jacky (with no acknowledgment that the
servant might have a real name in his own language). The other Europeans go
astray, and, "severed from my last white companion, I stand alone, save for the
presence of the aborigine, lost in the wilderness" (40). Jacky-Jacky, in other
words, is not a full companion, but something midway between a civilized
human and part of the natural scene. Jacky-Jacky has earlier been grouped with
the pack animals, both literally and through metaphoric terms such as
"trotted"-when the last horse dies, "the poor fellow's lamentations at the
untimely death of his favorite, beside which he had trotted so many weary
miles, were quite painful to witness" (31). The hero has learned a smattering
of his servant's language, and on the basis of that brief acquaintance assures the
reader that it is "a language abounding with deep gutterals and strange whispers,
but more easily acquired than one would at first credit, on account of the limited
range of its vocabulary" (23). Speaking a defective language, overly fond of
alcohol, companion to horses, so deferential to his white boss that he allows his
hairs to be plucked to provide fishing tackle (48), Jacky-Jacky is a typical
rendering of the half-assimilated Aborigine as seen through colonial eyes.
But natives who have not been brought into the Bri
influence fare even worse in Granville's narrative. Jacky-Jacky may be
described in animal-like terms, but the tribe of natives the lost explorers
encounter are actually a bizarre hybrid of animal and human. Here is the
narrator's first glimpse: "Looking from behind the leafy shelter of the bushes,
my eyes fell, first upon the fire itself, and then upon three perfectly round
objects, about four feet in height, covered with fur and looking like exaggerated
hedgehogs" (60). These furry spheres are the products of miscegenation,
descended on one side from
a certain lost tribe of aborigines, who many ages ago had wandered back into the
interior of the continent and had never been heard from again. The center of
Australia at that time had been largely overrun by that enormous marsupial, the
kangaroo. With these creatures the lost Assoluloo tribe was supposed to have
assimilated, they being a very low and degraded race, living chiefly on roots, and
being in a very small degree removed from the brute creation. (94-95)
The narrator-hero is not greatly surprised by these apparitions:
as I gazed upon the curiously formed creatures before us, and marked the almost
human intelligence with which they performed the duties assigned them by their
leader, I had little difficulty in tracing in their uncouth features some distinct
characteristics of the early aborigine, while in their fur-covered bodies, the
general activity of their movements, the half leaps with which they moved,
although circularly, from place to place, the distinguishing features of that
gigantic marsupial, the Central Australian kangaroo, were plainly to be
discerned. (95)
He assumes that these improbable hybrids were the products of rape, by

kangaroos, of captive tribal women-a blatant act of projection, considering
who actually carried out such rapes. In contrast, the effect of white incursions
on the lives of the local populace is presented as entirely benevolent. At the
novel's end, the hero and his queen begin to turn their realm into a sort of
missionary utopia, complete with steam engines and a free press. Most
importantly, " [f]rom an almost savage condition, she has, in a few years, rais
the masses of her people to a high average of intelligence" (351). Such is the
power of a determined white woman over even the most unpromising subjects.
The attitudes represented in Granville's novel did not disappear from the
Australian literary scene, but they did go underground-in one case liter-
ally-and other viewpoints began to challenge some of his assumptions. Writers
of fantastic fiction had plenty of other stereotypes to draw on in portraying
native peoples and cultures. Van Ikin mentions two standard attitudes toward
Aboriginal peoples within early fiction: "contempt or indifference" (xxxi). The
former is represented by G. Firth Scott's The Last Lemurian (1898), in which
ambushed white heroes "have no qualms about laying a trap and cold-bloodedly
killing every one of their attackers" (Ikin xxxi). The latter attitude often
expresses itself as absence: the Australian scene is written about as if it were a
province of England, completely free of prior occupation. A majority of sf
stories by Australian writers take place in the featureless laboratories, offices,
and apartments of formula sf, a setting even freer of dark-skinned people than
of women. Especially when projected into the future, this v

free continent is, in effect, a sort of bloodless genocide tha
with the inconvenience and guilt associated with Aboriginal presence. Another
way to get rid of the natives without guilt is to have someone else do it: in Erle
Cox's 1925 scientific romance Out of the Silence, a visiting superwoman offers,
if her white hosts wish, to weed out all the colored races (see Webb and Enstice
123).
Troublesome natives could also be eradicated from Earth by transforming
them into aliens. When American writers such as Edgar Rice Burroughs sent
their heroes to other planets, the beings they encountered on those worlds were
frequently native Americans in disguise-or, more precisely, reworkings of
Cooper's Indians. Similarly, the point of reference for an Australian writer
depicting aliens was some version of the Aborigine. In J.M. Walsh's Vandals
of the Void (1931), the inhabitants of Venus are described more flatteringly than
Granville's Aboriginals, but still in subhuman terms: "Those quaint, not
unlovable people who somehow remind one almost equally of a bird and a
butterfly. Pretty they are, hardly human as we understand it, they seem" (29).
In conformance with white descriptions of Aborigines, the Venerians eat
disgusting foods with relish (278), endure inhospitable environments (277), and
have short attention spans: "they were ... very interested in everything strange
and new, yet with an interest that one felt sure was purely evanescent" (29).
Although birds and butterflies are more decorative than spherical half-
kangaroos, they are not much closer to fully enfranchised humanity.
A more recent instance of the Aboriginal-as-Alien is Ron Smith's story
"Strong Attraction" (1968). In this version, people from Earth colonize a planet
with no apparent qualms about the existence of a native race, the "landies," who
are described as "primitive, with a culture at the food-gathering stage" (110).
The story's male narrator finds the landies repulsive: "Scaly, with a bright shine
like a snake has that looks like slime only isn't" (111). On top of that, they are
hairless, naked, and smelly. Women of the colony, however, respond
differently. It seems that the distinctive odor of the male landies is a powerful
sexual attractant that leads to a mass abandonment of the human men in favor
of "a new, crude, primitive, unknowable, unpromising way of life that came t
them as a strange mixture of freedom, which is fulfilment, and captivity, which
is the very basic fact of being human ..." (126; ellipses in original). Although
Smith's story treats the masculine colonists' point of view with irony, it
nonetheless reproduces a common colonial strategy, which is to project onto the
subject race the sexual aggressiveness actually demonstrated by the colonizers.
White men raping darker women are somehow transformed into visions of white
women being seduced by native men. This vision, in turn, can be used to
intensify the oppression of the native people.
Of the various attitudes expressed in fiction, the most benevolent-or least
malevolent-was the assumption that Aborigines were holdovers from the
distant past, survivors from the dawn of mankind, inevitably doomed by the
spread of European civilization but entitled to gentle treatment for as long as
they should hold on. This is the attitude expressed in many Australian poems,
reports, and memoirs such as Daisy Bates's The Passing of the Aborigines
(1938); and it occasionally carries over into the realm of science fiction, as in
Marjorie Bernard and Flora Eldershaw's utopian novel Tomorrow & Tomorrow
& Tomorrow (1983; originally published, in truncated form, as Tomorrow &
Tomorrow [1947]). The twenty-fourth-century narrator of that work comments
that Australia's First People are now
gone, completely and utterly, nothing was left of them but a few rock drawings,
a few spearheads in rosy quartz, some patterns incised in wood, the words of
some songs, soft, melancholy, their meaning forever sealed. Their dust was in
this dust, nothing more. In the north, where they had not perished but had been
absorbed, their docile blood had mingled without trace and no overt memory of
them remained. (4-5)
In the underground story mentioned above, however, a lost tribe of

Aborigines turns out to represent not humanity's melancholy past but its future
Phil Collas's "The Inner Domain" (1935), one of the first stories by an
Australian writer to be published in an American sf magazine, begins when a
set of strange radio signals arises somewhere in the center of the continent.
Deciphered, these signals prove to be utterances in an unknown language. The
narrative describes this language in terms reminiscent of Granville's description
of Jacky-Jacky's "limited" tongue: "Indeed, the gutteral, somewhat animal-like
sounds were declared by many scientists to be of purely animal origin, and it
was suggested that a huge joke was being perpetrated by broadcasting the voice
of an ape or other members of simian genus" (85). Later, though, this language
is declared to be related to the language of a vanished Aboriginal tribe, the
Arnuna.
At this point, the story seems to be heading in the direction indicated by the
editorial introduction, which asserts that "the aboriginals are regarded amongst
anthropologists as one of the least developed races of mankind-a survival of
the Stone Age...." (85). The editor speculates that the territory now held by
these "survivals" might once have cradled a more sophisticated society, but
"What people dwelt there and what degree of civilization they had reached, no
one knows-the deep, sandy desert holds many secrets" (85). No one
knows-but everybody knows, the editor implies, that such a civilization could
not have been built or maintained by anyone related to present-day Aboriginals.
Indeed, Collas does invent an ancient, highly technological civilization
hidden in a cavern beneath the desert. He departs from the lost-world romance
scenario, however, by having his Arnuna tribesmen take over from the long-
dead machine builders. Having wandered into the caverns decades ago, the
Arnuna have over time "learned all that was known to our predecessors-the
secrets and powers of the spheres of light; the method of extracting metal ore
from rock by fusion and attraction; how to create the translucent metal from
which our buildings and many other things are made-in short, everything the
original inhabitants knew" (102).
By the end of the story, we discover that the Arnuna have not only mastered
the ancient knowledge but have surpassed it, making machines that can read
thoughts and explore times past and future. In the process, they have remade
themselves as well. We see, on the viewscreen of the time-c

an image of the Arnuna as they once were: "The typical wa
weapons and dress could be reproduced by scattered tribes o
today. Gins carried squalling babies and the young lubras cr
giggling foolishly" (106).
Racially charged terms such as "gins" for Aboriginal mothers would come
naturally to the story's white hero, but the narrative seems to distribute his
impressions of the old-style Arnuna among their own modern descendants as
well. In the story's present, the Arnuna are represented as grave, dignified,
dressed in vaguely classical robes, and "of splendid proportions ... almost seven
feet in height" (90). They are also given a new origin. In the distant past, it
seems, the Arnuna had fled to Australia from Egypt after being attacked by "a
mighty force of fair-skinned metal clad warriors" (95). This rewriting of
prehistory allows Collas to associate the Arnuna with the origins of Western
civilization, so that their move into the caverns of the ancient race is portrayed
as a return to lost grandeur. Their time as "typical" natives is an aberration, a
result of their exile.
So "The Inner Domain" has it both ways: Aborigines are foolish subhumans
but they are also rational superbeings. The story offers a radically different
conception of their potential, but that potential is developed only by abandoning
all traditional ways of life. The Arnuna are the future of humankind, rather than
the vanishing past, but in becoming that future, they must trade their own
culture for that of the vanished aliens.
The Hopeful Moment. The first story to treat Aboriginal folkways as

something of value in themselves was Frank Bryning's "Place of the Throwing
Stick" (1956), published more than twenty years after Collas's tale. Bryning's
story takes off from the fact that the first Australian rocket-testing ground was
named "Woomera." The name was intended to honor the original inhabitants
of the region by borrowing their word for a spear-launcher-at the same time
those very inhabitants were being relocated to make room for the rocket ground.
Bryning adopts the point of view of a warrior named Munyarra, who has come
to Woomera to challenge this new threat to traditional ways of life. His
inspiration is an earlier hero of the Arunta people, who successfully (for a time)
drove off the cattle which were devastating the hunting grounds. Munyarra's
quest is not destined to be even that successful. A showdown between
boomerang and rocket is about as even as a match between a possum and a
semi-truck, and Munyarra ends up, predictably, as roadkill. The only trace of
his heroic effort is a dented fm on the rocket. Technicians looking over the
scene fmd only the boomerang, now "a charred bent object" (165). As for the
warrior himself, "all Munyarra's skill in the manoeuvre of evading spears had
never given him experience in evading a missile flying faster every second and
every yard from the moment it was launched towards him" (165). His body is
vaporized, leaving not even a "charred bent" trace behind.
Yet Munyarra and his quest are portrayed heroically, rather than as trivial
or ridiculous. He is fighting for something meaningful, though the only means
he has at hand are hopelessly inadequate. Unlike the Arnuna of Collas's story,
his traditional way of life is depicted as something complex and rewarding in
itself, not as an absence of civilization. Ultimately, Munyarra's culture is just
as doomed as that of the pre-underground Arnuna or Granville's half-kangaroo
Assoluloo. The difference is that in this case, the disappearance of a culture is
treated as something to be regretted. Having been immersed in Munyarra's
point of view throughout most of the narrative, we come to see the rocket as a
dangerous beast and its masters as irresponsible, at best, for letting it loose on
the landscape. Munyarra chooses to enact the part of a tribal hero, and heroes
of legend are not always triumphant. The tragedy is that his heroic, doomed
quest was unwitnessed and so will not be entered into his tribe's oral tradition.
If his deed were known and retold, it could change the world, as the earlier
hero's deed changed both his own time and Munyarra's.
Two decades later, Bryning came back to the same themes in a pair of
stories: "Mechman of the Dreaming" and "Nemaluk and the Star-Stone" (both
1978). These differ from "Place of the Throwing Stick" in that the Aboriginal
characters in each successfully challenge examples of advanced technology. In
"Mechman of the Dreaming," for instance, a seemingly invulnerable machine
called Multi-purpose Robot Eight, or MPR8, is sabotaged by unseen locals.
Unlike the indifferent rocket of "Place," MPR8 is crippled by boomerangs and
spears: "He swung about, unable to stand erect with the spears jammed in his
plates" (131). MPR8 is not only more vulnerable than a rocket, it is also more
sympathetic to its attackers' motives. Discovering that it has inadvertently
reenacted an Aboriginal myth about a golem-like creature called Woolgooroo,
the mechanical man, or mechman, chooses to withdraw. MPR8 even takes pride
in its assimilation into local legend: "I might like to claim, sometime, that
mechmen were amongst the aboriginal possessors of this land before the white
humen [sic] came. I might even like to claim Mechman Woolgooroo as a kind
of ... Dreamtime ancestor" (139; ellipses in original).
One key difference between the earlier and later Bryning stories is the
presence of a mediating sensibility. In "Mechman," this role is played by Dr.
David Mingarra, an anthropologist working as liaison between MPR8's
construction crew and the Department of Aboriginal Affairs. Mingarra
approaches the problem from a scientific point of view. He denies any special
insight into local tribal beliefs:
"You must realise that all I know of aboriginal culture and history is what I have
taken from the same books and University courses any white youth might take.
My ancestral tribe disappeared from East Gippsland more than a century ago. I
grew up in Melbourne as a second generation city-integrated youth on the lucky
side.... The only personal awareness I may have of the thinking and attitudes of
the myalls in the Reserve at this time is what I can pick up from the partially
integrated local blacks." (135)
Yet it is Mingarra, by virtue of having a foothold in two different cultures, who

solves the riddle of the mechman and its mythical predecessor.
When Dr. Mingarra is first introduced in the story, he is presented in a way
that indicates a non-Aboriginal narrator and audience. Unlike a white team-
member, who is simply introduced as "Sievers, in Electronics Maintenance"

(129), Mingarra gets a full and racially marked description: "He was the
Department of Aboriginal Affairs' liaison officer in the field with the survey
project. His eyes, deep set beneath prominent brows, had twinkled, and his
splendid white teeth had flashed against the dark of his face in response to
MPR8's joke against himself"' (131). There is no doubt about who represents
the norm and who the exception on this survey. Yet as Mingarra emerges as the
story's most important human character, his point of view begins to replace that
of Sievers and the others. When he comments on his own role as cultural
intermediary, he is careful to lay claim to European-Australian traditions as well
as Aboriginal-indeed, he has a better claim to white culture than to the local
traditions of a tribe far removed from his own people. He cannot know the
answer to why the people of the Reserve are attacking MPR8, "unless, perhaps
it could be in the literature about my race ... the white man's literature, I mean,
which is incidentally my literature also" (135). And it is a scientific literature,
though the subject matter is traditional myth. Dr. Mingarra maintains a
respectful distance from the beliefs he explicates. Interestingly, it is the
mechman who finds a personal connection with the story of the Woolgaroo. The
two characters cross paths, Mingarra having moved away from ancestral
traditions into the world of science while MPR8 goes from artificial origins to
a sense of belonging to the land and its myths.
To the degree that MPR8 stands for the white Australian society that
produced him, the implication is that a rootless newcomer can be grafted onto
native culture-at least he can do so if there is a character like Mingarra
available to interpret for him and to absolve him of guilt for past usurpations
and abuses. Mingarra also fills the reader in on historical developments that
make his role possible: "All other aborigines, like myself, are more or less
happily integrated within the all-Australian community. It is now nearly a
generation since the truly enlightened legislation of the early 'eighties and the
policies applying it" (139). Though this statement reads more ironically than it
did in the 1970s, it does express a hope that history and science together might
create a hybrid culture stronger than either tradition in isolation.
After "Mechman," the scientist or professional of Aboriginal ancestry
became a frequent character type, nearly always serving as a cultural bridge
between Western science and traditional myth. The opening section of Damien
Broderick's The Dreaming Dragons (1980) is told from the viewpoint of Alf
Dean Djanyagirnji. Like David Mingarra, he is an anthropologist, someone who
comes back to the traditions of his ancestors via academic study in the white
community. Broderick provides his character with a more detailed and more
troubled history than Bryning's. Alf Djanyagirnji, like many nonfictional
counterparts, was taken from his mother and tribe by bureaucrats. His adoption
into a white family allowed him to complete a formal education but it did not
protect him from racism and a feeling of outsider-dom. At the same time, being
adopted out of the Ngularrnga tribe kept him from learning the mythic traditions
as a boy of the tribe would learn them. Thus Alf finds himself alienated from
both worlds and unsure of his own identity. Perhaps for that reason he has
undertaken a project to de-mystify Aboriginal myths. His theory is that the

Rainbow Serpent and its variations are simply tribal explanations of dinosaur
fossils: "Alf's self-imposed treacherous role was to cap the white man's job, to
blow the Serpent in all its incarnations finally out of all the salt lakes, the
evaporated swamps. No more feathered snakes, yowies, dongus, tuntabah,
bunyips, sacred custodians: only ancient dried bones. No more dragons" (14).
Alf Djanyagirnji's inner conflicts and complicated personal history make
him a compelling character and a useful commentator on such issues as
alienness, alternative realities, and faith. Interestingly, Broderick says that he
originally wrote Alf as two characters: an Aboriginal oil-worker and a white
anthropologist (qtd. in Blackford 103). The more complex Alf, caught between
two world-views and two seemingly incompatible forms of validation, did not
appear until a later draft. The novel suffers when Alf recedes into the
background. He is replaced as point-of-view character by the military men and
American and Russian scientists called in to investigate the site he has located,
a site that turns out to be a gateway into an alien colony.
A number of factors may have encouraged the emergence of Aboriginal
characters and mythic motifs within sf of the late 1960s and early 1970s. One
is that the genre itself took off in Australia during those decades, following the
lead of two imports, one from Britain-A. Bertram Chandler-and one from the
Australian literary mainstream-George Turner. Chandler did not usually deal
with Aboriginal issues, but in his story "The Mountain Movers" (1971), the
indigenous people of an alien planet are revealed to be kin to Aborigines, and
their sacred monolith turns out to be, like Australia's Uluru, a grounded
spaceship. Their traditions tell them that they came from elsewhere: "Story say,
in Dream Time, wind come from there, wind move world...." (75; ellipses in
original). But they cannot reproduce their ancestors' achievement until they are
visited by a group of Australian tourists, who bring both scientific know-how
and Aboriginal ancestry: "Like most modern Australians we're a mixed
lot-and, in our fully integrated society, most of us have some aboriginal blood"
(73).
Turner, too, imagined a future in which Aboriginal genes and culture
contribute to a new Australian identity. In Turner's Down There in Darkness
(1999), for instance, the narrator comments that "plenty of people sported the
odd Koori in the bloodline (and in truth there are almost no pure-blooded races
on the planet) but it was a mite old-fashioned to be uptight about it...." (141).
The novel ends with a vision of an equally blended culture:
I saw in mind's eye a building somewhere on a hilltop, above the flurry of the
world, where the kurdaitcha students lived among all the books saved from the
claws of time-white and black and brindle, men and women, old and
young-and gazed into their own depths, drawing nearer and nearer to the core
of knowledge. The Great University of the World it was, where man learned his
own past and got hisself [sic] ready for his future. (351-52)
This future merging may reflect Turner's own heritage, for he believed his
maternal grandmother was of mixed race, perhaps part Aboriginal (Turner, In
the Heart 26). In several novels beginning with Beloved Son (1978), disasters
brought on by war and ecological collapse force survivors to find a more

sustainable way of life, one that echoes the ancestral folkways of the people
Turner calls Koori. Given Turner's characteristically sardonic viewpoint, it is
not surprising that he emphasizes not only the survival value of a traditional way
of life but also the harsh discipline and rigid roles.
It is not a coincidence that Aboriginal themes and characters proliferated
during the same decade that Australian sf began to achieve prominence at home
and abroad. Many writers credit the 1975 World Science Fiction Convention in
Melbourne for raising awareness of and standards within Australian sf. The
Guest of Honor at that WorldCon, Ursula K. Le Guin, has always sought to
bring broader cultural perspectives, especially non-European perspectives, into
sf. Both by her own example and by conducting a workshop for Australian
writers, she encouraged the production of stories involving alternative visions.
An anthology edited by Lee Harding, a direct outgrowth of that workshop, was
called The Altered I (1976), reflecting Le Guin's emphasis on being and seeing
differently as a result of cultural contacts.
Outside of sf, the 1970s marked the emergence of the first generation of
Aboriginal writers and the appearance of a number of influential texts deriving
from Aboriginal lore. Among the latter were children's books by Bill Scott,
Patricia Wrightson, and Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal). Scott's Boori
(1978) is a hero-tale that takes place when "The Dreamtime had ended in
Australia, and no white man had yet found the great land of the south" (1).
Wrightson wrote several fantasy stories based on indigenous legends, most
notably the three volumes beginning with The Ice Is Coming (1977). Walker's
Stradbroke Dreamtime (1972) differs from Scott's and Wrightson's books in
being based in her own experience as a member of the Noonuccal clan of
coastal Queensland and in combining autobiography with retellings of myth.
With these volumes and others that followed, Aboriginal history and storytelling
became familiar to Australian schoolchildren, something they were encouraged
to see as part of Our National Heritage rather than as distant and alien. In
bringing Aboriginal characters and motifs into their work, sf writers were
following a national shift of perspective.
Even though Aboriginality never dominated the sf genre, even in the 1970s,
it became prominent enough to trigger defensive reactions. In a review of a
1978 anthology that included Bryning's "Nemaluk and the Star-Stone" and
Chandler's "Not Without Precedent," Graham Stone complains that "both
Chandler and Bryning introduce aborigines and the flying saucer religion.
Chandler even brings in convicts. SF labors under enough disabilities without
adding the national obsessions, thanks" (10).
Similar reactions followed the appearance of a set of stories by Terry
Dowling that depicted a future Australia dominated by Aboriginal political and
religious traditions. Dowling's Rynosseros (1990) and subsequent collections
marked a greater maturation of science-fictional explorations of Aboriginal
culture. Focusing on the adventures of a non-Aboriginal, or "National," hero
operating within this cultural sphere, Dowling's Tom Tyson stories offer
sophisticated narrative techniques, memorable images, and troubling themes.
These themes usually revolve around conflicts between tradition and innovation
or nature and artifice. Most interestingly, Dowling does not equate Aboriginality
with tradition or nature-he is just as likely to pit advanced Aboriginal
technology against National attempts at resurgence or to frame the conflict
between tradition and novelty as a struggle between tribal factions.
Rynosseros adapts the sf tradition of Cordwainer Smith and Jack
Vance-characterized by distant futures, radically altered humanity, technologi-
cal effects that resemble magic, and an exuberant, even baroque language-to
the Australian scene. Against the backdrop of Australia's wide and arid interior,
Dowling places great sand-ships, talking belltrees, shapeshifters, cyborgs, and
visionaries, while overhead, tribal satellites guard against encroachments from
the remnant of white population along the coast. Though he received many
honors for his evocative and inventive fiction, Dowling did not please all
readers with his imagined future. To some it seemed to be an example of
cultural appropriation, and to others yet another instance of the convicts-plus-
Aborigines-equal-Australia habit that irked Graham Stone.
The Troubled Now. By the time Rynosseros appeared, however, other factors
besides fan resentment of "national obsessions" were operating. Even as
Australian sf writers began to realize the possibilities offered by incorporating
traditional Aboriginal voices and motifs into their work, those possibilities were
starting to close off. The 1970s were characterized not only by the emergence
of writing by Aboriginal authors but also by the first stirrings of political
activity by Aboriginal activists-many of them the same individuals. Kath
Walker, for instance, asserted her heritage by dropping her English-style name
in favor of her Aboriginal name Oodgeroo and by creating an informal culture
center at Moongalba on Stradbroke Island (very much against the wishes of
Queensland authorities). In a very short time the intellectual climate shifted
from dismissal of Aboriginal culture to extolling its richness, and thence to
condemning the exploitation of Aboriginal traditions by anyone not born to
them.
And indeed, Aboriginal ideas of the sacred have all too often been invoked
by people who have no notion either of the discipline that traditionally
accompanies the myths or of the historical forces that have repeatedly threatened
their transmission. Joseph Campbell and other myth popularizers have made the
Dreamtime a byword among pop psychologists and New Age religionists. One
literary equivalent of such New Age religious tourism is the transforming of
Aboriginal myths into fantasy stories with white protagonists (Charles Hulley's
1994 novel The Fire Crystal is a blatant example). Another is the use of
Aboriginal characters as mystical commentators on technological societies. The
latter ploy shows up in the film made from Tom Wolfe's 7he Right Stuff. The
movie cuts away from its high-tech settings to show one of the astronauts
helping to set up tracking sites in Western Australia. He meets a group of
Aboriginal men, who find nothing odd in the notion of flying out into space:
"See that old bloke there? He know. He know the moon. He know the star, an'
he know the Milky Way. He'll give you a hand, he know" (qtd in Muecke 2).
And, sure enough, later in the story, an Aboriginal ceremony provides magical
sparks that help protect John Glenn's space capsule. As Stephen Muecke points
out, the script uses "Aboriginality [as] a representation or emblem of 'the
primitive'-set up against space travel as the ultimate achievement of Western
modernity" (2).
Criticisms of Terry Dowling fail to note how differently he constructs the
relationship between the traditional and the modem. In the Tyson stories,
mysticism is not separated from scientific knowledge. Either world-view, or
both in conjunction, can be found among characters of any race. Dowling,
though, did not help matters when he chose the term "Ab'O" to name his
futuristic tribes. The shortened form of Aborigine, though not the most
offensive racial epithet available, has been used derisively more often than not.
An extra apostrophe and capital letter did not provide, for many readers,
sufficient estrangement of an all-too-familiar term. As John Foyster points out,
"To write of a future in which the power lies in the hands of Nig'Rs, or
Chin'Ks, or Wo'Ps would I think be regarded as a little on the tacky side" (29).
As Dowling's series has developed, he has worked very hard to create an
alternative vision of racial and tribal identities, to provide a genuinely new
concept to go with the estranged term, but it is not an easy task for an outsider
to imagine a new form of selfhood for a group that has been so strongly
Othered.
Most white Australian writers have chosen to avoid such controversy. Grai
Hughes's alien-artifact story, "Twenty-First Century Dreamtime," first
appeared in a fanzine in 1989 and was popular enough to reprint in the
professional magazine Aurealis. There, however, the editor commented that
"the author had intended to expand the story to novella length, but in his
research discovered that aspects of the extended version would offend certain
taboos of the Aboriginal people" (Strasser 4).
Rosaleen Love deals with the problem of writing across cultural and racial
lines by focusing on the fallibility of the human sciences. Her story "Trick-
ster"(1993) turns out to be about the unknowability of other people's pasts. An
ancient skull found near Melbourne defies categorization, even to the extent of
shifting its form:
At night in the skull room the bones rearrange themselves, a little, not much.
The indentations in the skull from Cow Swamp deepen. The orbital ridges
thicken. Scratches in the teeth enamel sink in, just a fraction.
Soon there will be a new theory of the origins of the human race.
The workers in the skull room assume the bones remain the same and it is
their theories which change. But that is not the case.
The bones know. It amuses them. (159)
Love's story goes about as far as one can go in refusing to claim ownership of
the cultural Other, and it manages to do so in a witty and thought-provoking
way. It exemplifies, in a sense, art of the no-contact zone. But the relationships
between past and present and between Anglo-Australian and Aboriginal cultures
keep changing. The publication of Sam Watson's The Kadaitcha Sung (1990)
and Archie Weller's Land of the Golden Clouds (1998), has reopened the
possibility of science-fictional dialogue between cultures. One could even argue

that these two novels alter the meaning of earlier texts such as Terry Dowling's
early Tom Tyson stories, just as Rosaleen Love's trickster skull retroactively
changes the origins of the human race.
The Kadaitcha Sung is not primarily sf, but Watson's heady mix of
storytelling tropes has led reviewers to label it as such, citing also myth, horror,
fantasy, and magic realism (Watson, "I Say" 591). The novel compresses the
whole history of white-Aboriginal relations into the family story of the creator
god Biamee, his twin sons Booka and Koobara, and his present-day descendent
Tommy Gubba. Tommy is a half-white, urban social worker, but he is also a
supernatural hero who talks to spirits, makes himself invisible, and goes in quest
of the powerful stone that is the heart of the Rainbow Serpent. Initiated as a
Kadaitcha, or tribal enforcer/shaman, he must maintain his double identity and
function in both worlds, magical and mundane, in order to defeat the evil
Booka, who has possessed the body of a white politician. Tommy's own clan
is the Biri, but he has to reach outside his own family connections and traditions
in order to achieve his quest. His initiation takes place in a cave in sacred
Uluru, half a continent away from his home (and well outside the traditional
stewardship of either Tommy's tribe or Sam Watson's). Beating Booka at his
own magical game requires assembling allies among Aborigines, whites, and
spirits, and also acquiring an amulet brought from Africa by his white
girlfriend's parents-it requires, in other words, all the resources of his own
culture and an infusion from other cultures as well. Tommy's final triumph
comes only after a great deal of violence (including sexual violence) and at great
emotional expense. Though offered privileges "beyond price" by Biamee (251),
he forfeits his reward and his life when he chooses to disobey tribal law and let
a member of another clan go unpunished for her clan's past treachery. Instead
of killing Jelda, a young woman of the black possum people, as he is instructed,
Tommy sends her away from Brisbane bearing his child. For this disobedience,
he must die, but he is doomed also because the Kadaitcha tradition he represents
is too wild, too powerful, and too violent to live on in the new social reality of
the Aboriginal people.
The Kadaitcha Sung startled many readers when it first appeared. It did not
fit into the accepted forms of discourse for Aboriginal writers-it was not a
retold folktale or a tragic autobiography or a piece of mystical wisdom. Even
a commentator as knowledgeable as Stephen Muecke, collaborator on and editor
of many Aboriginal texts, found the book "virtually unreadable" (Gelder and
Jacobs 108). Yet what Watson was doing in the novel was what another novelist
and essayist, Mudrooroo Narogin, has said Aboriginal writers should do: "The
Aboriginal writer is a Janus-type figure with one face turned to the past and the
other to the future while existing in a postmodern, multicultural Australia in
which he or she must fight for cultural space" (24). Turning to the past is
acceptable; staking a claim to the future by using modes like sf is more
controversial. Watson's book functions within the contact zone of European-
style fantastic fiction. It also reasserts the points of contact between urban
Aborigines and those who live more traditional lives:
white economists and white administrators have tried to separate the so-called
true Aboriginal person, the so-called full-blooded tribal person, who is
essentially a hunter-gatherer, from the urban blacks who were agitating for such
bullshit things as land rights and that sort of thing. I wanted to redress that and
say, not only to white Australia but also for my own brothers and sisters, that
even though we live in a land of concrete and bitumen, and even though we
speak in the language of the conqueror, wear the clothes of the conqueror, deal
in the currency of the conqueror and essentially earn a living within the camp of
the conqueror, we are still very much a tribalized, fully cultural people and we
still have, even through that boundary of concrete and bitumen, we still have a
very strong link to the land. So I constructed a story about the Kadaitcha figure
within traditional Australia. ("I Say" 590)
The Kadaitcha Sung functions within the contact zone of genre fiction; it is
itself an arena for negotiation among different traditions of narrative and
characterization; and its central figure Tommy Gubba, whose name, occupation,
and mixed blood all represent cultural interactions, asserts the continuity of
Aboriginal tradition within modern urban Australia.
An article in the The MUP Encyclopaedia of Australian Science Fiction and
Fantasy acknowledges Watson's originality: "There are many wonderful books,
most of them for young readers, with elements of Creation stories in them. But
only one book so far by an Aboriginal author delves into the fantasy range; this
is The Kadaitcha Sung by Sam Watson...." (Weller, "Indigenous Mythology"
97). The author of this article, Archie Weller, has himself written a novel that
straddles the line between fantasy and science fiction. Weller was acclaimed as
an Aboriginal writer of distinction for his realist novel The Day of the Dog
(1981), but he has also had his claims to Aboriginal ancestry challenged. Similar
questions have been raised about the racial identity of Mudrooroo Narogin and
a number of other writers identified as Aboriginal. Rather than scrutinizing
writers' family trees, we might note the significance of the fact that Australians
of mixed or unknown race would self-identify with the most visible and most
oppressed racial Other. In the MUP Encyclopaedia article, Weller seems not to
be numbering himself among Aboriginal writers, simply pointing out that "A
novel by Archie Weller, The Land of the Golden Clouds (Allen & Unwin 1998),
has two Nyoongah, or Southwest Aboriginal characters, among those who go
on a quest in an Australia three thousand years in the future" (97).
What Weller does in his futuristic setting is to offer a broad range of racial
and cultural possibilities. His questing characters interact with several groups:
pale city-dwellers who rule by psychic powers, even paler Nightstalkers who
live in caves and prey on the above-ground races, Gypsies moving within and
between different groups, Caribbean visitors who have preserved a higher level
of technology than any of the Australians, and even a society whose religion is
based on the game of cricket. The central characters Red Mond Star Light and
his kin, however, represent perhaps the most interesting version of racial
identity. They belong to a tribe of hunter-gatherers of mixed descent but mostly
European, called the Ilkari. Their myths and rituals reflect the influence of their
Aboriginal neighbors, whom they call the Keepers of the Trees. Some of them
have Aboriginal ancestry: "Sometimes, though it was strictly forbidden by the

Keepers' laws, an Ilkari woman would give herself to one of the Keeper men
and thus there were Ilkari who had a Keeper ancestor. But never would a dark
Keeper woman give herself to a white man. Their race was much too pure and
regal for that" (5).
In the post-Holocaust world of the novel, dark skin is both a mark of honor
and a survival advantage: many of the Ilkari suffer from skin cancer because of
exposure to the sun. The palest people are also the least trusted: the cave-
dwelling Nightstalkers. In the course of the story, many cultural boundaries are
breached. Red Mond shelters and falls in love with a Nightstalker woman, and
one of the Keeper warriors falls in love with a Caribbean visitor. Like Sam
Watson's Kadaitcha warrior, the Ilkari not only draw upon indigenous
Australian traditions but also ally themselves with other non-European powers.
Red Mond and his fellow wayfarers survive by pooling several sorts of
knowledge: forgotten technology, traditional stories, and newly-developed
psychic abilities. As they travel, they shake up the societies with which they
interact, giving a boost to dissident factions within each. By the end, a relatively
stable but fragmented world is giving way to a new cultural dynamic that may
result in a new and less destructive civilization.
Weller offers two different visions of Aboriginal futures. On the one hand,
the Keepers of the Trees remain apart, preserving the myths and disciplines of
nomadic life that have kept their ancestors alive for millennia. On the other
hand, descendants of Aboriginal people and the stories those descendants tell
provide the basis for a new hybrid humanity. Neither cultural pattern is marked
within the narrative as the right or only way to be Aboriginal.
Archie Weller and Sam Watson are able to use sf and related genres to
explore and reinvent Aboriginality not in spite of but because of those genres'
racist origins. A storytelling form that has been used to depict racial and cultural
interactions, even in the most outrageously biased fashion, can be redirected to
present other points of view. Once the Other has been invoked, there is no way
to post Keep Out signs on the genre. It has become a contact zone.
I find it particularly interesting to read The Kadaitcha Sung and Land of the
Golden Clouds alongside Dowling's most recent Tom Tyson stories. In the first
collection, Rynosseros, Tyson was a hero in the Rider Haggard romance
tradition: the white colonial who acquires power from native peoples-and finds
a love interest hidden among them but not usually one of them. He was opposed
by Aboriginal Kurdaitcha men (the more common spelling of Watson's
Kadaitcha) who resented his acquisition of a tribal ship and tribal spiritual gifts.
More recent stories, though, have changed the impression of who Tyson is and
what might be at stake in his search for his own identity. Tyson, it seems, may
be an artificial creation made by the Aboriginal Clever Men as part of their own
exploration of life and spirituality. He, like various artificial intelligences he
meets in his adventures, is a product of their superior technical ability, and his
frequent frustrations have more to do with differing scientific goals among
Aboriginal factions than with any personal vendetta.
Even the earlier Tyson stories change their meaning when they are read with
Watson's and Weller's novels. No longer do they bear the burden of speaking
for Aboriginal points of view, if they ever did so. Instead, they can speak about
what it might be like to live among Aboriginal neighbors in a radically altered
future, one in which science and myth go hand in hand and white Australians
must reinvent themselves, with the help of those neighbors, after bringing on
ecological and other disasters.
Tyson does not acquire power from the Aborigines but rather is allowed by
them to make his own discoveries to supplement theirs-so long as he abides by
their social rules. What he discovers has do with his own origins, with the land
itself, with hidden forces and intelligences at work in that land, and with the
organizing of all those factors into myth-like narratives. His is a quest for
pattern, and his dispatchers on that quest are the Aborigines, "as changed,
changing and changeless as they now are, who have always had the soul-map
of the songlines to keep intact this vital, pivotal connection between self and
place, reality and dream, identity and the infinite ... caught between amusement
and grudging approval at this growing habit among Nationals" ("Doing the
Line" 1). The patterns he finds have to do with three images that were planted
in his unconscious by his Aboriginal creators: a star, a woman's face, and a
ship. Each of these seems to have had a purpose that events in Tyson's life have
redirected. His own personal archetypes, these images can turn out to signal
many things, some of them contradictory. It is up to Tyson, finally, to decide
what story they will combine to form, which will be the story of his life.
And it is up to other writers, Aboriginal and "National," to decide what to
make of the contact zone that is science fiction. The zone has been expanded
repeatedly by Dowling, Weller, Watson, Broderick, Bryson, and others. It is
available especially to Aboriginal writers, who can find in it a form that links
their traditional oral literatures with a high-tech or post-tech future. By writing
in genres such as sf, Aboriginal writers remind us that they too participate in
contemporary world culture and have a claim on all forms of literary discourse.
For non-Aboriginal writers, sf may be less perilous than attempting to describe
the Aboriginal past and present from an outsider's perspective, for such attempts
all too often come across as "patronising, misconstrued, preconceived, and
abused" (Jackie Huggins, qtd. in Heiss 198). Within the zone of sf, abuse and
misconstruction may continue, but there is no excuse to carry preconceptions
over into the future. Dowling's complex future is best read, not as an
appropriation of Aboriginal themes, but as an invitation to other writers,
especially Aboriginal writers, to take part in a dialogue about possible futures
and new ways of being human. One of the most important functions of sf like
Dowling's and Weller's is to show us our own preconceptions and offer ways
to bypass them.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Part of the research for this essay was funded by a grant from the Faculty Research
Committee at Idaho State University, and a sabbatical leave from the University gave me
time to explore a new continent from a distance. I would like to thank all those who have
offered suggestions and insights, including Michelle Reid, Terry Dowling, Van Ikin,
Damien Broderick, Justine Larbalestier, Lyman Sargent, Kim Selling, Margaret Clunies
Ross, Robert Hood, Stephen Dedman, and Judith Leggatt.
WORKS CITED
Blackford, Russell. "The Damien Broderick Interview." Science Fiction: A Review of
Speculative Literature 4.3 (September 1982): 94-105.
Broderick, Damien. The Dreaming Dragons. New York: Pocket, 1980.
Bryning, Frank. "Mechman of the Dreaming." Other Worlds. Ed. Paul Collins.
Melbourne: Void, 1978. 129-39.
. "Nemaluk and the Star-stone. " Envisaged Worlds. Ed. Paul Collins. Melbourne:
Void, 1978. 77-83.
. "Place of the Throwing-stick. " 1956. Australian Science Fiction. Ed. Van Ikin.
St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1982. 159-65.
Chandler, A. Bertram. "The Mountain Movers." 1971. Centaurus: The Best of
Australian Science Fiction. Ed. David G. Hartwell and Damien Broderick. New
York: Tor, 1999. 63-81.
Collas, Phil. "The Inner Domain." Amazing Stories (October 1935): 85-113.
Dixon, Robert. Writing the Colonial Adventure: Gender, Race, and Nation in Anglo-
Australian Popular Fiction, 1875-1914. New York: Cambridge UP, 1995.
Dowling, Terry. Blue Tyson. North Adelaide, SA: Aphelion, 1992.
"Doing the Line." Rynemonn. Unpublished manuscript.
Rynoserros. North Adelaide, SA: Aphelion, 1990. Rpt. Parramatta, NSW:
MirrorDanse, 2003.
Twilight Beach. North Adelaide, SA: Aphelion, 1993.
Eldershaw, M. Bernard [Marjorie Bernard and Flora Eldershaw]. Tomorrow &
Tomorrow & Tomorrow. London: Virago, 1983. Originally published, in abbreviated
form, as Tomorrow & Tomorrow (Melbourne: Georgian, 1947).
Foyster, John. "Quest of the Three Worlds." Australian Science Fiction Review. 2nd
series. 1.3 (July 1986): 28-33.
Gelder, Ken and Jane M. Jacobs. Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a
Postcolonial Nation. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1998.
Granville, Austyn. The Fallen Race. New York: Neely, 1892.
Harding, Lee, ed. The Altered I: An Encounter with Science Fiction. Melbourne:
Norstrilia, 1976.
Heiss, Anita. "Writing about Indigenous Australia-Some Issues to Consider and
Protocols to Follow: A Discussion Paper." Southerly 62.2 (2002): 197-205.
Hughes, Grai. "Twenty-First Century Dreamtime." The Mentor 62 (January 1989): 18-
25. Rpt. in Aurealis 4 (1991): 51-59.
Hulley, Charles E. The Fire Crystal. Sydney: Mystic, 1994.
Ikin, Van. "Introduction: The History of Australian Science Fiction." Australian Science
Fiction. Ed. Van Ikin. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1982. ix-xxxvii.
Love, Rosaleen. "Trickster." Mortal Fire: Best Australian SF. Ed. Terry Dowling and
Van Ikin. Rydalsmere, NSW: Hodder, 1993. 157-62.
Muecke, Stephen. Textual Spaces:Aboriginality and Cultural Studies. Kensington: New
South Wales UP, 1992.
Narogin, Mudrooroo. Writing from the Fringe: A Study ofModern Aboriginal Literature.
Melbourne: Hyland, 1990.
Pratt, Mary Louise. "Arts of the Contact Zone. " Profession 91. New York: MLA, 1991.
33-40. Rpt. in Professing in the Contact Zone: Bringing Theory and Practice
Together. Ed. Janice M. Wolff. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of

English, 2002. 1-18.
Scott, Bill. Boori. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1978.
Smith, Ron. "Strong Attraction." 1968. Australian Science Fiction 1. Ed. John Baxter.
Sydney: Arkon, 1975. 109-26.
Stone, Graham. Review of Paul Collins, ed., Envisaged Worlds. Science Fiction News
53 (February 1978): 7-12.
Strasser, Dirk. "Editorial." Aurealis: Australian Fantasy and Science Fiction 4 (April
1991): 4.
Turner, George. Beloved Son. London: Faber, 1978.
Down There in Darkness. New York: Tor, 1999.
In the Heart or in the Head: An Essay in Time Travel. Carlton, Vic: Norstrilia,
1984.
Walker, Kath. Stradbroke Dreamtime. Sydney: Angus, 1972.
Walsh, J.M. Vandals of the Void. London: Hamilton, 1931. Rpt. Westport, CT:
Hyperion, 1976.
Watson, Sam. "I Say This to You. "Meanjin 53.4 (Summer 1994): 589-96.
. The Kadaitcha Sung. Ringwood, Vic: Penguin, 1990.
Webb, Janeen and Andrew Enstice. Aliens and Savages: Fiction, Politics, and Prejudice
in Australia. Sydney: HarperCollins, 1998.
Weller, Archie. "Indigenous Mythology." The MUP Encyclopaedia of Australian
Science Fiction and Fantasy. Ed. Paul Collins. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1998.
95-97.
. Land of the Golden Clouds. St. Leonards, NSW: Allen, 1998.
Wrightson, Patricia. The Ice Is Coming. London: Hutchinson, 1977.
ABSTRACT
Science fiction in colonial societies such as Australia can function as what Mary
Louise Pratt calls an "art of the contact zone"-an imaginative space within which groups
define themselves and negotiate their cultural differences. Australian sf falls into three
periods with regard to its treatment of Aboriginal characters and traditions. In the first,
from the 1890s to at least the 1960s, native characters are treated as subhuman and
Aboriginal beliefs and traditions compare unfavorably with European-derived science and
social organization. The second period overlaps the first, but a new perspective becomes
dominant in the 1970s; the emphasis is on positive qualities of Aboriginal culture and on
common ground between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians. After the 1970s,
increased awareness of political injustice and fears of impinging on Aboriginal experience
and intellectual property cause most European-Australians to avoid the topic altogether.
In the same period, however, non-white writers begin to explore the possibilities of using
science-fictional discourse to redefine their own history, identity, and traditions. Novels
such as Sam Watson's The Kaidatcha Sung and Archie Weller's Land of the Golden
Cloud open the genre up to new voices and points of view. These novels may be read as
commentaries upon, and responses to, earlier sf. Some of this new fiction benefits from
being read as part of a cross-cultural dialogue, most notably Terry Dowling's series of
stories about a high-tech, Aboriginal-controlled, re-mythologized future Australia.

Aboriginality in Science Fiction

Transféré par

Informations du document

Copyright

Formats disponibles

Partager ce document

Partager ou intégrer le document

Options de partage

Avez-vous trouvé ce document utile ?

Ce contenu est-il inapproprié ?

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Aboriginality in Science Fiction

Transféré par

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

SF-TH Inc

Aboriginality in Science Fiction

Aboriginality in Science Fiction

It is always hazardous to write across cultural boundaries, and when cultural

be seen, paradoxically, as a lost paradise, and the brutish savages of pioneer

The narrator-hero is not greatly surprised by these apparitions:

He assumes that these improbable hybrids were the products of rape, by

of women. Especially when projected into the future, this v

In the underground story mentioned above, however, a lost tribe of

themselves as well. We see, on the viewscreen of the time-c

The Hopeful Moment. The first story to treat Aboriginal folkways as

Yet it is Mingarra, by virtue of having a foothold in two different cultures, who

member, who is simply introduced as "Sievers, in Electronics Maintenance"

undertaken a project to de-mystify Aboriginal myths. His theory is that the

brought on by war and ecological collapse force survivors to find a more

possibility of science-fictional dialogue between cultures. One could even argue

have Aboriginal ancestry: "Sometimes, though it was strictly forbidden by the

Together. Ed. Janice M. Wolff. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of

Vous aimerez peut-être aussi