Eating Tongues: Australian Colonial Literature and ‘‘the Great Silence’’

Abstract

In a series of radio broadcasts in 1968, anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner spoke about ‘the great Australian silence’ regarding the Aborigines and frontier conflict. He did not mean that the Aborigines were completely ignored in white Australian discourse. On the contrary, before 1900 there were ‘scores of sorrowful expressions of regard for “the real welfare of that helpless and unfortunate race”; tenfold the number of condemnations of them as debased, worthless and beyond grace; and, one-hundredfold, acceptances of their inevitable extinction’.1 But in the twentieth century, with white Australian nationalism, there also arose ‘the cult of forgetfulness’ characteristic of nationalist historiography.2 It is true that there were literary representations of Aborigines in the pre-Second World War period as in the colonial era, and some of these representations were quite sympathetic, though stereotypic in various ways. For instance, sympathy was sometimes only expressed about the plight of what was still seen, before the 1940s, as a ‘dying race’. And in general the study of Aborigines was relegated to anthropology and archaeology; they were not viewed as an integral part of Australian history and culture. The ‘silence’ began to wane in the 1960s, owing in large measure to the growth of Aboriginal activism and the publication of literary works by Aborigines. Kath Walker, now known as Oodgeroo Noonuccal, published her first volume of poetry, We Are Going, in 1964, and a year later Colin Johnson, who subsequently changed his name to Mudrooroo, published the first novel by an Aboriginal author, Wildcat Falling. Before that decade, writing by Aborigines is sparse.3 David Unaipon is often considered the first Aboriginal writer of note, but the story of what happened to his Native Legends (1929) is telltale. In 1930 his manuscript was pirated by anthropologist William Ramsay Smith, who published it in London without any acknowledgment to Unaipon — an act characteristic of what has happened to the Aborigines and their cultures since 1788. Since the 1960s, moreover, writing by Aboriginal authors — indeed,