Representing Indigeneity: a reflection on motivation and issues

Abstract

Non-Indigenous Australian authors representing Indigeneity in their work need to address a number of issues, including the fundamental question of whether to do so. Having incorporated representations of Indigeneity in a children’s novel written as part of my PhD thesis, I traced the origins and evolution of my representational practices in the novel through the other component of the thesis, a multi-genre exegesis. The processes of writing both components raised a range of issues, including questions of motivation; my right, responsibility and competence to represent; and the strategies employed in both components to address some of these questions. In this paper I reflect on these issues, and conclude that my efforts have been unavoidably far from perfect, yet worthwhile as a stage in ongoing negotiations of meaning and power between non-Indigenous and Indigenous cultures in Australia, and that non-Indigenous writers like myself need to be conscious that our efforts are never, and can never be, purely benevolent and/or selfless.