Australian literature

Australian literature, the body of literatures, both oral and written, produced in Australia.

Perhaps more so than in other countries, the literature of Australia characteristically expresses collective values. Even when the literature deals with the experiences of an individual, those experiences are very likely to be estimated in terms of the ordinary, the typical, the representative. It aspires on the whole to represent integration rather than disintegration. It does not favour the heroicism of individual action unless this shows dogged perseverance in the face of inevitable defeat. Although it may express a strong ironic disapproval of collective mindlessness, the object of criticism is the mindlessness rather than the conformity.

This general proposition holds true for both Indigenous Australians and those descended from later European arrivals, though the perception of what constitutes the community is quite radically different in these two cases. The white Australian community is united in part by its sense of having derived from foreign cultures, primarily that of England, and in part by its awareness of itself as a settler society with a continuing celebration of pioneer values and a deep attachment to the land. For Aboriginal peoples in their traditional cultures, story, song, and legend served to define allegiances and relationships both to others and to the land that nurtured them. For modern Aboriginal people, written literature has been a way of both claiming a voice and articulating a sense of cohesion as a people faced with real threats to the continuance of their culture.

Aboriginal narrative: the oral tradition

When first encountered by Europeans, Australian Aboriginal peoples did not have written languages (individual words were collected from first contact, but languages as systems were not written down until well into the 20th century). Their songs, chants, legends, and stories, however, constituted rich oral literature, and, since the Aboriginal peoples had no common language, these creations were enormously diverse. Long unavailable to or misunderstood by non-Aboriginal people, their oral traditions appear (from researches undertaken in the last half of the 20th century) to be of considerable subtlety and complexity.

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The oral literature of Aboriginal peoples has an essentially ceremonial function. It supports the fundamental Aboriginal beliefs that what is given cannot be changed and that the past exists in an eternal present, and it serves to relate the individual and the landscape to the continuing spiritual influence of the Dreaming (or Dreamtime)—widely known as the Alcheringa (or Altjeringa), the term used by the Aboriginal peoples of central Australia—a mythological past in which the existing natural environment was shaped and humanized by ancestral beings. While the recitation of the song cycles and narratives is to some extent prescribed, it also can incorporate new experience and thus remain applicable—both part of the past (called up by the Ancestors) and part of the present.

Aboriginal oral tradition may be public (open to all members of a community and often a kind of entertainment) or sacred (closed to all but initiated members of one or the other sex). Narratives of the public sort range from stories told by women to young children (mostly elementary versions of creation stories—also appropriate for tourists and amateur anthropologists) to the recitation of song cycles in large gatherings (known as corroborees). Even the most uncomplicated narratives of the Dreaming introduce basic concepts about the land and about what it is that distinguishes right behaviour from wrong. When children are old enough to prepare for their initiation ceremonies, the stories become more elaborate and complex. Among the sacred songs and stories are those that are men’s business and those that are women’s business; each is forbidden to the eyes and ears of the other sex and to the uninitiated.

The chief subject of Aboriginal narratives is the land. As Aboriginal people travel from place to place, they (either informally or ceremonially) name each place, telling of its creation and of its relation to the journeys of the Ancestors. This practice serves at least three significant purposes: it reinforces their knowledge of local geography—that is, the food routes, location of water holes, places of safety, places of danger, the region’s terrain, and so on—and it also serves a social function (sometimes bringing large clans together) and a religious or ritual function.

Many of the stories have to do with the journeys of the Ancestors and the “creation sites,” places at which they created different clans and animals. Other stories concern contests between Ancestor figures for power and knowledge. A sequence of stories or songs—a story track or song line—identifies the precise route taken by an Ancestor figure. Knowledge and recitation of the journey of each totemic figure are the responsibility of that figure’s totemic clan. (Members of an immediate biological family belong to different totems, or Dreamings. Totem membership can be determined in various ways, from association with a locale to an acknowledgment of spiritual kinship.) Because an Ancestor’s journey is often traced over vast stretches of land, only a segment of the entire song cycle or story is known to a particular group. These are exchanged at meeting points, and, though the songs may be sung in a different language, an Ancestor’s story contains musical elements that make it clearly identifiable to all members of that totem, from whatever part of the country. Song lines and story tracks can be traced over the entire country. In this way oral literature sustains the sense of continuity between the clans as well as between the present and the time of creation.

Important stories that deal with the activities of perhaps just one or two of the ancestral figures and belong to adjacent areas and adjacent clans may constitute a song cycle. Some of these stories do not allow for variation and constitute a formal literature with precise structures and particular language. For example, repetition is an important structural device. Verb forms and tenses indicate the unchanging yet ongoing relationship between the ancestral past and the present. The persistent theme of transformation, a theme characteristic of many oral literatures, is for the people a way of access to their mythic past, to the eternal present of the Dreaming.

The Djanggawul song cycle recounts in 188 songs the journey of three ancestral beings, a Brother and Two Sisters, in the Millingimbi region. Those Ancestors created all that territory. Water holes become sacred because there they created the people of a particular totem or there an important aspect of the law was established. Places acquire a name; they come into being. Much of the cycle is about fertility and increase and about the relations between men and women. For example, men steal from the Sisters the sacred objects and the power that goes with them, and, while that legend might appear to concede the dominance of men in tribal practice (according to custom), it also acknowledges women as the original source of power and knowledge.

Above all, the oral literature of Aboriginal peoples is involved with performance. It is not simply a verbal performance. Traditional song is very often associated with dance, and storytelling with gesture and mime. Or stories may be accompanied by diagrams drawn in the sand and then brushed away again. Each song, each narrative, is in effect acted out. Storytellers will customarily announce who they are, where they come from, and what their relation to the story is, as though they are its agent. They may provide a frame for their story. They use the common devices of oral literature such as repetition and enumeration and formulaic expression. But they always take care with their songs and stories; they are as careful with imagery and symbolism, with the figures of speech, as they are with other aspects of ceremony.

The intention of the song man or storyteller is not to assert a sense of individuality but to identify the continuing validity of the song or the story. There may be direct address to the listener (or, in more recent times, the reader), but this is a device of inclusion. It is also a stratagem to ensure understanding, providing the opportunity for explanation and elaboration whenever that is desirable.

Increasingly, traditional Aboriginal peoples have permitted their songs and stories to be collected and recorded for the time when the young people, who they feel show little interest in their traditional literature at present, return to the old ways of custom. The non-Aboriginal person’s knowledge of this traditional literature relies almost entirely on printed translation. What non-Aboriginal people are permitted to read is therefore at least twice removed from its proper context—once by its metamorphosis from oral to written and again by its translation. Even with the most sympathetic mind and the most comprehensive set of footnotes, the non-Aboriginal person has little means of assessing the relation of custom to individual performance. Further, there remains the residual perception of the nature of traditional Aboriginal literature formed on a number of early, well-intentioned collections of myths and legends, such as Catherine Langloh Parker’s Australian Legendary Tales (1896) or Alan Marshall’s People of the Dreamtime (1952), where the stories are reshaped to meet European notions of narrative design and structure.

Anthropologists Catherine H. and Ronald M. Berndt were the first to publish traditional narratives and songs in full in the original language (though linguists have still not agreed on how best to represent Aboriginal speech), then with a translation and a commentary. One good example of their work is Three Faces of Love: Traditional Aboriginal Song-Poetry (1976). This approach enables at least an initial appreciation of the subtlety and the artistry of the oral tradition.

Not all Aboriginal song and story is in Indigenous dialect. In the 1970s and ’80s, as Aboriginal people began to write in formal English, some began to express themselves in what might be called Aboriginal English, an English that is different from standard English. It is formed in short, simple sentences, and it makes considerable use of repetition with variation. It also conveys a certain dignity—and a rich sense of humour. Some versions of this can be found in the different narratives included in Sally Morgan’s My Place (1987) and, more sensitive still as a transcription, in Paddy Roe’s Gularabulu: Stories from the West Kimberley (1983). In the last decades of the 20th century, the poet and storyteller Maureen Watson helped to maintain the oral tradition by reading on radio and television and by performing at schools.