Indigenous Australian stories in the Australian mainstream

This post will be quite short, but I wanted to briefly discuss Indigenous Australian stories which are available in the Australian mainstream.

I think stories are important. One of the things about being in a minority or an oppressed group is that you get used to seeing people who are “not like you”, to not seeing people who are “like you”, in mainstream stories.

Or, if you do see people who are “like you”, they usually have some special role, no character development, they’re 2D and in black-and-white rather than full colour. Often entirely good or entirely bad.

So I thought that I’d write about the exposure that I had to stories of Indigenous Australians as I was growing up, to illustrate the paucity of information about the Indigenous Australian experience in the (relative) mainstream.

First of all: Dreamtime stories.

I’ve always loved Dreamtime stories, just as I love other stories which fill similar roles in other cultures. I think my love of SF/F (especially fantasy) stems from this early love.

I had access to Dreamtime stories both at home and at school, in two general forms. One form: several picture books, which I understand were written and illustrated by Indigenous Australians (although not in “dot painting” style). The other form: a couple of anthologies.

Several of the stories have stuck in my mind very strongly, and many more are there in bits and pieces. I took a friend of mine from overseas to my parents’ place; we saw a goanna up a tree and I told my friend the story of how the Goanna and the Lizard got their markings (the link says Goanna and Perentie, but my book said Goanna and Lizard, so that’s what I’m sticking to!).

Having these Dreamtime stories had a big influence on me – when I was a kid, I wished that I had Aboriginal heritage. I wanted to belong to the land that we lived on. I told my mother, and got my first lesson in identity politics! She explained to me that I shouldn’t idealise Indigenous people, and told me a bit about the maltreatment of Indigenous Australians at the hands of Australians of European descent. [ETA: Just to clarify: the message was not "you shouldn't want to be an Indigenous Australian because they are treated poorly", but more, "idealising another group is as dehumanising as stereotyping them in other ways, especially when your group has mistreated that group".]

When I was a bit older, I remember two books in particular: I, the Aboriginal as told to Douglas Lockwood, which has a lot of the mystical about it and probably increased my wish to have Aboriginal heritage, and a little later, My Place by Sally Morgan (her own autobiography and the biographies of her mother, grandmother and great-uncle), which made me appreciate to a MUCH greater extent the real disadvantages that so many Indigenous Australians have suffered over the past few centuries. I also remember reading Walkabout, but it didn’t have all that much of an effect on me in addition to the other stories I’d read.

Since then, there have been movies such as Rabbit Proof Fence (which I’m ashamed to say that I still haven’t seen! I’m not a big movie person, I prefer books) and Ten Canoes. In addition, I am always interested in hearing accounts of current Indigenous experience – news stories as well as reports such as Bringing Them Home.

There may be a couple of other things, but the above is pretty much it. So that, in addition to some dot paintings on bark hanging up on the walls at home, was probably about the extent of my exposure to stories of Indigenous Australians (both (auto)biographical and cultural stories; both are important) while I was growing up. Not much, is it?

As Chally points out, it suggests that the Australian mainstream doesn’t really make much of an effort in getting any exposure to the stories of Indigenous Australians, doesn’t it?