25 - Mabo, History, Sovereignty

Summary

Australian novels of recent decades, canonical and lesser-known works, created by both Indigenous and non-indigenous writers, have been telling stories the nation and its readers have not wanted to hear for most of Australia’s colonial history. While novelists did engage, prior to the 1980s, with Indigenous presence on the continent, such engagement was sporadic and mostly peripheral to grander stories of pioneering bravado, white achievement and the battle with nature on the frontier. Now, peripheral stories have moved to the centre, for Australia was not an empty land settled peacefully by the British. The land was already occupied by sovereign nations of people. Storied, sung place was invaded with orchestrated violence; the land was taken, not ‘taken up’. Indigenous peoples now demand that their ‘ancient sovereignty’ be allowed to ‘shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood’ via constitutional amendment and treaty. Read against the backdrop of relatively recent developments – land rights, the Mabo decision, Stolen Generations, History Wars – this chapter examines work by non-indigenous authors like Kate Grenville and Andrew McGahan as well as Indigenous writers such as Alexis Wright and Tara June Winch, in tracing the rise of the postcolonial novel in Australian fiction.