Murdoch University
The Krishna Somers Foundation presents the year’s eighth event, a lecture by Ms Elisa Bracalente of the University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’. As usual excellent wine (and orange juice) will be available. The lecture will be delivered on Tuesday August 21 at 4.30PM in Humanities and Education Room 3.41.
Abstract
This paper will analyse selected contemporary Australian novels and will argue that contemporary Australian authors tend to re-write the history of Aborigines and their interactions with settlers. Postcolonial theory will be used to illustrate this fictionalised rewriting of early Australian history.
Australian History has been largely told by non-indigenous white Australians and has been constructed, following Said and Foucault, as a discourse which, finally, justified colonisation and its aftermath. In short, the process of settlement in Australia has been mythologized, its pioneers and explorers becoming national heroes. Up until the 1970s, Aborigines were erased from official history in what Stanner has called the ‘great Australian silence’ in order to justify the assumption of Australia as Terra Nullius, a legal necessity for the colonisation of the land. This discourse, and its parameters, had been for a long while a cultural dominant.
A decisive shift is in the air, and as an outsider I sense it acutely. Contemporary writers are beginning to rethink the erstwhile dominant discourse. The appearance of an Aboriginal literature that contests the official version of history and retells the other side of the story has been a relatively recent development akin to similar movements in other post-colonial literatures worldwide. This paper will analyse selected novels by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal authors and will argue how through the fictionalization of the early settlement period authors have re-written the history of the relationship between settler and Aboriginal people. In doing so these authors now present a ‘fairer’ or more balanced view of history.
About Elisa Bracalente
Elisa Bracalente is studying for a PhD in Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’. Her PhD thesis focuses on contemporary Australian novels that deal with the early settlement period and the relationship between settlers and Aborigines. She came to Australia to undertake research and to interact with experts in Australian Literature. Her undergraduate honours thesis was on Irish literature, specifically on the Irish roots of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. She has spent time studying in both Ireland and England as part of both her undergraduate and PhD degrees.
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