Mudrooroo (1)

Colin Johnson aka Mudrooroo is a controversial figure in the history of indigenous literature. His novel, Wild Cat Falling (A&R Classics) is said by some to be the first novel by an author ‘of Aboriginal blood’ in Australia. However he is not mentioned in the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature – which one might perhaps expect to include an excerpt from a novel of such apparent significance. However, he is listed on the AustLit database BlackWords. Why the discrepancy? Well, if you check out the author’s Wikipedia page, you can soon see why: his Aboriginality is a contested issue.

Well, as I said elsewhere, I’m not getting into the complex politics of Aboriginal identity: if an author identifies him/herself as indigenous, that’s good enough for me. What is more problematic is that the novel tells the story of Trugernanna and the ‘last male of Bruny Island’ (p207), and the cover blurb refers to ‘the last native Tasmanians‘ implying that Tasmanian Aborigines are extinct. They are not, as shown by Dr Ryan’s authoritative research in The Tasmanian Aborigines: A History since 1803 which also explains how the false belief arose and how Tasmanian activists have had to mount a long campaign to have their Aboriginality acknowledged.

But as it happens, Mudrooroo’s title prefigures that endurance into the 21st century. Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World is a remarkable book on any terms, and if it were to be reissued as an Australian classic with a clarifying introduction, any doubts about its author or intimations of successful genocide could be confronted. I think it would be a pity to let this book slide into obscurity because it is an elegy for a lost way of life and a snapshot of the dilemmas of the period. It makes an empathetic companion to The Tasmanian Aborigines: A History since 1803.

To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2012/05/27/doctor-wooreddys-prescription-for-enduring-th...… (meer)

This is not often I get to read books which such a postcolonial perspective and I enjoyed the book to a certain extent. This is about the life and the changes brought by white men to the inhabitants of a Tasmanian island. Out of this, I think, I will retain a certain sense of doom, some pervasive background negativity (of course, justified) about the whole story, and, while the plot is good, the narrative style keeps the reader at a certain distance and I had problems getting into the story because of this. The ending had an air of 'end of the world', ergo the title of the same name. This book is recommended to readers wanting to have a better sense of postcolonial issues and, to some extent, gender issues.… (meer)