Chris Tiffin

3. Look to the New-Found Dreaming: Identity and Technique in Australian Aboriginal Writing

The question of identity is fundamental to Aboriginal writing. Virtually all Aboriginal writing in English has come from urban part-Aborigines who are &dquo;divided to the vein&dquo;’ 1 as much as any writer in the Commonwealth, and find themselves in an invidious position socially and politically. Consequently this Aboriginal writing it is overtly political and recognizably distinct from the orature of tribal Aboriginals collected and translated by anthropologists.2 Only in books for children, often consisting of nostalgic recalling of childhood or accounts of traditional myths,’ is there some meeting between the tribal and the contemporary urban. Thomas Keneally’s novel The Chant ofJimmie Blacksmith has a scene in which Jimmie, a half-caste about to marry a white girl, tells his white employer his descendents will be virtually white. This is cruelly rejected by the employer: &dquo;Yair. And his kid’ll be an eighth black and his a sixteenth. But it doesn’t matter how many times yer descendants bed down, they’ll never get anything that don’t have the tarbrush in it. And it’ll always spoil ’em, that little bit of somethink else. &dquo;4 This sense of the smallest trace of Aboriginal blood being a disqualification from acceptance into white society may be an extreme view, but it does highlight the resistance by whites against people of mixed blood seeking to identify with the dominant culture. One result of this in the 1980s is the strong identification with Aboriginality by a large range of people whose genetic make-up is half or even predominantly white. As C. D. Rowley says, &dquo;Denied a common Australian identity they seek an Aboriginal one. &dquo;5 When Kevin Gilbert writes about the first Euro-