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'Tracking for Blackfellas is like reading for whitefellas.'
(Aunty Lil Smart nee Croker 1887-1980)
Aunty Lil was my Grandmother with whom I grew up.
This is a narrative paper that tracks a story of Aboriginal representation and the concept of nation across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries through some important Australian texts. I read this assemblage of settler literature through the cultural metaphor of tracking, because tracking is as much about anticipation as it is following. Tracking is about reading: reading land and people before and after whitefellas. It is about entering into the consciousness of the person or people of interest. Tracking is not just about reading the physical signs; it is about reading the mind. It is not just about seeing and hearing what is there; it is as much about what is not there. Tony Morrisson wrote of mapping 'the critical geography' (3) of the white literary imagination in her work on Africanist presence in American Literature, Playing in the Dark. This paper tracks the settler imagination on Aboriginal presence in Australian literature in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Barbara Johnson (148) argues that if we believe that texts present major claims which attempt to dominate, erase, or distort various 'other' claims whose traces, nevertheless, remain detectable to a reader, then reading in its extended sense is deeply involved with questions of authority and power. My aim is not to question the status of such acclaimed authors or the value of their works in writing a settler nation. Nor is it to be dismissive or to disregard the works of literary scholars who have critiqued these works through postcolonial, ideological, poststructural and feminist readings, although I do point out that the critics also largely assume a settler readership. My aim instead is to see these texts as settler cultural terrains and to focus on both the represented and those who assume the authority to represent as cultural agents for settler culture, and the literary uses the represented presence of 'the Aborigine' has served in settler nation writing. Most importantly, my intention is not to advocate or imply that these and other settler works of Aboriginal representation should not be studied. On the contrary, what motivates and excites me is the...