Anna Funder: This episode contains the voice of Oodgeroo Noonuccal who died in 1993. 

Archive Oodgeroo Noonuccal: Reading of “We Are Going” 

Anna Funder: That was the voice of poet Oodgeroo Noonnucal, and this is Fully lit, a podcast about Australian writing.  

Jeanine Leane: One of the things I’ve been really working hard towards developing a body of culturally rigorous First Nations literary criticism as a model to work with for future scholars. 

Anna Funder: I’m Anna Funder. And that was Jeanine Leane. 

She’s with host Graham Akhurst, and together they critique the critics in a discussion about how Indigenous writing is read.  

Graham Akhurst:  We need to have more academics and critical engagement from Mob with our own stories. 

Anna Funder: What is “cultural rigour”? And what do readers and critics need to know before they can really understand Black writing in Australia? 

It’s time to get Fully Lit 

[00:01:22 ] Graham Akhurst: Hello! It’s great to be here today in conversation with Janine Leane. She’s a Wiradjuri writer, poet and academic from south west New South Wales. And she’s not only an incredible poet and the author of Purple Threads, which was winner of the David Unaipon Award. But she’s also, in my humble opinion, our top critical scholar in the field of Indigenous literature at the moment. Jeanine, welcome. We’ve got some talking to do. 

[00:01:52] Jeanine Leane: Thank you. Graham. Yeah, Yiradhu marang everyone. That means hello in Wiradjuri. 

[00:01:59] Graham Akhurst: I think it’s really wonderful if we talk about Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s, work as one of the founding members of Indigenous literature and the development of this growing canon. 

[00:02:11]  Jeanine Leane: Oodgeroo is of the Noonuccal people from Stradbroke Island, but its original name is Minjerribah, whose work We Are Going, which was the name of her first collection, was published in 1964 by Jacaranda Press. And this was our first published book of poetry. It was before the 1967 referendum. That referendum completed the citizenship of Aboriginal people. And from that referendum too, we also get our current working definition of what is an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person. The three pronged definition genealogy, voluntary identification and belonging to community or communities. But, um, I think we never get away from that pernicious stereotype of either being too black or not black enough. 

[00:03:18] Oodgeroo Noonuccal: archive 

[00:03:41] Graham Akhurst: So Indigenous identity has been heavily politicised since colonisation. And I think Oodgeroo ‘s poem speaks to it in a sort of a different entry point. And we’ve decided to look at one of her poems today called The Past. 

[00:04:07] Archive Oodgeroo Noonuccal: Reading The Past 

[00:04:27] Graham Akhurst: We get the sense that she’s living within a suburban context. In this poem, she says. Tonight here in suburbia, as I sit in easy chair before electric heater, warmed by the red glow, I fall into dream. And within that dream she is harkening to a past, a particular type of past. But also within this poem, she’s sort of unravelling the fact that through an Indigenous lens, time works differently. 

[00:05:00] Jeanine Leane: The poem is called The Past, but I think that’s much more of an ironic play on the way settlers compartmentalise things and use a line to measure things. Whereas First Nations people, although we are diverse across the continent, I think a nonlinear measurement of time is common. It’s like all times are important. Whether it is in settler language, the past or the past continuous or the present or the future. They are not really aligned. They are more like a circle. And all those times are important, and none of those times are ever wholly resolved or over. I think she is playing on that irony of compartmentalisation, because the poem goes on to show that where the poet is located, and where their sentiments are located, and where their placing First Nations people more broadly is anywhere but in the past. And so it’s really questioning these kind of settler myths that are okay for settlers to hold, but they don’t translate across a cultural context, such as the past is a foreign country. I think it’s challenging all those ways of thinking. 

[00:06:34] Graham Akhurst: Absolutely. And it sort of talks to my favourite couple of lines of the poem at the very end. Now is so small a part of time, and we sense that the now is so fleeting. But her ideas within this poem talk to a really rich concept of time where past, present and future fold in on themselves. So small a part of all the race years that have moulded me, she says. And I believe your favourite line of the poem was towards the beginning. Jeanine. 

[00:07:07] Jeanine Leane: Uh, yeah. The second line of the poem. The first line is let no one say the past is dead. The following line is the past is all about us. And within. So there’s a lot to critique there in terms of the overriding of the nation and that quite erroneous contextualisation of First Nations people as past peoples. Yeah. When you do that, you can see where the fundamental splits between different cultures occur and how one culture goes in one particular philosophical direction. Like, for example, the West goes in the direction of seeing land as completely dormant until it is worked upon. Whereas First Nations culture sees land as completely sentient and living and ever evolving and not needing to be altered or land alters, people and people are land rather than people need to control land. You can see all these different schisms, which are really important when you’re when they’re informing critique. 

[00:08:36] Graham Akhurst: Janine, I was hoping that you could talk about cultural rigour and explain to the audience what cultural rigour is in the context of Indigenous critique. 

[00:08:47] Jeanine Leane: Yeah, it’s a model of critique that grows out of the particular community producing the art or the literature. In literary critique, First Nations cultural rigour is a nuanced approach to our diverse body of literature, and it’s a layered approach to non-linear storytelling. And such critique is savvy with the language of the community and the way the community speaks in vernacular. So it’s savvy with the language of the communities and the sociocultural and historical context of the communities from which the author and the story is produced, so familiar with the grounding of the story. Like, for example, in Alexis Wright’s writing, say, Carpentaria, for example. 

[00:9:40] READING Carpentaria by Alexis Wright 

[00:11:22] Jeanine Leane: That has a particular one.  North Queensland focus. Cultural rigour is understanding that groundedness. And one thing. First Nations culture does is avoid binary or polarised reviews or descriptions that either patronise First Nations writing or any minority writing really. But in this case, First Nations writing with hollow praise as the type identified by Alison Whittaker, which lazily might describe a First Nations works as. Oh, that’s really good, or that’s really important. But without engaging in the text. 

[00:12:08] READING: Whittaker from Jeanine Leane’s essay of Cultural Rigour 

[00:12:42] Graham Akhurst: And I know Alison Whittaker has called the need for a more robust, Indigenous critical analysis of our own literature a crisis where we need to we need to have more academics and critical engagement from Mob with our own stories. Aunty Jackie Huggins has also spoken about this. She ponders the sort of interface with the colonial critique industry. Why it is that they view intra racial critique between Indigenous people, such as sacred space, and the fact that in the white sphere, such critique is seen as a part of the intellectual rigour of the industry. But when it comes to Indigenous writers and critiquers critiquing each other’s work, it seems like such a sacred space and that it’s seen as infighting if we’re critiquing each other’s work rather than a robust intellectual critique. 

[00:13:50] Jeanine Leane: Yeah. I address this more fully in an essay that I wrote by the same name called Cultural Rigour. The biggest movement of identity politics here in Australia, or in any settler colony is the settlers. It’s just that they’re such a big movement that is not used to being questioned, that they see their identity politics movement as universal and or invisible, whereas they see minorities as identity politics. And why is it important? It’s important, as Jackie said Aunty Jackie Huggins, to establish models. 

[00:14:32]  All bodies of literature rely on culturally appropriate and culturally rigorous bodies of critical writing to sustain them, like the English canon of Chaucer and Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Dickinson, Dixon, Elliot, Hopkins relies on its literary critics and scholars to sustain its literary value and legacy, and the settler canon in Australia relies on its intra cultural settler critics to assign value to certain works over others as national literatures. I mean, on that note, how many white writers have written about Patrick White with no charges of bias or identity politics. So First Nations literary culture demands the same level of cultural rigour that’s led from within the communities that produces the literature, and the purpose of culturally rigorous literary criticism in First Nations literature is to assert systems of cultural value to our works beyond those determined by the colonial mainstream and set by the market. The other thing that cultural rigour does is intervene in the kind of pictures that the market sometimes draws, the kind of portraits, the kind of representations that the markets might draw of First Nations people, which are not always the stories we want to tell or the portraits that we want to come to the fore. And that’s sometimes a classic example of publishers driving an image. So the purpose of culturally rigorous critique is to intervene in that as well. And a further aim is to challenge celebrity colonialism in publishing and marketing that seeks to sell a particular stereotype or brand of minority group at a particular time and place, at the expense of ignoring the diversity of stories and the life experiences of the rest of the community.  

[00:15:48] Jeanine Leane: So First Nations critique rights against a spectre of absence into a space that we have until recently been structurally excluded from, and begins to fill it with culturally informed tools for how our works need to be read against the grain of national evasion. Narratives of history and of settlement and First Nations critical culture, asserts models to speak to the complex intersections of First Nations identity and An entanglement that a settler standpoint appears largely blind to. 

[00:16:34] Graham Akhurst: The MPhil research that I did at the University of Queensland speaks to some of of what Janine talks about and what I found so interesting in interviewing Janine and Kim Scott and Leah Purcell, amongst others, about their experiences with the Australian publishing industry and also Australian literary institutions, was the interface between the publishing market and the publishing arm of Colonial Australian Publishing, and the ideas around what makes an Indigenous story, or the fetishisation of authenticity when it comes to the production of Indigenous literature, and writers like Oodgeroo Noonuccal, who were really pushing boundaries at the very beginning, would have come up against this quite starkly and to a lesser extent. Now, as we build more and more body of writers and different voices from different angles and perspectives, and also using white ideas around genre and manipulating them to tell our stories our way, I think, is part of where we can go in the future. But I wondered if you could talk to us, Janine, around the idea of cognitive imperialism and how that plays a role within the creation of Indigenous stories and the sort of interface with the publishing industry, and also surrounding the ideas around cultural rigour. 

[00:18:01] Jeanine Leane: Cognitive imperialism is being colonised through literature, through story, the way most settlers get to know First Nations people or get to think they know First Nations people, is through colonial literature and most of that colonial literature, as my PhD showed through an analysis of some of those 20th century works like Coonardoo or like Patrick White, like David Malouf’s work. And these are just the iconic ones. There were many more. There were the Arthur Upfield series, say, of Bony. There’s Leonard Mann’s works around Black Virgin works. Most colonials got to form their impressions of Aboriginal people through colonial literature. Xavier Herbert is another one. Quite a violent one, actually. And these are the images of us that endure in people’s cognition. But they’re already colonised images of us. That’s what cognitive imperialism is, our entrapment in constant other settler canonical authors stories, very much ignoring what’s at stake in Representation based on that culturally chauvinistic idea that your imagination is free and that you could imagine anything, and that your imagination is not as culturally grounded as you are. And those representations have left a legacy. To turn that back on its head in creative writing, one of the most important things that I teach students is what’s at stake in representation and why you shouldn’t tell someone else’s story. And if you’re thinking of telling someone else’s story, there’s a series of very important questions that you need to work through. Good representation depends on immersion, and most of those, if not all of those settler representations, early representations of Aboriginal people, but not just earlier ones like Kate Grenville’s done some quite bad ones in the Secret River, and that was only 2005. Around the Dharug Hawkesbury mobs. Uninformed representation is dangerous and settler readers never really got to consider. And now they’re being forced to consider. There’s a lot of backlash about it. And here’s where you get the identity politics argument, but have never really been forced until quite recently to consider what’s at stake in representing other people and are not particularly used to it, to seeing themselves represented in someone else’s story until more recently. But that is happening now with Aboriginal writing representing settlers. It’s hard to write an Aboriginal story without representing settlers because there’s so many of them. 

[00:21:06] Graham Akhurst: My debut novel, borderland, was released on October the 1st of 2023 with University of Western Australia publishing as an Indigenous writer. People often think that it’s easier for us because we have a culturally Indigenous background, but in many ways, to tell our stories, it becomes even more difficult. We have a sense of responsibility that white settler authors don’t necessarily carry this novel. It’s a young adult fiction novel. There’s a young protagonist by the name of Jonno. He’s an urban, Indigenous young man. When I was growing up, I wished that I had had a text like Borderlands that I could see myself in. This is an extract from Borderlands towards the end of the book.  

[00:21:54] READING Borderland by Graham Akhurst 

[00:25:20] Graham Akhurst:Going back to cognitive imperialism. Our stories are meaningful and particularly in the sense of Borderland, which is catered towards young adult readers. I didn’t want to produce a text that was damaging their ideas around what an Indigenous person is, because they’re at a formative stage of their life, and they’re beginning to understand what Indigenous people are, and they’ve been overloaded through texts around negative representations or unfounded representations of Indigenous subjectivities. So I wanted to make sure that my rendering was not damaging to the representations that they’re forming within their psyches. 

Graham Akhurst: It also talks to the fetishisation of Indigenous authenticity, and I wanted to create a work that was Authentically Indigenous as an Indigenous author community grounded through consultation processes. But when it went out to the publishing industry, I wanted to make sure that I had multiple cultural sensitivity reads so that anything that I missed within the renderings of my Indigenous characters would be picked up. And it’s set predominantly in two places one’s Meanjin and Brisbane, which is Yuggera Turrbal country. And I spoke to Gaja Kerry Charlton, and she read the novel a couple of times, specifically looking at representations on her ancestral homeland. And when she was happy with that. I then spent a lot of time liaising with and I’ll be forever grateful for uncle Ray Stanley, who was the former head of the Aboriginal Property Association out on Gunggari Country. And he would come back to me and say things like, look, the dreaming aspects of your fiction, the too far aligned with Central Desert Mob. I needed to go and change that. So then began a cultural protocol process where I would envision a fictional cosmology, but it had to align in some ways with Angry Mob. No one else wrote a word of my text, but I was making sure to action what I was hearing. This novel has been marketed as a young adult novel, an Indigenous eco horror thriller in the realm of horror and speculative fiction. Now those are Whitefella terms, market driven terms, and I’ve been framing the book around something that you’ve said, which is a form of Indigenous realism. 

[00:27:58] Jeanine Leane: Yeah. Indigenous realism is not being defined or confined by the limitations of settler realism. And I wrote a more detailed explanation of that in an essay I wrote for the Sydney Review of Books called Returning To Our Futures when I looked at an edited collection by Mykaela Saunders of speculative. And that was the marketing term, speculative. But my critique of. That said, you know, it’s really not speculating at all. It is working either with what’s happened or what is about to happen, informed by what has happened. And it is working on a concept that all times are immemorial, all times are melded, and no time is resolved. And, you know, I actually said a better term for that might be a cumulative fiction or a cumulative realism rather than speculative. So but that that realism is something that is not confined by what A settler might say is or isn’t real or realistic. Also, Indigenous realism rejects other marketing terms which I know still get put on the books. Our books for market. But I think that’s where critique comes in to in pushing back on those terms, like, um, rejecting the word Gothic because it’s a racial trope from Europe anyway. And, um, do you really need to introduce that term gothic here when there is so much blood and horror on the ground? Anyway, it’s the realism. It’s not gothic, it’s realism. And speaking of First Nations realism or Indigenous realism, my first book, Purple Threads, had a lot of First Nations realism in it because it was cutting to the story the understory of nation, which is country. And underneath that, and underneath all those farms is the realism of First Nations people. And magic is also a term I reject, and I’m not the only one who rejects that. But Toni Morrison wrote a wonderful piece in her 1990 work, playing in the dark, and in a following essay called Rootedness Ancestral Narratives, where she said, whose magic thank you and whose realism put the problem back onto her American white readership by saying, well, if you think it’s magic, that’s your problem, because it really does happen. When people describe Alexis Wright’s works, for example, carpentry in particular, as magic realism, it’s dismissing the reality of Aboriginal time, Aboriginal experience, Aboriginal happening, Aboriginal agency. It’s quite dismissive, even though it’s a term that was initially used to apply to Latino writers. It was used with the same sort of dismissiveness because it was being read by a largely white audience who couldn’t grasp the particular reality of colonised South America. 

[00:31:36] Graham Akhurst: I wanted to ask you a pressing question. What do you see as the the future of Indigenous storytelling in this context, considering everything that you’ve you’ve told us today? 

[00:31:37] Jeanine Leane: Ideally, the way forward would be to see some more stories emerging, like we have a fairly vast array of stories in terms of we have poetry, we have non-fiction, poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, memoir, life writing, academic writing. I’d like to see a bit more lyric essay S.A. making its way into First Nations canons. I’d like to see publishers setting the agenda less and just accepting a lot more First Nations stories and thinking about the merit of the writing, rather than the actual questioning the validity or otherwise of the story. Because there are issues where publishers might be driving a market, which is, for example, skewed in terms of ageism because there might be only looking for younger writers. Whereas that goes against our community protocol of valuing elders and valuing all members of the community. You know, the onus is really on literary publishers, not just those who publish full length books, but those who publish literary magazines, like the ones that I’ve had these essays published in, which is a Sydney Review of Books. Overland. These are places that have taken a lot of responsibility to produce diverse critique and diverse writing, but I think there needs to be more of that. I think it’s really important that the community, in terms of writing for the future, sets its own values and does it on its own terms and refuses to be driven by a market. And that can be hard, but it’s not impossible. And it comes from a sort of literary solidarity. It’s up to all of us as authors to keep asking the right questions and not be driven by mainstream, colonial or market values in our work. 

[00:33:52] Graham Akhurst: Thanks so much, Janine Leane, for visiting us here at UTS and also for your time today. We’ve covered a lot of ground, looking at many aspects of time and history and the folding of time, and also the need for more critical rigour within our. Our Indigenous critique. There is a poem of yours that I’d love you to read to finish today’s interview, and I think it speaks directly to many of the issues that we’ve talked about today. 

[00:34:59] Jeanine Leane: Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for inviting me. Just a bit of context about the poem. It is challenging the monolithic structures of capital H history, which claims that there’s only one story to tell about a nation. And when you see the poem written on the page, it’s all the more powerful because it begins and ends with ellipses and deliberately puts history with a very small h.  

[00:34:57]READING history by Jeanine Leane 

[00:35:23] Anna Funder: Thanks for listening to Fully Lit. This series is brought to you by Impact Studios at UTS, the Sydney Review of Books with the UTS Writing and Publishing Program, and is produced by Regina Botros. I am Anna Funder, and if you’d like to hear any of our other episodes, look for Fully Lit wherever you get your podcasts.