This is the quest to regain sovereignty over my own brain —Reference WrightWright 2013, 4

As It Was in the Beginning

Before European invasion, Australia was not a land without stories. Just as it is today, it was alive with creation stories, song circles, history, and myths belonging to the country and its first peoples. Since colonization, however, Australia has become not only a contested terrain geographically, but for first‐nation people, sovereignty is a fight to strengthen Indigenous psychologies in order to overcome the ongoing effects of racism and white supremacy that colonization implies. The fight for psychological sovereignty is all‐encompassing, made up of unique ways of thinking, feeling, and being an Indigenous person across all aspects of life. This article is most concerned, however, with the representations of “sovereignty” in a textual sense, exploring how creative writing informs both a geographical understanding of place vis‐à‐vis ownership of ideas about land, both real and imaginary. In particular, this article will discuss how “sovereignty” is a psychological state and that land ownership is reinforced with the strengthening of Indigenous psychologies.

First, this article will summarize the clinical research that outlines the psychological trauma associated with systemic racism, white supremacy, and assimilationist policies that Indigenous subjects experience day to day. Unfortunately, mental health and suicide are significantly higher among Australian Indigenous populations, for reasons Colin Tatz associates with severe mental disorders and seeking “freedom in death” (Reference TatzTatz 2005, xxii). The experiences of colonization and ongoing racism contribute to common feelings of “craziness” in a clinical sense, but in a metaphorical sense it is like handing over one's “head” to a “state” of white patriarchal control. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, for example, articulates entrenched imperialism as a production of subjects with “bodiless heads and headless bodies” who are victims of “cultural theft” through assimilation (Reference NgũgĩNgũgĩ 1986, 28). Decolonization thus aims to keep heads attached to their bodies, avoiding holocaust and saving lives.

Bennelong, in 1796, was the first Australian Indigenous author to publish his work and proved writing was a channel for anger, but also a form of existentialist expression: detailing the possibilities for living a life of anticitizenship. Angry and aggressive styles of “protest writing” have a well‐documented literary history, proving colonial resistance is marked through creative penmanship. Various narratives by Mudrooroo and Oodgeroo, for instance, have illustrated the pain associated with suppressing anger, and the more positive effects that expressing emotions can have on the human heart. Gaps appear, however, around questions pertaining to whether “forgiveness” also exacts a psychic toll on the oppressed (Reference CartenCarten 2015). How do Australian Indigenous authors engage with the psychological struggles of oppression, using literature to reveal the challenges that come with forgiving colonizers?

Finally, this article will explore the ways forgiveness acts are represented textually, and will argue that Indigenous psychological well‐being and strengthening Indigenous psychologies (as they are represented in creative writing) have forged the way for postcolonial representations of reconciliation in the works of Indigenous authors, in particular, Marie Munkara's Every Secret Thing and Alexis Wright's The Swan Book. These texts make for interesting comparison, in that they both contest textual terrains from a feminist viewpoint and rewrite Indigenous subjectivity from inside and outside the master–slave relationship. Yet each demonstrates inimitable literary style and creative ability, and each has a similar purpose: to rewrite the politics of place and to portray the continually shifting paradigms of race relations through Indigenous storytelling: motifs, symbols, themes, and characterization that strengthen female Indigenous psychologies and inform a sense of citizenship through deconstructing the natural order of the dominant culture. Indigenous characters in both worlds, for example, separate, withdraw, and disengage from the “state,” rejecting the status quo—not due to a weakened state of mind or to submit to colonial or patriarchal governing powers—but to deliberately construct a position against colonial governments in their imaginary realms. Separation and withdrawal are therefore seen as positionality: the authors’ efforts to gain psychological power over their own minds through the creative/textual inclusion and exclusion of “women's business” or Indigenous knowledge (historical, spiritual, sacred) and the rejection of and “toying” with Western knowledge (economic, intellectual, epistemological) to preserve Indigenous women's ways of thinking, believing, being. Wright articulates she has “learnt how to escape the reality about this place” and declares: “I have created illusionary ancient homelands to encroach on and destroy the wide‐open vista of the virus's real‐estate” (Reference WrightWright 2013, 4). As Indigenous women, Wright and Munkara write to repair what intergenerational, patriarchal hegemony and colonization have perpetually broken in the psyches and imaginations of readers in Australia, and all over the world. Eric Williams's research, for example, shows how over time Black subjects have been portrayed mostly by those “ensconced in the superiority of imperialism” (Reference WilliamsWilliams 1964, 33). Hegel, for example, once likened Black characters in literature to colonial children (Reference HegelHegel 1956, 91–99), and in the Australian context, portrayal of the “noble savage” has implied that assimilation is necessary for a people needing to be “civilized.”

It is the ways in which the contemporary female Indigenous author uses language (not language itself) that is pivotal to the decolonization of her own mind and emancipates her from racist and sexist psychological imprisonment. These selected texts testify that Indigenous writers can reclaim sovereignty over their own brains and represent new psychologies in feminist imaginations. So what is to reclaim? I will now outline a brief history of Australian Indigenous psychologies in order to understand the ways it is represented in Australian literature and how it continues to change for feminist and decolonizing purposes.

Indigenous Psychologies

Indigenous psychology and the exploration of cultural self‐esteem is a well‐developed area in the academy and in the clinical practice of psychology. Indigenous psychology is not a new discipline, but it is an undertheorized concept explored as a postcolonial trope in literary studies, particularly in the writing of contemporary female Australian Indigenous authors. In a discussion paper on “Reconciliation and Psychology: Indigenous Australian Perspectives,” for example, the authors explore what “a culturally derived ‘psychology’” means in relation to how Indigenous people think, feel, and behave (Reference Dudgeon, Collard and PickettDudgeon, Collard, and Pickett 1997, 4). Similarly, empirical research in the areas of Indigenous children's ethnic self‐esteem and concepts of self were developed in the 1990s by Anne Pederson, Iain Walker, and Harry Pickett to confirm that Indigenous people have suffered from psychological barriers stemming from intergenerational feelings of powerlessness, helplessness, and distrust of white people and that these attitudes have blocked the road to better race relations and to reconciliation (Reference Pederson, Walker and PickettPederson, Walker, and Pickett 1997, 8). These arguments are reflected in the writing of Australian Indigenous authors as well, who write to regain not only rights and sovereignty over conceptualizations of land, but to improve psychological well‐being as first‐nation people. The ways in which Indigenous people think cannot be separated from their spirituality or their relationship with land. Land is integral to cultural identity and defined by various and multiple tribal groups across Australia. Belonging to place is different from legal sovereignty or “ownership” of land because a particular place is part of who one is—one belongs to that place, with those people, animals, stories—all of which coexist in a larger circle of life, connected to the present and the beginning of the Dreamtime (Reference TurnerTurner 2010).

Arguably, Indigenous writing has made such an impression on the national psyche that it has power, not only to alter Indigenous psychologies, but to alter a collective state of mind within the transcultural zone as well. As Indigenous scholar Marcia Langton argues, “Aboriginality” is a construction that is created when Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal people “engage in actual dialogue” (Reference LangtonLangton 1993, 35) and this dialogue includes reading and writing as well.

Needless to say, Indigenous writers have struggled to enter into the contested terrain of creative writing, not only because of language differences but because of the master–slave relationship that was established by early settlers from the onset of colonization. The relationship between “settler” and “native” was established well before the first settlers even arrived in Australia—when those in power prepared for how they would “handle the natives” once they arrived on foreign soil. It was the psychological and political view that Australia was “no man's land” and could be seized by men with enough courage to claim it. This informed “the nation as a white [male] possession,” which, according to Indigenous scholar Aileen Moreton Robertson, came to be naturalized “by circulating a coherent set of meanings about white [male] possession as part of common sense knowledge and socially produced conventions” (cited in Reference RussoRusso 2005, 100). Yet if Australian culture was once planned for and thoughtfully designed by men to justify colonial and patriarchal sovereignty (through detailed architectural, political, legal, creative, and artistic design), then it is possible for female (and male) Indigenous (and non‐Indigenous) writers to engage in this redesigning of the future through their own creative and artistic pursuits for postcolonial peace.

Since colonization, it has been problematic for Indigenous authors to write in English, yet it was considered necessary for Indigenous subjects to use English to communicate with their oppressors and to stir the visceral desire to lobby for social change. The research of Anita Heiss and Peter Minter, for example, argues that the genesis of Indigenous writing dates back to 1796 when Bennelong, the first Indigenous person to be captured by settlers, wrote a number of letters to request his release and to appeal for better treatment of Indigenous people (Reference Heiss and MinterHeiss and Minter 2008). Unbeknown to him, Bennelong founded a legacy for a historical human‐rights movement that would later span across all parts of Australian society, including the arts.

Bennelong may have realized that sovereign power lay in the hands of the monarchy and that the “head of state” had absolute control over its citizens, including the geographical, physical, and psychological terrains of “its natives.” However, what historians and politicians of the past did not predict was that Indigenous people would always have a different relationship with the “state” because they would always have psychological and spiritual views of “sovereignty” different from those of their colonial counterparts. Ancient Indigenous views of spiritual and psychological connection to place eventually proved to be “uncontrollable” by colonial governments when, in 1992, Eddie Mabo challenged the Australian High Court for recognition of Aboriginals Land Rights by denying that Australia was ever Terra Nullius or no man's land. This was bedrock for a changing psychology and emerging cultural self‐esteem for Indigenous people struggling with intergenerational effects of displacement.

Mabo founded a new sense of cultural confidence, with an improvement to mental well‐being seen in the types of publications by Australian authors from the 1960s to the 1990s. A brief outline of this literary history of “resistance” and later “reconciliation writing” is necessary before Wright's and Munkara's work can be positioned in a particular time and place of Australian writing and its politics. So how does writing inform a changing Indigenous psychology and work to reclaim sovereignty?

A Literary History of Resistance, Empowerment, and Reconciliation

Australian scholar Adam Shoemaker identifies Australian Indigenous writing from 1929–1988 as a time of writing back to the empire and contesting the legitimacy of colonial statehood by using literature as propaganda for equal rights, with power to be political, dissident, and empowering (Reference ShoemakerShoemaker 1989, 4). Australian Indigenous literature from the 1990s, however, has seen more and more thematic inclusions of Indigenous and non‐Indigenous race relations. Writing from this period was distinctly different from what Shoemaker categorized from 1929–1988 as “resistance writing” or those texts published around the same time of the 1967 Referendum and the 1966 Wave Hill strikes led by Vincent Lingiari. This writing emphasized an Indigenous psychology framed by protest, anger, and an urgency to gain equal rights—all necessary for social change and allowing for prolific publication of Indigenous writing, such as well‐known Australian Indigenous poet Oodgeroo, whose inspiring work is foundational to transformative writing all over the world. Although governments are often credited with achieving social and political change, polities are created through the less visible workings of a nation's polemical masters. As Bill Ashcroft articulates in his own research on transformative texts: “While the soldiers and politicians have gained most attention, it is the ordinary people—and the artists and writers, through whom a transformative vision of the world has been conceived—who have done most to ‘resist’ the cultural pressures upon them” (Reference Ashcroft and BennettAshcroft 2003, 385). Milestones and political events such as Australia's 1967 Referendum to include Indigenous people in the census may signify changing race relations, but placing a finger on when or how people's views and feelings began changing toward Others is more difficult. Measuring social transformation is not altogether impossible though, and arguably culture can be delineated by explicating ideas, signs, and symbols in Australian art and literature. Writing in particular reflects how transformation continues to operate as a complex cycle of inciting—reflecting—a change in the status quo and showing that culture is not simply given or “supplied” from the generations before us but written, captured, and directed by generations to come.

Arguably, the 1990s saw the dawning of Indigenous writing marked by the psychological empowerment of self‐determination and conceptual underpinnings of reconciliation in the imaginations of particular writers. From 1990, Indigenous (and non‐Indigenous) authors began writing stories that included characters of mixed blood who were on quests to find themselves as pan‐Aboriginal or to define Australia as a shared cultural creation of many nationhood(s) (see Boori Monty‐Pryor and Meme McDonald's writing, for example). This shift in textual themes and characterization is categorized here as the era of “reconciliatory literature” and builds upon Shoemaker's earlier research to chronologically map the terrain of Indigenous writing as “resistance writing.” The nature of “reconciliatory literature” also corresponds with significant cultural and political events in Australia's modern history and is punctuated by the Mabo decision, Paul Keating's Redfern Speech, the walks for reconciliation over Sydney Harbour Bridge, and Kevin Rudd's national apology to the Stolen Generations. Identifiable literary traits appear in the textual language, imagery, and themes belonging to “reconciliatory literature” by both Indigenous and non‐Indigenous authors writing in particular ways to represent the politics of race relations in a transcultural zone.

Such authors belonging to the genre of reconciliatory literature include: Larissa Behrendt (Home), Dianne Johnson (Lighting the Way: Reconciliation Stories), Kim Mahood (Craft for a Dry Lake), Meme McDonald (Love like Water), Bruce Pascoe (Convincing Ground: Learning to Fall in Love with Your Country), Boori Monty‐Pryor (Maybe Tomorrow), Daryl Tonkin (Jackson's Track: Memoir of a Dreamtime Place), and Carolyn Landon (Jackson's Track Revisited: History, Remembrance and Reconciliation). All of these authors reflect deeply on issues of race relations in Australia and the psychological roadblocks to reconciliation, including polarized racial perspectives on land, place, identity, and history. Their writing reflects improvements to Indigenous cultural self‐esteem and psychological wellness through tropes of forgiveness, redemption, and trans‐identity formations underpinned by knowing, understanding, and wanting an engagement with Others in an imaginary/literary or real way that incorporates seeing, hearing, remembering, and dreaming with the Other, feelingly, reflectively.

More recent texts, like The Swan Book and Every Secret Thing, however, warn readers of the creative and imaginary limitations of textual paradigms informed by reconciliation. As this article will subsequently discuss, Wright's and Munkara's texts show how representations of reconciliation can also serve patriarchal and neocolonial objectives that reinstate the master–slave relationship under the guise of freedom, equality, love, and closing the gap. Reconciliation is a dialogue calling for many perspectives and requiring the complex negotiation of ideas and interpretations of shared futures together, but ultimately the freedom for Indigenous people to exercise “self‐rule”—freedom to think and speak for oneself—is the “highest right of the people” (Reference Kant and GregorKant 1996, 470). White patriarchal hegemony can be represented in many (hybrid) forms, reinforcing the occupation of Australia's sovereign borders. Yet it is the critique of such forms that reveals aspects of Australian history and culture that may never be reconciled, and that reclaiming sovereignty (at least over one's own brain) has never been more urgent than in a time proposed for “reconciliation.” Through their writing, Wright and Munkara aspire to more than the achievement of self‐determination and equal rights; they insist on a complete overhaul of social order in their textual worlds, informing a reconciliatory dialogue that strengthens the mindsets and psychologies of Indigenous people, urging them to hold onto their ways of thinking, believing, imagining, creating, and being that is intrinsic to land ownership. These women reclaim sovereignty over their own brains, contesting both the geographical and psychological terrains that colonization invades over and over again. A detailed analysis of both novels will now illustrate the ways in which reclaiming psychological sovereignty becomes problematic when there is a contest for forgiveness and decolonization at the same time.

The Swan Book

Alexis Wright belongs to the Waanyi people on the Gulf of Carpentaria. She is a renowned land activist and has published seven novels, the most recent being The Swan Book (2013). Her novel Carpentaria (2006) won the Miles Franklin literary award in 2007 and is extensively referenced. The Swan Book is, however, equally poetic in style and shares many literary qualities with its forebearer. The front cover, for example, foregrounds the side view of a black swan—its feathers are intricately painted in black and white, yet appear more like scales on a snake than like the soft, glossy feathers of a migratory bird. These scales are perhaps reminiscent of the serpent's omnipresent symbolism in Wright's earlier work Carpentaria, and, again, in her most recent text, it is a creature from the animal world that becomes the center of the story. The title, The Swan Book, appears in the same bright orange that marked the cover of Carpentaria—an inscription of the desert's earthy orange dust emblematic of northern Australia, where both novels are placed.

Both texts are set in the future, incorporate apocalyptic themes, and implicate Indigenous and non‐Indigenous characters in the face of environmental and social calamity. There is a journey toward physical safety and psychological peace in destroyed places. Carpentaria begins with the telling of ancient knowledge in its first chapter, titled “From Time Immemorial,” and in this chapter readers are located at the beginning of creation, eventually coming to the apocalyptic ending of the novel, ironically titled “Coming Back.” It is only after environmental disaster in the form of a cyclone that destroys everything that there is hope to begin again. Similarly, climate change in the form of “Mother Catastrophe” dominates the setting of The Swan Book and disrupts the nature in which people congregate, move from place to place, and relate with one another. Characters show how “in every neck of the woods people walked in the imagination of doomsayers and talked the language of extinction” (Reference WrightWright 2013, 13). Governments lack power to control “one extinction event after the other” and there is an insidious silence among people everywhere.

The Swan Book begins with the narrator looking back to tell the story of what has occurred. There is reference to the fairytale of “Old Van Winkle” (Reference WrightWright 2013, 7), suggesting this story is concerned with the main characters’ past, an absence of time and a projection to the future like this old fable. For example, the protagonist, Oblivia, is a little girl lost from her people and found sheltering in the “huge woven roots” of an old tree after twenty years. She is found by an old woman, lives her life, and returns to the narrator (as a ghost) to tell her story. As the narrator informs us: “Oblivia! The old swan woman's ghost voice jumps right out of the ground in front of me, even though she has been dead for years … before swiftly backing off across the landscape until she disappears over the horizon” (2).

The first chapter in The Swan Book is titled “Ignis Fatuus”—meaning light that sometimes appears at night over marshy ground as a result of gas combustion; its other meaning is “a deceptive goal or delusive hope” (Reference Fowler and FowlerFowler and Fowler 1964, 602). As a metaphor, the title cuts both ways to give meaning to the text: Oblivia is a character who refuses to speak, yet her silent narration works like the spreading of gas or light across the land—the story unfolding as a pastiche of music, poetry, lyrics, whispering spirits, myths, symbols, and interior monologue, speaking in various echoes rather than one distinct voice. Although she is mute, her fingers constantly move as if she is writing “stanzas in ancient symbols wherever she could touch—on the palms of hands, and all over the tree root's dust covered surfaces … the oldest language coming to birth again instinctively” (Reference WrightWright 2013, 7). The second meaning of “ignis fatuus” can be applied to each character's modus operandi, as particular chapters concern a character's deceptive goal or delusive hope for the future.

This metaphor is at work in the second chapter, “Dust Cycle,” as we read of Bella Donna—an old white woman living in “delusive hope” that her white swans will follow her to this new foreign land in order to save the world from climate change. Yet she dies before the arrival of her beloved swans, and Oblivia suspects Bella Donna may have been an angel (73). In contrast, the chapter titled “The News from the Sea” introduces Warren Finch, the first Indigenous man to become Prime Minister of Australia. Yet he is driven by deceptive goals, claiming to better the lives of Indigenous people but only for his own self‐aggrandizement and personal success. Warren sees himself as:

Warren and his family were raised to “behave accordingly” and become “yes people” who do not argue for Indigenous rights because to argue is “anti‐culture, anti‐sovereignty, anti‐human rights, anti‐black‐armband history for remembering the past” (96–97). Being “good black people” means not having radical views about land ownership, but “being anti all these things to prove that they [Indigenous subjects] loved their children, and could get on, and if this is what it meant to be reconciled—Well! So be it!” (97). Warren Finch represents the dangers that reconciliation or forgiveness acts may impose on how Indigenous people speak, behave, and think. To live a life driven by deceptive goals proves “crazy,” while living a life in delusive hope proves a metaphorical path to psychological freedom.

Even though Bella Donna is white, and Warren Finch is Black, she chooses to live a life on the periphery with her Indigenous partner, Harbour Master, and Oblivia. The young girl asks her questions pertaining to psychological freedom: “How do you fly solo? Which way should you run to escape this world?” until she convinces “herself that only the mad people in the world would tell you the truth when madness was the truth, when the truth itself was mad” (73). What can be inferred from these textual meanderings is that reconciliation is not a moving of Indigenous people toward mainstream white culture, but a collective of Indigenous and non‐Indigenous subjects moving away in search of a new world order—as crazy, wild, or dreamlike it may at first seem. The swamp, for example, is renamed Swan Lake, but it meagerly resembles a detention center for Indigenous people rounded up and dumped there by the army. The swans, however, do eventually migrate to the lake and bring with them the rain—symbolic for what Wright describes as “a lifetime enmeshed with sea waves in a volatile shifting world that was irreconcilably changed” (26). Despite the collective dumping ground of cultures that the Swan Lake has become, the people remain psychologically strong, as we read in the next breath: “Then, without country, imagine that? Imagining! Can't imagine. For country never leaves its people” (26). Hence, subjects may be physically removed from their geographical location, but the willingness to hold onto psychological sovereignty is paramount to indigeneity in uncertain times of natural disaster and social unrest.

Wright likens the struggle for psychological sovereignty to a fight against a pervading virus, working to invade every cell of the body. The internal struggles of colonization are like fighting a debilitating virus that has invaded, crippled, and diseased Oblivia's mind from the inside out: “this kind of virus wasn't any miracle; it was just one of those poor lost assimilated spirits that thought about things that had originated somewhere else on the planet and got bogged in my brain … a sickness developed from channelling every scrap of energy towards an imaginary, ideal world with songs of solidarity” (3). Wright's depiction of colonization as a “virus” invokes metaphors of Susan Sontag's living in the “kingdom of the sick,” as she describes how being ill is vexed with deep reflection, yet at the same time completely flattens you (Reference SontagSontag 1983). Like any virus, colonization isolates one from the community, is invisible, invasive, obliterates the body's defenses, and, as history has shown, can lead to death. Similarly, Ngũgĩ has described colonial dominance as all‐invasive of a society's economic, political, military, cultural, and psychological functioning that leads to “holocaust” (Reference NgũgĩNgũgĩ 1986, 2). He calls this all‐invasive imperial control a “cultural bomb,” that, like viral warfare, works “to annihilate a people's belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves” (3). Both illness and oppression are psychological states of being whereby victims either give in or mobilize to fight off “disease.” Wright points to the opportunities for Indigenous subjects to “think” for themselves rather than give in to psychological subservience to the homogenizing, paternalistic, Eurocentric culture. There are, of course, other ways in which Indigenous authors fight back to regain psychological sovereignty though literary penmanship. Let us turn now to Munkara's award‐winning work as another case in point.

Every Secret Thing

Marie Munkara's Every Secret Thing (2009) is first notable for its engrossing front cover that displays a large black and white photograph of a white, middle‐aged man sitting behind the wheel of an overcrowded bush vehicle. There are about twenty Indigenous children piled into and on top of the vehicle, their arms waving enthusiastically for the camera. Even though the photo appears in black and white (to signify the time this story is set), some “color” has been superimposed over the photo as neon‐colored pen‐scribbling tracing over the church, for example. This is a story that satirizes and “scribbles over” the white male history of Australia's outback Christian missions and criticizes the deliberately planned assimilation of Indigenous children of mixed blood that was carried out by the Church. Inside the book, the title page includes a photo of Munkara laughing and suggests that this text was written with humorous spirit that pokes fun at colonial, hegemonic intentions to physically and psychologically control.

Every Secret Thing focuses on a particular time in Australian history that deeply affected the psychology and mental well‐being of Indigenous people, particularly women. Yet Munkara uses a humorous writing style to critique the early Christian missions’ approaches to the “coloured problem” of mixed‐race children being born to Indigenous mothers. In Australia, from the 1930s to the 1970s, Indigenous children of mixed blood were removed from their families under the Child Protection Act and placed in foster homes or missions to be raised by white people with Western values, ideologies, religions, and cultural expectations around race relations. These children were often taken against their mothers’ will and are known today as the Stolen Generations. In Every Secret Thing the dynamics of race relations in outback Australia are made complex in a parody about growing up in traditional Aboriginal culture yet expected to conform to Christian doctrine and Western values without freedom to negotiate or impart individual cultural beliefs. Munkara's humorous writing style, however, sets her Indigenous characters free from the colonizers’ gaze and reverses blame to colonial power structures for the psychological tortures experienced by Indigenous subjects under colonization. Munkara's female characters are the tour de force of psychological sovereignty, showing how gaining control over their brains as well as their female bodies exposes the psychological trauma and sexual abuse women encountered from the mission.

The mission Munkara writes of is inherently patriarchal: the priests hold unwavering power and are in charge of both the less superior missionaries and the Indigenous subjects they claim to “protect.” The brothers fall under the structured hierarchy of the priests but are considerably well above the nuns or sisters, who are often taken advantage of sexually and emotionally abused by some of the brothers running the Christian establishment. There are other men on the mission too, some Indigenous, but mostly those who come from in town to work at the mission that is terribly run down and in desperate need of renovation and repairs:

Religious men were employed to “protect” Indigenous people but instead competed with male emigrants entering the community for sexual access to Indigenous women. Tradesmen, for example, are eventually sent home and the brothers alone are given access to the Indigenous women: “No‐one thought to ask those men of the mission who pretended to serve their god but instead were busy helping themselves to the black women what they were going to do about the kids they fathered, did they?” (79).

Despite its humorous antics, this text explores the serious and shameful psychological effects of rape, molestation, death, and suicide. Serious references are made to expose missionaries for their treatment of Indigenous women, while at the same time ridiculing the once‐held belief that “Black” people could ever be made “white.” There is little to laugh about in the aftermath of suicide that deracinates the struggles of resistance. Munkara's sense of humor, however, serves a polemical purpose, as seen, for example, when one of the children questions the mission's religious teachings by “his Most Learned” in Sister de Pores's religious instruction class: “But why did Eve eat the apple? Wouldn't the snake have tasted better?” queried Jeremiah. “And why aren't there any black angels? Why are they always white?” asked another (11). Indigenous children were deliberately and forcefully set up to be psychologically affected by the Mission's Christian indoctrination, yet in this story the Indigenous children question the exclusion of Indigenous culture from bible teachings and demonstrate their own steadfast cultural and ideological resistance to racist and sexist indoctrination. The snake (a totemic symbol in many Indigenous cultures) is grounded in the children's questioning of racist (rather than Christian) beliefs as they challenge the assimilationist structures of Indigenous “faith” education intended to make them more white than Black.

The subtext of this example points to the impasse created between Indigenous and non‐Indigenous subjects in the reconciliation movement. The term reconciliation stems from Christian doctrine whereby believers seek forgiveness from sin through prayer and confessions to a priest. Christian priests are, across most denominations, typically male and mostly white—a romantic image mirroring the “angel” represented in Munkara's story. Reconciliation is difficult from the outset when the patriarchal and religious history of “reconciliation” implies a discourse already founded on ethnocentric convictions of a neocolonialist nature within a master–slave dichotomy. Nonetheless, Munkara's text shows there are many reasons for white subjects to make peace with Indigenous women in particular, yet there are discursive tussles underpinning the language of reconciliation that need to be overcome first.

Indigenous beliefs about healing and redemption are important because they are one way to identify with place and land. For many Indigenous people, the land is alive, it has healing influences that are valued, sung, and danced for its medicinal qualities and healing purposes. Indigenous woman Margaret Kemarre Turner, for example, explains how “People can sing for the Land and Ancestors to heal themselves. The Stories and songs, after they're performed, they come true. They're singing to make their spirit strong” (Reference TurnerTurner 2010, 144–45). Munkara's text portrays the importance of this spirit that embodied the land and the ways in which Indigenous people have come to trust its signifying power—much like Oblivia's experience of dust as a signal to spiritually and psychologically trust a place for survival in The Swan Book.

Characterization is founded on role reversal in this text and operates as a vehicle for transforming female Indigenous subjectivity in relation to the white male other. The actions of characters rather than dialogue are used to decolonize the Indigenous subject—a technique from Homi Bhabha's extensive analysis of “mimicry” proving effective time and again. Speaking traditional Indigenous languages was commonly banned in many missions, but this text includes many Indigenous words from Munkara's Tiwi Islands language group, such as “wuninga” (possum), “jerrekepai” (crocodile), and “kukuni” (fresh water). Humor is indeed resistance camouflaged here, and serves the purpose of what Bhabha calls “becoming mottled—the technique of camouflage practiced in human warfare” (Reference BhabhaBhabha 1994, 80). When, for example, Father Macredie introduces Dr. Colvin Curry, an anthropological researcher of the bush mob, Pwomiga is chosen to assist Curry with his research because of his excellent grasp of the English language and his status as a wise medicine man. This is a chance for Pwomiga to negate the master–slave relationship built on “scientific” knowledge prescribed by Curry's very own hero, Charles Darwin, who considered Australian Aborigines to be only slightly more advanced than the apes. Munkara describes this situation for Pwomiga as a “time of fun”—and describes it as resentment “replaced by the sense of camaraderie that only happens when the considered dumb‐arse isn't as smart as he thinks he is because somewhere along the way the roles have quietly been reversed” (Reference MunkaraMunkara 2009, 67). In a lesson on the local Indigenous language, Curry asks Pwomiga, “And so what do you call that?” pointing at a spear propped against a nearby tree. “Oh, I call him my timurarra” (meaning penis). Munkara shows what humor does for the state of Indigenous psychology by using jokes to debunk the predictability of colonial master–slave relationships. She gestures toward the possibilities for newly formed relations if superior/inferior dynamics are undermined by humor and are seen as a joke. As she suggests, resentment is replaced with camaraderie when humor allows for typical stereotypes about Indigenous people being “toyed” with and critiqued through textual exploration.

In Munkara's imaginary community, readers see how the “Mission Mob” tries to control the “Bush Mob” because they are deemed to be “out of control.” Their relations are underpinned by a language of control and do not render authentic or embodied reconciliation. The silent women of Munkara's text, however, find their voices in the way they are represented, pointing to the challenges of reconciliation and improved race relations for Indigenous women and men, particularly those who are non‐Indigenous. How does the Indigenous woman repair her state of mind in order to repair the state of her relations with her abusers? In the chapter titled “The Immaculate Misconception,” the nuns ponder over the circumstances of a woman from the “bush mob” giving birth to a light skinned baby. The baby “bore a striking resemblance to her mother, except for one thing: the baby was very pale and Mary Magdalene, who was now referred to as Wuninga because she was living back at the camp, was very black” (35). The nuns consider all paternal possibilities from the mission (except the Bishop) and are dumbfounded when Wuninga says, “Well, if it's alright for Mary of Nazareth to have an Immaculate Conception, why can't I?” (36). Perhaps the fear of having her baby taken away is enough for her to keep silent about who fathered her child. Father Macredie arranges for her to marry Caleb for the sake of her own “protection.” As she begins her married life with Caleb and leaves both the mission and the bush, she says nothing but watches “the road falling away behind them as she headed into the unknown” (87). She withdraws from the mainstream culture that the mission epitomizes in order to gain sovereignty over her own mind and body, and raise her baby her way.

The novel closes with images of macabre death, suicide, emptiness, and withdrawal from a life left only for the dominant culture. Characters such as Pwomiga disappear, and slowly “the grog came and the winding path of good intentions became a straight bitumen four‐laned highway that led even deeper into a world of self‐destruction and hopelessness that no one knew how to fix” (179). The missionaries fail in what they set out to do and, as they leave, a great despair descends on the bush mob, and some are “found hanging from trees or electrocuted by the power lines.” Her final words read: “But there was one thing they were certain of. They didn't have to die to go to hell because the mission had happily brought that with them when they'd arrived unasked on the fateful shores of the place that was their heaven all those years before” (179). Munkara questions the legitimacy of white sovereignty since the arrival of European settlers, yet she holds her colonizers responsible for more than just stealing her people's land. She suggests they are responsible for destroying an entire state of happiness—a “heaven,” she calls it—that existed before white contact. This cultural memory informs the psychology that her Indigenous characters aspire to return to, and it is the strength of this perception that sees the future of her people yet to be determined. A future of despair cannot be borne, and it is this contested terrain that inspires postcolonial themes rather than a promise to reconcile.

Textual Strengths: A Comparative Analysis

Whereas Munkara's Every Secret Thing deals with the psychological trauma inflicted on Indigenous people incarcerated by the missions of the past, Alexis Wright's The Swan Book presents a projection into the future of Australia, where Indigenous and non‐Indigenous subjects are forced to migrate to new places in order to escape a range of natural disasters. This movement of people in dire circumstances operates to completely overhaul conventional notions of sovereign borders and “one nation” that Western conceptions of “sovereignty” once implied. Yet Wright puts forward a different perspective—one that places Indigenous spirituality and understandings of place at the center of understanding people and moving forward. Methods of control have changed, and Wright shows her readers that “When the world changed, people were different” (Reference WrightWright 2013, 6). Unlike the establishment in Munkara's text of “missions” that waged psychological control, Wright's novel is set on an Indigenous homeland used for “Defence Force scheduled training manoeuvres” (12). However, the war appears to be on “modernity,” as the effects of progress intrude upon relations across the whole country. In contrast to Munkara's exposition of religious doctrine, Wright's world warns that the “day had come when modern man had become the new face of God, and simply sacrificed the whole Earth” (12).

Munkara's world includes “silent women,” as does Wright's, whose protagonist becomes a woman of no words but who is powerful in ways that escape language. Wright's textual prose relies on the power of subliminal messages that sometimes appear as musically encrypted whispers working to criticize the effects colonization has had on Indigenous psychologies. Wright's poetics contrast with Munkara's bold statements that explicitly ridicule, satirize, and critique a past responsible for the broken minds of Indigenous people. Both are equally powerful and challenge “truths” in a state of madness. Indigenous and non‐Indigenous relations are confronted, exposed, and made vulnerable in both textual worlds, but it is this irksome process of undeniable discomfort that presents itself as an act of torture and an act of forgiveness at the very same time.

As It Was in the End

Since colonization, the Australian literary landscape has provided a contested terrain: a field of literary criticism, intellectual tussle, discursive rigor, and debate has informed the shifting politics of race and relations in a transcultural zone. The challenges of this intellectual terrain are operating at a nexus of inclusion and exclusion for Indigenous authors (re)defining themselves, country, and nationhood(s) in a canon largely overrepresented by male authors, white readers, and Western publishing houses. Within this terrain, however, Indigenous authors have engaged in an ongoing fight for recognition of creative ideas and authentic representations of place and Indigeneity within mainstream publications, and have successfully contested stereotypical representations of Indigenous subjects as crazy, weak, submissive, nomadic, lost, and inferior. First‐nation characters have been reimagined as strong in culture and spirituality and as psychologically connected to country, especially in the works of Alexis Wright and Marie Munkara. Their literary contributions to a historical proliferation of Australian Indigenous writing is not only evidence of strong Indigenous psychology, but also a shifting trend in the choices white readers are making to move closer to Indigenous texts that embody a transforming society. Australian readers are coming to embrace literary diversity and seeking out texts that are ontologically dynamic, enabling them to escape a world already dominated by a patriarchal and colonial master narrative.

Indigenous writing has had significant effects on the reconciliation movement, and some may even suggest it has come to offer white readers a pathway to redemption (in a textual sense) from a literary past challenged by mimetic language and stereotypical representations of Indigenous people as “colonial children.” White readers have been invited to identify with how the place they were born is imagined and articulated by its first peoples, and as an act of forgiveness, given the chance to enter into imaginary worlds that explore alternate ways of thinking about and transforming place. The psychological transformation Indigenous writing offers is twofold: the masters become moved by so‐called “slaves” who call them to new truths about the nation's colonial past and just how “mad” it really is. So mad perhaps, that it is laughable in the eyes of women like Marie Munkara.

This article has offered a feminist critique, arguing that mainstream culture is still dominated by white patriarchal empiricism, but is being perpetually broken down in creative writing and literary scholarship. Creative writers are responsible for new becomings of social order and new ways of being in relationship with and communicating with one another. Reading and writing is thus a process that Julia Kristeva has always known it to be: “explorations and discovery of the possibilities of language … an activity that liberates the subject from a number of linguistic, psychic, and social networks … and grants linguists the unique possibility of studying the becoming of the significance of signs” (Reference KristevaKristeva 1984, 7). Within the Australian literary terrain, the significance of signs continues to shift and change, and these changes can be mapped alongside blocks of time corresponding with Australia's legal and political milestones, yet these milestones are not the essence of sovereignty or reconciliation alone. Indigenous thinkers and writers must continue to regain sovereignty over their own minds, writing of a Land that has always belonged to who they are: “like a head that cannot be severed from its body.”