Writing Never Arrives Naked

In 1848, German explorer Ludwig Leichhardt attempted to cross the continent of Australia from east to west, but his entire party vanished without word or trace. Patrick White’s novel Voss (1957) offered a fictional account of how the explorers lost contact with the European world. White proposed that it was Aboriginal people’s superstitious fear and hostility towards written documents that effectively severed the explorers’ last line of communication with home. As White tells it, when all hope fails and death is drawing near, Voss and his men put pen to paper to inform their loved ones of their fate and convey their last goodbyes. They enlist Dugald, one of their Aboriginal guides, to carry the letters back to the last white outpost. On the way, Dugald meets a band of Aboriginal men and women. He solemnly shows them the strange white sheets covered in rows of tangled black lines, and explains that the letters carry the white man’s pain and sadness away.1 A warrior jabs at the papers with his spear; a woman tastes the sealing wax and instantly splutters it out. The others examine the writing but see nothing but drawings of fern roots on the thin white sheets. Dugald, having failed to impress his newfound acquaintances, tears the letters to shreds, flings them into the air, and watches as ‘the pieces of paper fluttered round him and settled on the grass, like a mob of cockatoos.’ He abandons his role as letter-carrier, and treks away with the Aboriginal band towards a place of plentiful food.

Like many literary representations, White’s account suggests that Indigenous Australians in the colonial period saw writing and books as alien and irrelevant or evil and potentially dangerous. This axiom of settler ideology was deeply rooted in Enlightenment cultural theory, 19th-century evolutionary biology and social Darwinism — modes of thought that in Australia remained highly influential until well into the 20th century. In 1927, for example, the eminent anthropologist WB Spencer, Director of the National Museum of Victoria in Melbourne, asserted that:

Australia is the present home and refuge of creatures, often crude and quaint, that have elsewhere passed away and given place to higher forms. This applies equally to the aboriginal [sic] as to the platypus and kangaroo. Just as the platypus, laying its eggs and feebly suckling its young, reveals a mammal in the making, so does the aboriginal show us, at least in broad outlines, what early man must have been like before he learned to read and write, domesticate animals, cultivate crops and use a metal tool. It has been possible to study in Australia human beings that still remain on the culture level of men of the Stone Age.

Statements such as this make Indigenous literacy a contradiction in terms. The authority of science and the imaginative force of the arts have combined to create a perception that Aboriginal cultures are essentially oral, while literacy is the province of the settler society.

David Unaipon, whose Native legends was published in 1929, is generally believed to be Australia’s first Aboriginal author.3 Yet the history of Aboriginal writing might have various beginnings, depending on how we answer questions such as: What counts as ‘writing’? What counts as authorship? and Who counts as Aboriginal? It’s time to ask what the history of Aboriginal reading and writing would look like...