… theirs is a timelessness of men and women wandering around without recourse either to origin or destination … 1

This research begins with the premise that non-Aboriginal students are challenged by much Aboriginal writing and also challenge its representations as they struggle to re-position themselves in relation to possible meanings within Aboriginal writing. Many non-Aboriginal students come to read an Aboriginal narrative against their understanding of what it means to be an Aboriginal Australian, accumulated via their prior reading of Australian history, literature and more contemporary social analysis and popular commentary. Aboriginal writing is confronting when it disturbs the more familiar representations of Aboriginal experience and characterisation previously encountered. The aim of this paper is to provide a more informed basis from which to consider higher education pedagogy for this area of literary studies. A further aim is to contribute to the literary studies discourse on Aboriginal representation in Australian literature.

No abstract

Walk Back Over alludes to a bridge across the Murrumbidgee River where I grew up but, more symbolically, mirrors the need to revisit our past. Much was made of the 2000 Reconciliation Walk across Sydney Harbour Bridge—many settler Australians walked across this and other bridges, and I am not cynical about that—but there are many other spans in Australia that must be walked: not just once, walked back over.

BeginningsThis is a story about how I came to write. In 2010, when I was in my late 40s, I completed a PhD and wrote a volume of poetry and a novel. This is a story. It is not an essay or an article or a treatise or anything else that 'scholarly' writing is called in western literature. This is a story because Aboriginal people live for and by stories. This is the story about how I came to write all that I did and how I came to find my place and my voice in a nation that until the early 1970s was dominated by an official White Australia Policy. It can be argued that, even in the twenty-first century, vestiges of the 'white nation' still prevail.As Pierre Nora intended, I write this as a combination of personal history set against the broader socio-political contexts of the late-twentieth and earlytwenty-first centuries in Australia. In this way, I hope to shed some light on how growing up Aboriginal has informed my historical practice and why the relationship between my personal life and professional research is inseparable. The value of Nora's method for me is that it allows me to self-reflect on how my understandings of western culture were shaped and formed through my home culture and how Anglo-Australian understandings of Aboriginal people were shaped and formed in the classroom and how this continues to inform my research. As I write this, I have at the forefront of my mind ongoing issues of non-Aboriginal editing of Aboriginal works that continually ask Aboriginal scholars to justify their 'facts' against or in relation to a body of Anglo-western knowledge that is accepted and assumed as factual.