The Obliteration of a Writer

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dc.bibliographicCitation.firstPage41
dc.bibliographicCitation.lastPage66
dc.bibliographicCitation.volume41
dc.contributor.authorFischer, Gerhard
dc.contributor.editorFischer, Gerhard
dc.date.accessioned2025-07-11T14:51:48Z
dc.date.available2025-07-11T14:51:48Z
dc.date.issued2024
dc.description.abstractThe chapter traces the events leading to the exclusion of Mudrooroo from the circle of Indigenous Australian authors, resulting in the erasure of the previously celebrated writer and critic from scholarly discourse, and eventually in the cancellation of his life work from the country’s institutions of cultural memory. The intervention of a local Aboriginal organisation to reject Mudrooroo’s claim to Indigenous ancestry was widely regarded as a final verdict of the ‘community’, paving the way for Aboriginal writer Anita Heiss to suppress his name in influential anthologies and websites, edited by Heiss during her brief career as an academic. Similarly, Irish-Australian Maureen Clark published a Ph. D. thesis and a series of articles aimed at delegitimizing Mudrooroo’s literary work that found a receptive scholarly audience. Clark explains Mudrooroo’s meeting with his mentor Mary Durack as a key to his career: he supposedly “negotiated” his Aboriginal identity in dialogue with Durack, with both “involved in a conscious act of complicity”. Heiss’ and Clark’s writings are equally characterized by an essentialist understanding of Aboriginality based solely on bloodline, as well as duplicitous scholarship and a wilful disregard of Mudrooroo’s complex personality and the unconventional trajectory of his life story.
dc.identifier.doi10.35515/zfa/asj.41/2024.05
dc.identifier.urihttp://resolver.sub.uni-goettingen.de/purl?fidaac-11858/3528
dc.language.isoeng
dc.relation.journalZeitschrift für Australienstudien / Australian Studies Journal
dc.rightsCC BY-NC-ND 4.0
dc.subject.ddcddc:305
dc.subject.ddcddc:820
dc.subject.fieldaustralianstudies
dc.subject.fieldliterarystudies
dc.subject.fieldindigenousstudies
dc.titleThe Obliteration of a Writer
dc.title.specialissueMudrooroo (1938 – 2019)
dc.typearticle
dc.type.versionpublishedVersion
dspace.entity.typePublication

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Zeitschrift für Australienstudien / Australian Studies Journal; Vol. 41 (2024)