In the first half of the 19th century, George Augustus Robinson’s journals, which he had written after being officially appointed Protector of the Aborigines, show the growing interest in Indigenous populations, from the very first voyages of discovery to the beginning of the 18th century. Informed by Victorian attitudes, these first accounts contributed to forging the stereotypes which have since been rewritten and subverted in novels written by white or Indigenous Australian writers alike. Wavering between the ‘noble savage’, who may benefit from education, and the ‘ignoble savage’, violent and dangerous, these stereotypes feed on accepted attitudes and fuel them with new anecdotes and experiences. The present article explores how Mudrooroo engages with the relation between fiction and History in his novels that are set at the time of the first contacts between settlers and Indigenous Australians, ‘Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World’ (1983) and the ‘Master of the Ghost Dreaming’ tetralogy (1991). Mudrooroo’s rewriting of historical events starts either a conversation or a confrontation with the depositories of the first historical accounts about those encounters – white European authors.(1)

1. This article is a translation and partial rewriting of ‘Des carnets de G. A. Robinson aux romans de Mudrooroo: la figure de l’indigène en marge de l’Histoire australienne’ published in E-rea in 2016.