Abstract
In Australia, powerful stories expressing resistance to a white, postcolonising hegemony continue to be told in Indigenous women's fictional texts, including those from the 1990s onwards that are discussed in this article. Their particular historically-distinctive mode of satire or irony challenges postcolonising regimes and institutions, the legacy of colonialism, and the persisting dominance of the white capitalist nation-state. These more recent texts include Doris Pilkington Garimari's Caprice (1991) and Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (1996); Vivienne Cleven's Her Sister's Eye (2002); Larissa Behrendt's HomeBehrendt, Lisa. Home. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2006. (2006) and Legacy_____. Legacy. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2009. (2009); Marie Munkara's Every Secret Thing (2009); Jeanine Leane_____. Purple Threads. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2011.'s Purple Threads (2011); Melissa LucashenkoLucashenko, Melissa. Steam Pigs. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1997.'s Steam Pigs (1997) and Mullumbimby (2013); and Alexis WrightWright, Alexis. Plains of Promise. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1997.'s Plains of Promise (1997), Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013). All continue a central preoccupation of the earlier fiction by Indigenous women with struggling for the achievement of agency in contexts of unequal social and economic power; marginalised characters continue to engage with current questions and conditions. The article considers how these fictions have developed an Indigenous aesthetic to represent aspects of Aboriginal dislocation from land and place; separation from families; outsider and outcast identities; Indigenous people's epistemological relationships with their land and bodies of water, and the issue of sovereignty in relation to Country and environment.
Keywords:
Australian Aboriginal Fiction; Women; Sovereignty; Resistance; Indigeneity, Postcoloniality