Critics, Reviewers and Aboriginal Writers

It is only very recently that literary critics and historians have been faced with the new phenomenon of Aboriginal writing in what have been traditionally their fields. The question of what critical standards they are to apply to this new literature and history is a thorny one, and has already become something of a battleground. The ‘literature of protest’ in Western terms has of course a long history of its own. Minorities, and individuals, who feel themselves oppressed by the dominance of elements in their own society have often been able to express that sense within the literary modes and conventions of that society. But in the case of Aboriginal writers — part of an indigenous enclave of people within a society whose standards and criteria, as well as language, they may not feel the slightest compulsion to take as models — something new faces the critic working within his or her own literary tradition and culture. For the critic of today, a new tenderness of conscience may demand a questioning of critical method and a new look at literary styles and standards as they may be seen by the writer working wholly outside the acceptations of Western culture. Some critics and reviewers have chosen to stick to their lasts and speak de haut en bas as the standard-setters of a culture to which these new contributors must submit themselves. They apparently feel themselves unable, even unwilling, to accept a need to evolve a different aesthetic and critical method to take account of the aims, strengths and limitations of in­ digenous protest writing. They would presumably insist that an established literature and a language impose their own necessities, and that judgements can only be made in the terms they have laid down. But it is an uneasy position, and one that a colonising culture such as ours is increasingly forced to question. By what divine right have we established our own critical standards? Our long traditions of critical writing, for instance about poetry or the novel or the short story, are adapted to deal with the conditions and traditions of a social development very different from any milieu which Aboriginal writers live in or have to draw upon. And they are brief indeed when compared with the traditions of Aboriginal language, oral literature, oral history, evolved within a wholly different world-picture — one moreover which we have ignorantly despised and in most cases and places destroyed altogether. Can we apply the critical stand­ ards we use in evaluating new contributions to our own literature by those who inherit and live within the dominant culture and language, to those who have had no such education, training and background — and who, moreover, may bitterly and thoroughly reject all the bland assumptions of that culture and feel that language an alien imposition? Honest critics may have to admit that the tools of their trade — their education in linguis-