‘Uncanny encounters and haunting colonial histories in Australia’s reconciliation-era narratives’

Abstract

ABSTRACT Settler literature is haunted by the colonial past. Motifs found in the Australian literary tradition signify this haunting-Aboriginal spectrality, uncanny Aboriginal ceremonial grounds, and taboo massacre sites being the most common. Settler authors typically use these literary devices in moments of social and political upheaval that disturb the foundational myths of settler belonging. Australia's Reconciliation agenda brought realities of colonial frontier violence and the scale of Aboriginal deaths to the fore of mainstream socio-political consciousness. Literary scholars have adapted Freud's concept of the uncanny to argue that settler belonging feels imperiled or strange when confronted with the distressing knowledge of Aboriginal modernity. Overwhelmingly, the manufacture of Aboriginal haunting in Australia's Reconciliation—era signifies settler anxiety and attempts to reclaim the authority unsettled by Indigenous alterity. Works by Henry Reynolds—Why Weren't We Told? (2000)—and Alex Miller-Journey to the Stone Country (2003)—are representative of a broader literary response to Reconciliation, after which depictions of Aboriginal death and burial, as well as new settler quests for belonging, proliferated. The essay concludes by reading Noongar writer Kim Scott's novel Taboo (2017) as a subversion of works like those by Reynolds and Miller.