Des carnets de G. A. Robinson aux romans de Mudrooroo : la figure de l’indigène en marge de l’Histoire australienne

Abstract

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. Those first accounts were informed by Victorian attitudes and contributed to forging the stereotypes which can be found either in novels by early Australian (i.e. white) writers or, later, in those by Aboriginal writers. Wavering between the “noble savage,” who may benefit from education, and the “ignoble savage,” violent and dangerous, those stereotypes feed on these attitudes and fuel them with new anecdotes and experiences. This article explores how Aboriginal writer Mudrooroo engages with the relation between fiction and History in his novels, which are set at the time of the first contacts between settlers and Aborigines, Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World (1983) and the Master of the Ghost Dreaming tetralogy (1991). Indeed, this rewriting of historical events starts either a conversation or a confrontation with the depositaries of the first historical accounts about those encounters between whites and Aborigines—that is to say the whites themselves.

Keywords

• Australia
• intertextuality of History
• historiographic metafiction
• hybridity
• George Augustus Robinson
• ethnocentrism