1 In 1996, Mudrooroo was the head of the Aboriginal Studies Department at Murdoch University in Western Australia and a significant figure in indigenous literary circles in and beyond Australia. His Aboriginality was first challenged by Victoria Laurie in “Identity Crisis”, The Australian Magazine, 20-21 July 1996, pp. 28-32. Laurie cites genealogical records accumulated by Betty Polglaze, Mudrooroo’s estranged sister, to show that his heritage on his father’s side is African-American, while his heritage on his mother’s side can be traced back to the first European birth in the colony (p. 30). Then his Aboriginality was challenged by the Kicketts, a prominent Nyoongar family, to whom he had claimed kinship. In many minds, he was quickly transformed from a literary and academic icon to a caricature: correspondent Beatrice Faust called him “a career Aborigine” (“Races Are Easy to Lose”, The Weekend Australian, 3-4 August 1996, p. 25). Writing of the incident in his retrospective essay, Mudrooroo admitted to the constructed nature of his identity, saying that he had been “textualized” as Aboriginal by Mary Durak in the Foreword to his first novel, Wild Cat Falling (1965). At the same time, however, he likened the biological determinism informing the debate about his identity to “Victorian classifications of race... which reached their fulfilment in the Nuremberg Race laws” (Mudrooroo, “Tell Them You’re Indian”, Race Matters: Indigenous Australians and “Our” Society, ed. Gillian Cowlishaw and Barry Morris, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1997, p. 262.

2 Rumours about the suspect Aboriginality of Archie Weller had been circulating around Perth’s Nyoongar community for several years before the story finally broke in the wake of the Mudrooroo affair, devastating both the author and an already bewildered academy. In a 1997 interview, he reflected upon the personal impact of these accusations: “Really, it would destroy me, because writing is my whole life... I’ve spent my whole life writing my stories” (Richard Guilliatt, “Black, White, and Grey All Over”, Sydney Morning Herald, 11 April 1997, p. 13). However, the sympathy Weller might have garnered from all quarters was greatly reduced when, wanting genealogical evidence to substantiate his claims to Aboriginality, he made the unfortunate blunder of pointing to a flat nose and curly hair as evidence of his heritage.

3 Roberta Sykes has tried unsuccessfully to deal with public and academic scrutiny of her Aboriginality, which began long before the Mudrooroo affair. As Terry Goldie suggests parenthetically in his review of her autobiography, while Sykes never claimed an Aboriginal heritage directly, she did so indirectly, “Snakes and Ladders”, review of Snake Cradle and Snake Dancing, by Roberta Sykes, UTS Review, 5 (1999), 160. Aboriginal magistrate Pat O’Shane was less charitable, suggesting that she had been “trad[ing] on the public’s belief that [she was] Aboriginal for years” (qtd. in Goldie, 157). As Allison Ravenscroft demonstrates, Sykes no longer makes that claim through her father - who, it turns out, is of Fijian origin - but through her mother, “The Production of Whiteness: Revisiting Roberta Sykes’s Snake Dreaming”, Cultural Studies Review, 7 (2001), 164. Her three-volume autobiography, Snake Dreaming, which she promised would resolve the issue, has done little to allay the criticism of her detractors.

4 Originally self-published as a memoir, Mutant Message Down Under was purchased by HarperCollins in 1994 and remarketed as a novel, though the framing apparatus of the text suggests that the novel was based on Morgan’s actual experience.

5 See Vanessa Gould, “Elders Receive Apology”, The West Australian, 31 January 1996, p. 30.

6 Marlo Morgan, Mutant Message Down Under, New York: HarperCollins, 1994, p. 3.

7 Spinifex grows in large clumps, not in a plain like grass, as Morgan suggests.

8 Mutant Message, p. 63.

9 To many Aboriginal people, this aspect of the book is spiritually offensive because it involves a breach of gender specific secret-sacred knowledge. Aboriginal men in traditional settings do not discuss or participate in women’s business, and women do not discuss or participate in men’s business.

10 Amongst Aboriginal peoples who follow traditional ways, neither the didgeridoo nor the bullroarer are musical instruments. Many Aboriginal people take umbrage with the fact that the didgeridoo, which had traditionally been used in ceremonies involving secret-sacred men’s business, has become a musical instrument. So too with the bullroarer. Songlines, more appropriately called dreamtracks, are not used to measure distance.

11 Mutant Message, p. 148.

12 Elaine Adams of the Kansas City Star was the first to suggest that Morgan’s self-published version of the book doubled as a marketing ploy. Until Frank VanderSloot, company president of Melaleuca Inc. of Idaho Falls, Idaho, demanded Morgan desist, early versions of her book contained a card that readers could post for a catalogue from Melaleuca. She was a company distributor at the time. See Elaine Adams, “Oota, A Magic Lotion and A Chosen Mutant: Experts Scoff at Book on Trek across Australia”, The Kansas City Star, 28 June 1992, pp. A12-13.

13 Dumbartung acted on behalf of the Nyoongar community in south-western Australia because that community was implicated by the novel. Marlo’s trek clearly begins in Perth, Nyoongar territory, though the novel omits all place names. Indeed, Gareth Griffiths reports that while Morgan was at a dinner party he attended, she claimed to have travelled from Perth to Darwin. See Gareth Griffiths, “Mixed up Messages Down Under: The Marlo Morgan ‘Hoax’: A Textual Travesty of Aboriginal Culture”, Ulitarra, 9 (1996), 77-8). Nyoongars are also implicated by Morgan’s appropriation of the Black Swan totem for her Real People. Particularly offensive was the suggestion that coastal dwellers with Nyoongar totems colonized the interior, indiscriminately appropriating the territories and cultural practices of other Aboriginal groups, to escape contamination by the settlers. Similar issues directed Dumbartung’s consultations with communities in the Kimberleys and Central and Western Deserts: cultural groups from these areas were implicated in Morgan’s offensive narrative by geography, language, totem and cultural practice.

14 See Robert Eggington, ed., Bounuh Wongee: “Message Stick”: A Report on Mutant Message Down Under, Waterford, WA: Dumbartung, 1995, repr, 1997; <http://dumbartung.org.au/report1.html>, 24 October 2003). Hereafter “First Report.” All references are to the printed edition.

15 See Robert Eggington, ed., Bounuh Wongee: “Message Stick,” No. 2, A Report on Mutant Message Down Under, Waterford, WA: Dumbartung, 1995; repr. 1997, http://dumbartung.org.au/report2.html, 24 October 2003; and Bounuh Wongee: “Message Stick,” No. 3, A Report on Mutant Message Down Under, Waterford, WA, Dumbartung, 1995; repr. 1997). http://dumbartung.org.au/report3.html, 24 October 2003.

16 One postcolonial analysis precedes Griffiths’: Adam Shoemaker, “Mutating the Message”, Scarred for Life, ed. George Papaellinas, Pymble, NSW: Angus and Robertson, 1995, pp. 83-91. The brief article considers how Australia, and in particular, Aboriginal Australia, is metamorphosed in the minds of American travellers “who touch the idea of Australia from a North American vantage point” (p. 84). Shoemaker considers several examples of this phenomenon of metamorphosis and ends by reading Morgan’s Mutant Message as its most recent manifestation.

17 The 1993 Vogel Award winner, Helen Demidenko’s The Hand That Signed the Paper explores tensions between Ukrainians and Jews during the Holocaust. The novel also won the Miles Franklin Award and the Gold Medal of the Australian Literature Society. Despite a fairly elaborate and convincing act, complete with Ukrainian garb and dance, Demidenko, the sensitive daughter of Ukrainian immigrants who settled in Cairns, turned out to be Helen Darville, the appropriative daughter of British immigrants who settled in Brisbane. The controversy has produced four book-length studies to date.

18 In 1943, anti-modernist poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart wrote poems attributed to a deceased garage mechanic, Ern Malley, and sent them to champion of modernism, Max Harris, editor of The Angry Penguins, who naively published them as examples of Australian modernism. The debate on the significance of this affair continues today and has recently been given new life in Peter Carey’s novel My Life as a Fake (2003).

19 Griffiths, “Mixed up Messages”, p. 85.

20 Stephen Slemon, “Unsettling the Empire: Resistance Theory for the Second World”, World Literature Written in English, 30 (1990), 40.

21 Julie Marcus, Introduction to “‘Trancing into the Desert’: An Interview with Jackie Huggins”, interview with Adam Shoemaker, Thamyris: Mythmaking from Past to Present, 3 (1996), 6.

22 See Larissa Behrendt, “In Your Dreams: Cultural Appropriation, Popular Culture and Colonialism”, Law Text Culture, 4 (1998), 257-79.

23 Dumbartung was particularly concerned about the implications of Morgan’s representations of Aboriginal purity for real Aboriginal people. They express concern that her representation shows “a blatant disregard of the nature of the Aboriginal struggle and opposes the human right to tell our story our way”; and one sub-section of the Message Stick (3.1.5) is dedicated to the way Morgan’s representations denigrate “all Aboriginal people apart from the pure, albeit fictitious, “Real People” (Eggington, “First Report”, p. 23).

24 See Russell Skelton, “Blacks Hound ‘Hoax’ US author in Japan”, Sydney Morning Herald, 19 April 1997, p. 17.

25 Explicit reference to the Message Stick would not have been culturally inappropriate - that is, breaching Aboriginal protocol by intruding on Nyoongar affairs - any more than her analysis of Mutant Message could be deemed inappropriate because her people, the Kamilaroi and Eualeyai, were not specifically implicated by it in the way Nyoongar people were: the novel is an affront to all Aboriginal people; and the Message Stick may have originated with a Nyoongar organization, but it quite clearly calls for a broad-based Aboriginal solidarity on issues of cultural appropriation.

26 Elizabeth Povinelli, “Consuming Geist: Popontology and the Spirit of Capital in Indigenous Australia”, Public Culture, 12 (2000), 514.

27 Stephen Gray has also published two articles in this vein: “In Black and White or Beyond the Pale? The ‘Authenticity’ Debate and Protection for Aboriginal Culture”, The Australian Feminist Law Journal, 15 (2001), 105-120; and “Going Native: Disguise, Forgery, Imagination and the ‘European Aboriginal’”, Overland, 170 (2003): 34-47. The former considers Mutant Message in the context of a discussion about indigenous and non-indigenous notions of authorship; the latter considers Morgan as part of a tradition of Europeans who have “gone native.” Gray also gives the affair passing mention in a journalistic piece: “Blot on the Landscape”, The Australian’s Review of Books, 5 (2000), 8-9.

28 While interpreting Bhabha’s deployment of the term ambivalence, Robert Young describes its origins in psychoanalysis, “where it was first developed to describe a continual fluctuation between wanting one thing and its opposite”, Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, New York: Routledge, 1995, p. 161. Thus while ambivalence reveals itself through conscious acts, it operates on the level of the unconscious.

29 See Roger Sandall, “Romancing the Stone Age”, smh.com.au: Spectrum, 12 May 2001, <http://www.smh.com.au/news/0105/12/spectrum/spectrum2.html> (22 May 2001). Excerpts from the collection also appeared prominently in The Age and The Australian.

30 David Martin, “native title”, The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture, ed. Sylvia Kleinert and Margo Neale, Toronto: OUP, 2000, p. 659.

31 ibid., p. 660.

32 Ann McGrath, ed., Contested Ground: Australian Aborigines under the British Crown, St. Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1995, p. xxx.

33 Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs, Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation, Carlton South, Vic.: Melbourne UP, 1998, p. 23.

34 Peter Bishop, “Driving Around: The Unsettling of Australia”, Studies in Travel Writing, 2 (1998), 150.

35 Keith Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Vol. One. Van Diemen’s Land: 1803-1847, Paddington, NSW: Macleay Press, 2002, pp. 2-3.

36 ibid., pp. 5-6.

37 ibid., p. 3.

38 L.R. Hiatt, “A New Age for an Old People”, Quadrant, June 1997, p. 36,

39 ibid., p. 37.

40 I refer here to two distinctive modes of anthropological study, evolutionist and functionalist. See John Morton, “Anthropology” in The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture, ed. Sylvia Kleinert and Margo Neale, Toronto: OUP, 2000, pp. 521-3. According to Morton, early anthropology in Australia “was dominated by an evolutionist paradigm in which Aboriginal life was seen as exemplifying one of the most primitive stages of human evolution”. The next mode to gain favour was functionalist anthropology. Functionalist anthropologists were “interested in comparing systemic information about contemporary Aboriginal societies”. However, the premises informing their approach differed from evolutionist anthropology in their essentialist premises about Aboriginality: “The implicit assumption was that only ‘remote’ Aboriginal groups had ‘pristine’ societies and cultures worthy of scholarly attention, while Aboriginal people in ‘settled’ areas were thought to have lost much of their culture and to have assimilated to European forms of existence, however imperfectly”, Morton, p. 522. Both modes of anthropological study serve settler hegemony.

41 The first Message Stick contains a short report by John Stanton, Curator of the Berndt Museum of Anthropology at the University of Western Australia. See John Stanton, “Marlo Morgan’s Mutant Message Down Under: An Anthropological Perspective”, in Bounuh Wongee: “Message Stick”: A Report on Mutant Message Down Under, pp. 41-4; repr., 1997, <http://dum bartung.org.au/stanton2.html>, 24 October 2003. The report is one of many documents Dumbartung used to support their position. Others included testimonials from the wider Aboriginal community, letters of support for the campaign, and media reports.

42 Hiatt, “A New Age”, p. 37.

43 Eggington, “First Report,” pp. 12-13.

44 Hiatt, “A New Age”, p. 37.

45 Hiatt makes his case based on a report by Susan Wyndham in which she states that Morgan gave away 85,000 copies of her book (“The Mystery of Marlo Morgan Down Under”, The Australian Magazine, 29-30 October 1994, p. 26). That figure, like many others bandied about to promote the book, should be questioned. Even if one were to accept the figure, however, one would have to question Hiatt’s judgment of Morgan’s motivations based on other facts revealed in Wyndham’s report: for instance, the article also mentions that Morgan, working on commission for a company in Idaho, used her book to sell tea tree oil as an Aboriginal curative for sore feet until the company told her to desist, Wyndham, p. 54.

46 Hiatt, “A New Age”, p. 39. Here, Hiatt challenges a position articulated by anthropologist Julie Marcus: “Settler attempts to tap into the power of the Rock are seen by local Aboriginal people as simply more of what has gone before - now, settlers are mining Aboriginal culture rather than the body of the land itself”, Julie Marcus, “The Journey out to the Centre: The Cultural Appropriation of Ayer’s Rock”, in Race Matters: Indigenous Australians and ‘Our’ Society, ed. Gillian Cowlishaw and Barry Morris, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1997, p. 46.

47 Hiatt, “A New Age”, p. 39.

48 ibid., p. 38.

49 Roger Sandall, The Culture Cult: Designer Tribalism and Other Essays, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001, p. ix.

50 ibid., p. viii.

51 ibid., pp. viii-ix.

52 ibid. p. 6.

53 ibid.

54 ibid. p. 4.

55 Steve Hemming, “Hindmarsh Island (Kumarangk): Challenging Australian Mythologies”, in The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture, ed. Sylvia Kleinert and Margo Neale, Toronto: OUP, 2000, p. 441.

56 John Morton’s brief history of anthropology in Australia describes three stages of anthropology without giving the present stage a designation. I have called this contemporary stage poststructuralist anthropology, because Morton’s description of it reveals its poststructuralist allegiances, particularly in its acknowledgment of the dynamic nature of Aboriginal culture, and its awareness of the power relations determining those dynamics. (See Morton, “Anthropology”, p. 522.)

57 Sandall, Culture Cult, p. 6.

58 It does give one cause to suspect that Sandall relied on Hiatt for his information rather than reading the Message Stick himself.

59 It cannot be just any anthropological knowledge either. As I have already indicated, Dumbartung did enlist John Stanton to substantiate their challenges to Morgan’s truth claims, but we must assume that Sandall sees Stanton as in some way contaminated by Culture Cultist philosophy.

60 Hiatt also introduces the issue of secrecy and gender boundaries in a cursory way, writing “it is unlikely to have occurred to Marlo Morgan that, in representing openness between the sexes as a characteristic of Aboriginal culture, she was in fact demeaning it”, Hiatt, “A New Age”, p. 37. This simplistic reading of Aboriginal gender divisions is meant to prove that Aboriginal culture would benefit from Western enlightenment.

61 Sandall, Culture Cult, p. 6.

62 Annette Hamilton, “Gender, Aesthetics, Performance”, in The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture, ed. Sylvia Kleinert and Margo Neale, Toronto: OUP, 2000, p. 68.

63 Patrick Wolfe, “The Remorseless Right”, review of The Culture Cult: Designer Tribalism and Other Essays by Roger Sandall, Australian Book Review, 1 September 2001, <http://home.vicnet.net.au/~abr/Sept01/patrick wolfe.html> (24 October 2003).

64 In a more recent opinion piece in The Age preceding the launch of her new book on the Hindmarsh Island affair, journalist and writer Margaret Simons similarly refers to how Sandall used Hindmarsh as a “key example” in his book. See Margaret Simons, “Hindmarsh: where lies the truth?” The Age, 9 May 2003, <http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/05/08/1052280376344. html> (24 October 2003).

65 See John Morton, “Facing the Big Ditch”, review of The Culture Cult: Designer Tribalism and Other Essays, by Roger Sandall, The Age, 28 May 2001, <http://www.theage.com.au/books/2001/05/28/FFXXZBG49NC.html> (8 May 2002).

66 Morton, “Anthropology”, p. 522.

67 Irene Cunningham, “The Pendulum Swings for Cultural Rights”, The Western Review, April 1996, p. 10.

68 In 1995, Wanda Koolmatrie won the Dobbie Award for Women’s Writing for her autobiography, My Own Sweet Time. Her publisher, prominent Aboriginal press Magabala Books, discovered in 1997 that Wanda Koolmatrie was actually Leon Carmen, a non-Aboriginal man from Sydney. Right-wing critics delighted over this case of imposture, reading it as proof of a bias towards Aboriginal and women’s writing in the publishing industry and awards circuit. Indeed, as a result of this particular scandal, Pauline Hanson, co-founder of the extreme right-wing One Nation Party, would intone that “life as an Aborigine couldn’t be all that bad considering the number of whites who aspired to be black”, reported in Guilliatt, p. 13.

In 1980, Paul Radley won the inaugural Vogel award for his novel, Jack Rivers and Me. In 1982, Radley was voted “Young Australian of the Year”. He went on to publish two more novels and did a writer-in-residence stint at St. Andrew’s in Scotland before he revealed in 1996 that he had not written the novels at all. His uncle, Jack Radley, had written them. Apparently, Jack Radley thought it easier for a young man to be published.

Only weeks before the Koolmatrie/Carmen revelation, artist Elizabeth Durack revealed that she was the award-winning Aboriginal painter Eddie Burrup. Sydney sculptor Lawrence Gundabuka revealed that he had changed his family name from Beck to Gundabuka because he felt Aboriginal. And in the same year, the Welsh-born artist Ray Beamish claimed to have painted much of the work of his estranged partner, acclaimed Aboriginal artist Kathleen Petyarre. And in the world of politics, career diplomat Gordon Matthews, who identified as Aboriginal while at University, discovered that his father was Sri Lankan. He describes the process of self-discovery and de-Aboriginalizing in his autobiography An Australian Son (1996).

69 While several of the essays published in Annalisa Oboe’s Mongrel Signatures (2003) deal directly with the Mudrooroo affair, the collection itself does not focus exclusively on the issue. See Annalisa Oboe, ed., Mongrel Signatures: Reflections on the Work of Mudrooroo, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003.

70 Maureen Clark has made the most significant contributions to the academic debate concerning Mudrooroo. See “Unmasking Mudrooroo”, Kunapipi 23, 2 (2001), 48-62; “Mudrooroo and the Death of the Mother”, New Literatures Review, 40 (2003), 83-102; “Colin Johnson/Mudrooroo [1938-]”, Dictionary of Literary Biography: Australian Literature 1950-1975, Columbia, SC: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 2004, pp. 168-74. But even Clark cannot be said to have engaged Dumburtung in a meaningful consultation. She does make passing mention of Dumbartung’s role in “Unmasking Mudrooroo”, if only to suggest that Eggington’s stance over-simplifies the issue of Mudrooroo’s Aboriginal identity: “Mudrooroo’s case should not be confused by this widely published series of non-Aboriginal impostures” says Clark contextualizing his case in light of others. “Nor does it fit neatly within the context of the latest charges brought, in particular, by activist Robert Eggington on behalf of the Dumbartung Aboriginal Corporation” (49). Clark reads Eggington’s charges in the light of his perceived espousal of Australian regulations defining Aboriginality. My meetings and interviews with Eggington between May 2001 and July 2004 highlight a different side of his position. First, he asserts that the issue of Mudrooroo’s identity is Nyoongar business, because the writer claimed to be Nyoongar. It is also family business for Dumbartung’s co-ordinator because Eggington is married to a Kickett. The Kickett family approached him about Mudrooroo’s claims, asking for Dumbartung’s help, and the Aboriginal Corporation proceeded to deal with the issue following Nyoongar protocol. Clark’s reliance on newspaper reports concerning Eggington’s position (See 60, Note 6) leads to a critical over-simplification of that position: while her reading does acknowledge that meetings were conducted “following the dictates of Aboriginal tribal law” (50), it disregards the centrality of that law to Dumbartung’s stance on Mudrooroo. When Clark emphasizes the attention Eggington places on the fact that Mudrooroo cannot lay claim to Aboriginal identity based on federal regulations, she de-emphasizes the privilege he claims for Nyoongar protocol in determining the writer’s status. And in the process, she deemphasizes Eggington’s assertion of Nyoongar political autonomy.

71 At my last count in 2001, Dumbartung’s “Wall of Shame” consisted of thirty 4′ X 6′ panels dedicated to issues of cultural appropriation in Australia. Ten of these panels are dedicated to the anti-Mutant Message campaign.

72 Debra Jopson, in an article concerning the Mudrooroo affair, cites this qualified reaction from prominent postcolonial critic Bruce Bennett: “The professor of English at the Australian Defence Force Academy, Professor Bruce Bennett, described Mr Eggington’s calls as an ‘extreme reaction’: ‘Forms of censorship of that kind are probably a bad idea,’ he said”, Debra Jopson, “Destroy Books: Black Group”, Sydney Morning Herald, 25 March 1997, p. 5. More recently, Maureen Clark equated Eggington’s call for radical censorship with “a repressive Nazi Germany when the books of ‘undesirable’ authors were repeatedly burned”. See Clark, “Colin Johnson/Mudrooroo”, p. 174. Clark’s comparison of this Nyoongar call for censorship with actual Nazi book burning involves a disturbing revision - perhaps, even reversal - of historical and contemporary settler/indigenous power relations in Australia. In fact, in interviews I conducted with Eggington, he revealed that such calls for censorship were strategic assertions of the Nyoongar right to define how Nyoongar knowledge is circulated. He knew that “there was probably little possibility... there ever was going to be a result of a ban”, but he felt it important to make that assertion anyway (Robert Eggington, interview with author, Waterford, Western Australia, 21 January 2004).

73 The exceptions are two opinion pieces published in Westerly: Graeme Dixon, “The Mudrooroo Dilemma”, Westerly, 41 (1996), 5-6; and Tom and Lorna Little, “The Mudrooroo Dilemma”, Westerly, 41 (1996), 7-8. Nyoongar elder Rosemary Van den Berg also comments briefly on the affair in an article concerning intellectual property rights. See “Intellectual Property Rights for Aboriginal People”, Mots Pluriels, 8 (1998), 1-5. Also available at < http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/motspluriels/mp898rvdb.html>.

Other Aboriginal writers and scholars have commented on the affair. See Ruby Langford Ginibi, “The Right to be a Koori Writer”, The Australian, 7 August 1996, p. 12; and Gary Foley, “Muddy Waters: Archie, Mudrooroo & Aboriginality”, May 1997, <http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/essays/essay_10. html>, 10 October 2004. However, neither Langford Ginibi nor Foley are Nyoongar, so while their contributions to the debate are valuable in many ways, especially given that Mudrooroo’s case affected the broader Aboriginal literary and academic communities, they should not preclude a meaningful consultation with representatives of the Nyoongar community.

74 As Stephen Gray suggests, Western notions of censorship can serve Western hegemony. He traces contemporary Western notions of the artist - “as a lone genius, possibly starving in a garret, his or her imagination roaming unfettered across national, racial and sexual boundaries, beyond questions of politics and with a privileged access to truth” - to their liberal humanist origins in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To a society that values this kind of artist “Censorship is anathema”, Gray, “Black and White”, p. 107. He notes, however, that indigenous concepts of the artist as a cultural custodian privilege the good of the community over the freedom of the artist: “All stories are owned and have rights and responsibilities attached to them which are more important than the author’s theoretical individual freedom. Truth arises from a social reality which entitles the author to speak, and the author’s duties to the culture or milieu from which the stories arose is privileged over their individual creativity”, Gray, “Black and White”, p. 108. And George E. Marcus sees indigenous calls for strict controls over the dissemination of cultural property/knowledge as sophisticated, even radical, gestures tied to political aspirations: “Claims to cultural property have been forged from pre-existing bodies of law concerning cultural property as it applies to national patrimony and to intellectual property law, particularly in relation to artistic production. What makes the claims of indigenous peoples so potentially provocative to Western liberal thought is that they define a form of cultural property that does not respect the nation-state...”, George E. Marcus, “Censorship in the Heart of Difference: Cultural Property, Indigenous Peoples’ Movements, and Challenges to Western Liberal Thought”, in Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation, ed. Robert C. Post, Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1998, p. 233. Claims to cultural property thus complement claims to political autonomy and self-government.

75 On two occasions, while engaged with fellow academics concerning Dumbartung’s position on Mudrooroo, I have heard Eggington dismissed as a radical.

An Unsettling Affair: Territorial Anxieties and the Mutant Message

Abstract