“From the Spear to the Pen”: How Indigenous writing has enriched our literary landscape
by Marie Munkara From the noble savage to the dull witted primitive the representation of indigenous people in literature by the non-indigenous has provided interesting reading since the days of early settlement in this country. But one can only ponder how much of the colonial depictions were based on scientific theory as naturalist Charles Darwin’s belief that the Australian Aborigine was only one rung up the evolutionary ladder from the great apes must have shaped the attitudes of many in the new penal colony. His comment in 1835 that “All the aborigines have been removed to an island in Bass…