Aboriginal Cultural Studies On Coonardoo

The question of the Aborigines remains one of the most sensitive and controversial issues in Australia. So when Coonardoo by Katharine Susannah Prichard was published in 1929, it aroused a storm of controversy in Australia among the critics because it was the first Australian novel that portrayed an Aboriginal heroine from childhood to death in a comprehensive and penetrating way.A wide range of negative stereotypes and functions were applied by the postcolonial white dominant culture. The Australian Aboriginal and its culture were always ignored and discriminated against in the White's literature under the special context of the postcolonial Australia. Meanwhile, the Aboriginal writers believed that only aborigines could really write about aborigines since most White writers often perceived the Aborigines from the White's perspective. But before writing the novel Coonardoo, Katharine Susannah Prichard spent months on an outback cattle-station to get the precious first-hand materials. Living with the Aborigines and observing them, Prichard made a deep survey into the Aboriginal culture. So she presented us a true and faithful Aboriginal world. The Aboriginal culture in Coonardoo is authentic and convincing so it gives us a good opportunity to explore into the essence of the Aboriginal culture. The novel is embedded in a postcolonial background, so the devastating effects of the cultural hegemony, which force the Aborigines to believe in their subordination and inferiority ideologically, are quite obvious and deserve our penetrating study. Living in a white dominant society, bombarded by the whistling material world, the Aborigines still refuse to internalize the white values, and firmly adhere to their own culture, which shows their forceful resistance to the cultural hegemony.The thesis first introduces the Australian Aborigines and their culture, and then makes a comparison between the cultural facts and the...