Their Own Voices

Alexis Wright,the first Indigenous Australian writer granted Miles Franklin Literary Award,is one of the most influential writers in Australian literature.Her works mainly present the social and political issues of Australian Aboriginal people and express profound considerations of Aboriginal rights.Her award-winning masterpiece Carpentaria is claimed as a ground-breaking ethnic epic,which draws greatly on Indigenous mythology and oral storytelling tradition to demonstrate the unremitting efforts of Indigenous people who assert their cultural primacy and defend their land rights in a white-dominant society.The thesis,enlightened by postcolonial theory of cultural resistance,intends to analyze the Aboriginal cultural resistance in Carpentaria.Cultural resistance occurs when the efforts are made by the suppressed and marginalized ethnic groups to save or restore the cultural tradition and reconstruct their ethnic identities and discourse so as to counter all the pressures of the dominating cultures.Thus,the thesis makes analysis of the resistance at three different levels,respectively in Indigenous narratives,Indigenous spirituality and Indigenous land rights struggles,aiming to reveal the efforts of the Indigenous people to write back to the hegemonic centre from periphery through constituting their own narratives;their efforts to counter against white spiritual assimilation and material exploitation through restoring their cultural tradition;and their efforts to defend their spiritually-based society through striving for their land rights.In a deeper sense,the thesis endeavors to bring broader exposure to the voices of the Indigenous people to gain respects for their cultural differences and achieve an equal position and rights as other Australians in a multicultural country.The thesis is innovative in its attempt to offer a new research perspective on Carpentaria,and to provide a new interpretation of Aboriginal cultural resistance.Cultural resistance is not a confrontation between two cultures,but a communicating ground for mutual understanding.This offers the probability to re-evaluate the relationship between the Whites and Indigenous people,and to enhance the understandings among peoples from different cultural backgrounds in Australia.