CULTURE CONNECT
re VIEW THE ABORIGINAL STORY OF BURKE AND WILLS: FORGOTTEN NARRATIVES
Edited by Ian D Clark and Fred Cahir CSIRO Publishing, 2013 There are many ironies at the heart of the Burke and Wills story. It was ironic (and tragic) that Robert O’Hara Bourke, with no prior experience as a bushman, surveyor or navigator, was chosen to lead one of Australia’s most ambitious and challenging overland explorations. It was ironic that the ‘ghastly blank white man’s grave’ of Central Australia was yet so intimately familiar to its Aboriginal residents, full of life-giving plants and animals and charged with spiritual significance. It was ironic too that when the starving explorers eventually did learn to gather an Aboriginal food – the seedlike sporocarps of nardoo, an arid zone fern – they did not learn to prepare it properly, such that its toxins may have actually contributed to their deaths. But perhaps the most surprising irony to emerge from this new book is the way that Aboriginal people disappeared from the Burke and Wills story as its narrative became a ‘national myth of heroic endeavour’. The Aboriginal story of Burke and Wills: forgotten narratives represents a deliberate attempt to challenge this literary terra nullius.
The authors delve into the cultural background of Aboriginal people living in the Coopers Creek region and explore Aboriginal oral history accounts of the expedition, drawing on a rich source of archival documents, anthropological and linguistic research, visual art and historical photographs. At its best the book draws on Indigenous perspectives to shed a whole new light on this seemingly familiar story. For example Darrell Lewis describes an intriguing oral history that challenges the standard narrative that Burke died of deprivation and exhaustion. Phillip Clarke, by documenting the explorers’ use (and misuse) of Aboriginal ecological knowledge, shows just how narrow the margin between life and death may have been for the ill-fated pair. Fred Cahir explores the ‘terrible bind’ of the Yandruwandha people, caught between their cultural obligations to assist strangers in need and the equally compelling need to repel culturally insensitive intruders. Ultimately in this book, it is the Yandruwandha who step from the shadows to the centre of the Burke and Wills story. It is sure to be enjoyed by anyone with an interest in the history of Australian exploration or in the development of our Australian national identity. DR SCOTT MITCHELL
The book is the first major study of the cross-cultural exchanges that took place on the Burke and Wills expedition and subsequent rescue attempts. The seventeen chapters by a multi-disciplinary team of academics, Aboriginal elders and artists explore how expedition members interacted with Aboriginal people.
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Explore 35(3) Summer 2013
