Travel Writing from Black Australia ─ Utopia, Melancholia, and Aboriginality

Over the past thirty years the Australian travel experience has been ‘Aboriginalised’. Aboriginality has been appropriated to furnish the Australian nation with a unique and identifiable tourist brand. This is deeply ironic given the realities of life for many Aboriginal people in Australian society. On the one hand, Aboriginality in the form of artworks, literature, performances, landscapes, sport, and famous individuals is celebrated for the way it blends exoticism, mysticism, multiculturalism, nationalism, and reconciliation. On the other hand, in the media, cinema, and travel writing, Aboriginality in the form of the lived experiences of Aboriginal people has been exploited in the service of moral panic, patronised in the name of white benevolence, or simply ignored. For many travel writers, this irony - the clash between different regimes of valuing Aboriginality - is one of the great challenges to travelling in Australia.Travel Writing from Black Australia examines the ambivalence of contemporary travellers’ engagements with Aboriginality. Concentrating on a period marked by the rise of discourses on Aboriginality championing indigenous empowerment, self-determination, and reconciliation, the author analyses how travel to Black Australia has become, for many travellers, a means of discovering ‘new’ - and potentially transformative - styles of interracial engagement.

Robert Clarke is Lecturer in the School of English, Journalism, and European Languages at the University of Tasmania, Australia. He is editor ofCelebrity Colonialism: Fame, Power and Representation in Colonial and Postcolonial Cultures (2009), and has published articles and reviews in international journals includingStudies in Travel Writing, Journal of Australian Studies, Journeys: the International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing,Jouvert, M/C Review and Australian Literary Studies.