Dr Penny Van Toorn

BA Hons (U. of Sydney), MA Hons (U. of Sydney), PhD (U. of British Columbia)
Senior Lecturer
penny.van.toorn@arts.usyd.edu.au
+61 2 9351 6856

Penny van Toorn's research explores writing by and about the Indigenous peoples of Australia and Canada. Her recent book, Writing Never Arrives Naked: Early Aboriginal Cultures of Writing in Australia (2006) traces the beginnings of Aboriginal writing back to the early colonial era, and investigates the different cultural and institutional settings in which Aboriginal people produced and deployed written texts. Her current project – "Autobiography of a People" – examines early Aboriginal life-writing in the form of written correspondence between Aboriginal people in Queensland and their official government "Protectors" from the 1890s to the 1930s.

• "Autobiography of a People: Aboriginal Writing in Queensland, 1890s-1930s"
• "Aboriginal poetry: The New Generation" (with Dr Wendy Brady)

Books

• Writing Never Arrives Naked: Early Aboriginal Cultures of Writing in Australia (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2006).
• Rudy Wiebe and the Historicity of the Word (Edmonton: University of Alberta Pres, 1995).
• Stories Without End. Coedited with Anita Heiss. Special issue of Southerly 62/2 (2002), on new Indigenous writing.
• Speaking Positions: Aboriginality, Gender and Ethnicity in Australian Cultural Studies. Coedited with David English. (Melbourne: Dept. of Humanities, Victoria University, 1995).
• Approaches to Ruby Langford Ginibi's Don't Take Your Love to Town http://www.emsah.uq.edu.au/awsr/Publ_Ruby/ruby.htm

Selected Book Chapters and Articles

• "Aboriginal Writing." The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature. Ed. Eva-Marie Kroller. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) pp. 22-48.
• "Indigenous Texts and Narratives." The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature. Ed. Elizabeth Webby. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) pp. 19-49.
• "Institutional Structures and Individual Agency: Writing With, About and To Aboriginal Authors." Compromising Post/Colonialisms. Ed. Greg Ratcliffe and Gerry Turcotte. (Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 2001) pp. 55-63.
• "Indigenous Australian Writing: Tactics and Transformations." Telling Stories: Indigenous history and memory in Australian and New Zealand. Ed. Bain Attwood and Fiona McGowan. (Crow's Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2001) pp. 1-20.
• "Discourse/Patron Discourse: How Minority Texts Command the Attention of Majority Audiences." SPAN 30 (April 1990), pp. 102-115.
• With Ruby Langford Ginibi. "Who's in Whose Canon? Transforming Aboriginal Writers into Big Guns." Southerly (Spring 1997) pp. 125-136.
• "Mudrooroo and the Power of he Post: Alternative Inscriptions of Aboriginalist Discourse in a Post-Aboriginalist Age." Southern Review 28/2 (July 1995), pp. 121-139

Teaching

• Penny van Toorn teaches in the areas of Indigenous writing and film, postcolonial literatures and theory, and Australian literary and cultural history. She was awaded a Faculty of Arts Excellence in Teaching Award in 2001, and a Vice-Chancellors's Award for Outstanding Teaching in 2005.

Research Topics

• Aboriginal writing and the Australian Literary canon and Early Aboriginal writing (pre 1964)
• Aboriginal historiographic practices
• Rudy Wiebe and Canadian historiographical metafiction
• Bakhtin/Volosinov and postcolonial theory

• "Bennelong's Letter," "New Worlds and Readers," Society of the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, Wellington, New Zealand/Aotearoa, 27-19 January, 2005.
• "Early Aboriginal Women's Life Writing – An Induced Birth?", Australian and International Feminisms Conference, Women's College, University of Sydney, 12-14 December, 2004.
• "Poetry, Philology and Indigenous Theories of Writing in Canada and Australia," Conference of the Association for Canadian Studies in Australia and New Zealand, 23-25 September, 2004.
• "Sky Gods and Stolen Children," "World & Text," Association for the Study of Australia Literature," Women's College, University of Sydney, 5-7 July, 2004.

Editorial Board member for the following scholarly journals:

• Canadian Literature
• Southerly
• The Bible and Critical Theory
• Postcolonial Text
• Journal of the Assocition for the Study of Australian Literature

Director of the Faculty of Arts Post-graduate Research Centres 1 & 2