Early Aboriginal Writing

Department of Australian Studies

Dr Penny van Toorn

Penny van Toorn is a Senior Lecturer in Australian Literature and Australian Studies. She has published widely on writing by and about Indigenous peoples in Australia and Canada, and has worked on collaborative projects with Indigenous writers and scholars. From 1995 to 1997, she worked as an honorary editorial assitant to Bundjalung author, Ruby Langford Ginibi, on Langford Ginibi's son's biography, Haunted By the Past (1999). Since then, she has co-edited a special edition of Southerly (62/2) on new Aborignal writing with Dr Anita Heiss, co-authored a module on Aboriginal writing in English Mosaic 4, with Anthony McKnight, and is currently working on an article on Aboriginal poetry with Dr Wendy Brady.

Penny van Toorn's recent research extends knowledge of Aboriginal (alphabetic) writing back to its beginnings in the late 18th century. It establishes the ways in which Aboriginal writing, past and present, is elicited and shaped not only by missionary teaching and colonial bureaucratic requirements, but also by traditional land-based Indigenous protocols of communication. Her work refines understanding of the ways in which the technologies of writing and print worked both as instruments of colonial control and as resources that Aboriginal people utilised for their own purposes.

Penny van Toorn's current Australian Research Council funded project, "Autobiography of a People: Aboriginal Writing in Queensland, 1890s-1930s," makes audible the lost voices of Queensland’s early Aboriginal writers. It focuses on the written correspondence between Aboriginal people in Queensland and their white Protectors from the 1890s to the 1930s. This correspondence is examined as fragmentary autobiographical writings in which Aboriginal men, women, and children (and white male government officials) performed various kinds of self-hood on paper. This project extends and deepens knowledge of Indigenous literary history, generates innovative explanations of how writing works as an inter-cultural, socio-political practice, and highlights the ways these early Indigenous authors saw themselves as writers.

Regarding the "Autobiography of a People" project, I will be consulting with relevant families and Indigenous community representatives, to explain what the project is about and why I see it as important, to ask their permission to study the writings, to see whether/how my research might be of use to families and other members of the communities, and to find out about any limitations they might wish to place on the inquiry. Drafts of the research findings will be sent to relevant communities for comment before publication, and copies of published findings arising from the research will be sent to communities for their own records. Contributions of information and publishing permissions by individuals and communities will be acknowledged in all publications arising from this project.

Aboriginal Writing in Colonial Australia (forthcoming with Aboriginal Studies Press)