Audible in the silence: Douglas lockwood, waipuldanya, and the postwar aboriginal life narrative

During the period between the end of the Second World War and the appearance in the 1970s of the first indigenous autobiographical narratives, a significant number of texts that attempted to imagine what Australian society looked like through indigenous eyes were published and attained popularity. The majority of these were fictional works; several, however, were ostensible memoirs or autobiographies that claimed to be based closely on reminiscences transmitted orally by their Aboriginal subjects. They were all but entirely ignored by contemporary literary critics, historians, and even by most anthropologists. Through an examination of the most popular of the texts under consideration, Douglas Lockwood’s I, the Aboriginal, this discussion argues that it should be understood as an indicator of an important phase of Australian society’s dialogue with itself. The life story of Waipuldanya—the “I” of the title—while on one level clearly supportive of an assimilationist ethos that reinforces Western cultural norms and assumptions, is construed by the text on another level as an empowering vantage point from which to recuperate Aboriginal values and conceptions. Though he is seen to have attained the state of individualist selfhood valorised by the Western autobiographical tradition, he is also shown to be resistant to full deracination; he exercises his culturally inflected sense of autonomy to choose to remain faithful to his birth culture’s more communal conception of selfhood.