Beyond Orality and Literacy: Textuality, Modernity and Representation in Gularabulu: Stories from the West Kimberley

Since the 1980s, a particular challenge for many Indigenous authors of collaborative life-writing has been how to manage their own textual agency so that this is not reduced either to mere 'presence' or marshalled as 'evidence' in the service of a non-Indigenous collaborator's theoretical or professional agenda. A parallel challenge for non-Indigenous editors of such texts has been how to manage the realities of their role in ways that do not mimic strategies that disavow Indigenous textual agency and authority. Historically, editorial strategies have diminished or denied the role of Indigenous authors in the production of their stories as texts. Sometimes Indigenous authors have been written out of the work altogether, as occurred with the 1930 publication of David Unaipon's collected Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines under the name of William Ramsay Smith.1 In other cases, non-Indigenous editors have been at pains to insist on the stark demarcation between their role as creators of written text as opposed to the Indigenous author's contribution as oral 'storyteller' or narrator, a feature of more recent works such as Jack Bohemia and Bill McGregor's Nyibayarri: Kimberley Tracker