Cheeky

Here, I want to consider the language of Australian literature as being distinct from other Englishes in its relationship with Aboriginal English, a language that is used creatively in Aboriginal literature. Aboriginal English and Aboriginal literature have, in turn, their separate relationships with Aboriginal languages, many of which are lost, and with Indigenous knowledges, which they continue and communicate. Those other Aboriginal languages, known and unknown, shadow Australian literature in English in ways that set it apart. To this extent, I will argue, Australian literature speaks a language that resists ready assimilation to Anglophone and world literary constructions. It is open to ways of reading that pivot between different scales of attention, from the macro at one end of the spectrum, where the world is the frame and the hedgehog the focus of description and inquiry, to the micro at the other end, where reading is localised to the level of the word in its specific community meaning, and an appreciation of the multiplicities of the fox is the aim. Far from being mutually exclusive, these ways of reading oscillate in a complementary way, as I hope to show by moving between distant ('macro') and close-up ('micro') focal points in this essay.