Alice Bellette on Indigenous Writing and Gothic Convention

Memory in the Blood: Haunting and Vitality in the Work of Natalie Harkin

Alice Bellette (University of Melbourne)

• Wednesday 1 April, 4.00-5:30pm
• 4th Floor Linkway, John Medley Building, University of Melbourne

Abstract

The oppressive narrative upheld in the colonial archive— including the Australian literary canon—stands in stark opposition to the lived experiences of First Nations peoples since settler invasion. The lives held hostage in the record haunt it. By exploring these tensions between the colonial archive and the embodied archive of ‘memory in the blood’, contemporary Aboriginal writers are tapping into a space where Gothic conventions are reimagined in new and politically potent contexts. This paper examines recent work by Narungga writer and researcher Natalie Harkin to show how it catalogues the discrepancy between colonial records and the intimate histories they obscure.

Alice Bellette

Alice Bellette is a Palawa descendant, writer and researcher. She is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, where her research encompasses literary refusals in Aboriginal women’s writing, the Indigenous Gothic, and antiracist citational practice. Alice’s writing has been published in Griffith Review, Sydney Review of Books, Meanjin, Cordite Poetry Review, Australian Poetry Journal and JASAL: Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature.