The Distribution of Settlement: Appropriation and Refusal in Australian Literature and Culture

The Distribution of Settlement is an important milestone in the ongoing conversation between settler and Indigenous literary histories. In its examination of Indigenous opacity and refusal, this book refocuses interest on the ethics of reading and reinvigorates pressing current debates about cross-cultural engagements. It’s essential reading for all readers of Australian literature. - Associate Professor Anne Brewster, University of New South Wales

Settler representations of Indigenous culture and identity weigh heavily on the way Indigenous people tell their stories in the present. These representations affect the way Indigenous writers themselves operate to represent themselves and their people. The rendering visible of Indigenous culture involves a fraught history riven with appropriation, misrepresentation and material and discursive forms of violence.

The Distribution of Settlement tells a partial story about the effect of these histories within Australian literature and culture. Tracking such cases of appropriation and misrepresentation in white Australian writing from the middle of the twentieth century, the book also turns to the legacy of these acts on and in contemporary Aboriginal writers as diverse as Kim Scott, Alexis Wright, Tony Birch and Tara June Winch.