SOURCE: Van Toorn, Penny. “Early Aboriginal Writing and the Discipline of Literary Studies.” Meanjin 55, no. 4 (1996): 754-65.

In the following essay, van Toorn describes the difficulties associated with the study of pre-twentieth-century Aboriginal writing.

The history of Aboriginal writing might have any number of beginnings depending on the way we constitute it as an object of knowledge. In the discipline of literary studies, Aboriginal writing is usually considered to be a recent phenomenon. It is thought to have begun tentatively with David Unaipon's Native Legends (1929) and then to have lapsed for thirty-five years before being inaugurated in its modern form in 1964 with the publication of Oodgeroo Noonuccal's (Kath Walker's) first book of poetry, We are Going. What I want to propose is that Aboriginal people began using the technologies of alphabetic writing and print far earlier than the dominant literary historical narrative would suggest.

On 29 August 1796 Bennelong dictated a...