Cultural Heritage and Identity in the Literature of Australian South Sea Islanders and Other Media
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.12.1.2013.3391Abstract
Australian South Sea Islanders represent a small community whose ancestors mainly came from Melanesian Islands to work as indentured labour in the sugar cane plantations of Queensland from the 1860’s to the beginning of the 20th century. Many still live near the old sugar towns, but apart from an official recognition of their existence and distinctiveness bythe Federal Government in 1994 and by the Queensland Government in 2000, South Sea Islanders’ culture, economic and political roles are still underrepresented or even ignored in Australia. In the 1970’s, writers belonging to that community, such as Faith Bandler, Mabel Edmund and Noel Fatnowna started to tell their own family history since the arrival of their first ancestors on the continent. These autobiographical accounts enabled them to reassert their identity as a culturally distinct group and to shed light on a part of Australia’s forgotten past. Other written testimonies followed at the beginning of the 21st century but the lack of young South Sea Islander writers induced us to look at their other means of expression to promote their culture and complete the missing parts of their personal and collective history.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Authors who submit articles to this journal agree to the following terms:
1. Authors are responsible for ensuring that any material that has influenced the research or writing has been properly cited and credited both in the text and in the Reference List (Bibliography). Contributors are responsible for gaining copyright clearance on figures, photographs or lengthy quotes used in their manuscript that have been published elsewhere.
2. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) License that allows others to share and adapt the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
3. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository, or publish it in a book), with proper acknowledgement of the work's initial publication in this journal.
4. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (see The Effect of Open Access or The Open Access Citation Advantage). Where authors include such a work in an institutional repository or on their website (i.e., a copy of a work which has been published in eTropic, or a pre-print or post-print version of that work), we request that they include a statement that acknowledges the eTropic publication including the name of the journal, the volume number and a web-link to the journal item.
5. Authors should be aware that the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) License permits readers to share (copy and redistribute the work in any medium or format) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the work) for any purpose, even commercially, provided they also give appropriate credit to the work, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. They may do these things in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests you or your publisher endorses their use.