‘Still I Am Not Tragic’: Indigenous Australian Women’s Sovereignty in Marie Munkara’s Every Secret Thing and A Most Peculiar Act

Abstract

In this paper, I examine the representation of the Indigenous women characters in two novels by Indigenous Australian writer Marie Munkara, namely Every Secret Thing (2009) and A Most Peculiar Act (2014). Munkara’s novels are set in the early phase of the colonisation of Australia and trace the takeover of Indigenous lands and lives by the Catholic Church and bureaucrats employed by the office of the Chief Protector of Aborigines. I argue that colonial constructions of white femininity disempowered both settler and Indigenous women. Despite being doubly colonised because of their race and gender, Munkara’s female characters maintain their sovereignty by engaging in decolonising practices. Indigenous women’s resistant subjectivity works in tandem with their connection to their lands to expose white ways of knowing as not the universals they are taken to be. They reveal that acquiring the coloniser’s language and imitating white cultural practices do not take away from their Indigeneity. Rather these are signs of Indigenous people’s dynamism and syncretism; they are means by which Indigenous women survive colonisation, maintain their sovereignty, and even creatively counter the colonial imposition.