VALIDATING WHITE’S CONVICTICISM AND ABORIGINALS (AUSTRALIA) VICTIMIZATION THROUGH ABORIGINAL LITERARY FICTION (Pages 33-47) by Dr. Bollavarapu Raju in THE ENGLISH RESEARCH EXPRESS / ISSN:2321-1164 (Online); 2347-2642 (Print)

Australian race relations can best be understood within a historical context. Australia, as a nation, has never been at peace. The Aboriginal people believe they are spiritually and physically tied to that land, and have been there since “time immemorial.” On January 20, 1788, the Captain Arthur Phillip and the convictloaded First Fleet landed in Botany Bay, near modern day Sydney. The most detrimental occurrence in race relation history took place that day when Phillip declared the land “terra nullius” – Latin for “empty land.” Because of conflicting definitions of ownership, the British declared that the land had no previous occupants and was therefore settled, rather than conquered. From this time on an undeclared warfare raged. “Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006), explores embodied and indigenous subjectivity in presenting Australian society reeling from the genocidal trauma and subsequent rage at its foundations: consequences of colonialism. Carpentaria shows the progressive amplification of indigenous traumatic experience from the personal to intra-familial to societal, and illustrates many areas of indigenous people’s lives that trauma affects: from modalities of the maternal, through gendered temporality to embodied subjectivity, and specifically, the indigenous relationship to country. The rudiment of white’s evil and intentions is explained through Alex Wright’s Carpentaria (2006) and Kim Scott’s True Country (2009)and Benang(1999). Keywords: time immemorial, Dreamtime, terra nullius, convicticism, victimization, genocide, assimilation, and so on.