ABSTRACT
A fundamental disconnection exists in Australian society between contemporary colonial/post-colonial hegemonic society and the ‘epistemic enclosures’ (Matereke 2011) maintained around Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ forms and representations of knowledge. This disconnection can be located in socially constructed mechanisms that attempt to render many forms of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge invisible or irrelevant. The ‘master narrative’ (Wiley 1996, 2021) of Northern epistemology created the myth of terra nullius and labelled cultures and communications of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as intellectually lower than that of the colonizers, encapsulated in the term ‘oral traditions’ (Nakata 2007). In this chapter I contend that this narrative and related clash of epistemologies is ongoing and that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander representation of knowledge ‘constantly battles for recognition and place against northern universalisms’ (Connell 2007: ix) in the area of literacy studies. Northern models of literacy, the autonomous, (as defined by Street 1984) and the ideological (Street 2000), are critiqued in this chapter in an attempt to locate their place within Northern epistemological frames and the extent to which they are inclusive of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander literacies is explored. Santos’s (2007, 2018) metaphor of the ‘abyss’ proves helpful in discussing the disconnection and attempts made to span and cross the abyss and find a new analysis of literacy practices that sit outside the Northern gaze.
