ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the recent writings of three Aboriginal women: Ruby Langford’s Don’t Take Your Love to Town, Sally Morgan’s My Place and Labumore: Elsie Roughsey’s An Aboriginal Mother Tells of the Old and the New. It explores the ways in which inequality is represented in their writings and looks at how such representations are constrained by non-Aboriginal discourses. Pat O’Shane regards racism as particularly important in the context of Aboriginal women’s relationship to a ‘white’ women’s movement which attempts to convince Aboriginal women that ‘sexism’ is what the fight is all about. Aboriginal ‘savagery’ in general is explained in terms of bad leadership and in relation to strangers entering their country, threatening a previously peaceful people and stealing their women and killing. In contemporary Australian society, ‘living black’ and writing about it can be seen as a process of political confrontation.
