ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to illustrate the impact of the Bringing Them Home Report (BTHR) on the Australian novels published in its aftermath through the analysis of Gail Jones's Black Mirror. The novel's main storyline revolves around Anna Griffin's task of writing the biography of the fictive Australian Surrealist painter Victoria Morrell. The chapter discusses whether Gail Jones's novel makes use of an aesthetics of trauma as a palliative strategy whereby white settlers avoid acknowledging their responsibility for the violence inflicted upon Indigenous Australians so as to preserve and safeguard their sense of belonging. It also discusses the novel's representation of trauma alongside the framework of shame. The chapter also discusses how the novel makes use of the Australian national myth of the bushman to represent shame as a form of injurious dispossession. It focuses on the narrative techniques employed to approach dispossession as a counter-discursive strategy.
