ABSTRACT
Published some 20 years apart, Doris Pilkington Garimara’s life narrative – Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (1996) – and Claire Coleman’s political dystopia – Terra Nullius (2017) – are two plot lines embedded in the historical context of European colonization. However, these narratives seem to be doing a little bit more than just challenging the dominant Eurocentric views of white Australian official historiography. By placing in dialogue a bio-memoir and a piece of speculative fiction written by two contemporary female Indigenous authors from Western Australia, discussions about literary representations of trauma, scars, and wounds will bring to the fore the Aboriginal unified view of body and mind. Topics to be covered in this essay include grief, trauma, and self-injurious behavior in Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence; scars and sadness as signs of vulnerabilities in Terra Nullius; and an analysis of the mind–body nexus by reflecting on mental scars and physical damage in Aboriginal literature.
