Looking for Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander Speculative Fiction to Read

There has been a lot of discussion about gender balance in Australian authors/award nominations etc over the last few years (most recently represented by some interesting posts by Ian Mond crunching statistics from the Ditmar awards – plus a follow up – and a guest post by Tansy Rayner Roberts entitled Is Australian Fantasy Dominated by Women on Cheryl Morgan’s website). I’ve found all these discussions very interesting and they have had an impact on my reading and writing.

As previous posts on this blog have shown (e.g. my reading comfort zone), I’ve been trying to expand my reading of late, in particular attempting to read more broadly across Australian speculative fiction and participating in the Australian Women Writers’ 2012 Reading Challenge. While obviously the pursuit of gender equity in my reading will never be complete, I am interested in exploring other aspects of diversity in the Australian speculative fiction community. To that end, I’m attempting to seek out Australian Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander speculative fiction authors.

My search isn’t going too well so I suspect I’m not looking in the right places. So let me set a challenge for readers of this blog – any suggestions?

Author: mark

A writer of speculative fiction and all round good egg. Well, mostly good. OK, sometimes good.

6 thoughts on “Looking for Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander Speculative Fiction to Read”

  1. Thanks Mark for checking out my site and thanks very much Karen for the referral :-)

    You might also want to check out Amberlin Kwaymullina, author of The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf.

    It would be great if you could post a list of your discoveries as I know there must be a lot of Aborignal specfic authors but we can be hard to find! I keep looking too! Good luck with your search and thanks for including me :-)

    Reply

    1. Hi Ray,

      Thanks for writing in. I really enjoyed your short stories in Antipodean SF and Dead Red Heart. I haven't tracked down any of your other work, but look forward to reading it. I see from your blog that you're getting back into writing after a hiatus – exciting stuff!

      Thanks for the recommendation – I hadn't heard about The Interrogation of Ashla Wolf and am trying to track down a copy now.

      I hadn't had much luck tracking down Land of the Golden Clouds by Archie Weller either, but seeing your comment prompted me to look again and a copy just happened to be on sale on eBay so hopefully it is on its way to me as we speak!

      I also have on order Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, which I understand includes some speculative fiction from Australian Aboriginal authors (although I haven't been able to see the table of contents to confirm that yet).

      As you can see, so far my discoveries have been pretty limited. If you come across any more authors or works you think I should be looking at definitely let me know.

      -m

      Reply

  3. A while ago I did a similar search, and though Australians love SF books with words like 'Dreaming' and 'Aboriginal' in their titles, there's only one that I could find that was written by an Aboriginal: Land of the Golden Clouds (1998) by Archie Weller. I haven't read it yet, but one of my local libraries has a copy, and I am planning to.

    Reply

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