Evidence of indigenous habitation of Australia dates back some forty or fifty thousand years before European settlement. As Mudrooroo (previously Colin Johnson, b. 1939) noted in The Indigenous Literature of Australia, Aboriginal oral literature contains accounts of the wanderings of the creative ancestors who shaped the land and people, but the most sacred aspects of these stories were reserved for initiates. As the white Australian governments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries discouraged Aboriginal communities from following their cultural and religious practices, many sacred secret stories were lost. Other, more public, stories often suffered in translation from Aboriginal languages, their mythological dimensions reduced to the status of fairy tales or simplistic creation stories for children.

Indigenous Fiction and Religion

Aboriginal people were introduced to the Roman alphabet by the British following their landing at Sydney Cove in 1788. Christian missionaries were zealous educators, and...