Mudrooroo
Encyclopedia
Colin Thomas Johnson, better known by his nom de plume
, Mudrooroo (Born 21 August 1938) is a novelist, poet, essayist and playwright. He has been described as one of the most enigmatic literary figures of Australia and since 2001 he has been living in Kapan, Nepal
. His many works are centred on Australian Aboriginal
characters and Aboriginal topics.
Also known as Mudrooroo Narogin and Mudrooroo Nyoongah. Narogin after the indigenous spelling for his place of birth, and Nyoongah after the name of the people from whom he claimed descent. Mudrooroo means paperbark
in the Bibbulmun language group spoken by the Noongar
.
) in Western Australia to Elizabeth Johnson (Né
Barron) and Thomas Creighton Patrick Johnson (died 7 June 1938). Named Colin after a playmate of his brother Frank, he was the youngest of 12 children (which included three from his fathers first marriage), eight of whom had been taken into state care following the death of his father.
At the age of nine, Mudrooroo and an older sister, then living in the small country town of Beverley
with their mother who was a declared destitute
, were charged with theft and the two children were "sent to institutions in Perth" by the magistrate. Mudrooroo was placed in Clontarf Boys’ Town
, a boys home run by the Christian Brothers
just outside of Perth
and on the Swan River
. It was considered a beautiful location but life was hard and tough, though he did achieve a Junior educational Certificate as well as a strong interest in religion. In his first novel Wild Cat Falling
, he wrote about how boys coped with Boys’ Town life; Hard indeed were the blows, but hard indeed were our souls – perhaps?
In 1954, at the age of 16, he left the orphanage. The Catholic Welfare society found him a clerical job which he loathed and abandoned for a life on the streets. He became what was termed a Bodgie
in Australia, a zoot suit
er with a taste for juke boxes and rock’n’roll which was then becoming popular with young Australians. In June 1956, Mudrooroo was sentenced to twelve months imprisonment in Fremantle Prison
. As it was for many young Aboriginal males then, life would have led to the bottom of the social pile had he not met Dame Mary Durack
. Durack, a wealthy Western Australian novelist and poet, invited him to stay with her on his release and later sent him to Melbourne where he would have more opportunities. Mudrooroo later commented that without Durack's influence he doubted he "would have become a writer".
Public Service at the Motor Registration Branch. Mudrooroo attended a Buddhist
Society in Melbourne and later met the Bohemian
poet, Adrian Rawlins who introduced him to the writings of the Beat Generation
as well as to artists and writers living in Melbourne. He was inspired by the poetry of Allen Ginsberg
and even more by the spontaneous prose of the novelist Jack Kerouac
to write his first novel Wild Cat Falling, which was published in 1965. This novel was well received by critics and is still in publication. His early works used a mixture of fiction and autobiography, Wild Cat Falling was about a young Aboriginal man facing racist attitudes in Western Australia and failing to cope with it. Wild Cat Falling includes a foreword by Mary Durack (which has since become an afterword) that reveals what the author was like in his late teens.
In Melbourne, Mudrooroo mixed with writers and poets such as Leo Cash and Deidre Olsen (Crienna Rohan) and artists such as Machem Skipper and the famous Boyd family
. Following publication of Wild Cat Falling he married Jennie Katinas, a refugee from Lithuania who introduced him to European style and fashion, while in return he introduced her to his Beatnik
lifestyle. After reading The Dharma Bums
by Jack Kerouac and having received advance royalties for his book, they travelled to Thailand, Malaysia, India and then London. Returning to Melbourne after six months, Mudrooroo expressed a desire to return to India.
bought the paperback rights of Wild Cat Falling, it gave him enough money to return to India with his wife in 1967. They travelled first to Calcutta
, then to Darjeeling where they met Lama
Kalu Rinpoche
with whom they studied as well as receiving initiations. They later travelled across India to Dalhousie
where they received an initiation from His Holiness the Dalai Lama
. However, Mudrooroo's wife Jennie missed her family and later returned to Australia. Mudrooroo stayed to become a real Dharma Bum, a Buddhist Monk
, and spent the following six years wandering India with the Vipassanā
meditation
teacher, S.N. Goenka giving meditation camps. Although a powerful teacher, Mudrooroo had remained a layman and began thinking about whether it was better to return to his old life. He returned to Melbourne in August 1974.
chose the documentary film maker, Guy Baskin to assist him. In Perth he lived in the then seedy Northbridge
area, where he began writing his novel Long Live Sandawara. For Long Live Sandawara Mudrooroo chose Jandamarra
(Pigeon), a Western Australian Aboriginal hero from the late 19th century, as his main character and he discussed the idea with Mary Durack who had previously written an article about him. Durack gave him a copy of Ion Idriess
' book; Outlaws of the Leopolds, a quasi historical account of Pigeon's armed resistance against the British in the King Leopold Ranges
of Western Australia which Mudrooroo used as his main source.
In Perth he met Elena Castaneda, a Spanish American
tourist. Mudrooroo travelled with her to California and then to San Francisco where he visited the City Lights Bookshop, meeting poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti
. Mudrooroo also visited Haight-Ashbury where he found little remained of the hippie
s he expected to find. California at the time was the home of counter therapies and with Castaneda he began doing primal therapy
. Always short of money, he lived on the streets and eventually ended up in a Salvation Army
workshop which cared for the homeless in exchange for work. By the end of 1975 he had finished Long Live Sandawara and returned to Melbourne where he met Aboriginal activist Harry Penrith (later known as Burnum Burnum
) and through him, Mudrooroo became active in Aboriginal Affairs.
The novel he had finished in California, Long Live Sandawara lay about until by chance he met Anne Godden of Hyland House who accepted it for publication. In 1983 his Tasmanian historical novel, Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World was published. It had been fully researched. Mudrooroo had walked over much of the island of Tasmania with the Mansell elder and seen the sites that he discussed, described and set the action in. His main character was the custodian of Tasmanian Aboriginal culture, Dr. Wooreddy, he of the many names and attempts at surviving who ended his life on a ship off the northern coast of Tasmania. He was taken ashore and buried on a lonely island and with his death ended the book.
, an early Aboriginal poet. He added Nyoongah later when he returned to his South Western Australian land and needed a second name to change his name legally by deed poll. The name Mudrooroo meant “paperbark” (an Australian tree) in the Noongar
language of south-western Australia, of which he knew quite a few words, though it was by then a dead language and nyoongah simply meant person. A Djamadji friend, Allan Morrywalla Barker suggested it. Oodgeroo of the tribe Noonuccal was a great friend and influence on Mudrooroo’s work, adding to his cultural awareness as she took him over her land Stradbroke Island passing over to him the Aboriginality of the land, just as in Tasmania the Mansell elder had done. It was through her that he began taking poetry seriously again and she helped him to put his Song Circle of Jacky (published 1986) together. It was late in 1988 that he decided to go bush and live on the land in Bungawalbyn, the Aboriginal writer Ruby Ginibi’s country in Northern New South Wales.
Mudrooroo’s collection of poetry Dalwarra: the Black Bittern was published in 1989 by the University of Western Australia which had money remaining over from the Celebration of a Nation and backdated it a year. He had been against any Aboriginal participation in the 1988 Bicentenary
and this ignoring of his political position resulted in him dashing off a piece of spontaneous verse and prose, “Sunlight Spreadeagles Perth in Blackness”, which was never published, though he declares that it is his “Howl
”. Attendance at the First Aboriginal Theatre conference held in Canberra resulted in him writing “Doin Wildcat: a Novel Koori Script as Constructed by Mudrooroo” which appeared some twenty-three years after “Wild Cat Falling”. Anne Godden of Hyland House told him that it was the best thing he had written, with a swinging prose you could read aloud or think aloud. “Doin Wildcat” sought to describe or bring out the feeling and “soul” of an Aboriginal conference and it is filled with “Black Fellow” humour.
In 1991 the volume of poetry, The Garden of Gethsemane was published. The poetry had been written on Stradbroke Island and even in some of the parks and supermarkets of Brisbane. By then Mudrooroo had come across the poems of the Murri poet, Lionel Fogarty and was impressed by them so much that he attempted to follow their style by using words he found in the world around me. Most of this verse didn’t work and was discarded. In 1992 this volume won two Western Australian Premier’s book awards. In the same year he finished Wildcat Screaming in which he introduced his detective character Dr. Watson Holmes Jackamara. He later featured him in The Kwinkin, (1993) a novel set in Fiji which Mudrooroo wrote after meeting the Samoan writer, Albert Wendt who enlightened him about these so-called South Sea Island paradises. Dr. Holmes Watson Jackamara became his favourite creation with the ability through his acute mind to examine and see into the wiles of Australia. His last appearance was in the unpublished novel, The Survivalist.
In Master of the Ghost Dreaming Mudrooroo sought to enter the spirit world and perhaps wanted to live there forever, but the piece of land which he was renting came up to be sold in 1991. It was then that he came to Sydney for a meeting of the Aboriginal Arts Board and met Gerhard Fischer, a German Professor with an idea dating from the bi-centennial, linking together the French Revolution with the invasion of Australia in 1788. He wanted an Aboriginal text to interpenetrate or something like that with a play by the German playwright Heiner Muller, Der Auftrag. Mudrooroo decided to do it to see if it could be done in an Aboriginal way.
Mudrooroo was put in a house of the University of Sydney to do the play and given access to the library with the result he did a lot of reading on Victorian sexuality and discovered the broken backed woman. Strange sexuality was a strong part of Der Auftrag and it was a type of Victorian sexuality that he had to read about. In the library he discovered a whole collection of Gothic books which he found to have been written in the 18th century around the time Australia was invaded and settled. The 18th century was a Gothic monster which could not be ignored for long and it wasn’t. If monsters didn’t make it into the play they entered with a rush in the last three books of the Ghost Dreaming series set during the so-called spread of settlement along the southern coast of Australia, a Gothic series of events indeed. These three volumes are known as his Vampire books and are underground classics.
Professor Gerhard Fischer gave him the opportunity to roam in his mind and after six weeks or so he finished a script called The Aboriginal Protestors Confront the Declaration of the Australian Republic on 26 January 2001 with the Production of The Commission by Heiner Müller. Eventually after much rewriting and editing it was staged in Sydney and then taken to the European festival in Weimar where nearby were the remains of the concentration camp of Buchenwald where the Romany people had been imprisoned and murdered. This evil place provided the inspiration for Mudrooroo to attempt a drama in verse, Iphigenia in Buchenwald which has never been produced
After finishing his commission early in 1992 and being at a loose end after the stint working on the play, Mudrooroo accepted the position on contract for five years as the Coordinator of the Aboriginal Studies program at Murdoch University. During this time he wrote Us Mob—History, Culture, Struggle: An Introduction to Indigenous Australia. This won the Ruth Adeney Koori Award for Aboriginal writing in 1995.
in 1992 that traced her family back five generations, Laurie contacted Polglaze who told her that she could find no trace of Aboriginal ancestry in the family. Laurie subsequently wrote an article for her newspaper titled Identity Crisis sparking a scandal that received nationwide media coverage in 1996/97.
Polglaze's research found that her family were direct descendants of Irish immigrants Edward and Jane Barron who had arrived in Western Australia in 1829 and that their paternal grandfather was Thomas Creighton Johnson, an African American who had arrived in the colony of New South Wales
from North Carolina
in 1863 and who later married an Irish immigrant, Mary Gallagher, in 1868. Mudrooroo rejected the genealogy, suggesting that the mother listed on his birth certificate "may not have been" his real mother. His brothers and sisters requested he take a DNA test, which was declined. Similarly, a request by the Nyoongah community to substantiate his claimed kinship to the Kickett family was not acknowledged and on 27 July 1996 the Nyoongah elders released a public statement: "The Kickett family rejects Colin Johnson's claim to his Aboriginality and any kinship ties to the family". Mudrooroo's prior statements about Indigenous writers such as Sally Morgan
, whom he excluded from his definition of Aboriginality, did not assist his cause. He had said of Morgan's book My Place
, that it made Aboriginality acceptable so long as you were "young, gifted and not very black." Mudrooroo's writings had placed emphasis on kinship and family links as key features of Aboriginal identity. His rejection of his biological family deeply offended the Aboriginal community.
The resulting scandal and public debate over issues of authenticity and what constitutes Aboriginal identity led to some subject coordinators removing Mudrooroo's books from academic courses and he later said he was unable to find a publisher for a sequel to his previous novel. Initially, many people came to Mudrooroo's defence, some claiming it was a "white conspiracy" or a racist attack on Aboriginality with some claiming Polglaze's "amateur sleuthing" was being exploited. Award winning Indigenous author Graeme Dixon called on Mudrooroo to come forward and tell the truth, stressing that it was important to "out" pretenders and reclaim Aboriginal culture. Several authors see evidence in his writings that Mudrooroo deliberately assumed an Aboriginal identity to legitimise his work when in his early 20s, although it remains possible he was unaware. Editor Gerhard Fischer believes that it was Dame Mary Durack who "defined and determined" his Aboriginal identity. In an article published in 1997, Mudrooroo described Durack's foreword to his first novel as the origin of the "re-writing of his body" as Aboriginal. Mudrooroo later replied to his critics, stating that his dark skin meant he was always treated as Aboriginal by society, therefore his life experience was that of an Aborigine. Mudrooroo retired from public life following the controversy, living for a time on Macleay Island
off the coast of Queensland
.
Mudrooroo: A Critical Study, by Adam Shoemaker (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1993);
Mongrel Signatures, Reflections on the Work of Mudrooroo, ed. By Annalisa Oboe (Cross Cultures 64, Amsterdam-New York, Rodopi, 2003).
The Work of Mudrooroo: thirty-one years of literary production, 1960–1991: a comprehensive listing of primary materials (including unpublished work) with secondary sources, compiled by Hugh Webb. Perth, SPAN: Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies , ed. By Kathryn Trees. Number 33 (1992).
Pen name
A pen name, nom de plume, or literary double, is a pseudonym adopted by an author. A pen name may be used to make the author's name more distinctive, to disguise his or her gender, to distance an author from some or all of his or her works, to protect the author from retribution for his or her...
, Mudrooroo (Born 21 August 1938) is a novelist, poet, essayist and playwright. He has been described as one of the most enigmatic literary figures of Australia and since 2001 he has been living in Kapan, Nepal
Kapan, Nepal
Kapan, Nepal is a village in Kathmandu District in the Bagmati Zone of central Nepal. At the time of the 1991 Nepal census it had a population of 4567 and had 833 households in it.-References:...
. His many works are centred on Australian Aboriginal
Australian Aborigines
Australian Aborigines , also called Aboriginal Australians, from the latin ab originem , are people who are indigenous to most of the Australian continentthat is, to mainland Australia and the island of Tasmania...
characters and Aboriginal topics.
Also known as Mudrooroo Narogin and Mudrooroo Nyoongah. Narogin after the indigenous spelling for his place of birth, and Nyoongah after the name of the people from whom he claimed descent. Mudrooroo means paperbark
Melaleuca
Melaleuca is a genus of plants in the myrtle family Myrtaceae known for its natural soothing and cleansing properties. There are well over 200 recognised species, most of which are endemic to Australia...
in the Bibbulmun language group spoken by the Noongar
Noongar
The Noongar are an indigenous Australian people who live in the south-west corner of Western Australia from Geraldton on the west coast to Esperance on the south coast...
.
Early life
Mudrooroo was born Colin Thomas Johnson on 21 August 1938 at East Cubelling (near NarroginNarrogin, Western Australia
Narrogin is a large town in the Wheatbelt region of Western Australia, southeast of Perth on the Great Southern Highway between Pingelly and Wagin...
) in Western Australia to Elizabeth Johnson (Né
NE
-Places:England* NE postcode area, a postcode for the City of Newcastle upon Tyne, Tyne and WearItaly* Ne, Liguria, a comune in the Province of GenoaNiger* Niger, ISO 3166-1 country code** .ne, the country code top level domain for Niger...
Barron) and Thomas Creighton Patrick Johnson (died 7 June 1938). Named Colin after a playmate of his brother Frank, he was the youngest of 12 children (which included three from his fathers first marriage), eight of whom had been taken into state care following the death of his father.
At the age of nine, Mudrooroo and an older sister, then living in the small country town of Beverley
Beverley, Western Australia
Beverley is a town located in the Wheatbelt region of Western Australia, south-east of the state capital, Perth, between York and Brookton on the Great Southern Highway...
with their mother who was a declared destitute
Poverty
Poverty is the lack of a certain amount of material possessions or money. Absolute poverty or destitution is inability to afford basic human needs, which commonly includes clean and fresh water, nutrition, health care, education, clothing and shelter. About 1.7 billion people are estimated to live...
, were charged with theft and the two children were "sent to institutions in Perth" by the magistrate. Mudrooroo was placed in Clontarf Boys’ Town
Clontarf Aboriginal College
Clontarf Aboriginal College is the current name of a former orphanage for boys operated by the Christian Brothers organisation in the Perth suburb of Waterford in Western Australia. Opening in 1901, the facility has been used for a number of purposes since, most notably as an orphanage but also as...
, a boys home run by the Christian Brothers
Congregation of Christian Brothers
The Congregation of Christian Brothers is a worldwide religious community within the Catholic Church, founded by Blessed Edmund Rice. The Christian Brothers, as they are commonly known, chiefly work for the evangelisation and education of youth, but are involved in many ministries, especially with...
just outside of Perth
Perth, Western Australia
Perth is the capital and largest city of the Australian state of Western Australia and the fourth most populous city in Australia. The Perth metropolitan area has an estimated population of almost 1,700,000....
and on the Swan River
Swan River (Western Australia)
The Swan River estuary flows through the city of Perth, in the south west of Western Australia. Its lower reaches are relatively wide and deep, with few constrictions, while the upper reaches are usually quite narrow and shallow....
. It was considered a beautiful location but life was hard and tough, though he did achieve a Junior educational Certificate as well as a strong interest in religion. In his first novel Wild Cat Falling
Wild Cat Falling
Wild Cat Falling is a novel published in 1965, in Australia...
, he wrote about how boys coped with Boys’ Town life; Hard indeed were the blows, but hard indeed were our souls – perhaps?
In 1954, at the age of 16, he left the orphanage. The Catholic Welfare society found him a clerical job which he loathed and abandoned for a life on the streets. He became what was termed a Bodgie
Bodgies and Widgies
Bodgies and Widgies refer to a youth subculture that existed in Australia and New Zealand in the 1950s, similar to the Teddy Boy culture in the UK or Greaser culture in the US....
in Australia, a zoot suit
Zoot suit
A zoot suit is a suit with high-waisted, wide-legged, tight-cuffed, pegged trousers, and a long coat with wide lapels and wide padded shoulders. This style of clothing was popularized by African Americans, Mexican-Americans, and Italian Americans during the late 1930s and the 1940s...
er with a taste for juke boxes and rock’n’roll which was then becoming popular with young Australians. In June 1956, Mudrooroo was sentenced to twelve months imprisonment in Fremantle Prison
Fremantle Prison
Fremantle Prison is a former Australian prison located in The Terrace, Fremantle, in Western Australia. The site includes the prison, gatehouse, perimeter walls, cottages, tunnels, and prisoner art...
. As it was for many young Aboriginal males then, life would have led to the bottom of the social pile had he not met Dame Mary Durack
Mary Durack
Dame Mary Durack AC DBE was an Australian author and historian. She wrote Kings in Grass Castles and Keep Him My Country.-Childhood:...
. Durack, a wealthy Western Australian novelist and poet, invited him to stay with her on his release and later sent him to Melbourne where he would have more opportunities. Mudrooroo later commented that without Durack's influence he doubted he "would have become a writer".
First novel: Wild Cat Falling
With his Junior Certificate Mudrooroo got a job as a clerk with the VictorianVictoria (Australia)
Victoria is the second most populous state in Australia. Geographically the smallest mainland state, Victoria is bordered by New South Wales, South Australia, and Tasmania on Boundary Islet to the north, west and south respectively....
Public Service at the Motor Registration Branch. Mudrooroo attended a Buddhist
Buddhism
Buddhism is a religion and philosophy encompassing a variety of traditions, beliefs and practices, largely based on teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, commonly known as the Buddha . The Buddha lived and taught in the northeastern Indian subcontinent some time between the 6th and 4th...
Society in Melbourne and later met the Bohemian
Bohemianism
Bohemianism is the practice of an unconventional lifestyle, often in the company of like-minded people, with few permanent ties, involving musical, artistic or literary pursuits...
poet, Adrian Rawlins who introduced him to the writings of the Beat Generation
Beat generation
The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...
as well as to artists and writers living in Melbourne. He was inspired by the poetry of Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
and even more by the spontaneous prose of the novelist Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac
Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...
to write his first novel Wild Cat Falling, which was published in 1965. This novel was well received by critics and is still in publication. His early works used a mixture of fiction and autobiography, Wild Cat Falling was about a young Aboriginal man facing racist attitudes in Western Australia and failing to cope with it. Wild Cat Falling includes a foreword by Mary Durack (which has since become an afterword) that reveals what the author was like in his late teens.
In Melbourne, Mudrooroo mixed with writers and poets such as Leo Cash and Deidre Olsen (Crienna Rohan) and artists such as Machem Skipper and the famous Boyd family
Boyd Family
The Boyd family is an Australian artistic dynasty. Members of the family over several generations have established themselves as painters, artists, illustrators, sculptors, potters, ceramists, writers, architects, graphic designers, and musicians....
. Following publication of Wild Cat Falling he married Jennie Katinas, a refugee from Lithuania who introduced him to European style and fashion, while in return he introduced her to his Beatnik
Beatnik
Beatnik was a media stereotype of the 1950s and early 1960s that displayed the more superficial aspects of the Beat Generation literary movement of the 1950s and violent film images, along with a cartoonish depiction of the real-life people and the spiritual quest in Jack Kerouac's autobiographical...
lifestyle. After reading The Dharma Bums
The Dharma Bums
The Dharma Bums is a 1958 novel by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac. The semi-fictional accounts in the novel are based upon events that occurred years after the events of On the Road...
by Jack Kerouac and having received advance royalties for his book, they travelled to Thailand, Malaysia, India and then London. Returning to Melbourne after six months, Mudrooroo expressed a desire to return to India.
Travels in India
When Penguin BooksPenguin Books
Penguin Books is a publisher founded in 1935 by Sir Allen Lane and V.K. Krishna Menon. Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its high quality, inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other high street stores for sixpence. Penguin's success demonstrated that large...
bought the paperback rights of Wild Cat Falling, it gave him enough money to return to India with his wife in 1967. They travelled first to Calcutta
Kolkata
Kolkata , formerly known as Calcutta, is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal. Located on the east bank of the Hooghly River, it was the commercial capital of East India...
, then to Darjeeling where they met Lama
Lama
Lama is a title for a Tibetan teacher of the Dharma. The name is similar to the Sanskrit term guru .Historically, the term was used for venerated spiritual masters or heads of monasteries...
Kalu Rinpoche
Kalu Rinpoche
Kyabje Kalu Rinpoche was a Buddhist meditation master, scholar and teacher. He was one of the first Tibetan masters to teach in the West.-Early life and teachers:...
with whom they studied as well as receiving initiations. They later travelled across India to Dalhousie
Dalhousie, India
Dalhousie is a hill station and popular tourist spot in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh, India.- Weather :Dalhousie experiences winter-like cold climate throughout the year. Heavy rain with thunder showers are experienced during the period from June to September...
where they received an initiation from His Holiness the Dalai Lama
Dalai Lama
The Dalai Lama is a high lama in the Gelug or "Yellow Hat" branch of Tibetan Buddhism. The name is a combination of the Mongolian word далай meaning "Ocean" and the Tibetan word bla-ma meaning "teacher"...
. However, Mudrooroo's wife Jennie missed her family and later returned to Australia. Mudrooroo stayed to become a real Dharma Bum, a Buddhist Monk
Bhikkhu
A Bhikkhu or Bhikṣu is an ordained male Buddhist monastic. A female monastic is called a Bhikkhuni Nepali: ). The life of Bhikkhus and Bhikkhunis is governed by a set of rules called the patimokkha within the vinaya's framework of monastic discipline...
, and spent the following six years wandering India with the Vipassanā
Vipassana
Vipassanā or vipaśyanā in the Buddhist tradition means insight into the true nature of reality. A regular practitioner of Vipassana is known as a Vipassi . Vipassana is one of the world's most ancient techniques of meditation, the inception of which is attributed to Gautama Buddha...
meditation
Meditation
Meditation is any form of a family of practices in which practitioners train their minds or self-induce a mode of consciousness to realize some benefit....
teacher, S.N. Goenka giving meditation camps. Although a powerful teacher, Mudrooroo had remained a layman and began thinking about whether it was better to return to his old life. He returned to Melbourne in August 1974.
Long Live Sandawara
After returning to Melbourne Mudrooroo's brother in law Al Katinas, a film maker, suggested that he apply for a grant to write a cinematic treatment of Wild Cat Falling. Mudrooroo decided to write it in Perth and the Australian National Film BoardFilm Australia
Film Australia was a company established by the Government of Australia to produce films about Australia. Its mission was to create an audio-visual record of Australian culture, through the commissioning, distribution and management of programs that deal with matters of national interest or...
chose the documentary film maker, Guy Baskin to assist him. In Perth he lived in the then seedy Northbridge
Northbridge, Western Australia
Northbridge is an inner city suburb of Perth, Western Australia, separated from Perth's central business district by the Fremantle and Joondalup railway lines...
area, where he began writing his novel Long Live Sandawara. For Long Live Sandawara Mudrooroo chose Jandamarra
Jandamarra
Jandamarra or Tjandamurra , also known as "Pigeon", was an Indigenous Australian of the Bunuba people who led one of the few organised armed insurrections documented against European settlement in Australia.- Background :...
(Pigeon), a Western Australian Aboriginal hero from the late 19th century, as his main character and he discussed the idea with Mary Durack who had previously written an article about him. Durack gave him a copy of Ion Idriess
Ion Idriess
Ion Llewellyn Idriess, OBE was a prolific and influential Australian author. He wrote more than 50 books over 43 years between 1927 to 1969 - an average of one book every 10 months, and twice published three books in one year...
' book; Outlaws of the Leopolds, a quasi historical account of Pigeon's armed resistance against the British in the King Leopold Ranges
King Leopold Ranges
The King Leopold Ranges are a range of hills in the western Kimberley region of Western Australia. Crossed by the Gibb River Road about east of Derby, part of the ranges are covered by the King Leopold Ranges Conservation National Park, managed by the Department of Environment and Conservation...
of Western Australia which Mudrooroo used as his main source.
In Perth he met Elena Castaneda, a Spanish American
Spanish American
A Spanish American is a citizen or resident of the United States whose ancestors originate from the southwestern European nation of Spain. Spanish Americans are the earliest European American group, with a continuous presence since 1565.-Immigration waves:...
tourist. Mudrooroo travelled with her to California and then to San Francisco where he visited the City Lights Bookshop, meeting poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti is an American poet, painter, liberal activist, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers...
. Mudrooroo also visited Haight-Ashbury where he found little remained of the hippie
Hippie
The hippie subculture was originally a youth movement that arose in the United States during the mid-1960s and spread to other countries around the world. The etymology of the term 'hippie' is from hipster, and was initially used to describe beatniks who had moved into San Francisco's...
s he expected to find. California at the time was the home of counter therapies and with Castaneda he began doing primal therapy
Primal therapy
Primal therapy is a trauma-based psychotherapy created by Arthur Janov, who argues that neurosis is caused by the repressed pain of childhood trauma. Janov argues that repressed pain can be sequentially brought to conscious awareness and resolved through re-experiencing the incident and fully...
. Always short of money, he lived on the streets and eventually ended up in a Salvation Army
Salvation Army
The Salvation Army is a Protestant Christian church known for its thrift stores and charity work. It is an international movement that currently works in over a hundred countries....
workshop which cared for the homeless in exchange for work. By the end of 1975 he had finished Long Live Sandawara and returned to Melbourne where he met Aboriginal activist Harry Penrith (later known as Burnum Burnum
Burnum Burnum
Burnum Burnum was an Australian Aboriginal activist, actor, and author. He was born a Woiworrung and Yorta Yorta man at Wallaga Lake in southern New South Wales...
) and through him, Mudrooroo became active in Aboriginal Affairs.
Melbourne
He went with him to Monash University where he got work at the Aboriginal Research Centre then headed by Colin Bourke. With him Mudrooroo did a short introduction into Aboriginal Life called Before the Invasion. Under his direction he also began writing Dr.Woreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World and went to Tasmania to research the book. A Tasmanian Aboriginal, a Mansell elder, took him over the island telling him stories about an old bloke called King Billy and also introduced him to mutton birding. Back in Melbourne Colin Bourke suggested that he do a university course. He accepted his advice and began a B.A. (Hons.) course at Melbourne University. He met Bruce McGuinness then head of the Victoria Aboriginal Health Service. He had set up Koorie College to teach a health course for Aboriginal students based on the bare foot doctors’ approach to medicine as then practised in China. Mudrooroo taught there a course on Aboriginal culture.The novel he had finished in California, Long Live Sandawara lay about until by chance he met Anne Godden of Hyland House who accepted it for publication. In 1983 his Tasmanian historical novel, Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World was published. It had been fully researched. Mudrooroo had walked over much of the island of Tasmania with the Mansell elder and seen the sites that he discussed, described and set the action in. His main character was the custodian of Tasmanian Aboriginal culture, Dr. Wooreddy, he of the many names and attempts at surviving who ended his life on a ship off the northern coast of Tasmania. He was taken ashore and buried on a lonely island and with his death ended the book.
Change of name
In 1983 Mudrooroo married Julie Whiting, a university librarian and later academic. Their son Kalu was born in 1985 and daughter Malika Claire in 1988. The children were brought up by their mother in Perth, Western Australia. 1988 was a special time for him, a time of Aboriginal uprising in Australia during which Mudrooroo hit the road to visit different Aboriginal settlements to find out how the people lived. It was from his contacts that he coined the term, Aboriginality. In 1988 as a political act he legally changed his name to Mudrooroo after talking it over with Oodgeroo NoonuccalOodgeroo Noonuccal
Oodgeroo Noonuccal was an Australian poet, political activist, artist and educator. She was also a campaigner for Aboriginal rights...
, an early Aboriginal poet. He added Nyoongah later when he returned to his South Western Australian land and needed a second name to change his name legally by deed poll. The name Mudrooroo meant “paperbark” (an Australian tree) in the Noongar
Noongar
The Noongar are an indigenous Australian people who live in the south-west corner of Western Australia from Geraldton on the west coast to Esperance on the south coast...
language of south-western Australia, of which he knew quite a few words, though it was by then a dead language and nyoongah simply meant person. A Djamadji friend, Allan Morrywalla Barker suggested it. Oodgeroo of the tribe Noonuccal was a great friend and influence on Mudrooroo’s work, adding to his cultural awareness as she took him over her land Stradbroke Island passing over to him the Aboriginality of the land, just as in Tasmania the Mansell elder had done. It was through her that he began taking poetry seriously again and she helped him to put his Song Circle of Jacky (published 1986) together. It was late in 1988 that he decided to go bush and live on the land in Bungawalbyn, the Aboriginal writer Ruby Ginibi’s country in Northern New South Wales.
Mudrooroo’s collection of poetry Dalwarra: the Black Bittern was published in 1989 by the University of Western Australia which had money remaining over from the Celebration of a Nation and backdated it a year. He had been against any Aboriginal participation in the 1988 Bicentenary
Australian Bicentenary
The bicentenary of Australia was celebrated in 1970 on the 200th anniversary of Captain James Cook landing and claiming the land, and again in 1988 to celebrate 200 years of permanent European settlement.-1970:...
and this ignoring of his political position resulted in him dashing off a piece of spontaneous verse and prose, “Sunlight Spreadeagles Perth in Blackness”, which was never published, though he declares that it is his “Howl
Howl
"Howl" is a poem written by Allen Ginsberg in 1955 and published as part of his 1956 collection of poetry titled Howl and Other Poems. The poem is considered to be one of the great works of the Beat Generation, along with Jack Kerouac's On the Road and William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch...
”. Attendance at the First Aboriginal Theatre conference held in Canberra resulted in him writing “Doin Wildcat: a Novel Koori Script as Constructed by Mudrooroo” which appeared some twenty-three years after “Wild Cat Falling”. Anne Godden of Hyland House told him that it was the best thing he had written, with a swinging prose you could read aloud or think aloud. “Doin Wildcat” sought to describe or bring out the feeling and “soul” of an Aboriginal conference and it is filled with “Black Fellow” humour.
Murdoch University
Mudrooroo had switched from the University of Melbourne to Murdoch University in Perth to finish his B.A. (Hons) which involved writing a thesis. From this Hyland House carved out Writing from the Fringe: a Study of Modern Aboriginal Literature in Australia (1990), a work of critical analysis that was criticised for being too harsh and dictatorial. A little later with Uncle Jack Davis, poet and playwright from W.A., Stephen Muecke, academic, Adam Shoemaker, friend and academic, Mudrooroo put together Paperbark, a motley collection of Aboriginal writings to which he added his novella, Struggling, based on a Bengali novel, by Sunil Gangopadhyay. Mudrooroo had been influenced in his poetry by the great Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore to such a degree that his Stradbroke Island Dreaming collection reflected some of his love for the land and nature; but the novel, Pratidwandi was about the city youth of Calcutta and how their distress and anger would lead to the Naxalite Revolution of the late Sixties and early Seventies. Yes, the suffering of youth can lead to revolt and rebellion.In 1991 the volume of poetry, The Garden of Gethsemane was published. The poetry had been written on Stradbroke Island and even in some of the parks and supermarkets of Brisbane. By then Mudrooroo had come across the poems of the Murri poet, Lionel Fogarty and was impressed by them so much that he attempted to follow their style by using words he found in the world around me. Most of this verse didn’t work and was discarded. In 1992 this volume won two Western Australian Premier’s book awards. In the same year he finished Wildcat Screaming in which he introduced his detective character Dr. Watson Holmes Jackamara. He later featured him in The Kwinkin, (1993) a novel set in Fiji which Mudrooroo wrote after meeting the Samoan writer, Albert Wendt who enlightened him about these so-called South Sea Island paradises. Dr. Holmes Watson Jackamara became his favourite creation with the ability through his acute mind to examine and see into the wiles of Australia. His last appearance was in the unpublished novel, The Survivalist.
Der Auftrag the Mission
Published in 1991 Master of the Ghost Dreaming was dreamt from the old Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World which transformed the square historical narrative into a Maban (Shaman) story of magic realism. It became Mudrooroo’s favourite book and had been written in Bungawalbyn away from civilisation on a hundred acres of solitude with a few cows and magic mushrooms and plenty of emptiness to fill with his dreams. This had started out as a screen play but then became a novel which would later develop into a series and then be abandoned when publishers abandoned him and he gave up writing for a long while. There he also put together the poems in the collection Pacific Highway Boo Bloos about Northern New South Wales which he found a fabulous place in which people actually could hear the spirits of Aborigines singing and dancing as well as see the giant prawn.In Master of the Ghost Dreaming Mudrooroo sought to enter the spirit world and perhaps wanted to live there forever, but the piece of land which he was renting came up to be sold in 1991. It was then that he came to Sydney for a meeting of the Aboriginal Arts Board and met Gerhard Fischer, a German Professor with an idea dating from the bi-centennial, linking together the French Revolution with the invasion of Australia in 1788. He wanted an Aboriginal text to interpenetrate or something like that with a play by the German playwright Heiner Muller, Der Auftrag. Mudrooroo decided to do it to see if it could be done in an Aboriginal way.
Mudrooroo was put in a house of the University of Sydney to do the play and given access to the library with the result he did a lot of reading on Victorian sexuality and discovered the broken backed woman. Strange sexuality was a strong part of Der Auftrag and it was a type of Victorian sexuality that he had to read about. In the library he discovered a whole collection of Gothic books which he found to have been written in the 18th century around the time Australia was invaded and settled. The 18th century was a Gothic monster which could not be ignored for long and it wasn’t. If monsters didn’t make it into the play they entered with a rush in the last three books of the Ghost Dreaming series set during the so-called spread of settlement along the southern coast of Australia, a Gothic series of events indeed. These three volumes are known as his Vampire books and are underground classics.
Professor Gerhard Fischer gave him the opportunity to roam in his mind and after six weeks or so he finished a script called The Aboriginal Protestors Confront the Declaration of the Australian Republic on 26 January 2001 with the Production of The Commission by Heiner Müller. Eventually after much rewriting and editing it was staged in Sydney and then taken to the European festival in Weimar where nearby were the remains of the concentration camp of Buchenwald where the Romany people had been imprisoned and murdered. This evil place provided the inspiration for Mudrooroo to attempt a drama in verse, Iphigenia in Buchenwald which has never been produced
After finishing his commission early in 1992 and being at a loose end after the stint working on the play, Mudrooroo accepted the position on contract for five years as the Coordinator of the Aboriginal Studies program at Murdoch University. During this time he wrote Us Mob—History, Culture, Struggle: An Introduction to Indigenous Australia. This won the Ruth Adeney Koori Award for Aboriginal writing in 1995.
Shamanism
Mudrooroo had always been interested in what is called "Shamanisn" and his Nepali wife's father is a natural shaman (that is, he didn't learn, instead, he had been taken by the spirits to do their work). Speaking to Aborigines from the desert with their culture to a great extent intact, he discovered that their minds were different. He termed this difference "maban reality". He theorised about this in a revised edition of Writing from the Fringe, titled The Indigenous Literature of Australia: Milli Milli Wangka which Anne Godden had urged him to finish so that it was a bit uneven. During this period he was always in a rush to finish some writing or other. In his journal he had mapped out an ambitious list of plots for a planned series of detective books featuring Doctor Holmes Watson Jackamara; but before that he turned to continue the adventures of the Master of the Ghost Dreaming and his band of men and women, the very last of the Tasmanian Aborigines seeking a spiritual home in a demon dominated world in which a female vampire grows in strength. The Undying (1998), Underground (1999), and The Promised Land (2000), are the three volumes written in his Master of the Ghost Dreaming Series.Controversy
In early 1996, a member of the Nyoongah community questioning Mudrooroo’s Aboriginality approached journalist Victoria Laurie. Informed that Mudrooroo's sister, Betty Polglaze, had conducted genealogical researchGenealogy
Genealogy is the study of families and the tracing of their lineages and history. Genealogists use oral traditions, historical records, genetic analysis, and other records to obtain information about a family and to demonstrate kinship and pedigrees of its members...
in 1992 that traced her family back five generations, Laurie contacted Polglaze who told her that she could find no trace of Aboriginal ancestry in the family. Laurie subsequently wrote an article for her newspaper titled Identity Crisis sparking a scandal that received nationwide media coverage in 1996/97.
Polglaze's research found that her family were direct descendants of Irish immigrants Edward and Jane Barron who had arrived in Western Australia in 1829 and that their paternal grandfather was Thomas Creighton Johnson, an African American who had arrived in the colony of New South Wales
New South Wales
New South Wales is a state of :Australia, located in the east of the country. It is bordered by Queensland, Victoria and South Australia to the north, south and west respectively. To the east, the state is bordered by the Tasman Sea, which forms part of the Pacific Ocean. New South Wales...
from North Carolina
North Carolina
North Carolina is a state located in the southeastern United States. The state borders South Carolina and Georgia to the south, Tennessee to the west and Virginia to the north. North Carolina contains 100 counties. Its capital is Raleigh, and its largest city is Charlotte...
in 1863 and who later married an Irish immigrant, Mary Gallagher, in 1868. Mudrooroo rejected the genealogy, suggesting that the mother listed on his birth certificate "may not have been" his real mother. His brothers and sisters requested he take a DNA test, which was declined. Similarly, a request by the Nyoongah community to substantiate his claimed kinship to the Kickett family was not acknowledged and on 27 July 1996 the Nyoongah elders released a public statement: "The Kickett family rejects Colin Johnson's claim to his Aboriginality and any kinship ties to the family". Mudrooroo's prior statements about Indigenous writers such as Sally Morgan
Sally Morgan (artist)
Sally Jane Morgan is an Australian Aboriginal author, dramatist, and artist. Morgan's works are on display in numerous private and public collections in both Australia and around the world.-Early life:...
, whom he excluded from his definition of Aboriginality, did not assist his cause. He had said of Morgan's book My Place
My Place (book)
My Place is an autobiography written by artist Sally Morgan in 1987. It is about Morgan's quest for knowledge of her family's past and the fact that she has grown up under false pretences. The book is a milestone in Aboriginal literature and is one of the earlier works in indigenous writing.-...
, that it made Aboriginality acceptable so long as you were "young, gifted and not very black." Mudrooroo's writings had placed emphasis on kinship and family links as key features of Aboriginal identity. His rejection of his biological family deeply offended the Aboriginal community.
The resulting scandal and public debate over issues of authenticity and what constitutes Aboriginal identity led to some subject coordinators removing Mudrooroo's books from academic courses and he later said he was unable to find a publisher for a sequel to his previous novel. Initially, many people came to Mudrooroo's defence, some claiming it was a "white conspiracy" or a racist attack on Aboriginality with some claiming Polglaze's "amateur sleuthing" was being exploited. Award winning Indigenous author Graeme Dixon called on Mudrooroo to come forward and tell the truth, stressing that it was important to "out" pretenders and reclaim Aboriginal culture. Several authors see evidence in his writings that Mudrooroo deliberately assumed an Aboriginal identity to legitimise his work when in his early 20s, although it remains possible he was unaware. Editor Gerhard Fischer believes that it was Dame Mary Durack who "defined and determined" his Aboriginal identity. In an article published in 1997, Mudrooroo described Durack's foreword to his first novel as the origin of the "re-writing of his body" as Aboriginal. Mudrooroo later replied to his critics, stating that his dark skin meant he was always treated as Aboriginal by society, therefore his life experience was that of an Aborigine. Mudrooroo retired from public life following the controversy, living for a time on Macleay Island
Macleay Island
Macleay Island is an island located in Moreton Bay, South East Queensland. It is in the Redland City Council Local Government Area and has the postcode 4184. Perulpa Island is a small attached to Macleay Island by a causeway....
off the coast of Queensland
Queensland
Queensland is a state of Australia, occupying the north-eastern section of the mainland continent. It is bordered by the Northern Territory, South Australia and New South Wales to the west, south-west and south respectively. To the east, Queensland is bordered by the Coral Sea and Pacific Ocean...
.
Later life
As the 21st century dawned Mudrooroo travelled to Nepal, where he married Sangya Magar, an Indigenous Nepali, on 22 May 2002. Thay have a son, Sam. In Nepal, Mudrooroo began writing his autobiography, which he began to consider his major work. It was then that he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, with perhaps only a few years to live. After an operation in November 2010, during his convalescence he did a three week Buddhist sutra retreat to get over his trauma. He laid in bed reading, studying and pondering these sutras: The Larger Sukhavati-vyuha, the Smaller Sukhavati-vyuha, The Vajrakkhedika, the Larger Prajna-Paramita-Hridaya-Sutra, the Smaller Prajna-Paramita-Hridaya-Sutra, the Amitayur-Dhyana-Sutra, the Vimalakirti-Sutra, the Suramgama-Samadhi-Sutra, and the Lotus Sutra in a translation by Burton Watson. After three weeks, he regained enough strength to get up and continue his autobiography, which he hopes to finish before his life ends. His older children, Kalu and Malika, hope to read about their Father's life one day.Editorials and essays
- Struggling, a novella, in Paperbark: A Collection of Black Australian Writings, edited by J. Davis, S. Muecke, Mudrooroo, and A. Shoemaker (Universityof Queensland Press, 1990), pp. 199–290
- The Mudrooroo/Müller Project: A Theatrical Casebook, edited by Gerhard Fischer, Paul Behrendt, and Brian Syron—comprises The Aboriginal Protestors Confront
- The Declaration of the Australian Republic on 26 January 2001 with the Production of The Commission by Heiner Müller (Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 1993)
- Tell Them You're Indian, An Afterword, in Race Matters: Indigenous Australians and "Our" Society, ed. By Gillian Cowlishaw & Barry Morris (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies P, 1997)
Sources
Maureen Clark Mudrooroo: a likely story : identity and belonging in postcolonial Australia Peter Lang (publishers) 2007 ISBN 905201356XMudrooroo: A Critical Study, by Adam Shoemaker (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1993);
Mongrel Signatures, Reflections on the Work of Mudrooroo, ed. By Annalisa Oboe (Cross Cultures 64, Amsterdam-New York, Rodopi, 2003).
The Work of Mudrooroo: thirty-one years of literary production, 1960–1991: a comprehensive listing of primary materials (including unpublished work) with secondary sources, compiled by Hugh Webb. Perth, SPAN: Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies , ed. By Kathryn Trees. Number 33 (1992).