The Last Pack of Dingos.

Ross, Robert L.

It is generally known now that B. Wongar is not an Aborigine but Sreten Bozic, a Yugoslav immigrant to Australia (see WLT 64:1, pp. 34-38). In fact, the stories themselves should reveal the double identity of the writer. On one level they reflect the assumed B. Wongar side by the thorough knowledge of Aboriginal life and lore that is embedded within. On another level, however, they carry the Sreten Bozic European sensibility that expands the Aboriginality. Through this peculiar wedding of the appropriated native Australian sources and the European influences, the essentially didactic stories shed all traces of didacticism and manage to teach without teaching. B. Wongar's "Nuclear Cycle"--the three novels Walg, Karan, and Gabo Djara--possess the same quality, as do his other collections of short stories. This oeuvre simply has no parallel in Australian fiction, whether of Aboriginal or Anglo-Celtic origin. Instead, it comes across as a kind of Aesopian-Kafkaesque-Aboriginal invention.

The Last Pack of Dingos offers an engaging preface about the author's supposed experience which is as farfetched and imaginative as the twenty-seven stories that follow. In all the stories the Australian wild dogs play the main role while both Aborigines and white Australians act in supporting parts to such unlikely protagonists. In fact, B. Wongar dedicates the book "To the Pack"--presumably the dingos he actually keeps on his country property. (The Last Pack of Dingos was appropriately launched during a party at an Australian dingo reserve.)

Some of the stories are less than a page long, others three or four pages, but they are all characterized by a tight structure that makes each one memorable. Throughout, a strong message prevails: that those of British and European descent who settled Australia have during the past two centuries exploited the land and in turn destroyed those who dwelled on it for thousands of years before the First Fleet arrived in 1788. One historical fact repeated in story after story--a kind of macabre leitmotiv--is the British-sponsored nuclear testing in the Australian desert that polluted not only the land but also those who lived on it. Another oft-repeated actuality pertains to the uranium mining on Aboriginal land by Australian and international companies. Vivid pictures of the barren, drought-stricken, ruined landscape recur in all the narratives, as dingo heroes attempt to return from white man's captivity to their ancestral homes, only to find a wasteland--literally and figuratively.

Although the stories remain bleak in outlook, they do find relief in their unlikely comedy; for example, the final story, "Dingos 777," emerges in part as a comic revision of the Gulf War. Another bright quality lies in the charming illustrations by the Aboriginal artist Yumayna Burarwana. The disarming simplicity of these drawings contradicts the dark prose they illustrate.

B. Wongar's work, like his identity, brims with contradictions. Therein lies the appeal of his original fiction, which has so much to say about injustice.

Robert L. Ross University of Texas, Austin