摘要：Mudrooroo is a black Australian writer who has ostensibly been focused on responding to particular national concerns, namely stories of first contact between Indigenous and non- Indigenous Australians and the need to restore Indigenous primacy to the creative rendering of that encounter. And yet the creative construction of this encounter in Mudrooroo’s writing is presented through a series of exorbitances; a string of across, through or beyond positions which exceed any source, so much so as to reveal the nationalist origin to be illusory. Postcolonial nationalist literature is always a paradoxical search for the originary, a desire to find an essence from the past that will reveal and define the nation in the present. As Ken Gelder has argued using J.M Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, while European literatures are activities in depth, writing for themselves, colonial national literatures attempt to ‘reveal’ the newly constructed nation to others.1 In fact, all literature is simulation, a representation not the real. But the newly emerging national literature of the colonial state has much to prove. In the case of Australia – national myths and the early national literatures echoing such myths – were, in turn, drawn from colonial dystopian and utopian fantasies.2 These included the fantasy of a land full of opportunity and involved a desire to continue the connection to the imperial motherland yet assert a new, vibrant and cohesive identity that belied the reality of Indigenous dispossession. In the process, early nationalist literatures can fail to acknowledge the illusory nature of the national myths that inform them and can make opaque their simulation and construction of identity
