Gillian Cowlishaw: The City's Outback. Sydney, UNSW Press, 2009. ISBN: 9781921410871. Online
Addressing the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People in 2004, Pope John Paul II referred to new waves of migration as the 'birthpangs of a new humanity'. Others speak of a new frontier similar to the migrant groups of earlier periods in Australia.
Mt Druitt and surrounding areas, with its large numbers of different
migrating groups, is one of the focal points of this new humanity. It is the new frontier.
Frontiers are times of opportunity but are also risky, raw and hard.
Just as Pope John Paul II emphasised the opportunities of a 'new humanity' as
well as the pangs of giving birth to new life, in The City's Outback Gillian Cowlishaw shows both the life and the pangs of this new frontier:
the hope and the despair, the visions and the realities, of Aboriginal
life in this youthful, growing, struggling and fascinating part of
Australia.
Mt Druitt bears another similarity to earlier Australian times, when Aboriginal people were at the forefront of encounter with the first colonisers. In Mt Druitt lives one of the largest groups of Aboriginal people in Australia: more than 7000 in the Blacktown local government area. One hopes the outcomes on the new frontier are happier than those encounters with the early colonisers.
Cowlishaw's great contribution is to enable Aboriginal voices to be heard. She has laboured amid the difficulties of this ethnographic task to hear voices not normally heard, certainly not in the public forum; as Frank Doolan (an Aboriginal man and central character in The City's Outback) would say, to hear voices 'talking under water'.
In the earlier frontier times we got little directly from Aboriginal informants. We heard less regarding Aboriginal perceptions of the encounters with the new arrivals. Cowlishaw strives to redress this in our time.
Apart from this key theme, Cowlishaw organises her work around several other themes: the pain and bewilderment of life ('History hurts'), the stories of stolen and broken family life ('Writing reconciliation'), survival in the urban environment ('Living skills'), and the struggle for identity — who or what makes you Aboriginal ('Authenticity'). These themes are captured in real stories. One needs to read them to get the flavour and the feeling and above all to see things through the eyes of the interviewees.
The struggle for Aboriginality