Published in Overland Issue Print Issue 200 Spring 2010 Main Posts / Reviews Dreaming the Concrete Jungle Simone Hughes The City’s Outback explores the deprivation of the blackfella experience and documents intergenerational trauma in the ‘concrete jungle’. Cowlishaw asks: ‘Can the mythic “we” actually offer Aborigines, “them”, equality, self-determination, “our” respect or understanding?’ Reconciliation, as it presently stands, can only be recognised in impersonal terms – as an abstraction, of crimes perpetrated by ‘others’. The City’s Outback is based upon an ethnographic study conducted in Mount Druitt, a suburb in western Sydney. Cowlishaw introduces Frank Doolan, a blackfella who helps her find Aboriginal people to interview – ‘the people of the place’ living within the city’s ‘subordinated self’. Doolan is an agitator, poet, protector, confidant and mediator. He recognises something woeful in a world that ‘systemically damages Aboriginal lives’. Cowlishaw, an ARC Professorial Fellow at UTS, is familiar with Australia’s race-related difficulties. She has produced several accounts before, including Rednecks, Eggheads and Blackfellas: Racial Power and Intimacy in Australia (1999) and was the winner of the Gleebooks Prize for Literary and Cultural Criticism in 2004 with Blackfellas, Whitefellas and the Hidden Injuries of Race. She wants her account to mean something beyond the usual ‘talking under water’. Despite the public expressions in the media, the politicking, the whitefellas ‘shit-eating grin’, an arduous question remains: how to tackle the problem of Aboriginal control of their own self-representation? Simone Hughes More by Simone Hughes Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays 1 First published in Overland Issue 228 14 December 202225 January 2023 Reviews The moral risk of taking things too seriously: on Gareth Morgan’s When A Punk Becomes A Spunk Elese Dowden In his review of Lucy Van’s The Open, Gareth Morgan writes that Van writes 'against the impulse to ponder dutifully about the sins of the past and present.' This fucked me up for some time. What is it to ponder dutifully? But perhaps more importantly, how do we ponder in a way that's more … metal? First published in Overland Issue 228 1 December 20226 December 2022 Reviews Calling the racist a racist: Janaka Malwatta’s blackbirds don’t mate with starlings John Kinsella Malwatta is a skilled and motivated user of tone and tonality in expression, and he shifts between perpetrator and victim with a disturbing but powerful ease: we hear the racists in the hospital, we hear them at the barbecue, and we hear the racism coming from the mouths of white leaders and dissemblers.