Black Spice for White Lives: A Review Essay

Abstract

There is a rapidly growing body of literature appearing in which Aborigines and their cultural property are cast in the role of saviours to an allegedly ailing and decadent West. In Australia these wider concerns provoking settler-Australians to fossick amidst Aboriginal cultural property and identities are usually subordinate to the more parochial interests of, amongst other matters, overcoming supposed settler alienation from landscape. It is the broader concerns, however, that are primarily responsible for Aborigines attracting the interest of foreign writers. The accounts of these author’s ‘pilgrimages’ into Aboriginality reflect this different prioritising of concerns. This review essay provides a critical examination of one such account.