The City’s Outback
By: Gillian Cowlishaw, Publisher: UNSW Press
6 Apr 2009
The City’s Outback is a fragmented narrative that explores the lives of Indigenous Australians living in Mt Druitt while questioning the role and nature of ethnography. Cowlishaw renders scholarly discourse accessible to a lay audience, without oversimplifying. Her insights – into events, social situations and people’s motivations, including her own – are sometimes discomfiting and frequently startling in their clarity and frankness. However, Cowlishaw’s use of the present tense blurs the sense that almost ten years passed before she could grapple with these events in a coherent way. She writes that it was difficult to find the balance “between two kinds of failure as a fieldworker – rejection by and absorption into the group being studied”. This ambivalence is reflected in her authorial voice, which alternates between vernacular storytelling and a more formal tone; it is the subtle, but telling difference between writing about “whitefellas” and writing about “whiteness”. The City’s Outback is an engaging and thought-provoking read.
Rachael Quigley
Gillian Cowlishaw is an ARC Professorial Fellow with the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Her research focuses on relationships between Indigenous and settler Australians in Arnhem Land and in rural and urban NSW.
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