Of Rembarranga, Tiwi, Macassan, and Chinese descent, Marie Munkara’s first book, Every Secret Thing, won the David Unaipon Award and the Northern Territory Book of the Year Award. She has also published another collection, A Most Peculiar Act, in addition to two children’s books, Rusty Brown and Rusty and Jojo.

Excerpt from Cambria Press Publication
Giving This Country a Memory (Chapter 5: Marie Munkara )

“The humour here is a powerful vehicle for revealing the contradictions between doctrine and practice; […] It seems to be laughing in the face of what Munkara described as the “church’s angst about sex and their morbid interest in the sexual practices of others” (36). It targets the hypocrisy of the Church for whom an expression of repentance is assumed to obviate the guilt that arises from sexual predation (9). However, the story also works to confer a carnivalesque agency and energy on the indigenous characters that is absent in the characterisation of the mission mob. The bush mob on occasion have the capacity to mimic their oppressors, to perform white culture, and to take up white culture’s expectations and demands of Aboriginal people, without sacrificing their own bodily imperatives and personal and political agendas.” (p.177)

Giving This Country A Memory: Contemporary Aboriginal Voices of Australia by Anne Brewster is part of the Cambria Australian Literature Series, headed by Susan Lever.

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