Doctor Wooreddy's Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Doctor Wooreddy's Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World is a 1983 novel by the Australian writer Mudrooroo , in which the colonization of Tasmania is viewed from the perspective of the Aboriginal Wooreddy. He witnesses the humiliation and systematic extermination of the Tasmanian natives.

content

Born and raised on Bruny Island , southeast of Tasmania , Wooreddy had a vision as a child that would shape him for the rest of his life. He learns that the end of the world is near and decides to survive at all costs until that point. As an adult, he allied himself with the missionary and later " Chief Protector of the Aborigines ", George Augustus Robinson , and accompanied him on his expeditions through the Tasmanian bush. During these forays , Wooreddy establishes contact with several Aboriginal tribes for Robinson. By largely adapting to the colonizers, he and his wife Trugernanna (also known as Truganini ) manage to hold out to the end. The end of the world brings the Aborigines to the end of all life as they know it: the death of their tribes and almost all of Tasmania's indigenous people.

Brief interpretation

In Doctor Wooreddy's Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World , contrary to the representation in the occidental chronicles of the Europeans, the ignorant, uncivilized, inhuman is. The invaders, as Robinson's example illustrates, are unable to see the worth of the culture they are examining. They fail to recognize the social structure of indigenous communities as well as the complexity of their languages.

With a few passages in the text, Wooreddy's perspective of the events is given priority by the author. In contrast to romance addicts like Robinson, he observes in a scientific manner - hence his nickname "the good doctor". Combined with his mythical knowledge of the interrelationships of the world, which the elders passed on to him, he draws conclusions about the causes of the processes around him and his possible reaction to them.

Still, Mudrooroo avoids replacing one ethnocentric view of historiography with another. Rather, at the end of the novel, he reveals the bias of this portrayal of the events by letting the basis on which Wooreddy judgments are based collapse. Mudrooroo takes up deceased indigenous personalities and individual incidents from the history of Tasmania in order to create their own, equally fictional construct.

swell

  • Arthur, Ketryne. "Fiction and the Rewriting of History: A Reading of Colin Johnson". Westerly , 1 (March 1985), 55-60.
  • Fielder, John. "Postcoloniality and Mudrooroo Narogin's Ideology of Aboriginality". Span , 32 (April 1001), 43-54.
  • Johnson, Colin (Mudrooroo). "Captured Discourse; Captured Lives". Aboriginal History , 11: 1-2 (1987), 27-32.
  • Kerr, David. "The Last Tasmanians as Tragic Heroes". Overland , 111: 59-63 (1988 June).
  • MacGregor, Justin. "A Margin's History: Mudrooroo Narogin's Doctor Wooreddy's Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World ". Antipodes , 6: 2, 113-118 (1992).
  • Narogin, Mudrooroo. "Private Voice, Public Reception: The Journals of GA Robinson". Island Magazine , 33 (Summer 1987), 41-46.
  • Tompkins, Joanne. "It All Depends On What Story You Hear": Historiographic Metafiction and Colin Johnson's Doctor Wooreddy's Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World and Witi Ihimaera's The Matriarch . Modern Fiction Studies , 36: 4 (1990), 483-498.