MUDROOROO'S DOCTOR WOOREDDY'S PRESCRIPTION JOR ENDURING THE ENDING OF THE WORLD: APPROPRIATING AND UNDERMINING WHITE OFFICIAL CULTURE FROM THE ABORIGINAL/(UN)OFFICIAL FRINGE

Abstract

During the last three decades, the writing of Indigenous peoples in white settler colonies has emerged and developed as a potentially powerful catalyst in the undermining of the white official establishment. Since Aboriginal Australians also believe that writing is an important means to articulate self-definition, in their works they systematically strive to emphasize the importance of their own spiritual tradition and to bring to life Koori cultural memories. Yet what turns out most striking is that they also see, and proclaim themselves as still colonized never free of a history of white occupation. In a word the emphasize that Aboriginality forms a hybrid and quintessential part of Australia. The aim of this paper will therefore be to explore how Mudrooroo’s novel Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the world oscillates constantly and subversively between what is native and the culture of the colonizer, and makes use of different registers and of a mixture of fantasy and humour in order to adopt and uphold ambivalence and hybridity as the most outstanding mark of identity of its eponymous seer-hero, thus making it obvious that nothing is absolute that “truths” and “official knowledges, are never whole pure and unquestionable. Paradoxically enough then it is he co-existence of the two cultures or rather said, the subservient position of Aboriginal culture with regard to while culture that allows for the preservation of the Koori “cultural matrix” (as Mudrooroo puts it) and thus for the radical questioning of the very foundations of the white official establishment.