Author: Chaitali Bag
DOI Link ::
Abstract: Judith Arundell Wright was a poet and short story writer. She had thought and worked for the most tortured souls. One is for Australian Aboriginal people and other is their mother Nature. She was keen defender of the Aboriginal land rights movement. She has also campaigned for the Conservation of Great Barrier Reef and Fraser Island. As an environmentalist she portrayed nature profoundly in her poetry. One can discover natural landscape of Australia vividly in her poetry. After colonization the Aborigines lost their land as well as their culture. After arriving at the island the British settlers announced the land as terra nullis, i.e. no one’s land where the Aborigines have a large number of groups and different languages. They denied the individual identity and considered them as a single culture. The Aboriginal people lost their sacred ground, Bora where initiation ceremonies took place. Their festival, corroboree is also no more celebrated. Under the rule of the Whites they forgot the stories of Dreamtime. The song lines is also lost which carries the stories of Dreamtime. Their ecocentric life was also destroyed. In “Bora Ring” Wright has bemoaned for them. She recorded that how ‘alien tale’ engulfed the ‘tribal story.’ She also honoured their culture through this poem. The Aboriginal people are inseparable from Nature. Their pulse is nature. Urbanisation occupied the island. They are adopting the culture of the rulers. Colonization has changed their life and also of nature. The present paper entitled as “ Judith Wright’s Bora Ring: Postcolonial and Ecocritical Study” is going to connect the aftermath of Post colonialism and its impact on nature and human beings.
Keywords: Post colonialism, Ecocriticism, Bora, Corroboree, Dreamtime, Terra Nullis, Australian Aborigines