The generic labels that get put on texts such as these are connected to how close what seems to be the authorial voice is to that of the narrator. Personal autobiographical lifewriting has a documentary effect, it gives the reader the sense of being told the truth. In fact, Langford Ginibi has explicitly stated that she is not producing fiction:

The Acknowledgments tell us that Don't Take `is a true life story of an Aboriginal woman's struggle to raise a family of nine children in a society divided between black and white culture in Australia.' When Langford Ginibi was born in 1934, it was the Depression and conditions were particularly hard. Housing, health and education have been, and continue to be, key issues for Aboriginal people. Even years later, in the 1960s, things many of us take for granted were luxuries for families like hers: alone with eight children and trying to get housing from the APB, she has 'fantasies about getting a roof over the kids' heads and having taps, and floors' (108). On one occasion, when she is going into labour, she has to walk to the hospital; on another she has to carry her daughter, Pearl, who has bronchitis, four miles to find a doctor; no help was available. When another daughter, Ellen, is at high school, the mother is told by the headmaster that she has been fighting. Ellen's explanation is: `The girl I hit called me a dirty abo, so I decked her' (175).

Even today, Langford Ginibi does not see a dramatic improvement, either in relation to ideas having changed or wealth being distributed more equally. `I say to people that say that there's no racism in this country, paint yourself black for a day and see how well you fare' (Interview, 1994: 118). As she put it in a later book: `There are two types of people who inhabit Australia: there's the rich and the poor, and I don't mean just that it's Aborigines who are the most disadvantaged' (My Bundjalung People, 45).

Intersecting with poverty and racial discrimination is the specific oppression associated with gender. There has been much debate about whether sexism, or racism, or class oppression under colonisation and capitalism, has been the primary negative factor in Aboriginal women's experience. Langford Ginibi's life as a woman is affected by racism, and her life as an Aboriginal person affected by sexism. Often it is hard to separate the issues, though there is a gender-specificity to some of the differences between the experience of being black (and very often poor) of Aboriginal women and men.

In reading an Aboriginal woman's autobiography like Don't Take, what contributes to a sense of its truth-effects are such things as the informal mode of address that has some affinities with oral expression, and the candour with which Langford Ginibi describes a number of painful and sometimes embarrassing experiences.

Earlier practices of colonisation forced certain roles, two in particular, upon Aboriginal women. One was that of `black velvet' (sexually available and `promiscuous'), the other was that of the upstanding, moral pillar of the family. Until recently, Aboriginal women writers have been wary of depicting their characters or themselves as the former, perhaps because of concerns about reinforcing a stereotype. Langford Ginibi's friend Pammy, an Aboriginal artist, with whom she travels back to her Bundjalung country says as part of a speech that she makes there:

Don't Take is unusual in presenting a sexualised self, just as Tracy Moffat's film, Nice Coloured Girls, was pioneering in this way when it first was shown. Almost all the other women writers of Aboriginal autobiography are reticent; their narratives hint at secrets too difficult to tell. Alternatively, or as well, to withhold information can be a strategy of resistance. This is a central theme of Sally Morgan's My Place. The Murrie writer, Jackie Huggins, when she was working on her mother's biography, Auntie Rita, was told by Rita Huggins:

Often what is hard to talk about is sexual and other violence from white men in a historical situation where the sexism and sexual oppression encountered by women is compounded for black women by racism. Langford Ginibi is comparatively explicit about this: `My grandmother was a full-blood. She was raped by an Italian, the banana plantation owner up home, Billy Nudgell, that's how my mother came to be. You see' (Interview, 1994: 105). Even more extreme economic inequality than many white women have experienced exacerbates the effects of domestic violence. Langford Ginibi is beaten up by Sam earlier, and later by Lance, though, by contrast, when the boys are in their early teenage years and have run away from home and Ruby asks Lance to 'give them a good belting', he only pretends to do it and hits the beds instead (128).

Langford Ginibi does not shrink either from talking about another source of some shame - how she begins to drink to excess, and her children have to come to the pub looking for her. While she attributes her heavy drinking partly to the death of Pearl (which she felt so badly that she would go up to the cemetery at Botany and sleep on her grave, 149) she does not deny that she also enjoyed the destructive activity of excessive drinking:

It took some years before she realised: `I'd started drinking when Pearl died and twelve years later it hadn't drowned my sorrows. Every morning when I woke up my sorrows were there again, worse if I was hungover' (216).

There are some common features to the experiences of black and white women (writers). Using writing as a tool for consciousness raising, and writing in such places as at the kitchen table in the middle of the night when the children are asleep (Don't Take, 226), are two that are frequently discussed. Langford Ginibi had no 'room of her own' then: her early formation as a writer came in 'the times I had to myself - the men gone to work and the kids still asleep - and I sat on the bank fishing and thinking about life' (83).

There are also some significant differences between black and white women's writing, produced not only negatively by the racism, sexism and class factors I mentioned before, but also by racial and cultural difference, asserted as a positive thing. Singularity is the objective of traditional autobiography; in Aboriginal women's writing, identity is achieved as an extension of the collective. Langford Ginibi has commented: 'this is not only my book, my story, it's the story of every Aboriginal woman in this country today that's got kids to raise. I'm only one' (Interview, 1994: 114). History and family history is written; Langford Ginibi is proud to have been able to trace 'five generations of Koori experience' (Interview, 1994: 103).

Caring and sharing is very much a feature of Aboriginal lifestyles depicted in writing like Don't Take, and it is often contrasted with a self-centredness and a lack of warmth and generosity in the colonising culture. Within the family and extended family in particular, relationship is created and maintained. Langford Ginibi is abandoned by her mother, but later reunited with her, to some degree. Her aunt's extended family becomes hers, as well as other relatives. Even deceased members of the family have a continuing presence. Writing and publishing her story gives Langford Ginibi a way of recreating those relationships, as well as rewriting a more general history and, beyond that, when she finishes her book, she knew she could `examine my own life from it and know who I was' (269). The Nyoongah writer and critic, Mudrooroo, suggests that Langford Ginibi became explicitly political and entered activism through the initial act of writing Don't Take.

Jan Labarlestier has commented that Aboriginal women's life-writing: 'is a challenge to the ways in which Aboriginality has been constructed in dominant "white" discourses. In contemporary Australian society, "living black" [the title of an anthology by Kevin Gilbert] and writing about it can be seen as a process of political confrontation' (90). Langford Ginibi's earlier political involvement with groups like the Aboriginal Progressive Association had been curtailed by Lance who demanded to know why she didn't stay at home to look after the kids 'instead of running around to meetings' (118). From her own personal experience later of her son Nobby being in jail, she starts taking an interest in black deaths in custody when (for the moment) she has spare time, with only Jeff left living at home to be looked after. Soon she has her granddaughter Jaymi too, until her father David dies of a drug overdose, and she goes back to her mother. The socially destructive effects of hard drugs, and the inability of various organisations to rehabilitate the casualties of an oppressive syystem lead Langford Ginibi to trying to find out how David got the drugs: 'but everyone I spoke to was so pathetic, and all in their own private hells' (227).

For Langford Ginibi, writing is also a way of articulating the pain of all these experiences; she recalls how 'back in the room I'd run to hide my hurt' (Interview, 1994: 102); 'I can assure you that everything that's written in there is true, because I've got the scars to prove it' (115), she also comments. These are both scars on the body and scars on the mind. Later, she tells her Aunt Alma, 'I don't want to get upset any more about Nobby . . . But reading this, I'm getting upset about everyone' (257).

However, what Langford Ginibi also does is consistently refuse the status of victim, as someone the reader should be sorry for. She comes over as brave and bold, and her use of humour is one of the main contributing factors to this effect: 'Aboriginal humour is our survival mechanism' (Interview, 1994: 111). This is found both in the use of language with jokes such as 'the gubbament' (coined from 'gubba' meaning white), to more detailed incidents such as when she has found out that her boyfriend, Lance, is sleeping with her best friend and drifts into a cinema searching for escape, only to be confronted with 'close-ups of giant bodies and their sexual desire, doorieing everywhere'(119). Another later Langford Ginibi book, Real Deadly (1992), has an amusing story called 'Perfumes.' She has bought herself two bottles and her friend Margaret comes to visit her.

The song 'Don't Take Your Love to Town,' by Kenny Rogers that Langford Ginibi has used as her title, she recalls, 'an old boyfriend used to sing that to me. That fella that I wrote about in there, Georgie, who was heaven's gift to the women of the world. Or he thought he was' (Interview, 1994: 114). She wryly comments on how, by 1971, after a number of attempts to be a couple, she felt: 'I'd taken my love to town too many times' (170).

The difference in the situation of Aboriginal men and women in a racist society is apparent in both their lives and their writing, which expresses, as in the Epigraph from Bobbi Sykes' poem, 'the accumulated pain of two centuries,' the overcoming of experiences that have produced, as in the Walt Whitman Epigraph, a sense of being 'jagged and broken.'

Families are broken up, men wander off or get incarcerated. When Ruby has six children and her relationship with Gordon is collapsing, she talks to her friend Midge about men, 'and how hard it was to find one who didn't mind the responsibility and kept on loving you, and had a sense of humour' (85). Gordon turns out just the same as Sam. Wryly looking back on this later, she can say to her son-in-law, Steve, that she will only get married again 'When I can get a man who can look after me better than I can do myself'(170). She also comments of her friend of thirty-eight years, Nerida: `the only time we had a row was over a man, and we didn't think it was worth losing our friendship over' (221).

Writing by Aboriginal men including Archie Weller and Mudrooroo often expresses a sense of alienation, arising out of experiences similar to those of Nobby and his friends. Women are to some extent compelled to be those who hold the family together. This is not initially what Langford Ginibi's own mother did, she went away with her baby when Ruby was young, leaving the other children with their father; and it is her father who for the time being holds the family together, along with Uncle Ernie Ord. Soon however, in Sydney, Langford Ginibi's mother has another family. This loss produces some anguish for Langford Ginibi, and her reaction then is: 'I promised myself if I ever had kids I'd never leave them'(10). When they later on run into their mother at the markets at Botany Road, she comes towards them crying and clearly wanting contact, the father refuses to allow this to happen for quite some time. Langford Ginibi meets her mother again and is invited to her house. The emotions are so high, however, that when told by her mother that she should keep away from Sam Griffin, 'he's no good,'(52) and Langford Ginibi retorts 'You don't have to worry about me now, you never cared before,' this upsets her mother so much that she physically attacks her. They don't meet again for another three years.

Don't Take depicts a world where youth get into trouble with the gungies, get put into institutions, take risks with hard drugs, kill themselves, or die in a prison system that Langford Ginibi describes as 'killing our sons like a war' (224). All this time the mothers, and often the sisters, are supposed to be always there, holding everything together. Langford Ginibi was - but the accumulated stress of this was enormous. Talking of her friend of thirty-eight years, Nerida, she comments:

There is some ambivalence in Langford Ginibi's representation of being a mother, and of all the pain involved in the fight for survival. In 1984, she is living in Allawah hostel in Granville, 'for people who'd raised their families and didn't want to become live-in baby-sitters for their kids' (267). She has her 'first holiday away from my children in thirty-three years . . . and I needed to stop thinking about them for a while, and calm myself' (229). The enormous load of responsibility borne by mothers in particular can produce immense strain. Langford Ginibi recalls how she wrote to Nobby that his being in jail was as painful (in different ways) for his family as for himself:

The question of what kind of audience this text seems to expect is an interesting one. As Jackie Huggins has pointed out: 'let's face it, there are more whites than blacks who read books out there. So are you looking at a book that's going to be basically written about blacks and called black? Or are you looking at the market which is predominantly white and, in a sense, appeasing their consciences about blacks, because that is what they like?' (Interview 143). Langford Ginibi has suggested: 'the truth is just to educate people) mostly non-Aboriginal people) about how we really are' (Robinson Interview, 1993: 13). Langford Ginibi's writing has, then, an element of the didactic. It is designed to teach, and to foster understanding.

However, in her view, good writing must also have 'the humour, the drama, all the emotions, the laughter, the tears) everything. You can mix the past with the present, bring them back in and out of the story like you're weaving something' (Sandham Interview, 1993: 13).

Don't Take, then, is part of a group of Aboriginal women's autobiographical texts but in some ways it advances their frontiers, particularly in its greater explicitness than usual about aspects of sexuality and sexual oppression. This has also been a feature of much writing since the 1970s by non-Aboriginal women writers but, as I have pointed out, taking account of issues of race adds extra dimensions to the readings that can be made, including those which focus on issues of gender, and can help build solidarity between women from different racial and ethnic backgrounds in struggling against the still-prevalent discrimination based upon gender.

Carole Ferrier
Associate Professor of English at the University of Queensland
Editor of Hecate

Carole Ferrier teaches courses on gender, race and class in relation to literature in the English Department at the University of Queensland, and has also been an activist in these areas for many years. Since 1975, she has been editor of the feminist journal, Hecate.

Further Reading

Ferrier, Carole. `Aboriginal Women's Narratives.' In Ferrier, ed, Gender, Politics and Fiction: Twentieth Century Australian Women's Novels, Second expanded edition, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1992.

Huggins, Jackie and Isabel Tarrago. `Questions of Collaboration.' Interview with Carole Ferrier. Hecate 16, 1/2, 1990.

Huggins, Rita and Jackie Huggins. Auntie Rita. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1994.

Labarlestier, Jan. `"Through their Own Eyes": An Interpretation of Aboriginal Women's Writing,' in Gill Bottomley et al., eds. Intersexions: Gender/Class/Culture/Ethnicity, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991.

Langford Ginibi, Ruby. `Ruby Records Her History.' Interview with Sonya Sandham. SMH, 26 June 1993.

Langford Ginibi, Ruby. `Author to Help Discover New Talent.' Interview with Judy Robinson. SMH 17 July 1993.

Langford Ginibi, Ruby. Interview with Janine Little. Hecate 20.1 (1994): 100-121.

Langford Ginibi, Ruby. Real Deadly. Sydney: Angus and Robertson 1992.

Mudrooroo. Interview with Janine Little. Hecate 19. 1 (1993): 143-154.