Resonating Opinions and Identities: Using Poetics Methods to Explore Non-Aboriginal Attitudes towards Aboriginal Reconciliation in Australia

Abstract

This article reports findings from an ongoing research project into non-Aboriginal attitudes towards Aboriginal reconciliation in Australia and Canada. The two countries share important details in their histories of mistreatment of Indigenous peoples as well as in their postcolonial attempts at reconciliation. Our research uses focus groups and an expressly poetic framework of analysis to explore quotidian or “less public†discourses about Aboriginal reconciliation in both countries. The public poetics approach used here lends itself to simultaneous exploration of both referential and textural elements of participant discourses within the focus groups. This leads to the finding that non-Aboriginal people in both countries conceive of aboriginal reconciliation as a highly transactional phenomenon – whose leading parties are a non-Indigenous “us†and an Indigenous “them†in each case.