Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Western Sydney, 2006. / A thesis submitted to the University of Western Sydney, College of Arts, School of Communication Arts, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Includes bibliography.

This thesis is about the depth of colonisation through translation. I develop an analytic framework that explores colonisation and translation using the trope of romantic love and an experimental textual construction incorporating translation and historical reconstruction. Utilising both the first and the final drafts of “Chapter X, Songs of Human Beauty and Love-charms” in Songs of Central Australia, by T. Strehlow, I show how that text, written over thirty years and comprised of nine drafts, can be described as a translation mediated by the colonising syntax and grammar. My interest lies in developing a novel textual technique to attempt to illustrate this problem so as to allow an insight into the perspective of a colonised person. This has involved a re-examination of translation as something other than a transtemporal structure predicated on direct equivalence, understanding it instead as something that fictionalises and reinvents the language that it purports to represent. It begins by establishing an understanding of the historical context in which the translated text is situated, from both objective and personal viewpoints, and then foregrounds the grammatical perspective of the argument. Utilising the techniques and processes of multiple translation, Internet-based translation software, creative writing and historical reconstruction, it continues to consider the role of imagination and begins the construction of a visceral argument whereby the reader is encouraged to experience a cognitive shift similar to that understood by the colonised other, which is revealed in a fictional autobiography written by an imagined other. It concludes by considering the coloniser within the same context, using, as an example T. Strehlow, who had a unique understanding of the Arrernte language. Tracking his extensive alterations, revisions and excisions within his drafts of Chapter X, this thesis traces a textual history of change, theorising that the translator, no matter how "authentic", is as much translated by the text as she or he is a translator of the text. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)