This creative practice-led thesis is in two parts - a novella entitled Leaning into the Light and an exegesis dealing with issues for creative writers who are non-Indigenous engaging with Indigenous characters and inter-cultural relationships. The novella is based on a woman's tale of a cross cultural friendship and is set in a Queensland Cape York Aboriginal community over a period of fifteen years. Leaning into the Light is for the most part set in the late 1960s, and as such tracks some of the social and personal cost of colonisation through its depiction of Indigenous and non-Indigenous relationships within a Christian run mission. In short, Leaning into the Light creates an imaginary space of intercultural relationships that is nevertheless grounded in a particular experience of a 'real' place and time where Indigenous and non-Indigenous subjectivities collide and communicate. The exegesis is principally concerned with issues of non-Indigenous representation of indigeneity, an area of enquiry and scholarship that is being increasingly theorized and debated in contemporary cultural and literary studies. In this field, two questions raised by Fee (in Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, 1995) are key concerns in the exegesis. How do we determine who is a member of the Aboriginal minority group, and can majority members speak for this minority? The intensification of interest around these issues follows a period of debate in the 1990s which in turn was spawned by the &quotunprecedented politicisation of {Australian} history" (Collins and Davis, 2004, p.5) following the important Mabo decision which overturned the &quotnation's founding doctrine of terra nullius" (ibid, p.2). These debates questioned whether or not non-Aboriginal authors could legitimately include Aboriginal themes and characters in their work (Huggins, 1994; Wheatley, 1994, Griffiths, et al in Tiffin and Lawson, 1994), and covered important political and ethical considerations, at the heart of which were issues of representation and authenticity. Moreover, there were concerns about non-Indigenous authors competing for important symbolic and publishing space with Indigenous authors. In the writing of Leaning into the Light, these issues became pivotal to the representation of character and situation and as such constitute the key points of analysis in the exegesis.

Cette recherche présente une lecture des textes poétiques de deux auteurs indigènes contemporains: Hugo Jamioy Juagibioy et Anastasia Candre Yamacuri. Dans leurs œuvres, ils évoquent des pratiques culturelles et des expressions rituelles des groupes ethniques auxquels ils s’identifient. Ce pourquoi cette étude établit des liens entre les textes poétiques et les contextes culturels où se déroule l’art verbal des camënstá et múruimuina, respectivement. Dans la première partie nous encadrons cette analyse dans une perspective conceptuelle, historiographique et critique dans le débat académique qui réfléchit sur l’incorporation des expressions littéraires de racine orale dans le domaine des études littéraires. La deuxième partie comprend deux chapitres à propos de l’œuvre de chaque auteur. Chaque chapitre expose une analyse qui se partage entre l’herméneutique littéraire et une approche documentaire et ethnographique des contextes rituels évoqués dans leurs œuvres. De cette façon, nous constatons que ces auteurs mettent en lumière la dignité de leurs langues maternelles, ainsi que les formes d’expression symbolique de leurs groupes ethniques vis-à-vis de la société majoritaire. De plus, leurs textes expriment des formes alternatives d’interprétation du monde à partir d’un exercice complexe de traduction qui constitue une poétique particulière. / This research focuses on two contemporary indigenous authors and their poetic texts: Hugo Jamioy Juagibioyand Anastasia Candre Yamacuri. In their work, these authors evoke cultural practices and ritual expressions ofthe ethnic groups which they identify with. Bridges between the poetic texts and the cultural areas where theCamëntsá and the Múrui-Muina verbal art exist, will be proposed. In the first part, I will analyze conceptually,historically and critically, the academic debate about literary expressions with oral roots that have beenincluded in the field of Literary Studies. The second part is divided in two pieces, each one focusing on one ofthe authors. An analysis between literary hermeneutics and ethnography on the ritual contexts and culturalpractices that the authors mention in their texts will be used. In celebrating in the society at large their ownnative language and the symbolic expressions of their ethnic groups, Candre’s and Jamioy’s texts propose aunique poetics based on a complex translation exercise, and an alternative interpretation of the world.