Author: Mudrooroo
First Published: 1998
Contains spoilers
The Blurb:A daring and thrilling journey into a fantastical world of shamans and vampires where aboriginal Dreaming and Gothic horror are woven together to create a powerful and seamless narrative.
I'm the stranger with strange habits which make me avoid the full light of day, enter into the warm circle of your fire and will exchange my yarn for your company...
The stranger, George, tells a story of wonder and horror. Jangamuttuk, his father and Master of the Ghost Dreaming, is a shaman with ceremonies to send the white ghosts back to their own world. But the ghosts keep coming, settling on the land and destroying the local people. Initiated into the Dreaming, George learns the secret of transforming into his animal companion, Dingo, and discovers the thrill of the hunt. But he is not alone in his lust for blood. Amelia, the white woman, shares his appetite, feeding on humans and animals to maintain her terrible power.
The Review: When I came across this in the chapter Australia and New Zealand Vampires of Palgrave’s Handbook of the Vampires I knew I wanted to read a book that drew vampires into Indigenous Australian belief and was written by an Indigenous writer. What I was not expecting, until I read the book and then researched for this review, was the controversy around Mudrooroo’s status as an Indigenous writer. Born Colin Johnson, he changed his name in 1988 but his claim to Indigenous heritage was questioned in 1996 and his sister, Betty Polglaze, had done some (incomplete from what I can tell) genealogy that traced their ancestry mainly back to European settlers, with some African American heritage. Whether his ancestry did contain Indigenous heritage, was a literary hoax or was a misplaced but sincere belief, I cannot begin to posit. He was, of course, Australian and his work deserved to be covered in the chapter I discovered it in, though mention of the controversy was something that should have been included. I will say that, as I read it, my first reaction was that its style owed much to the Beats – and, within the research I did, I have picked up that his first novel was “heavily influenced by the poetry of Ginsberg and the prose of Kerouac”.
For the book itself, however, it must be stated that this is the second of the Master of the Ghost Dreaming series. I read it without the benefit of that first book but was not lost in doing so. The first book was about a group of Indigenous people in Tasmania who were ruled over by a “ghost” called Fada – ghost being terminology for the white settlers, thought to be spirits or returned dead and Fada being a thinly veiled version of the historical George Augustus Robinson. Jangamuttuk finds a song that allows them to escape Fada and this volume starts with the survivors on a stolen schooner, helmed by African Wadawaka (later identified as a freed man, through Britain’s abolitionist movement, whose imposed name – John Summer – likely conflated two historic identities. Jonathan Strong and Somerset, 2014). The story is told by George, Jangamuttuk’s son and details them finding the mainland, George’s first hunt in which he tastes (wallaby) blood and gains a fever that awakens his spirit animal – the blood drinking dingo. They then, in the dreamtime, encounter a bat creature who, in a melee, manages to drink of his blood and he accidentally drinks of its. That bat is the animal form of Amelia, a blonde-haired white woman from London who happens to be a vampire.
This vampirism is Euro-centric, with her needing to sleep on native earth, avoid sunlight and able to hypnotise victims. Sharing of blood allows her to create a servant – though George, who she later terms “her dog”, had a vampiric tendency anyway. She is, however, recognised by both George’s mother and Wadawaka (separately) as a vampire. The former calls her a blood sucker and the latter calls her a subagu (I couldn’t find an origin for the term). This euro-centric aspect is further underlined by her making a (bogus) shaman her servant and calling him Renfield (though this is devolved to Renfiel as it is the closest that he can pronounce). The book also has a werebear (of the polar variety) who is one of the colonisers.
I found the book a strange brew of western ideas, Australian Indigenous lore (though I cannot say how authentic this was) and a brutal commentary on the colonisation of the continent. The language, as I mentioned, was reminiscent of the Beats and that drew me into the world Mudrooroo created. I have no idea if his claimed racial heritage was real or not but I certainly enjoyed this book. 7.5 out of 10.
In Paperback @ Amazon US
In Paperback @ Amazon UK
For the book itself, however, it must be stated that this is the second of the Master of the Ghost Dreaming series. I read it without the benefit of that first book but was not lost in doing so. The first book was about a group of Indigenous people in Tasmania who were ruled over by a “ghost” called Fada – ghost being terminology for the white settlers, thought to be spirits or returned dead and Fada being a thinly veiled version of the historical George Augustus Robinson. Jangamuttuk finds a song that allows them to escape Fada and this volume starts with the survivors on a stolen schooner, helmed by African Wadawaka (later identified as a freed man, through Britain’s abolitionist movement, whose imposed name – John Summer – likely conflated two historic identities. Jonathan Strong and Somerset, 2014). The story is told by George, Jangamuttuk’s son and details them finding the mainland, George’s first hunt in which he tastes (wallaby) blood and gains a fever that awakens his spirit animal – the blood drinking dingo. They then, in the dreamtime, encounter a bat creature who, in a melee, manages to drink of his blood and he accidentally drinks of its. That bat is the animal form of Amelia, a blonde-haired white woman from London who happens to be a vampire.
This vampirism is Euro-centric, with her needing to sleep on native earth, avoid sunlight and able to hypnotise victims. Sharing of blood allows her to create a servant – though George, who she later terms “her dog”, had a vampiric tendency anyway. She is, however, recognised by both George’s mother and Wadawaka (separately) as a vampire. The former calls her a blood sucker and the latter calls her a subagu (I couldn’t find an origin for the term). This euro-centric aspect is further underlined by her making a (bogus) shaman her servant and calling him Renfield (though this is devolved to Renfiel as it is the closest that he can pronounce). The book also has a werebear (of the polar variety) who is one of the colonisers.
I found the book a strange brew of western ideas, Australian Indigenous lore (though I cannot say how authentic this was) and a brutal commentary on the colonisation of the continent. The language, as I mentioned, was reminiscent of the Beats and that drew me into the world Mudrooroo created. I have no idea if his claimed racial heritage was real or not but I certainly enjoyed this book. 7.5 out of 10.
In Paperback @ Amazon US
In Paperback @ Amazon UK
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