Towards a Hybrid Discourse: The Poetry of Mudrooroo

The Song Circle of Jacky and Dalwurra: The Black Bittern are probably Mudrooroo's most successful post-colonial works. In the texts he produces a form and a content that do not subsume or marginalize an/Other; instead he liberates his writing from colonial discourse and generates a hybrid form that accepts and inscribes difference. While there may be some minor slippages in language and form that repeat the marginalization of colonial discourse, both texts produce a hybrid discourse that includes Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals, escapes the vortex of the Manichean Allegory and undermines binary classifications. The Song Circle of Jacky and Dalwurra produce a hybrid discourse that combines two distinct archives, the Aboriginal and the non-Aboriginal, by speaking from the space where European and Aboriginal discourses 'spill into each other'.1