'The life, the loves, of that dark race': The Ethnographic Verse of Mid-Nineteenth-Century Australia.

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  • Author(s): O'Leary, John
  • Source:
    Australian Literary Studies. 2007, Vol. 23 Issue 1, p3-17. 15p.
  • Additional Information
    • Subject Terms:
    • Subject Terms:
    • Abstract:
      The article describes ethnographic verse in Australia in the mid-nineteenth century. Ethnographic verse is a distinctive kind of verse that poets produced about Aboriginal people before, or during the very first phase of, European colonization. There were two types of ethnographic verse in Australia, namely, the tribal dramas, which described the life of pre-European aboriginal people in the course of narrating a story of love, death and revenge, and the retellings of tribal legends or Dreamtime myths. The purpose of ethnographic verse was underlined by the use of extensive endnotes and appendices explaining various aspects of pre-European Aboriginal culture, as this was understood in the midnineteenth century.