Two Traditions, Held Without Apology

Unaipon preached Christianity for most of his adult life and wrote down Ngarrindjeri and neighbouring Aboriginal narrative, and he did not present these as competing loyalties. His retellings are recognisably his own: he wrote in an elevated English prose built out of Milton, Bunyan and the King James Bible, and he set Aboriginal narrative in a frame a British readership of the 1920s would recognise as literature.

Later readers have taken that two ways. One reading treats the Christian and literary framing as a distortion imposed on the material, and prefers narratives recorded in language and closer to performance. The other treats it as the point: a Ngarrindjeri man in the 1920s, in a country that would not let him hold a full patent or vote on the ordinary terms, chose the most prestigious available register in order to argue that Aboriginal narrative belonged in it, and made that argument in the writing rather than in a preface. This atlas homes him under Christianity, because that is the tradition he professed and preached and it would be wrong to assign him another. His standing in the Aboriginal material is recorded by an explicit link instead, and it is real and of a different kind: he is the first Aboriginal Australian to have written the tradition down for publication, and the man whose authorship of that record was taken from him and later returned. He died in February 1967, months before the referendum that changed how the Constitution counted Aboriginal people.