Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 June 2025
In this section, I want to comment briefly on the approach I followed in my personal interview with Lionel Fogarty on March 17, 2017. The approach that I adopted in this interview was that Fogarty's responses were recorded, transcribed, and published as part of my book. However, there is a striking difference between my transcriptions and those of Professor Muecke in his ground-breaking Gularabulu: Stories from the West Kimberley (1983, 2016). Muecke's aim was to imitate the spoken word of Aboriginal Elder Paddy Roe, and, thus, to incorporate “into the printed text some of the expressive devices of Roe's oral art, the use of his voice, the repetitions and seeming untidinesses that all other editors had conscientiously erased from the record” (Hodge and Mishra 1990, 83). Fogarty is not necessarily performing his answers in my interview. While Muecke's innovative editorial strategies incorporated into the printed text some of the expressive devices of Roe's oral art, I have, with Fogarty's permission, removed these instances from the transcribed text of the interview while being mindful of the need to avoid what Muecke calls “over-editing.” Fogarty is highly aware of the problem of over-editing of Aboriginal “oral text”:
I think you have all the permission from me to translate, edit, or rearrange my writing to advantage myself as well as other Aboriginal writers in this country because we will not ever lose the meaning. Politically we will always have that connection for our poetry to change together, to revolutionize the ideas of education in wisdom and wiseness of cause. We do not want westernized people to really interpret or translate Indigenous oral text in English because they do not know about our experience or they do not have similarities with our struggle. (Fogarty, personal communication, March 17, 2017)
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