Australian Aborigines’ Reconstructed History in Robert Merritt’s Play,The Cake Man

One of the parts and parcels of postcolonial literature is to deconstruct the history written by imperialism and to present the one as experienced by the colonized. As victims of British colonialism, Australian Aborigines have always mirrored the historical religious and territorial subjugation of their land in their writings, especially in their dramatic literature because of its high popularity and social impact. Robert Merritt’s The Cake Man is an important dramatic text in Aboriginal literature which explores forced conversion and resistance to it. The play’s reexamination of history as experienced by the colonized makes it a suitable target to study the application of Althusserian philosophy to postcolonial literature. Because of the recurrent exposure of colonial ideology and “ideological state apparatuses” in The Cake Man, it can be concluded that Althusserian theory can be an illuminating background to investigate historical concerns of postcolonial literature.