B. Wongar (Banumbir Wongar) Biography

Australian novelist and short-story writer, born Sreten Bozic in Gorna Tresnevica, Serbia, where he was educated at the local school; he emigrated to Australia in 1960. He adopted his Aboriginal name (meaning ‘messenger from the spirit world’) after he began living with tribal Aborigines in the Northern Territory. Several collections of his short stories, including The Sinners (1972) and The Track to Bralgu (1978), and the play Balang an Village (1973) appeared in the course of the 1970s. The depth of his imaginative immersion in the tribal culture is such that he was taken to be an Aborigine until his identity was disclosed in 1981. His central achievement is the novel trilogy Walg (1983), Karan (1985), and Gabo Djara (1987), which fuses Aborigine and Serbian oral traditions in its complex mythological and historical evocation of the collison of Aborigine culture and western modernity. Wongar's other publications include the short stories in Babaru (1982), Marngit (1992), and The Last Pack of Dingoes (1994).