When Mary Ann Hughes complained in 1998 that critics were preoccupied with the process of editorial collaboration that shaped Australian Aboriginal texts, she argued that this focus led to the neglect of the literary merit of the work. While the collaboration of mainstream writers with editors primarily went unremarked, “in the case of an Aboriginal writer, the role of the editor in constructing the work is the issue which most readily springs to the fore” (56). Hughes remarked upon the then decade-long critical determination to materialize the traditionally invisible craft of editing. This critical preoccupation ran parallel with the second wave of Aboriginal life writing (Brewster, 44), which witnessed the transformation of Aboriginal publishing from marginal to mainstream, reaching beyond the local to global audiences (Haag, 12). The exponential increase in the publication of Aboriginal life writing was accompanied by the politicization of publication processes, including coproduction, that have conventionally been kept from public view.

Sally Morgan's best-selling life narrative My Place (1987), a watershed in Australian Aboriginal publishing, also prompted critical interest in the politics of collaboration. Australian critics responded with skepticism to the mass-market appeal of this multivoiced life story, which capitalized on burgeoning interest in Aboriginal affairs fostered by the celebration of the bicentenary of white settlement in Australia. Aboriginal scholars found a “soft analysis” (Huggins and Tarrago, 143) of the colonial past that allowed for a “catharsis” of white settler guilt (Langton, 31).