B. Wongar

B.Wongar
Born	Sreten Božić 1932
Occupation	writer and anthropologist

B. Wongar (born 1932 as Sreten Božić) is an Australian and a Serbian writer and anthropologist. For the most of his literary career the concern of his writing has been, almost exclusively, the condition of Aborigines in Australia.

Božić grew up in the village of Gornja Trešnjevica, near Aranđelovac, Serbia, then Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In the mid-1950s, he started his writer's career by writing poetry which he published in the Mlada kultura and the Novi vesnik literary journals. He was a member of the "Đuro Salaj" workers-writers group in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. At the same time worked as a journalist in Serbia. Yugoslav communists found his writing politically incorrect and banned him from journalism for lifetime. In 1958 he moved to Paris France where he lived in a Red Cross refugee camp. There he met Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and published his literary works in Les Temps Modernes.

Božić arrived in Australia in 1960. In his search for a job (construction worker, miner) he bought a camel in order to cross the Tanami desert where he was lost and about to die. He was saved by a tribal man which made him live with tribal Aborigines for ten years. The name B(anumbir) Wongar, which means morning star and messenger from the spirit world, was given to him by his tribal wife Dumala and her relatives. From Dumala he learned about Aboriginal poetry and their traditional way of life in the bush. This way he was introduced to Aboriginal culture suppressed and treated as worthless by British colonial power for centuries. His first book The Track to Bralgu is a collection of stories based on traditional Aboriginal stories belonging to the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land, NT, Australia. The book was translated into French as Le Chemin du Bralgu , from the original manuscript and published in Les Temps Modernes (1977), a magazine which was edited by Sartre and de Beauvoir. When the book appeared in the English edition a year later (Jonathan Cape, UK; Little, Brown, USA), it heralded a new genre of creative writing and brought international fame to the author. In Australia however Wongar was criticized by some white people for his portrayal of the Aborigines and there was a campaign to discredit his work as "fake". He was not allowed to stay any longer in the Northern part of Australia and had to move to Melbourne. His wife Dumala and the children were to follow but they died from drinking water from a poisoned well, as claimed later in Dingoes Den, his autobiography (at the end of Chapter 12). While he was in the Northern part of Australia Wongar worked on his Totem and Ore photographic collection known also under the title Boomerang and Atom. The collection contained several thousand black-and-white photographs portraying the impact of uranium mining and the British nuclear testing on tribal Aborigines. In 1974 Wongar was asked to send some of the Totem and Ore photographs for an exhibition in the Parliament House Library in Canberra. The exhibition was banned by order of the Australian parliament only a few hours after the official opening.

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