Practices of Proximity investigates the appropriation of the English language taking place in the Australian literary contact zone between an official ‘white’ Australia—the apparent owners of both the land and the English language—and Australian Indigenous peoples. Rescuing the debate from seemingly peripheral locations—the ‘empty’ Great Sandy Desert, or the abject urban margin—it insists on the complex, ultimately open-ended and multilateral ownership of the English language by all who inhabit the intersubjective space of literature, rendering the inherited authority of who...