Wanda Koolmatrie

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Wanda Koolmatrie was an Indigenous Australian pseudonym used by white Australian Leon Carmen.

In 1994, the Aboriginal publishing house Magabala Books published a novel entitled My Own Sweet Time. The author was supposedly Wanda Koolmatrie, an aboriginal woman born to the Pitjantjatjara people in 1949. She was taken from her mother in 1950, becoming one of the stolen generation raised by white foster parents. The book was supposedly her autobiographical account. In 1996 the author received the Dobbie Award.

When Koolmatrie offered Magabala a sequel to the book in 1997, the publishers demanded to meet her for editorial discussions. It turned out that the real author was a white Australian taxi driver named Leon Carmen. In a later interview, Carmen claimed that he tried to break into the Australian literary market and believed he could not get his book published otherwise.

[edit] References

• Wanda Koolmatrie (2004). My Own Sweet Time. Trafford Publishing. ISBN 1-4120-3378-0.