Wanda Koolmatrie, My Own Sweet Time

Leon Carmen's deception in publishing a novel, My Own Sweet Time, about a young Australian Aboriginal woman under the name ‘Wanda Koolmatrie’ has elements in common with the other examples discussed in this study. Like James Frey and the authors of Jiri Kajane's Winter in Tiranë, Carmen presented himself, in the wake of his fraud's exposure, as a literary artist manque whose writing only gained a positive reception when published under an assumed identity. Unlike Frey, Carmen published his work as a novel rather than non-fiction, although the context of his imposture had meant that My Own Sweet Time was described as an ‘autobiography’ or instance of ‘life-writing’. As in the case of the Yasusada poet's imitation Hiroshima survivor, the particular identity Carmen took on led to ideological contestation, although in this instance it did not take place alongside acknowledgement of the novel's literary identity, but tended to submerge it.

Wanda Koolmatrie's novel My Own Sweet Time was published in Australia in 1994 by Magabala Books, a government-funded publisher that describes itself as ‘a not-for-profit organisation to preserve, develop and promote Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures’. The following year, the novel won the Nita May Dobbie Award for a first book by a woman writer and was placed on the shortlist of the 1996 New South Wales Premier's Award for Literature. In her author biography, Koolmatrie was said to have been born ‘in the far north of South Australia’ in 1949, taken from her Pitjantjara mother in 1950 and ‘raised by foster parents in the western suburbs of Adelaide’. ‘Koolmatrie’ was the surname of Wanda's late husband Frank, so that her own family heritage was not disclosed.

It is partly the overlap between what turned out to be two fictions – that of the novel itself, and that of its author's biography – that led to descriptions of My Own Sweet Time as autobiography rather than fiction, even though no claim about the link between the two was asserted in the book itself.