He attended Guildford Grammar School in Perth as a boarder.[1] His mother was a journalist and his father was a farmer. As a young child Weller was encouraged by his grandfather to write.[2]
Weller's first book, The Day of the Dog, was written, in his own words, "within a period of six weeks in a spirit of anger after his release from Broome jail for what he regarded as a wrongful conviction".[2]
Weller's second novel, a fantasy novel entitled Land of the Golden Clouds, was published in 1998.[1]
The title story in the collection Going Home deals with the complexities of the Aboriginal identity in Australia. It is set in the 1980s, and the protagonist has succeeded at university. He excels at sports, studies art and does paintings that are admired by the white community. But in achieving this acceptance he has turned his back on his home and his family. He feels white, but at the same time he is proud to be black. On his 21st birthday, nostalgia for his roots leads him to return to the camp of his birth, only to discover that his new "white" identity is invisible in the darkness of ignorance and prejudice. Another story in the collection, "Herbie", is about a white boy named Davey who witnesses the killing of an Aboriginal boy and though he is cruel to the boy and offers no resistance to the boys who eventually result in his death, the boy sympathises with Herbie's mother and shows remorse.[3]
In 1993 The Day of the Dog was made into a film entitled Blackfellas, directed by James Ricketson and co-written by the director and Weller.[6] It won two AFI Awards in 1993.[7]
^Christine Matzke, Susanne Muehleisen Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective 2006 "Archie Weller has written less formal stories including his novel The Day of the Dog (1981),12 which shows how young people of native stock become pressured into social exclusion and towards crime."
