[3] His 1978 short story collection, The Track to Bralgu, was released to critical acclaim by the foreign press, who were led to believe by publisher Little Brown that Wongar was of Aboriginal ethnicity.
[4] The revelation that Wongar was a Serbian immigrant, as well as inconsistencies in his life story, have led to controversy and allegations of literary hoax and cultural appropriation.
There he met Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir who helped him to publish his literary works in Les Temps Modernes.
[citation needed] The name B(anumbir) Wongar, which means morning star and messenger from the spirit world, was said to be given to him by his tribal wife Dumala and her relatives.
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, it heralded a new genre of creative writing[citation needed] and brought international fame to the author.
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).
The collection contained several thousand black-and-white photographs portraying the impact of uranium mining and the British nuclear testing on tribal Aborigines.
[13] Wongar settled on his bush property Dingo Den in Gippsland, south of Melbourne where, helped by photographic images from his Totem and Ore collection, he wrote his "Nuclear Trilogy", comprising the novels, Walg, Karan, and Gabo Djara.
Within Australia there is a widespread obsession with Wongar's biographical credentials to the extent that it eclipses any review of the fictional texts as part of Australian writing.
[citation needed] There are a variety of Wongar's moral indictments ranging from being a white who usurped Aboriginal culture to the claim saying that all artists are charlatans, who con the public.