INDIGENOUS CHARACTERS IN AUSTRALIAN FICTION
Copyright © Carmel Bird
2002.
All rights reserved.
This text was delivered as a talk at the University of Granada in December 2001
AN OVERVIEW OF THE PRESENCE OF INDIGENOUS CHARACTERS IN AUSTRALIAN FICTION
Recently in a bookshop in Sydney, a colleague of mine was launching her new novel. It was a contemporary novel about a crime. There were no Aboriginal characters in the story, and no Aboriginal issues or questions either. Yet a woman in the crowd made the comment that the author had not, in this novel, dealt with the current Aboriginal issues. It was a very strange comment. It was a comment which, just a few years ago, would have been virtually impossible to frame. The idea that a reader would now have an expectation that a contemporary Australian novel absolutely must display some attitude to matters of Aboriginality is a very twenty-first century idea. Novelists have always found rich inspiration and material in the question of how Europeans and Indigenous people in Australia have related to each other since the late eighteenth century, but it is really only now that readers might be expected to demand a position on the question in the fiction that they read. The questions of the relationship between Indigenous and Non-indigenous in Australia have always been questions that fiction writers could never ignore, and the imperative grows ever stronger.
What I tell you today will be like a story in itself. Some parts of the story will be familiar to you. I am going to select for discussion, from the short history of literature in Australia, a number of texts with which to illustrate the path of Aboriginal characters in the fiction. In order to place these texts in their context, I will also draw a picture of the history of the relationship between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous people in Australia. I have provided for you a list of works in which there are Indigenous characters. This list, while not exhaustive, is much longer and more detailed than the list of novels my talk will be able to cover. It is very humbling for me to contemplate the sweep and complexity of the Australian fiction which has been inspired by the history of contact between the races in Australia. I hope I am able to give you a picture of the development of this narrative, using the works I have selected to highlight along the way.
Until white Englishmen came to Australia and stayed there in 1788, the continent had been the home, for thousands of years, for regional tribes of Indigenous people with highly developed cultures, and with many different languages.
The language of the discourse of this arrival of white people has changed over time. The white people were described as colonisers and settlers, but are now frequently described as invaders, conquerors, thieves, and murderers. Perhaps the key word in the current discourse is ‘reconciliation’, freighted with the idea that black and white Australia need to come together with understanding in order to go forward. All the words are not without their own elements of difficulty, being unacceptable to some groups on one side or other of the debates. To put it crudely, one side of the debate describes the other side as wearing a black armband of mourning for the past, while the other side of the debate describes their opposites as wearing the white blindfold. It will be clear enough to you that I could be accused of wearing the black armband.
The colonial discourse of otherness in one form or another permeates Australian life and literature. (My own language for white and black Australians is actually unstable – you will find that I move uncertainly from Indigenous to Aboriginal to black. Sometimes my language is dictated by the times – if I am speaking about present-day fiction or events, I generally say Indigenous, but if I am discussing nineteenth century fiction, it feel it is more apt to say black.)You must realise that the history of the contact between Indigenous and Non-indigenous people in Australia has been a short one – 1788, when New South Wales was established as a prison colony, is not so very long ago. Dominant white Australia celebrates the year 1788 as the beginning of the nation; black Australia mourns the date as the beginning of the end of their civilisation. It is a complicated story of conflict, as such stories can be expected to be, and has all the elements required of fiction. But because any fiction that takes its inspiration from the relationship between black and white in Australia is finding its material in the recent and highly sensitive past, and in the shadows which that past must cast on the present, the task of the writer of fiction is particularly delicate. The fiction will often state dominant conservative cultural views, and then will sometimes enunciate a new and radical view, inserting into the conflict itself a powerful spur towards change in attitude. The role of fiction in the attitudes to race in Australia has been as a reflector and as an agent of both conservatism and of change. The guiding emotional response of white to black in Australia has historically been fear, both physical and psychological. Such fear often has a paralysing and mutilating effect on the realities of relationships of any kind, and when the psychic fear of another race is located in the heart of the oppressor of that race, the twists and turns of personal and bureaucratic response are likely to be very complex indeed. The colonial projection of fear of the Other is located in the Aboriginal people, and added to this is the evidence of a profound and generally un-acknowledged guilt. And with the guilt goes denial. All this was, from the early nineteenth century when Australian fiction began to be written, naturally feeding into the composition of fiction. Part of fiction’s brief is to make meaning of the puzzles of reality. In Australia these were and are amazing and devious, labyrinthine and powerful puzzles.
In a lecture of this length, having chosen a subject of such complexity, I can really only give you an overview of the key texts. I hope I will lead you to look more widely and closely at the literature where you will discover more about the multi-facted nature of the topic. Hence the list I have given you of the titles of the works I will discuss, and many that I will not.
In a sense the woman who commented on the absence of Aboriginal issues in a work of current fiction was right on track, and it has become – I say this as a writer of fiction – difficult not to include the issue of race in the writing of fiction, because the questions are so urgent and so current, so perpetually present in one’s heart. For a time, as I will explain later, Australian fiction was marked by a stereotype of the Indigenous character, but from the middle of the twentieth century this position became gradually less and less viable in serious fiction. It is possible to chart the conflict between the races in non-fiction documents such as letters and official papers and biographical material, but my own interest is in the construction of the Aboriginal characters in the fiction, although there is sometimes an overlap in the genres of fiction and non-fiction.
In the nineteenth century, the fiction inspired by the everyday life of the soldiers, settlers, and convicted criminals could scarcely ignore the presence of Indigenous characters. These characters were generally stereotypes – there was, early on, some attempt to see Indigenous people as noble savages, but they quickly transformed into violent and treacherous savages; innocent stupid childish adults; grotesque ugly primitives; filthy brutal cannibals; like animals; to be patronised, pitied, and lampooned. They were treated with suspicion, and used as slave labour, the women sexually abused. They were also employed as trackers, translators of the mysteries of the landscape. But in my understanding, it is generally fair to say that they were as a people relegated to the lowest rung of society, below the convicted criminals – who treated them with vigorous derision, pleased to assert their own superiority over another group. The destruction of Aboriginal culture was accomplished (by neglect, brutality, misunderstanding, disease, violence, massacre, and alcohol) alongside the construction of a European colonial society, and the fiction was written, and is being written, alongside and within the conflict. You can see the ambiguities and paradoxes inherent in the situation. A whole race of people has been displaced, and while the fiction inspired by this displacement was first of all inscribed by the displacer, there has been a move in recent years whereby fiction written by the descendants of the displaced is being published. I think in particular of a the work of Aboriginal writer Kim Scott whose novel Benang won major literary prizes in 2001.
The body of non-fiction, autobiographical work by Indigenous writers is now often published, and this writing does much to educate Non-indigenous Australians about he realities of Indigenous lives across the past two hundred years. My Place (1987) by Sally Morgan, is an account of the writer’s family experience of racial and class prejudice, and is a much celebrated and widely read text. In 1997 a government report on the tragic lives of Aboriginal children who had been officially removed from their families in an attempt to see them absorbed in some way or other into the dominant white culture was published, and contained the testimonies of the people, come to be known as the Stolen Children. It is a document that has revealed to Non-indigenous Australians an aspect of their society that was previously concealed, and it has had a powerful effect in changing the perception of many Non-indigenous towards Indigenous people and issues.
To return now to the history of fictional Aboriginal characters. Of course it took some time for Australian novels to be imagined, written, and published. In 1843 Charles Rowcroft published Tales of the Colonies, and in 1846 he published The Bushranger of Van Diemen’s Land. Rowcroft was born in London in 1798 and was educated at Eton. He became a free settler in Van Diemen’s Land in 1821, and returned to England in 1843, becoming editor of a magazine. Tales of the Colonies is written in the form of a fictional journal, and in it Aborigines are characterised as the violent enemy savages who threaten the well-being of the white farmer. They are drawn as stereotypes.
James Tucker, who is believed to have been the author of Ralph Rashleigh which was published in 1852, was a convict born in Bristol in 1808. This
novel is a fictional reminiscence of a convict’s life. The main character, Reuben Kable, escapes from prison and becomes first a bushranger and then a member of an Aboriginal tribe. The life and ceremonies of Aboriginal people are described, and Reuben is finally murdered by Aborigines. His sojourn with the tribe could have been inspired by the real life of William Buckley, a convict who lived for many years with the Watourong people who believed him to be the reincarnation of a dead chief. Buckley was not murdered by his hosts, but returned to white society and became an official interpreter of Aboriginal language. The most recent text to dramatise Buckley’s story is Ghosting William Buckley by Barry Hill (1993).
In Ralph Rashleigh there is a vivid account of an Aboriginal attack on a settler’s cottage where the family waits in terror. This scene, inspired as it was by the realities of frontier life, became, predictably, a staple of early Australian fiction.
Another novel from the middle of the nineteenth century is The Emigrant Family by Alexander Harris. Harris was born in London in 1805, and spent time in Australia as a free settler between 1825 and 1840. The novel was published in 1859, and explores many aspects of Australian life, showing the how the Aborigines despised the convicts as the scum of white society, while the convicts, simply because they are white, regard the Aborigines with contempt. The drama of this mutual hatred is like a vein of dark glittering mineral, or a strain of disease, or a fault line running through much Australian fiction.
There was an earlier novel, published in 1830, and possibly written by a woman, Sarah Porter, about whom little is known. It is called Alfred Dudley - or - The Australian Settler. It is the narrative of a man who becomes a wealthy owner of farmland in New South Wales, and who attempts to construct there a replica of his lost family estate of Dudley Park in England. He includes in his estate community a number of Aboriginal people who seem able to live side by side and in harmony with the white people. This note of early generosity and philosophical optimism was seldom stuck again. It is worth noting that Alfred Dudley was written before the massacre of Aborigines by whites at Pinjarra in Western Australia 1834.
The governor of Western Australia took a party of 25 mounted soldiers and police and surprised a tribe of Aborigines at Pinjarra in the early morning. The raid was in reprisal for the theft of some flour and for suspected murders of whites. The official records say that fourteen Aborigines were killed. Aboriginal accounts claim that a whole tribe of about 300 people died.
Then in 1838 in New South Wales a group of settlers surprised, shot, and incinerated twenty-eight Aborigines at Myall Creek. Most of the dead were women and children. This was a highly controversial case, with seven of the white men being tried and executed for the killings.
After events such as these, the dire and bitter conflict between the races became embedded in the fabric of the fiction, one way or another, and it would take a long time for writers – and the society as a whole – to begin to work through the issues involved and arrive at a place in 2001 where Kim Scott could write Benang, and where Benang could be celebrated within the literary community. And of course there were many more massacres throughout the country as time went on. These were often denied, and some continue to be denied.
One of Australia’s greatest poets is Judith Wright who died this year. In 1959 Judith Wright published a family memoir called The Generations of Men which recounts the narrative of her family history in rural New South Wales and Queensland. This is the story – beautifully told, taken from letters and journals – of white landowners, and I have always been struck by the thoughts of one of the women, May, in the 1870s. May is looking at the Aboriginal servant women:
‘They ate with the dogs, they had no pride, May thought; yet there was pride in the way they spoke and acted. Could they have souls? …It did not seem possible to her.’
May is a thoughtful, kind, good, intelligent woman, and yet she is unable to place the Aboriginal women in her own human category, allowing them human souls. They are heroic but pitiable, and this strain of pity runs deep in the dealings between nineteenth century Indigenous people and their dominant Non-indigenous masters, and runs through the fiction alongside the contempt and the cruelty and violence. It surfaces in the depiction of the degeneration of the black race into lazy, drunken, criminal drifters on the edges of cities and towns, and into the stereotype of the ignoble savage dressed in rags. These people came to be known as ‘fringe dwellers’. (In 1961 a novel The Fringe Dwellers by Nene Gare was published. This novel examines the loves of people who are part-Aboriginal, living on the edges of Australian towns. It is possible the Nene Gare invented the term ‘finge dwellers’ – I am not sure.)
And from the beginning, there was the hot issue of the relationship between white men and black women. The matter of Black Velvet. You can see how all this might be rich material for the writing of fiction, but also how, since the writer was living in the midst of the situation, it was also highly problematic material. It must have been hard to tease out the meaning, even harder sometimes to construct meaning within the frame of fiction.
The fiction of the second half of the nineteenth century shows little questioning of the racial stereotypes. The binaries of colonial discourse are generally embedded in the texts. There is violence and counter violence and added to the Aborigine’s catalogue of stereotypes is that of treachery and betrayal. In Robbery Under Arms (1888) Rolf Boldrewood tells the story of Captain Starlight, a white bushranger whose assistant Warrigal is part Aboriginal. Warrigal betrays the bushrangers.
The contact between blacks and whites had taken on the nature of warfare, and was in fact known as ‘the land wars’ as the traditional owners fought their losing battle with the invaders. Rosa Praed was a six year old child living near Hornet Bank in Queensland when men of the Jimman tribe raped and massacred the white Fraser family in a dawn raid of reprisal for the rapes and deaths of their own women. This massacre became a focus for widespread white reprisal, and casts its shadow, I think, to the present day, over rural Queensland. Rosa Praed’s family moved from the area after the massacre. Rosa became a writer, and in an autobiographical work My Australian Girlhood she describes her great affection for the Aborigines on the family station. But in her novel Fugitive Anne (1902) the principal character of the white woman shows a stereotypical fear and sexual ambivalence towards the black man. She brings the racial conflict to the centre of her novel Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land (1915) which traces the aftermath of a white family which has been massacred by blacks.
I want to digress slightly for a moment, and raise the matter of Aboriginal myths and legends. For by the beginning of the twentieth century an interest in these traditional stories had developed, and a Victorian poet,
George Mc Crae, who died in 1927, expressed in his poetry his belief that an understanding of the myths would bring greater understanding of the people, and could work towards a peaceful solution to the violent, tragic, and bloody events which continued to colour Australian life. Myth would be a bridge from black culture to white consciousness. It was a wise and visionary idea, and its progress can be followed to the present day where there is a wealth of story that moves from the ancient Indigenous legends into the lives of people in the twenty-first century. Such cultural enrichment and exchange is not without its problems, for Indigenous people are protective of the sacred nature of their myths, and Non-indigenous readers must approach with great sensitivity. Indigenous people have a specific attitude to the ownership of stories, and the reality and importance of this attitude must be respected. It isn’t really like copyright – it’s more as if the story is part of the person or the people who own the story. So to transgress is to break a sacred taboo. In the middle of the twentieth century Roland Robinson and others collected and published many Aboriginal myths and legends, and it is a fact that by the publication of these stories Non-indigenous Australians have developed a greater awareness and understanding of Aboriginal culture. The first Aboriginal to publish a book was David Unaipon. He published Native Legends in 1929. In the later part of the century writers such as Oodgeroo Noonuccal also published legends – Aboriginal people speaking their own stories. The question of the ownership of stories as distinct from copyright became an issue in publishing.
Much of the work with the myths, in white literature, has been done in the area of books for children, where there is also a lot of writing that focuses on Aboriginal characters. I will discuss a few of these books, since they are a very significant chapter in the story of the Aboriginal presence in Australian fiction. The early fiction for children is particularly revealing of the narratives the adults were creating and privileging. These narratives embody the ideologies which state the superiority of whites, of men, of the British, of Western culture generally, and in their positioning of the Aboriginal characters as either infantile or as primitive savage, they feed into the belief that white and right will prevail, and that the black people will and should die out and make way for a decent white society. The power of these children’s texts can not be under-estimated in the shaping not only of the literature, but of the society itself. It is both reflector and constructor of the anxieties, tensions, and contradictions of the culture. The texts write into the consciousnesses of children the language and values the culture promotes to those children. This may (and often is in Australia) later be subverted by some adults, but generally, with the majority of unreflective readers, it can be expected to go deep into the consciousness and to perpetuate itself, at least to a certain extent. I realise I am putting forward a perception of novels for children as weapons against change – there is in fact quite a culture of nostalgia in Australia for the novels of children’s writers Mary Grant Bruce and Mrs Aeneas Gunn.
Mary Grant Bruce and Mrs Aeneas Gunn were writers for children, and both lived from the 1870s to the nineteen fifties, early sixties. There work had a profound influence on the young readers of the greater part of the twentieth century, and can therefore be considered to have played a part in the construction of the literature written by the adults who had read them. Girls in particular would collect Mary Grant Bruce’s Billabong Books in the way that children of today, in a more hyped and hysterical way, collect Harry Potter.
Aeneas Gunn’s Little Black Princess, published in 1905, is a highly significant text in that it is the first to have an Indigenous character in the central role. However, the sensibility is not that of the black child. The child is seen from the outside, and is viewed with patronising, sentimental amusment and tolerance. She is something between a loveable idiot and a rather stupid domestic animal. The wild bush Aborigines – called niggers – are hunted down like game. The Aborigines kill cattle. The pastoralists shoot the Aborignies. That’s the way things are. The narrator is a white woman who finds a black girl child in the bush and takes her home to the station, treating her like a pet animal. She names the child Bett-Bett, the double diminutive name placing the child as infantile, inferior, amusing, primitive, sweet, Other. This is the other as pet, and like a dog the child herself will delight by her faulty imitation of more human ways. The title of the book is instructive in the extreme – for Bett-Bett is little, she is black, and her status as a princess is a sentimental and inverted white fantasy, and a source of entertainment. The narrator in fact states that she could not be lonely on the station because she has, in the blacks, a ‘perpetual circus and variety show on the premises.’ There is a surface sympathy for the Indigenous characters, but the narrator and the implied reader are positioned on the safe side of an unbridgeable chasm whereby Bett-Bett is always at the mercy of the narrator, and is powerless in the face of the cultural norms. It was the custom for the first half of the twentieth century for school children to read regularly from specially designed anthologies. The construction of these anthologies is a study in itself, but I just want to show here that a very small piece is taken from The Little Black Princess. In this extract you will hear the type of English in which Aboriginal people were represented as speaking. Of course it is more or less how they did and in some places still do speak, but it is here an opportunity for amusement and mockery. And the black child’s grasp of nature and spirituality is, while apparently not mocked, presented as a quaint response as observed by the calm reason of the narrator. It is a very short piece, and yet the reader would immediately understand from the context the relationship of mistress and pet, and the reader would be flattered to be positioned with the narrator, amused by the black child’s language, and by her unsophisticated response to the night sky. There is a note from the editor to the readers attached to the little story, explaining that ‘children and savages personify things around them’, clarifying the fact that Bett-Bett is both child and savage and therefore presumably an object to be patronised.
The extract, taken from the school anthology, is called ‘Bett-Bett and the Stars’. The child is describing the twinkling of the stars – and her description is actually rather brilliant, but it is meant to be naïve and funny. I find it almost impossible to read because I think it is so terribly terribly sad. It is meant to be sweet and amusing.
‘Look, Missus,’ said Bett-Bett, pointing up at the sky, ‘little fellow star come on now. Him look this way. Him look that way. Him talk which way sun sit down.’ And is seemed, as I watched, as if they were really peeping about. Suddenly raising her voice to its very highest and shrillest pitch, she called – ‘Sun bin go away all right.’
After she had called, a great number of stars came quickly one after another, and she got very excited about it.
‘Him bin hear me, Missus,’ she cried. ‘Straight fellow, him bin hear me.’
The anthologies were still being used in schools in the 1960s – even though the voice of Aboriginal activism was becoming more and more strongly heard. In 1938 as white Australia celebrated 150 years of settlement, Aborigines met in Sydney and declared the first national Day of Mourning. The movement for Aboriginal Rights can be seen to date from that Day of Mourning.
Mary Grant Bruce, the other woman writing at the same time as the author of The Little Black Princess wrote 37 novels for children. The first one was A Little Bush Maid published in 1910, the first of the Billabong series. The principal character of the Billabong series is Norah, the daughter of a wealthy station family. The Aboriginal boy, Billy, is a servant and a regular clown. He looks at the white children with awe and obeys them with ‘the unquestioning obedience of a dog’. He a safe and domesticated native, and is referred to in pejorative terms – lazy young nigger – and other Aboriginal characters are sub-human, dressed in sacking and rags, with faces ‘hideous in their dark ugliness’. In 1992 the Billabong books were re-issued, and, in the racial climate of the time, an attempt was made to remove from them the offensive passages. The removal of the more glaring racial slurs from the text does little except bleach out the prose, however, since the whole structure of the society at Billabong is predicated on racial and social hierarchies, with the white men at the top, and the rest of the society descending – through women to children to servants to Chinese, to Aboriginal to dogs. Horses in fact – and sometimes even the dogs – come before Aborigines and Chinese. Billy is a servant as well as a companion – as part of his job he has to bait the hooks for fishing and groom the ponies before the white children can ride them. In 1887 a Brisbane weekly paper published these words which illustrate the values underlying the social structure of Billabong:
‘The Australian nigger is generally regarded as about the lowest type of human creature about. There are some splendid points about the Black, and one in which he is far ahead of the Chinkie. He will die out, and the Chinkie won’t.’
Altering part of the language of a Billabong text is a futile exercise in mutilation. These books were read during the heyday of the White Australia Policy, the aim of which was to keep the population white, and the Billabong books would have reinforced the prevailing racial attitudes. Massacres were still taking place in the late 1920s.
The end of the nineteenth century saw the birth of Australia as nation, with the coming together of the states in the Commonwealth of Australia. And in the new Constitution of 1901 Aborigines were officially de-recognised as members of the Australian people – the precise words being ‘They shall not be counted’. They were not to get the opportunity to vote in elections for government until 1967, when there was legislation to remove the discriminating clauses from the Constitution. After World War Two, in fact, racial paranoia in Australia gradually began to modify, and the protection of the rights of Indigenous people began to appear in parliamentary legislation.
The long-held popular image of the Aboriginal as sub-human, dangerous, and ridiculous began to fade (slowly), and by the 1980s the movements for Aboriginal rights were gaining momentum. By the late 90s the recognition of Aboriginal land claims and of the crimes against the children who had been removed from their families by government decree was at its height, and the Federal Government was being pressured by powerful public sentiment and action to produce a formal apology to the Indigenous people for past crimes of dispossession and cruelty and neglect. This apology has not yet been made.
I want to go now to a novel that was and is a real turning point in Australian fiction, a novel, written by a white woman, in which the life of an Aboriginal woman is created on the page with affection and compassion, and from which the stereotype is absent. The novel is Coonardoo by Katharine Susanna Prichard, and it was published in 1929. The author said, ‘The motive of the book was to draw attention to the abuse of Aboriginal women by white men – a subject that demanded immediate attention.’ You will notice that here the Aboriginal woman is given her tribal name, not some sentimental or insulting diminutive or corruption of an English name, such as Bett-Bett. (Aboriginal men were often, in literature and in life, known as Jacky-Jacky.) And in a rather cool inversion of the naming game, the Aboriginal characters refer to the main male character, whose name is Hugh as ‘You’ - which is the second person pronoun (Usted). It can be insulting in English to drop a person’s proper name and call them ‘You’ instead – like if you say: ‘Come here, you.’ That’s very impolite.
Katherine Susannah Prichard was a writer who went out to stay on a remote cattle station in Western Australia in 1926 in order to complete a novel on which she was working. The material of her novel was unrelated to station life, but while she was on the station she became inspired by the lives of the white station owners and the black workers. This all happened at a time when interest in the frontier life of Western Australia was growing among people of the eastern Australian community. In 1926 there was a massacre of blacks by whites at Umbali in the west, and in 1928 there was another at Consiton. It was time for the first real nation-wide reflection on the reality of the ongoing problem of the relationship between black and white races in Australia. Coonardoo was written and published in this climate, and it was an astonishing work for its time. It concerns the moral repercussions of racial contact; it examines the tragic meaning of love between a black woman and a white man in the context of the society of the time. The stereotype is transgressed, and the character of Coonardoo is newly and fully human in ways not before seen in Australian writing.
It does great dis-service to the novel to outline for you the bare facts of the narrative, but I must briefly do this in order to give my comments their context. The name of the station is Wytaliba. It belongs to the Watt family. Hugh and Coonardoo grow up as close childhood companions. Hugh is sent away to school, and when he returns as a young man, Coonardoo already has an Aboriginal husband. However when Hugh’s mother dies, Hugh is deeply unhappy, and is nursed back to sanity and health by Coonardoo. Over the course of this time, Hugh makes love to Coonardoo who bears him a son. Hugh is not culturally able or ready to make her his wife, although it is clear that he has a profound affection for her. He marries a white woman who hates station life, and when that woman discovers the truth about the child of Coonardoo and Hugh, she leaves Hugh and the station forever. When Coonardoo’s tribal husband dies Hugh, partly to protect her from the unwanted advances of other black men, acknowledges her as his woman. Yet he does not invite her to live with him. One time when Hugh is absent, another white man forces himself upon Coonardoo, and when Hugh returns he vents his fury on her, in fact throwing her on a fire. Coonardoo runs away and begins to drift aimlessly and forlornly as a dispossessed and hopeless black woman. The station fails to prosper, and Hugh is forced to sell it – in fact he sells it to the same man who violated Coonardoo. The station falls into decay, and finally Coonardoo returns, alone, to die. The narrative has come full circle, with the closing scene a mirror image of the opening scene at Wytaliba.
The outline of the plot could underpin a trashy melodramatic story, but the compassion for both Coonardoo and Hugh in the novel, and the poetic nature of the prose raise it to a far far higher level. Katherine Susannah Prichard had great control of her material, and was clear in her desire to enter the heart of her focal subject, Coonardoo. And Hugh’s moral dilemma forms the anguished heart of the novel. I don’t need to tell you that at the time it was published this novel was highly controversial. I will read you some brief quotations from the text.
The novel begins with Coonardoo as a child, and places her is the setting of the station Wytaliba, painting a picture of the child as a fine sensibility within her surroundings which are described in detail, with interest and affection. It is twilight, a time of shadows and change and danger. All is lyrical and magical, a context for the child who is the centre of interest in the text. There is an emphasis on words, on language, and on the relationship between the land and the song. Her song, which is in fact her description of the kangaroos she can see coming to feed, is in her own language. I don’t really have any ability to pronounce the words, but I will try – and the text also translates this song into English which is: "Kangaroos coming over the range in the twilight, and making a devil dance with their little feet, before they begin to feed."
‘Coonardoo was singing. Sitting under dark bushes overhung with curdy white blossom, she clicked two small sticks together, singing:
"Towera chinima poodinya
Towera jinner mulbeena"
Over and over again, in a thin reedy voice, away at the back of her head, the melody flowed like water running over smooth pebbles in a dry creek bed. Winding and falling, the words rattled together and flew eerily, as if she were whispering to herself, exclaiming, and in awe of the kangaroos who came over th range and made a dance with their little feet in the twilight before they went to feed.
"Towera chinima poodinya"
(Kangaroos coming over the range in the twilight.)
It was no more than a twitter in the shadow of dark bushes near the veranda; a twitter with the clicking of small sticks. Coonardoo was not supposed to be there at all. Everybody was asleep in the long house of mud bricks and corrugated iron, and under the brushwood sheds beyond the wood pile. But Coonardoo did not want to sleep.
A little aboriginal girl about nine years old in a faded blue gina-gina, she sat there, part of the shadows, with her dark skin, fair hair, and brown eyes shadowed across the cornea. Clicking and singing, she watched the plains, the wide shallow pan of red earth under the ironstone pebbles which spread out before her to the furry edges of the mulga, grey-green, under a pale blue sky.
‘There was not a breath of wind,. The windmills struck hard lines against the sky, their fans motionless, although the roofs of the buggy shed, harness-room and smithy shivered in the heat. Stones on the plains glistened in the clear white light, shimmered and danced together.’
And I will read you the final paragraphs of the novel, telling of how Coonardoo returned to Wytaliba and it is forlorn and empty. She imagines the presence of the ghost of Hugh’s mother, known as Mumae. And the word ‘narlus’ means evil spirits. It is twilight again.
" It was lonely down there by the creek. White bark of the trees gleamed with the faces of narlus. The trees looked very tall; their leaves swooped down, heavy and dark.
White cockies were settling to roost in the big gum-tree beside the house. Mumae was there, Coonardoo told herself. Mumae would see and know that she, Coonardoo had done as Mumae had bade her for Youie. She had looked after him and obeyed him, although in some way she had displeased him so; brought down the torrent of his anger upon herself.
‘Towera jinner mulbeena"
Little feet of the kangaroos were doing their devil dance in the twilight. Coonardoo’s voice fluttered out; embers of her fire were burning low. Crouched over them a daze held her. From that dreamy and soothing nothingness Coonardoo started suddenly. The fire before her had fallen into ashes. Blackened sticks lay without a spark.
She crooned a moment, and lay back. Her arms and legs, falling apart, looked like those blackened and broken sticks beside the fire.’
That is the end of the novel, with Coonardoo dead in the twilight, outside the empty house where she grew up, black and broken, part of the land.
The problem of inter-racial sexuality addressed in Coonardoo was further developed in the works of writers who followed, including Kings in Grass Castles by Mary Durack, To the Islands by Randolph Stowe, and Black Lightning by Dymphna Cusack.
And as awareness of the racial issues grew the twentieth century saw the publication of such powerful and important novels as The Timeless Land (1941) by Eleanor Dark and Brian Penton’s Landtakers (1934) and Inheritors (1936). Then came the powerful novels of protest against the white treatment of Indigenous people such as Capricornia (1938) and Poor Fellow My Country (1975) by Xavier Herbert, Riders in the Chariot (1961) by Patrick White, The Second Bridegroom (1991) by Rodney Hall, Remembering Babylon (1993) by David Malouf. The aboriginal characters in these works hold the secrets of the land, they belong, they are at one with the earth in ways that are difficult for Non-indigenous people to comprehend. Writing from within Indigenous culture, Mudrooroo has, in his many novels which include Wild Cat Falling(1965) and four volumes of Master of the Ghost Dreaming(1991- 2001), developed a philosophical vision of the story of Australia from long before white settlement until the present, a vision that speaks to both black and white Australians. Some of the most arresting creations of a black sensibility in Australian fiction are found in the characters of Mudrooroo’s fiction.
In 1972 Thomas Keneally published The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. The central character is a part-Aboriginal boy brought up by a Christian missionary. This novel was inspired by the true story of Jimmy Governor who lived from 1875 to 1901. Remember that the year 1901 is a highly significant year in wider Australian history, as it is the year when the separate states came together as a Federation. The short story of Jimmy Governor, a story of Aboriginal dispossession and white racial hatred and brutality, is that Jimmy and his brother committed several murders of white people and were hanged in 1901. In the novel Jimmie Blacksmith is a tragic and heroic figure. He rejects his own black ancestry, and in his adoption of white culture he marries Gilda, a white woman. He is consistently mistreated and he and his brother murder the white women of the station and run away. They kill more people as they are hounded by police, the brother is killed, and Jimmie is taken prisoner and eventually executed. This examination of historic events highlights the ongoing tragedies of the contact between black and white. The Aboriginal character here is presented with a stark realism, and he arouses in the reader all the feelings of guilt that underpin the history.
The realism is replaced in the work of Patrick White and Randolph Stow into a kind of poetic transcendence whereby the characters, one of whom is Indigenous, in Riders in the Chariot (1961) and the white Christian missionary in To the Islands (1958) move into a spiritual plane where their essential humanity is read as their transformation into the divine.
In 1966 Peter Mathers published Trap, a novel which still stands out as one of the most significant texts located within the racial debate in all of Australian writing. The character Trap is a part-Aboriginal who is being investigated by a white social worker David David. In the names of the two characters already there is much to read. The white man’s name mimics the double naming of Aborigines, and the name of Trap, a subversive, outlaw figure, is descriptive of the dangers inherent for white society in the figure of the part-Aboriginal. David David is employed to keep a diary for a year, detailing the exploits of Trap. As the diary writes, David’s personality grows closer and closer to that of Trap until the voices of the two characters merge into one. Trap is a charismatic embodiment of anarchy, and David David is subsumed into the charisma. Trap is finally found to be of common ancestry with the very people who have employed David David to investigate him, so that the investigation has uncovered the very worst truths. The reviled figure of the Aborigine is revealed as the central power in the narrative of Australian history. I should point out that the novel is constructed in wild leaps of time and territory, and is energetic, comic, ironic, tragic – a most Australian mix.
In 2000 Mudrooroo published the fourth volume of his Master of the Ghost Dreaming series. This novel is called The Promised Land and it concludes the quartet of novels which are fantastic, satiric, and yet grounded in the realities of early Australian history. The white man is determined to westernise and Christianise the black. It is probably for me to tell you that the project is a tragic failure. But this text is not sombre, not fixed in gloom and despair as are many of the texts I have discussed. The satire lifts into the comic, and the reader is left amazed in fact warmed by a kind of deep hope for the future (distant of course from the events described) of Indigenous people.
I would like to read you a short lyrical paragraph. It has some elements in common with the pieces I read from Coonardoo.
‘The rap-rap of clapsticks broke the silence of the evening and reached out to enter the seat of government. Rap-rap rap-rap. In the clearing which had been cut out for the new governor’s mansion – separated from the bungalow by a narrow belt of disarray – fires erupted to glow through the heavy boles of the eucalypts. The flames grew in size, as Jangamuttuk chanted: ‘Fire, flickering, flame grows, flame grows.’
It is not too far-fetched I think to see that fire as a signifier of the growing power and passion of the black characters in the fiction of Australia. But I would like to conclude with a reference to one of my personal favourite choices from all the novels in which the Indigenous characters capture the hearts of the readers. This is The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow (1996) by Thea Astley. The novel as inspired by a massacre of black people on an island off north Queensland in the nineteen twenties. This is an incredibly sad, sweet, tender novel, telling as it does a forlornly violent narrative of the clash between black and white, and of white madness. Sections of the narrative are written in the musical language of the black characters, so that the reading consciousness is occasionally opened up to the hearts of those characters as the story unfolds.
I would like to end by reading to you the first page of the text. Again you will find echoes of the beginning of Coonardoo. This is the leading page of the text, and it is written in the language of one of the Indigenous characters. READ
The blue fire, he said. This blue. Burn my heart it jump like fish jumpin down sky. Marl-gan. Sky-fire! Cum-oo, he said. Water. He yelled, Go-ah go-ah go-ah! Rain! Talking Gungganyji. Talking language. Talking migaloo, whiteman talk. Made talk migaloo after the big wind at the Heads. Shacks blew down. All shacks. In the mornin after they creep out from behind the rocks where they shelter all night, the bodies. Mumma, he whimper, mumma stickin his pink and brown paw into hers. Uncles killed. Tribal cousins. Even the boss big house scatter along rain-soaked grass and the rain still comin and no-one to tell them what to do.
Did they need anyone to tell?
Mumma, he ask in language, what we do?
Find your dadda, Manny. That what we do.
There are several, perhaps many, strands, or currents of the race narrative flowing, twisting, twining through Australian fiction. I have traced some of these in some of the Indigenous characters of the fiction spanning two centuries. The strands are private and philosophical, public and political – of course they are always political. One of the great projects of serious Australian literary fiction, particularly since the First World War, has been the examination and expiation of the guilt deep in the heart of white Australia for the crime committed against black Australia. The narrative remains one of tragedy and abjection, still reflecting mournfully on the horrors of the past which casts its shadow across the future. It is often informed by a particular form of Australian sharp comic irony, but the dominant note remains one of sorrow, deep sorrow, and regret.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Astley,Thea. The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow. Penguin Books, Australia,1996
Boldrewood, Rolf. Robbery Under Arms. London, Macmillan & Company, 1888
Bruce, Mary Grant. A Little Bush Maid. Ward Lock, London, 1910
Cusack, Dymphna. Black Lightning. London, Heinemann, 1964
Dunkle, Margaret. Black in Focus. ALIA Press, Deakin ACT, 1994
Gare, Nene. The Fringe Dwellers. Melbourne, Sun Books, 1967
Gelder, Ken and Jacobs Jane. Uncanny Australia. Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1998
Gunn, Mrs Aeneas. The Little Black Princess. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1905
Healy, J.J. Literature and the Aborigine in Australia. St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1978
Herbert, Xavier. Capricornia. Sydney, Publicist Publishing Company, 1937
Hergenen, Laurie. Unnatural Lives. St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1983
Keneally, Thomas. The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1971
Mathers, Peter. Trap. Melbourne, Thomas Nelson, 1966.
Morgan, Sally. My Place. Fremantle, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1987
Mudrooroo. The Promised Land. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 2000
Oodgeroo Noonuccal. Australian Legends and Landscapes. Canberra, Australian Government Publishing, 1988
Praed, Rosa. Fugitive Anne, London, J.Long, 1903
Prichard, Katherine Susannah. Coonardoo. London, Jonathan Cape, 1929
Porter, Sarah (probably). Alfred Dudley or The Australian Settler
Penton, Brian. Landtakers 1934
Reynolds, Henry. This Whispering in Our Hearts. Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1998
Robinson, Roland. The Feathered Serpent. Sydney, Edwards and Shaw, 1956
Rowcroft, Charles. The Bushrangers of Van Diemen’s Land. London, Smith Elder and Co. 1846
Ryan, Lyndall. The Aboriginal Tasmanians. St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1982
Scott, Kim. Benang. Fremantle, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000
Stow, Randolph. To the Islands. London, Macdonald, 1958
Tucker, James. The Adventures of Ralph Rashleigh. London, Jonathan Cape, 1929 (1852)
Unaipon, David. Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines. Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 2001
White, Patrick. Riders in the Chariot. New York, Viking Press, 1961
Wilde, Hooten, Andrews. The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature. Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1985
Wright, Judith. The Generations of Men. Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1959
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