Representing Aboriginal Childhood: The Politics of Memory and Forgetting in Australia [1 ed.] 0367568535, 9780367568535

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Representing Aboriginal Childhood

This book critically investigates the ways in which Aboriginal children and childhood figure in Australia’s cultural life to mediate Australians’ ambivalence about the colonial origins of the nation, as well as its possible post-​colonial futures. Engaging with representations in literature, film, governmental discourse, and news and infotainment media, it shows how ways of representing Aboriginal children and childhood serve a national project of representing settler-​Australian values, through the forgetting of colonial violence. Analysing the ways in which certain negative aspects of Australian nationhood are concealed, rendered invisible, and repressed through practices of representing Aboriginal children and childhood, it challenges accepted ‘shared understandings’ regarding Australian-​ ness and settler-​ colonial sovereignty. Through an innovative interdisciplinary approach that engages critical theory, post-​colonial theory, literary studies, history, psychoanalysis, and philosophy, Representing Aboriginal Childhood responds to urgent questions that pivot on the role of the Indigenous child within settler nation-​state formations. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology and social geography, collective memory, politics, and cultural studies. Joanne Faulkner is Australian Research Council Future Fellow in Cultural Studies in the Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language and Literature at Macquarie University, Australia.

The Cultural Politics of Media and Popular Culture

Dedicated to a renewed engagement with culture, this series fosters critical, contextual analyses and cross-​disciplinary examinations of popular culture as a site of cultural politics. It welcomes theoretically grounded and critically engaged accounts of the politics of contemporary popular culture and the popular dimensions of cultural politics. Without being aligned to a specific theoretical or methodological approach, The Cultural Politics of Media and Culture publishes monographs and edited collections that promote dialogues on central subjects, such as representation, identity, power, consumption, citizenship, desire and difference. Offering approachable and insightful analyses that complicate race, class, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability and nation across various sites of production and consumption, including film, television, music, advertising, sport, fashion, food, youth, subcultures and new media, The Cultural Politics of Media and Popular Culture welcomes work that explores the importance of text, context and subtext as these relate to the ways in which popular cultures work alongside hegemony. Series Editor: C. Richard King Columbia College Chicago, USA Also available in the series: Isn’t it Ironic? Irony in Contemporary Popular Culture Edited by Ian Kinane Representing Aboriginal Childhood The Politics of Memory and Forgetting in Australia Joanne Faulkner For more information about this series, please visit: www.routle​dge.com/​The-​ Cultu​ral-​Polit​ics-​of-​Media-​and-​Popu​lar-​Cult​ure/​book-​ser​ies/​ASH​SER-​1395

Representing Aboriginal Childhood The Politics of Memory and Forgetting in Australia Joanne Faulkner

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Joanne Faulkner The right of Joanne Faulkner to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Faulkner, Joanne, author. Title: Representing Aboriginal childhood : the politics of memory and forgetting in Australia / Joanne Faulkner. Other titles: Politics of memory and forgetting in Australia Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Series: The cultural politics of media and popular culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2022043915 (print) | LCCN 2022043916 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367568535 (hbk) | ISBN 9780367568542 (pbk) | ISBN 9781003099666 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Children, Aboriginal Australian–Social conditions. | Aboriginal Australians, Treatment of. | Aboriginal Australians in mass media. | Australia–Colonial influence. | Australia–Ethnic relations–History. | Australia–Social conditions. Classification: LCC DU124.C45 F38 2023 (print) | LCC DU124.C45 (ebook) | DDC 305.899/15094–dc23/eng/20220915 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022043915 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022043916 ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​56853-​5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​56854-​2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​003-​09966-​6 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/​9781003099666 Typeset in Times New Roman by Newgen Publishing UK

Contents

Acknowledgements 1 Introduction

vi 1

2 Gumnut Babies and ‘Babes in the Wood’: The Nativised White Child

20

3 Amnesiac Recollections: The Found White Child

47

4 The Romance of Reconciliation: The Mixed-​Race Aboriginal Child

66

5 ‘Breeding Out the Colour’ in GevaColor: Jedda

87

6 Finding ‘Home’ Through the Child: Bringing Them Home and Assimilationism’s Present

114

7 En-​Gendering Failure: Sexualised Girls, Criminalised Boys, Through the Colonial Apparatus

142

8 Representing Invisibility: The Indigenous Child as Subaltern

170

9 Conclusion: Impasse or Emergence? The Unrepresentability of the Aboriginal Child

193

Bibliography Index

204 222

Acknowledgements

This book was written for the most part during the pandemic, sometimes in lockdown and almost always at ‘home,’ on the land of the Gadigal and Wangal peoples. I pay respect to the people who belong to those places, which always was and always will be Aboriginal lands. I owe thanks to Chris Peers for reading and providing comprehensive feedback on several chapters, as well as Peter Chen and Simon Lumsden for reading chapters and providing valuable insights and encouragement, and Joseph Pugliese for his sage advice at various points of this project. Thanks also to colleagues and students in the Cultural Theory Group at Macquarie University, especially Daozhi Xu, Stefan Solomon, Jane Hanley, and Stephanie Crewes, who read and discussed two chapters; and the Interiors group for their collegial sustenance and advice, and the scaffolding of care that kept my morale uplifted: Nicole Matthews, Willa MacDonald, Jane Simon, Helen Wolfenden, Kate Rossmanith, Karen Pearlman, and Julie-​ Anne Long. I need to acknowledge colleagues and comrades who contributed to the Decolonisation Discussion Circle, for feedback on early versions of chapters and for their courage and generosity. Thanks to Leroy Boon-​Kuo, Peter Banki, Lizzy Jarrett, Lorna Munro, and Aunty Jenny Munro especially, for being there. I am also grateful to colleagues who discussed the ideas in this book and beyond it, in a workshop titled “Representing Aboriginal Childhood(s)” at Macquarie University in July 2022, co-​hosted by the Children’s Rights, Participation and Perspectives Faculty of Arts research stream, and the Centre for Global Indigenous Futures. Thanks are due especially to Sana Nakata, Sandy O’Sullivan, Zain Swaleh, Bryan Mukandi, Bronwyn Carlson, and so many more people. Earlier versions of some of the material in this book have been published already in article form, as Copyright ©2019 Johns Hopkins University Press, “ ‘Suffer Little Children’: The Representation of Aboriginal Disadvantage Through Images of Suffering Children, and the Wages of Spectacular Humanitarianism,” Theory and Event 22(3), July 2019, pp. 595–​629, some of which appears in Chapter 7; “Settler-​Colonial Violence and the ‘Wounded Aboriginal Child’: Reading Alexis Wright with Irene Watson (and Giorgio Agamben),” International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy 9(4), 2020, pp. 45–​ 60, https://​doi.org/​10.5204/​ijc​jsd.1689, some of which

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Acknowledgements  vii appears in Chapter 8; “ ‘Failure to Thrive’? Imagining Precarity, Sensing Agency, Through Ivan Sen’s Toomelah,” Childhood Vulnerability 2, February 2019, pp. 63–​79, https://​doi.org/​10.1007/​s41​255-​020-​00008-​7, some of which appears in Chapter 9. This research was fully supported by the Australian government under the Australian Research Council Discovery Future Fellowship scheme (project number FT170100210). The views expressed herein are mine and are not necessarily those of the Australian Government or Australian Research Council.

1 Introduction

The image of the ‘Aboriginal child’ as a scene of ultimate vulnerability haunts relations between non-​Indigenous and First Nations peoples in Australia. This image, elaborated in literature, cinema, news media, and bureaucratic discourse, is densely invested with the traces of a history in which Indigenous children have consistently been key targets of colonial power. Twentieth-​ century policies of forced removal of children (the Stolen Generations) are the most publicly registered form of such intervention.1 The many ways in which racism is experienced by Aboriginal children every day is in part revealed and in part obscured by measures such as rates of incarceration –​23 times more than any other cohort (Productivity Commission, 2020, section 17.5) –​and removal into child protection –​at 10 times that of non-​Indigenous children (Davis, 2019, p. 394).2 These distortions render the Aboriginal child more visible in these settings, as a canary in the coalmine of colonial Australia. Likewise, Aboriginal children are visible in popular culture, news media, and public policy, only insofar as they signify risk and vulnerability. It is the effects of these representations of Aboriginal childhood that interest me here: the way material distortions connected to the structure of colonisation in Australia are baked into these images, and are, in turn, perpetuated by them. This book takes up the question of how settler-​ colonial Australia represents Aboriginal children and childhood as a register of how colonisers imagine their relationship with First Peoples and the Australian nation’s past and future. As a figure of colonial imagination, the Aboriginal child serves colonisers’ interests. In this ambivalent figure, settler colonisers constitute themselves as rescuers in relation to an Indigeneity that remains after colonisation but as attenuated, thus more manageable; and yet which also, in so remaining, continues to place in question the foundation of settler sovereignty on the legal fiction of terra nullius. Settler identity is thus formed through a dual movement within the relation to Aboriginal childhood, whereby the child legitimates colonialism as its object of rescue, while also undermining colonialism in their being as Aboriginal: that is, as original inhabitants of land, sovereignty of which was never ceded. Settler representation of Aboriginal children and childhood is a technology for the production of terra nullius DOI: 10.4324/9781003099666-1

2 Introduction through the forgetting of colonial violence. Yet it is also a symptom that erupts from the colonial unconscious to remind Australians of the presence of a people marked by that violence. If interrogated as symptoms, these representations may be read diagnostically. To unravel the dense investment of colonial interest, we would ask, what does the evocation of the Aboriginal child disclose here, and what does it attempt to conceal? An incident that illustrates this settler-​colonial formation of subjectivity took place in proximity to one of the Australian calendar’s most contentious days: ‘Australia Day’ (or ‘Invasion Day’), which falls every year on the anniversary of the arrival of the First Fleet on Gadigal land (Sydney Cove). Over several years 26 January has been the occasion for marches to raise consciousness about what it means to celebrate colonial dispossession, and in 2019 the marches had grown large enough to garner the attention of mainstream media outlets. During a discussion of these protests on Network Ten’s Studio 10 program, veteran television presenter Kerri-​Anne Kennerley changed the subject from the claims raised by protesters to accuse them of not caring about Aboriginal women and children who, she claimed, are abused in “the outback”: Has any single one of those 5,000 people waving the flags saying how inappropriate the day is, has any one of them been out to the outback where children, where babies and five-​year-​olds are being raped, their mothers are being raped, their sisters are being raped. They get no education. Scandal erupted after fellow panellist Yumi Stynes cautioned Kennerley that her remarks made her “sound racist.” But many viewers, commentators, and the television station itself sided with Kennerley, under the pretext that she was truly concerned for Aboriginal women and children. Conversely, Stynes, by uttering ‘the R word,’ had broken a significant taboo in Australia, where accusing another of racism is a worse offence than any racist behaviour that would attract such accusations, short of burning crosses or ‘heiling’ Hitler. Stynes was blacklisted from daytime television; and the network engaged a public relations rehabilitation of Kennerley by sending her to the Northern Territory (the “outback,” where ‘authentic’ Aboriginal people are thought to live), to be filmed alongside Aboriginal women and children. Although this episode was contentious, it was not extraordinary, but rather typical of mainstream treatments of the life and place of Aboriginal people in Australian society. It revealed a meaning and use of Aboriginal childhood within the settler-​colonial regime of representation as a site of rescue and form of bare life, evocation of which evacuates a situation of politics and  power that might otherwise have been discussed, negotiated, resisted, and transformed. Instead, in the face of an imagined suffering of the Aboriginal child, calls for self-​determination and the abolition of a national celebration of colonial conquest are construed as frivolous, even detrimental

Introduction  3 to the safety of children. Moreover, this episode, in both content and format, enacted an infantilisation of Aboriginal people through a staging of concern for the Aboriginal child that excluded them from that discussion. This gesture is not just a result of the self-​interested prejudice of non-​Indigenous individuals. It is also conditioned by the repertoire of stories, images, and cultural logics that are available to individuals within a shared imaginary. In the settler-​colonial Australian cultural imagination, an identification with the ‘white saviour’ that rescues Aboriginal children from their ‘backward’ and ‘abusive’ communities replaces a more complicated scene, in which contemporary settlers are complicit in the structures that render children vulnerable. Certain representations of Indigenous childhood are privileged according to an interpretation of Australian nationhood and history that preserves white settler sovereignty and innocence. The Aboriginal child, rendered visible according to the vicissitudes of white settler-​colonial desire, distracts from an understanding of Indigeneity and of childhood that would contest the primacy and right of settler belonging. A key contention of this inquiry is that anxiety about settler sovereignty congeals in the figure of the Aboriginal child, as it appears in news media, film, literature, and discourses of governance. The book situates representations of childhood and of Indigeneity within broader circuits of culture that operate in Australia, and particularly with respect to an implicitly shared compact regarding what it means to be Australian: that is, to form a nation on land that was never ceded by its original owners, and from which First Peoples were, and continue to be, violently dispossessed. The chapters that follow will examine the work that the image of the Aboriginal child performs, as a construct of the settler-​colonial cultural system, to support Australians’ self-​concept and sense of belonging. Importantly, this image is a point of convergence for diverse and often conflicting thoughts, feelings, and values, and is charged with managing ambivalence regarding Australian identity and memory. The Aboriginal child thus carries a substantial freight of unsettled significances –​what might ironically be called a ‘white man’s burden.’ Because of the ambivalence of significances trafficked within the figure of the Aboriginal child, I will argue, this representation bears within itself a ‘record’ of the transactions made by mainstream Australian culture production that might also be drawn on as a point of resistance against it: a significance that can be seen only from the periphery, and through critical examination of the arrangement that gives that image to appear as it does to the majority. This alternate register of the Aboriginal child image –​which positions its viewer in relation to circuits of colonial power –​may be accessed via critical attention to the defences of white settler colonialism, as they are played out in practices of representation. It also highlights that the process of representation is always contested, as agents with different and sometimes opposed interests take part in the meaning-​making activities that comprise culture. Representations such as the Aboriginal child are interwoven with diverse significances that sometimes confront the viewer as an opacity, a dense

4 Introduction and unreadable knot. For settler colonisers, an interpretive knot within the representation indicates an investment in remaining ignorant of the effects of colonialism, to maintain belief in their own innocence regarding the dispossession of First Peoples. The knot indicates the place where not only that knowledge but also the mechanism of its denial is encrypted. The Aboriginal child is in this way charged with a secret, unconscious, knowledge. Ownership of Aboriginal childhood and its representation is thus highly political, as colonial power works through this figure to shape ideas, emotions, and material outcomes regarding nation, sovereignty, Indigeneity, and the place of Indigenous peoples.

The Native-​Child Nexus in Settler-​Colonial Imagination This study focuses on the critical potential of ‘the child’ rather than representations of the Aboriginal ‘adult’ or ‘elder,’ notwithstanding that each of these images is inflected with racialised stereotypes, each interacts in commerce with the other, and serves the maintenance of white supremacist ways of being. The historical use of the image of the child, however, from the first stirrings of the developments that led to British colonisation of the land mass now referred to as Australia lends this figure to be a potent focal point through which the settler-​colonial perspective is both constructed and potentially unravelled. Simply, the Aboriginal child is a privileged site of investment for settler colonisers, as a nexus of two terms forged within European modernity: the ‘native’ and the ‘child.’ Conceptualisations of the child and the meaning of childhood form a significant part of the ‘baggage’ British colonisers brought with them, and which in part made it possible to imagine the imperialist enterprise. The modern idea of the child –​as elaborated through the discourses of literature, philosophy, pedagogy, and government –​gave place to colonialism as an enterprise. As Jo-​Anne Wallace puts this, “the West had to invent for itself ‘the child’ before it could think a specifically colonialist imperialism” (Wallace, 1994, p. 176). The child –​as a formation of thought, a site of affective investment, and a set of cultural practices –​thus washed up onto the shores of Sydney cove as a key term through which settler colonial being was understood. The preoccupations, hopes, and fears that characterised the colonial project were folded into the figure of the child, which has come to operate as a site through which ambivalences and anxieties about colonisation and settler belonging are managed. The child served, conceptually, as a modal operator for ‘the human,’ switching between possibility and actuality: as a representative for ‘modern man,’ undertaking imagined journeys into other worlds. The Aboriginal child figure, as component of the Australian cultural system, is conditioned by the meanings accrued to the child in European imagination, to which we will turn shortly. If, in modernity, the child represented a new beginning, life yet-​to-​be-​lived, pure potentiality, ‘race’ came to bear upon this significance, resurrecting more archaic meanings of childhood. As Stuart Hall

Introduction  5 argues in “The Spectacle of the Other,” racialised associations are trafficked through representations –​and the traces of historical oppression can be read in them: “moments when the ‘West’ encountered black people [have given] rise to an avalanche of popular representations based on the marking of racial difference” (Hall, 1997, p. 239). In this way, in a particular historical situation, everyday understandings of childhood and of children’s significance and social place are relative to other concepts and representations. In Australia, the cultural meaning of colonisation interacts with the significances of childhood and of indigeneity to form the Aboriginal child as a complex site through which the psychological, affective, and material being of the settler coloniser is negotiated. The racialised Aboriginal child is afforded a different destiny within that system than the ‘white child,’ according to a schism that belongs to the child figure’s historical development from original sin to original innocence. Relative to one another within the Australian settler-​colonial cultural imaginary, the Aboriginal child is fallen so that the white child may be saved. There are other, apparently more diverse, vicissitudes of the Aboriginal child within this formation, which structure this book, and which I will elaborate shortly: as a site of mediation, of intervention, and of impasse. These vicissitudes constitute a variety of combinations of the ‘fallen versus saved child’ trope. The cleavage between the fallen and the saved child opened in the late seventeenth century and continued to develop into the nineteenth century, by which time the Romantic conception of the child as a figure of sentimentality and innocence had emerged. Childhood was conceptualised prior to then, first, as property under the Roman legal system –​a form of bare life, prone to the absolute sovereign power and mercy of the patriarch –​and then, after Augustine, as the bearer of original sin and exemplar of human imperfection. The classical understanding of the ontology of childhood was framed in terms of privation: children were considered sub-​rational and not-​yet human, beneath the threshold of interest that might render them objects of literature or philosophy (Pattison, 1978, p. 1). For Plato children’s inferiority was due to their undisciplined nature; they needed to be trained and regulated to become worthy of respect. Children were viewed as having an ontological proximity to non-​human animals. For Aristotle they were considered as potential adults yet wanting in reason and judgement. This exclusion of children from full humanity rendered them legally equivalent to slaves; indeed, the Greeks “employed the same word for both child and slave (pais) since servitude was considered the natural condition of those whose lack of reason rendered them incapable of organizing their own lives” (Rollo, 2018a, p. 65). Augustine of Hippo inherited these views regarding children’s inferiority and closeness to animality but translated the classical emphasis on reason into theological discourse as faith, through which the child’s unworthiness was thus comprehended by the notion of original sin. An implication of Christ’s sacrifice, for Augustine, is that all human beings bear Adam’s sin even from infancy: “no one is free from sin in your sight, not even an infant whose

6 Introduction span of earthly life is but a single day” (Augustine, 1997, I.VII.xi). This sin is transmitted to infants through their conception, or what Augustine calls “concupiscence.” Each human life individually recapitulates Adam’s fall, with children being the most fallen, with least access to salvation (hence the need for infant baptism). Children were thought to be blameworthy, and Augustine took their crying as evidence of the extent of their sinfulness (Augustine, 1997, I.VII.xi). The image of the child that emerges in modernity, by contrast, is characterised by original innocence. In an optimistic age focused on the progress of humanity, the child became a figure for humanity’s inherent goodness, representing a purer humanity, natural and free of prejudice and vice. Moderns desired to see themselves as good, and the child became the mirror in which this goodness could be reflected. Instead of being bestial and depraved, the child was now represented as a simpler and more ideal human in miniature form. This conceptualisation of childhood was still privative, yet this privation now signalled innocence (a lack of knowledge or experience) rather than sin (lack of moderation, training, or faith). The child was valuable in early modernity insofar as its telos was the (adult) man of enlightenment, but by the nineteenth century the romantic child would be invested with nostalgia for an enchanted past and unalienated self. This teleology at the level of the individual was also mapped onto ‘mankind’ during the Enlightenment, through conceptions of social formations as more or less ‘developed’ which is expressed in the scientific language of the day as ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.’3 A cross-​fertilisation of representations of childhood and of Indigeneity emerge at this time (see Mills and Lefrançois, 2018). Rousseau’s depiction of human being in the state of nature as more innocent, simple, and childlike than his European contemporaries is a familiar example of this conception. A trope in literature of the time, the noble savage’s ‘virtue’ is conceived only as an absence of the vices cultivated in political society. Following Rousseau, Immanuel Kant characterised all non-​Europeans as culturally static and incapable of ‘development’ (Eze, 1997, p. 118). The historical process through which modern Europeans achieved enlightenment had not included peoples of colour, who were thereby understood as having no history, as immature and underdeveloped. This infantilisation continues to mark white settler-​colonial fantasy as the ‘Indigene’ of the ‘outback,’ untouched by colonisation or colonial violence. As Eualeyai/​Kamillaroi woman and legal scholar Larissa Behrendt writes of this fantasy: Aboriginal people, even as elders or adults, are wrapped in an unspoilt innocence by the “noble savage” construct. This innocence reflects their naturalness and purity, untouched by the knowledge and power of the European world. This innocence cannot be transcended. And so, the noble savage character will not develop past childhood. (Behrendt, 1998, p. 271)

Introduction  7 Relegating Indigenous peoples to the role of ‘noble savage’ and ‘child of mankind’ thereby fetishises the ‘Aboriginal’ by obscuring the social production of that category (violent colonisation). Hall’s taxonomy of representational strategies helps map this transference of meaning from ‘animal’ to ‘child’ to ‘native.’ Naturalisation, essentialism, reductionism, and stereotyping all work to produce a fixed and accessible image of the ‘other’ through which to manage fear and anxiety about otherness, and the desire to violently exploit them. Representation in this way tracks power and reflects political struggle. Indeed, following Edward Said (1978), representation and its techniques are an exercise of power. Hall also shows that whatever these stereotyped representations of the other cannot contain –​whether the subject’s own repressed unconscious, or the opacity of other ways of doing and being –​produces an ambivalence that feeds into the stereotyped representation as much as it might contest it: The conscious attitude amongst whites –​that “Blacks are not proper men, they are just simple children” –​may be a “cover,” or a cover-​up, for a deeper, more troubling fantasy –​that “Blacks are really super-​men, better endowed than whites, and sexually insatiable.” It would be improper and “racist” to express the latter sentiment openly but the fantasy is present, and secretly subscribed to by many, all the same. Thus when blacks act “macho,” they seem to challenge the stereotype (that they are only children) –​but in the process they confirm the fantasy which lies behind or is the “deep structure” of the stereotype (that they are aggressive, over-​ sexed and over-​endowed). The problem is that blacks are trapped by the binary structure of the stereotype, which is split between two extreme opposites –​and are obliged to shuttle endlessly between them, sometimes being represented as both of them at the same time. Thus blacks are both “childlike” and “oversexed,” just as black youth are both “Sambo simpletons” and/​ or “wily, dangerous savages”; and older men both “barbarians” and/​or “noble savages” –​Uncle Toms. (Hall, 1997, p. 263. Emphasis in original) The management of ambivalence through the strategy of ‘disavowal’ further contributes to the infantilisation of Indigenous peoples, enabling coloniser subjects to both “indulge” and “deny” their fantasies and desires (Hall, 1997, p. 267). This is one way of understanding how the child and ‘the native’ are used as limit points for ‘the human,’ to contain material that challenges the white subject’s self-​image. The designation of Indigenous peoples as the ‘childhood of humankind’ had thus brought back into circulation those earlier significances of childhood as subhuman and in need of improvement, to manage perceptions of the violence endemic to colonisation (Rollo, 2018a). The modern conceptual separation of the child from the adult through which philosophers refined theories about what it is to be human, and which expressed a new optimism about human progress and development, left in

8 Introduction its wake the older understanding of the child as sinful, corruptible, unreasonable, unmanageable, and in general the worst part of humanity. This negative image of childhood was segregated from the positive modern conception, to be invested in coloniser representations of Indigenous peoples as ‘children.’ And, importantly, segregation of these polarised significances of childhood supported the purification of white childhood (and whiteness more broadly) from ungodly, bestial irrationality, which could then be conceptually cauterised –​limited to the figure of ‘the native.’ As Toby Rollo has argued (2018a), colonisers’ understanding of ‘civilisation’ deployed an ancient misopedy (hatred of children) that was able to endure through the characterisation of native peoples as children in need of violent correction and education to raise them from darkness into spiritual and intellectual enlightenment. The civilising mission takes its raison d’être from this classification of Indigenous peoples as children. This homology between Indigeneity and infancy within colonial imagination furnishes the civilising mission (to educate and improve), as well as a justification for the taking of lands. The doctrine of terra nullius depends on the portrayal of Indigenous peoples not only as children, but also as ‘feral children,’ ‘bastard children,’ and ‘orphans’: that is, as children raised outside human society and without the inheritance that would issue from paternity. As Rollo puts this, Classified as the orphans of civilization, native peoples were conceptually and legally precluded from making claims to land. In virtually all European legal codes, as in British common law, those born out of wedlock and therefore without parentage can inherit nothing, being looked upon as the son of nobody; and sometimes called fillius nullius. The colonial categorization of natives as the children of no one and inheritors of nothing is mirrored in the categorization of land as having no inherent claim upon it, as terra nullius. (Rollo, 2018a, p. 64) The conceptualisation of Indigenous peoples as ‘feral children’ engenders in the coloniser a disposition of paternalism towards them, both in the assumptions made about ‘the native’ and the role colonisers appoint themselves in the colonial relation. Colonial paternalism interprets resistance by First Peoples as immaturity, efforts to practice culture and language as insubordination and ignorance, to be ‘corrected’ through harsh treatment and extreme measures if necessary. Through the frame of paternalism, First Peoples’ sovereign claims over land their ancestors never ceded appear to the coloniser as ungrateful, childish tantrums: Indigenous people, according to white settler-​colonial fantasy, are supposed to “live in harmony, devoid of the conflicts and emotions of every day life.” Accordingly, “[c]‌onfrontational Aborigines are not worthy of the noble savage label and the associated reverential awe” (Behrendt, 1998, p. 270).

Introduction  9 The Studio 10 incident with which I opened illustrates this mindset well. Steeped in the settler-​colonial imaginary and embodying its mandate, Kerrie-​ Anne Kennerley reacted with violent indignation to Aboriginal land rights claims expressed at the Invasion Day protest. The affect of Kennerley’s response was anger, and the tone condescension: these naughty children were asking for too much! Her dismissal of the claims as frivolous and immature was quickly followed by her assumption of the more comfortable role of white saviour to ‘authentic’ Aboriginal people who live in the “outback.” Kennerley’s claim to concern for Aboriginal children, along with denigration of their families and communities, draws from a deep reservoir of historical associations of Indigeneity with those most archaic resonances of childhood: as a form of bare life over which the patriarchal coloniser exerts the absolute sovereign power of life and death.

Political Imaginaries and Image Politics I want now to turn to the ontological status of imagery and of representation in this study, which hangs particularly on the image of the Aboriginal child and its place in the Australian settler-​colonial political imaginary. The question I pose to this image throughout is: what utility does its reproduction and dissemination afford to the settler coloniser and to conceptions of Australian nationhood? And what are the effects on Aboriginal people, and on the relationship between colonisers and First Peoples, of its dissemination and reproduction? Political Imaginaries As Benedict Anderson has shown, political communities are imagined –​ which does not mean they are not ‘real,’ but their reality is grounded in the strong emotional and psychological hold they exert on those who apprehend the idea of them. They are “cultural artefacts” forged through specific historical circumstances rather than concrete or natural facts (Anderson, 2016, pp. 4–​6). The idea of the ‘nation,’ particularly –​with its specific limits and sovereignty –​exercises a power over those who participate in it to the extent that they are willing even to die for that idea (pp. 6–​7). It is a currency for politicians, who prescribe and proscribe shared national values and interests, who does and does not belong, what is characteristically ‘Australian’ or ‘un-​ Australian,’ etc. Through these discourses, they appeal to citizens’ imaginations to co-​construct a community. ‘Nation’ is all the more persuasive a reality to the extent that it is constructed on a bedrock of ‘nothing’: Anderson’s example of the tomb of the ‘unknown soldier’ –​an empty tomb, with which so many nations evoke a sense of patriotism in contemplation of death –​demonstrates well the work of nothingness to galvanise the collective imagining of nation: “void as these tombs are of identifiable mortal remains or immortal souls, they are nonetheless

10 Introduction saturated with ghostly national imaginings” (p. 9. Emphasis in original). It is not only death, but also the tomb’s emptiness that lends it poignancy and gives place to the idea of death for one’s nation, so that each citizen may be interpellated in their own way. The sarcophagus surrounds a vacuity into which the sundry fears and aspirations of each is gathered and invested with a ‘national’ character. Australia has its own ‘Tomb of the Unknown Soldier’ at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra:4 an institution that still refuses to acknowledge the frontier wars that precipitated the establishment of the nation, despite a long campaign by Indigenous veterans to include commemoration of those conflicts.5 This is a pointed reminder that national projects of remembering are also constitutively forgetful: they shape and limit memory rather than ‘merely’ represent it. This forgetting of frontier conflicts signals the more fundamental oblivion –​national project of forgetting –​upon which the idea of Australia is founded, which is terra nullius: the notion that there was nothing, no one, present to contest sovereignty when ‘Captain Cook’ charted the east coast in 1770. As Goenpul woman and philosopher Aileen Moreton-​Robinson has argued, the zero-​sum game of White sovereignty depends on the application of the “legal fiction terra nullius” (2015, pp. 4, 15, 18) just as its continued maintenance relies on the recapitulation of terra nullius through the grant of the capacity to extinguish Native Title (established by the Mabo v. Queensland (1992) decision, which recognised Indigenous sovereignty at the very moment it also put in place a process formally to remove it). By diminishing but not erasing terra nullius, white law resuscitates terra nullius, the attempted erasure of First Peoples (Moreton-​ Robinson, 2015, p. 68). This founding gesture of erasure prefigures a series of exclusions that are constitutive of Australia’s imagined community. From the various migration acts of colonial parliaments that helped galvanise the argument to federate to the anti-​Chinese Immigration Restriction Act (1901), which was one of the first pieces of legislation to pass through the newly formed parliaments of Australia, to twenty-​ first-​ century race riots, in which ‘Aussie’ white supremacists claimed to defend the beaches from Muslim youths commuting from Sydney’s western suburbs to recreate, we can see that Australians frequently articulate their patriotism in relation to a person or group deemed to be ‘unAustralian.’ The place of First Peoples in this logic of exclusion is absurd. For, while the ‘we grew here, you flew here’ slogan supposed to differentiate ‘Aussies’ from (racialised) immigrants would seem to reinforce an Indigenous claim to Australian belonging, Aboriginal people remain excluded on the basis that they were not supposed to have been ‘here’ in the first place. Moreover, the existence of First Nations people continues to be placed under question. Terra nullius, qua legal apparatus, has been supplanted by the apparatus of authenticity tests that continue to arbitrate on Aboriginality according to blood quotient, geographical location, or skin colour. Terra nullius is thus more than a claim that occurred at a particular historical moment, at a time

Introduction  11 past and best forgotten. Rather, the temporality of terra nullius is circular, so that the oblivion of Aboriginal peoples recurs continually as an ontological void about which the nation orbits. Australian settler-​colonial community is founded on the fundamental exclusion of First Peoples. Imagining the Australian nation entails recapitulating this exclusion, which is even embedding in the calendar as Australia Day. Whether you celebrate or mourn, host a barbeque, or organise a march, you are sorted, your place or non-​place in the imagined community settled. The Visible and the Invisible These delineations of inclusion and exclusion that shape the imagined nation also affect what can be seen and what is hidden in interactions with, and representations of, racialised others. Ways of representing Aboriginal childhood reflect this boundary work, reproducing what is “Australian” and is not recognised as Australian. French philosopher Jacques Rancière provides a critical theoretical framework through which I understand a political aesthetics to be at work in colonisers’ use of images of Aboriginal childhood, in his notion of the ‘distribution of the sensible.’ According to Rancière, politics is elaborated aesthetically: what becomes most ‘visible’ to a political community is that which is recognised as belonging, as having a stake in that community. Conversely, whatever is understood not to have a stake is ‘invisible,’ unsayable, unthinkable, undoable, and impossible. The values of a community –​the people, groups, activities, affects, times, and places that are considered important or unimportant –​are expressed aesthetically through cultural apparatuses such as literature, art, film, news and social media, television, and radio, as well as holidays and celebrations like ‘Australia Day.’ These aesthetic forms represent a ‘partition of the sensible’ which both reveals and enacts privilege towards some and vilification (or even invisibility) of others: those deemed to have no part in the political life of the community. As Rancière puts it, this aesthetic dimension of politics is a “delimitation of spaces and times of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience” (Rancière, 2004, p. 13). Rancière elaborates this idea with reference to Aristotle and Plato, each of whom was anxious to place conditions upon political participation such that only men somewhat like themselves could be recognised. Whereas Plato took pains to delineate what the political society capable of producing justice would look like as a hierarchy of individuals ordered according to aptitude (The Republic); Aristotle limited democratic participation by defining speech (pertaining to the concerns of politics) as the preserve of free-​born Greeks, as opposed to voice, which is shared with animals and expresses only pain and pleasure. Each of these cases presents politics as a field in which certain attributes and actions may appear (rights, justice, civil argument), and outside of which they cannot appear. This ‘outside’ of the political –​termed variously

12 Introduction as a state of nature, the private or domestic sphere, or terra nullius –​gives free reign to domination; and anyone forced to inhabit only this ‘outside’ sphere is excluded from the political realm, or is, in aesthetic terms, invisible. The Greeks took this aesthetic dimension of politics very seriously: Plato, especially, viewed art and poetry as potentially dangerous because he saw these arts as copies of a copy, according to his theory of forms, whereby the idea (or ‘form’) of a thing is its original, and the material instantiation is already a copy: each iteration occasions a loss of being, such that the artwork is degraded. For Platonism, artworks betray meaning the further from their origin they stray, and yet also have the capacity of verisimilitude, of appearing true and thus of illegitimately replacing the original. In Plato’s Republic the arts are tightly regulated. To ensure order, art should represent values that support the authority of the state. For Plato, the arts’ only value is in reproducing what Rancière calls “police”: an appearance of things that upholds, or at least does not call into question, the regular distribution of power and of ‘parts’ (shares in participation, or recognised positions within the community). In this way, contra Plato, for Rancière aesthetics/​arts/​culture are not ancillary to political power, but rather bring politics into being by showing up the limits that demarcate who may count. An important implication of Rancière’s theory is the potential to intervene in the political status quo through aesthetic and cultural arts, such as poetry, painting, film, theatre, music, and television, and by reconfiguring how one appears in public collectively through protest and demonstration. Artists, writers, filmmakers, and activists can change how people perceive the world through critical interventions that show up the aesthetic dimension of politics –​the distribution of the sensible. Individuals and collectives who engage creatively with the political aesthesis are able critically to show the limits of a political system –​how it privileges some while excluding others. Visual artists like Destiny Deacon, Fiona Foley, Julie Gough, and Tracey Moffatt, performing artists like Bob Maza and Gary Foley (National Black Theatre), and the activists responsible for founding and maintaining the Aboriginal tent embassy,6 all play with the limits of the visible and invisible in the Australian distribution of the sensible. All also blur boundaries between politics and art –​a deliberate ambiguity intrinsic to the communication of their politics and art. The denial of a ‘part’ to First Peoples is a primordial factor determining colonial relations as they presently stand and the Aboriginal child image is deployed regularly to recapitulate terra nullius. Making what is ‘invisible’ in this figure ‘visible’ means showing up that structure, and how that image reprises the exclusion of Aboriginality. It might also mean critically reworking and re-​appropriating that image. Through art, writing, activism, politics, those without a part are rendered anew –​render themselves anew –​as politically salient, agential, and sovereign. The sensible, and with it, power, might be redistributed.

Introduction  13 Image/​Politics The ontology of representation is coterminous with the history of Western philosophy. Recall that Plato’s account of ‘being’ places what he calls the ‘form,’ or the idea of a thing, at the apex of a hierarchy, at the bottom of which lands the representation, whether painted, acted, sung, or written. This is what is called a mimetic theory of the image, which supports a dualist ordering of existence that pits the intelligible (belonging to mind) against its sensible and sensual copy (belonging to corporeality). Indeed, as Roland Barthes points out, the root of ‘image’ is the Latin imitari, thus linking it to re-​presentation, imitation, the copy (Barthes, 1964, p. 40). But what is a ‘form’ if it is not already an ‘image,’ albeit one that is held in the mind of a god, or in a repository of ideas labelled ‘a priori’ and shared by all humanity? While this mimetic theory of the image gives the image to be, as Barthes puts it, “felt as weak/​poor in respect of meaning” [l’analogie est sentie comme un sens pauvre (ibid.)], theories of the image and of representation generally agree at least that it is essentially a vehicle for the communication of meaning, whether it is understood as a degraded copy, or as providing the very conditions of possibility of communication, and, indeed, of meaning. What, and how, do images of the Aboriginal child communicate? At least in his earlier, semiological, works, Barthes demystifies the image’s apparent transparency and naturalness, emphasising the cultural contexts in which images are received, and the ideological work performed by the image, at the level of connotation. As I will explore in the chapters that follow, images of Aboriginal children both produced and received within a settler-​colonial culture support a narrative that serves the interests of settler colonisers. These images are thus read here as elaborations of settler-​colonial ideologies and mythologies, which are encoded into the image in such a way that they appear as natural and unmediated. The conventions of representing Aboriginal children draw from a historical aquifer that connects them to other sites of colonialism –​to practices of slavery and genocide, as well as apparently benign missionary paternalism. To the extent that these conventions are habitual, however, they are also relatively invisible to viewers positioned in the colonial structure as coloniser. I intend not to limit this study to a semiology of representations of ‘the Aboriginal child,’ however, for two reasons. First, I explore the need to which those representations respond. How is the imagining of these images adaptive for a specific shape of being (i.e., of the settler colonial)? For, images may be understood not only as vehicles for communication but also as meaning-​ making practices that address an existential yearning. These images represent an effort to achieve certainty in the face of uncertainty, vulnerability, or threat. Settler-​Australian philosopher Alison Ross provides insights in this regard, where she argues for a philosophical anthropology of the image as “a sensuous experience of meaning that organises a world and inclines its recipient to particular paths of action” (Ross, 2016, p. 31). Drawing together the work

14 Introduction of Hans Jonas and Hans Blumenberg, Ross argues that an ‘image’ comprises an adaptive capacity to generalise –​an artifice to seek and impose order –​with which the human species compensates an instinctual insufficiency to navigate a hostile environment. Whereas Jonas emphasises the image’s facility for moving from particulars to universals, to identify patterns and connections, and as an evolutionary precursor to concepts, for Blumenberg, the image is an adaptive tool that enables human being to transform an unfamiliar and unmanageable environment into a familiar and receptive habitat. Blumenberg situates this adaptation in the species’ shift to bipedalism that precipitated the move from jungle to savanna. This leap was perceptually advantageous for early humans, who could then see into the far distance to the horizon; yet it also rendered them more visible, and so vulnerable to predators. In this context, the image “defines the environment as hospitable for action” (p. 27). “Raw anxiety” is managed through the construction of images, which give shape to the unknown by enabling the human to anticipate and predict future possibilities, and thereby to orient action. Another way of putting this is that the image “re-​calibrates” nature (p. 23), investing the world with its own meaning and intention. Accordingly, images of the Aboriginal child form part of a repertoire of images upon which settler colonisers draw to lay claim to land: to render a previously hostile environment into a habitat. These representations demonstrate an effort to habituate and domesticate the other; transform a rival people into a captive population and neutralise their presence by rendering it as a trajectory to absence. Production and consumption of imagery of Aboriginal children respond to an existential anxiety particular to settler-​coloniser being, and characterise a relation to Indigenous people of which efforts towards reconciliation or compensation must take account. This book aims to elaborate this need, as it is invested in those representations. Second, beyond a semiotic analysis, this study aims to explore the blind spots within representations of the Aboriginal child, or the moments of resistance, where these images appear as enigmatic or opaque –​because where the text/​image withholds meaning, there will be found its creator/​receiver. This is to say, one does not interpret these images from a place of innocence, especially given my own position with the structure of colonialism in Australia, as a settler coloniser living on stolen Aboriginal land. The Aboriginal child-​ image is so often fetishised because within it is secreted an investment of the viewer’s (and creator’s) own subjectivity. The coloniser subject appropriates that image, and in so doing also alienates their desire within it. To the extent that I participate in, and benefit from, this culture, my perspective is also limited. What is my investment, and where is my constitutive blind spot? Where the image withholds meaning, there, also, I will find myself.

Good Coloniser/​Bad Coloniser This brings me to the structure of representation within which the Aboriginal child image circulates, and which interpellates settler colonisers in relation to

Introduction  15 it as ‘good colonisers,’ often in contrast to ‘bad colonisers,’ that is, the ones charged with the violent dispossession of Indigenous peoples so that ‘I’ (as good coloniser) may remain innocent. In Australian works of fiction and even memoir where an Aboriginal child appears as victim, the bad coloniser is often also present to absorb guilt for whatever tragic situation has befallen the child, and to shield from blame the subject position with which the reader identifies. This settler-​colonial dialectic between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ coloniser supports and strengthens the structure of colonialism by enabling settler-​coloniser subjects to ignore their own implication in the oppression of Aboriginal people. The good coloniser is a moment of synthesis within that dialectic, which passes through the bad coloniser to resolve in a reconciled Australia in which the good coloniser has earned their sovereignty, freely given to them by a grateful ‘Aborigine’ (often a child, sometimes an elder). That dialectic surfaces throughout this book: in literature, both old and new (Dot and the Kangaroo; Manganinnie; Jasper Jones), in film (Jedda; Australia; Rabbit-​Proof Fence), and even in the mastermind of the Stolen Generations A.O. Neville’s ‘bureaucratic memoir’ Australia’s Coloured Minority. A key figure within settler-​colonial representations of Aboriginality, the category of ‘half-​caste,’ precipitates this split between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ coloniser, as what I call a ‘figure of excess.’ A figure of excess attracts a subject’s ambivalence regarding their own place within a field of meaning, thus orienting their identification with the ‘good’ position and facilitating the projection of guilt onto the ‘bad.’ In Australia, colonisers’ ambivalence, and uncertainty regarding their own part in colonial violence, is trained to the ‘half-​caste’ child, who occupies the position of both/​neither white and/​nor black. Within the settler-​colonial economy of meaning, the fair-​skinned Aboriginal child symbolises the dilution of Aboriginality, or its fusion with whiteness as the embodiment of a reconciled Australia. Yet, to the extent that these children belong to a community of First Peoples and identify as Aboriginal, their existence continues to assert the survival of Blak sovereignty7 and repudiation of terra nullius. Moreover, for adherents of eugenic discourse like Neville, the ‘half-​caste’ child is at once a trajectory to the absorption of Aboriginality within a White Australia that will have forgotten that First Peoples had ever existed and living proof of colonisers’ failure to keep blood lines separate in the first place. In the latter case, bad colonisers are men unable to control their appetites for Aboriginal women –​‘black velvet’ in colonial slang (Conor, 2016). This bad coloniser allows Neville and other upright Australians –​good colonisers –​to maintain both innocence of wrongdoing to First Peoples and their claim to the spoils of colonisation. The national apology to the Stolen Generations in 2008 provided a new apparatus to channel settler ambivalence about colonisation and a new discourse to support the performance of good colonialism: those non-​Indigenous Australians for whom the apology was a meaningful corrective, in contrast to the bad colonisers who railed against the apology. This is not to say that one position is no worse than the other. Stolen Generation survivors welcomed a

16 Introduction national apology and saw it as a positive step towards healing. Yet, arguably, the apology eclipsed rather than facilitated remedies to the systems that continue to enact violence against First Peoples, as good colonisers –​distracted by the theatrics of reconciliation –​stalled on the threshold of taking responsibility for change. In this regard, the apology, erected to the memory of past sins of Australian colonialism, was itself also a technology of forgetting, as the crowd moved on and relegated those sins to the past rather than acknowledge the violence and dispossession that continues to mark the present. ‘Sorry’ remembers in order then to forget, and settler-​coloniser representations of the Aboriginal child enact this rite of forgetting. The desire for this figure conceals settlers’ implication in colonisation, by furnishing them an alibi as ‘rescuer.’

Chapter Summary Elaborating how representations of the Aboriginal child serve settler-​colonial objects will occupy the remainder of this book. It is structured according to three analytics which posit the Aboriginal child either as a site of mediation, intervention, or impasse. The child as a site of mediation fosters white belonging to Australia by embodying ‘reconciliation,’ enabling a performance of conscience that leaves settler-​colonial sovereignty relatively undisturbed. Chapter 2 draws out the legacy meanings of childhood in the context of settler-​colonial culture, beginning with convict children and the trope of the ‘lost child’ (Pierce, 1999; Torney, 2005), and proceeding to the ‘nativised’ or ‘indigenised’ white child. These representations of ‘currency’ childhood –​ white children born ‘Australian’ –​negotiate with the spectral Indigenous other to establish a relation to the land as ‘habitat’ that naturalises white Australia. Chapter 3 explores further the indigenisation of white childhood through the figure of the ‘found child’ in fiction and history: lost settler children raised by Aboriginal people before returning to the colony as ‘white Aboriginal.’ This figure again mediates a relation between colonisers and First Peoples by negotiating white sovereignty. Inducted into Aboriginal society and lore, the found child is shown to perform indigeneity more expertly than their teachers, who are viewed, after all, as evolutionary dead ends. The found child thus appropriates sovereignty to settler colonisers in apparently Indigenous terms –​that is, where sovereignty is grounded in one’s belonging to the land rather than (as in colonial terms) through an act of instituting violence. The found child trope revises the terms under which settler colonisers displaced Indigenous peoples, allowing settlers to forget their implication in colonial violence and instead to ‘play native’ with the child. Chapter 4 turns to representations of Aboriginal childhood that mediate settler belonging by displacing and denaturalising Aboriginal belonging. Addressing a representation of Aboriginal childhood fashioned by settler-​ colonial ‘fantasy’ to soothe white anxiety, this chapter highlights uses of the Aboriginal child figure as symbol of reconciliation and a post-​racial future.

Introduction  17 Such representations fetishise ‘the Aboriginal child,’ which symbolises hope for a harmonious Australian political community by concealing the dissensus and division that runs so deeply within the nation’s history. This representation of the Aboriginal child therefore enacts a kind of amnesia. ‘Nullah,’ the Aboriginal child at the centre of Baz Luhrmann’s film Australia (2008), is a key exemplar of this tendency and is connected to an historical articulation of white Australian belonging through the figure of the ‘half-​caste.’ The image of the dispossessed Indigenous ‘other’ is neutralised –​rendered safe and benign –​by means of the child’s purifying, amnesiac, capacity. Chapters 5 and 6 explore the Aboriginal child as a site of intervention, available to the social engineering of populations, to ‘improve’ the race and the nation. Chapter 5 draws on two texts that address the racial assimilationist policies posed as a solution to the ‘Aboriginal problem’ in mid-​twentieth-​ century Australia. I read Charles Chauvel’s 1955 film Jedda alongside A.O. Neville’s Australia’s Coloured Minority (1947) to draw out different modalities –​cinematic and bureaucratic –​through which the ideology of assimilation was naturalised in Australian culture. Each of these texts articulates the colonial logic of elimination through blood quantum that drove policies of removal of Indigenous children from their families enacted by Australian states and territories until the 1967 referendum transferred race powers from the states to the Commonwealth. Chapter 6 brings us into the present –​and present-​day complicity of settler colonisers –​by examining the continuities and ruptures in the representation of the Aboriginal child as a site of intervention in contemporary discourses of governmentality, cinema, and literature. From a preliminary examination of responses to the Report into the Removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families, Bringing Them Home, Chapter 6 examines representations of the Aboriginal child as constitutively homeless and neglected in both contemporary literature and fiction and present-​day Child Protective Services decision making. Drawing from insights of the Independent Review of Aboriginal Children and Young People in Out of Home Care (OOHC), Family Is Culture (Davis, 2019), I explore the effects of a culture of representing Aboriginal children as homeless on the actions of street-​level bureaucrats who effectively continue to remove Aboriginal children under the auspices of child protection rather than biological and cultural assimilation. Chapters that take up the third analytic, the child as site of impasse, consider the Aboriginal child as the settler-​colonial system’s excess: that is, as what cannot be assimilated and so is instead hidden and forgotten. This is the trajectory from intervention that leads to abandonment within the child protection and carceral systems, where the ‘loose ends’ of Australian settler colonialism are concealed. This figure is considered ‘dangerous’ to the polity insofar as it bears the memory of colonial violence Australians would sooner forget, and reminds that violence belongs to the colonial present and not only its past. Children placed in situations of extreme exclusion are so hidden from

18 Introduction view that their representation itself becomes an event. Chapter 7 focusses on the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NT Intervention) as an apparatus through which Aboriginal children are constructed as objects of rescue and abandonment, invented by politicians and contingents of the media. Considered (after Agamben) as an anthropological/​gynaecological machine, the Intervention reduces Aboriginal children to bare life and then sorts them according to gender: girls are accordingly represented as highly sexualised and boys as incipient criminals. Drawing on Moreton-​Robinson’s analyses of the pathologisation of Indigenous people, I argue that political and news media representations of violence affecting Aboriginal women and children in the Northern Territory tend to insulate settler colonisers from blame by locating the causes of injury within Aboriginality itself. Chapter 8 considers the function of the Aboriginal child as impasse in terms of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s question ‘can the subaltern speak?’ The image of Aboriginal childhood as impasse –​sexualised or criminalised –​ congeals as an opacity regarding which the urge to rescue falters. Reflecting this through Spivak’s analysis of ‘representation’ in her landmark essay allows me to interrogate my own part in this inquiry –​as a settler coloniser, living and working on Gadigal, Wangal, and Darug lands –​alongside the question of what a decolonised representation of Aboriginal childhood might look like. Waanyi woman and writer Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book is read as a poetics of subalternity and as a retrieval of the ‘Aboriginal girl’ from the colonial archive, to figure instead a Blak sovereignty that remains untouched by the eliminative logic of settler colonialism. This conception of Aboriginal sovereignty is drawn from Tanganekald, Meintangk, and Boandik woman Irene Watson’s legal philosophy and informed by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of ‘Limbo’ and ‘Whatever being.’ Finally, Chapter 9 explores the idea that the image of the Aboriginal child as impasse, in the hands of First Nations creators, preserves an alternative sovereign logic within its un-​representability in settler-​colonial terms. I consider Aboriginal filmmakers’ depictions of Aboriginal childhoods not as displaced by colonialism, but rather as finding that they are always already home, in, to quote Watson, “a place [they] have always been” (2002, para. 34). These portrayals resist being instrumentalised by settler colonialism to represent settler belonging, or the transferral of sovereignty. Rather, they suggest the failure of the coloniser’s system to extinguish Blak sovereignty. This thought is tested through contemplation of Warwick Thornton and Ivan Sen’s cinematic depictions of Aboriginal childhood in the interstitial spaces between cultures, between places, and between childhood and adulthood. Through this attention to the ambiguous space of the in-​ between, this concluding chapter draws out how sustained consideration of the way in which representations of Aboriginal childhood manage memory and forgetting in Australia can work to unsettle neo-​colonial uses of that representation.

Introduction  19

Notes 1 The policies and practices of removal of children were brought into public visibility by the 1997 Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (Bringing Them Home). While Aboriginal people had already been aware of removals and were forming groups such as ‘Link-​Up’ to help trace family members, most within the non-​Indigenous community were not aware of these events until after Bringing Them Home was tabled, and many wondered how they had not known –​why they had not been remembered and acknowledged more broadly. Historian Henry Reynolds addresses this feeling of ‘unknowing’ or ‘forgetfulness’ and the collective responsibility to understand the past in Why Weren’t We Told (1999). 2 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children make up 37.9% of children in child protection, but only 3.3% of the total population of Australia is Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (Davis, 2019: Figure 1, 394). 3 Ernst Haeckel coined this phrase, in terms of his “biogenetic law,” in 1866. It was a synthesis of Lamarckian theory and Goethe’s Naturphilosophie, and held that the development of each individual (particularly the embryo) recapitulated the evolution of the species. However, the idea was often generalised in more popular literature and thought to apply to societies seen to be ‘lower’ in the evolution of the species, which would accordingly culminate with Europeans. 4 In Australia’s case, the tomb purports to contain the remains of an unknown Australian soldier. Rather than being empty physically, it is epistemologically empty. The official website for the tomb can be found at www.awm.gov.au/​visit/​visi​ tor-​info​rmat​ion/​featu​res/​hall-​of-​mem​ory/​tomb (accessed 22 March 2020). 5 The reasoning provided by the Australian War Memorial (AWM) is that “Australian” military forces did not exist at the time of the wars fought between Indigenous peoples and settler colonisers, and the AWM “has found no substantial evidence that home-​grown military units, whether state colonial forces or post-​ Federation Australian military units, ever fought against the Indigenous population of this country” (Pooley, 2013). Notably, the AWM does commemorate the Boer War, which took place before “Australia” existed as a nation, with over 4,000 objects in its collection from that conflict. Likewise, First Peoples at the time of colonisation constituted “home-​grown military units” fighting an invader, so exclusion of the frontier wars is a telling omission. It prompts the question, for whom does the AWM commemorate? It is supposed to commemorate “our fallen,” so to exclude First Nations warriors by invoking such definitions as “home-​grown” is not only question begging, it also demonstrates again that Australia is predicated upon terra nullius. 6 The Aboriginal Tent Embassy’s founders include Billy Craigie, Bert Williams, Michael Anderson, Tony Coorey, Paul Coe, Gary Foley, Gary Williams, John Newfong, Sam Watson, Pearl Gibbs, Roberta Sykes, Alana Doolan, Cheryl Buchannan, Pat Eatock, Kevin Gilbert, Denis Walker, Isabel Coe, and Shirley Smith. 7 ‘Blak’ refers to the political movement of Indigenous peoples to take back language from the coloniser as an expression of power, differentiating their being from that imposed by the coloniser as the racialised ‘black’. It also distinguishes peoples with black skin in Australia from African Americans. See https://​sites.goo​gle.com/​site/​ aus​tral​ianb​lakh​isto​rymo​nth/​extra-​cre​dit.

2 Gumnut Babies and ‘Babes in the Wood’ The Nativised White Child

A Country of Naughty Children Within the colony’s first 50 years, an identification had already formed between the states of ‘childhood’ and of being a settler coloniser in Australia. A classic of the national juvenile literature, Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians articulates this identification, while also giving ‘Australian childhood’ its own character: In England, and America, and Africa, and Asia, the little folks may be paragons of virtue … But in Australia a model child is –​I say it not without thankfulness –​ an unknown quantity. It may be that the miasmas of naughtiness develop best in the sunny brilliancy of our atmosphere. It may be that the land and the people are young-​hearted together, and the children’s spirits not crushed and saddened by the shadow of long years’ sorrowful history. There is a lurking sparkle of joyousness and rebellion and mischief in nature here, and therefore in children. (Turner,1894, Kindle Loc 85/​2092. Emphasis added) This description of Australian ‘native-​born’ children as ‘naughty’ is not a departure, but rather crystallises and romanticises a preponderance of historical and narrative accounts of what were called ‘currency’ (Australian-​born) lads and lasses. Many early accounts of children concerned juvenile convicts: ‘street urchins’ and ‘Artful Dodgers’ of London, who were transported to Port Puer (Van Diemen’s Land) and were considered the most hardened and amoral segment of humanity. “It’s impossible to imagine a more corrupt fraternity of little depraved felons,” Governor King writes of them; yet, as Modern-​era children, they were also seen still to be malleable and therefore salvageable. More broadly, children in the colonies were perceived to be rougher, more neglected, noisier, and more visible than children in England (Kociumbas, 1997, xi–​xii). Likewise, Turner’s currency children are not naughty in precisely the sense of the Port Puer boys. Rather, they consist of a sublimated, affable DOI: 10.4324/9781003099666-2

Gumnut Babies and ‘Babes in the Wood’  21 naughtiness, a naughtiness that is enigmatic, desirable, signalling as it does a new kind of being (“an unknown quantity”), a new moral freedom. Turner’s construction of the Australian child as harmlessly naughty serves a purpose in relation to Australian national identity more broadly. Specifically, it enacts a commitment to forgetting that characterises the Australian national psyche. The image of the white Australian child as carefree, joyous, playful, and just naughty enough to signify a freedom of spirit (but not enough to indicate malevolence) encapsulates the sentiment that Australia is young, and is not weighed down by a long and sorrowful history. This drive to forget forms a powerful undercurrent to Australian literature and arts, which relegates First Peoples’ presence to past memory, to be mourned and then consigned to oblivion. As Bundjalung woman and poet Evelyn Araluen puts it, [i]‌f Aboriginal presence is considered in such work, it is a representation predominantly concerned with symbols of atavistic inconvenience to the colonial project, charged with psychic significance in the symbolic evocation of a ghostly spectre haunting land lost to Aboriginal people, but which ultimately clears space for the discovery and cultivation of that land by the appropriate settler. (Araluen, 2019, para. 13) The children’s book participates in this movement no less than works produced for adults. Supposed to form an identification with its reader, to tell children stories with which they relate, children’s literature also interpellates them into a burgeoning national identity that self-​authorises by forgetting the peoples and cultures that had already existed on those lands. The child protagonists in books such as Seven Little Australians (Turner, 1894), Dot and the Kangaroo (Pedley, 1920 (originally 1899), and Snugglepot and Cuddlepie (Gibbs, 1918), among many other works, assisted a transition for settler colonisers between the discomfiting awareness of one’s being as an intruder implicated in the violent near-​eradication of Indigenous peoples, and an uncomplicated, future-​ oriented existence as rightful owners of the place they call home. Notwithstanding this attempted amnesia that Australian children’s books such as these represent, each contains residues of the presence of First Peoples and tries to reconcile this knowledge to the story it tells of settler sovereignty. They are also written with a backward-​looking glance to literatures in Europe, and especially England, taking up the anxieties and social issues that ‘childhood’ negotiates in the ‘old country,’ and drawing on affinities to demonstrate continuity as well as the break with the past the transition from colony to nation is supposed to represent. These early national texts form a reserve of material –​tropes, themes, and story arcs –​that are taken up in contemporary literature. Particularly, an eco-​ nationalism present in these early works –​through representations of Australian native-​born childhood at home in the Australian bush –​is

22  Gumnut Babies and ‘Babes in the Wood’ carried through to contemporary Australian literature that in other respects attempts explicitly to confront the question of white settler belonging, and to process the bloody history of colonisation. This chapter thematises these early works in relation to the diverse influences and objects that formed them and draws out these works’ connection to contemporary national imaginaries regarding settler-​ coloniser Australian belonging. Particularly, the theme of ‘naturalisation’ (or ‘nativisation’) of the settler-​Australian child is a mainstay of these texts, regardless of whether or not they attempt to countenance the historical situation of colonisation. In the case of contemporary works (of both literature and film), there remains a tendency to use the child figure as a reservoir of innocence through which to ground settler-​colonial sovereignty, even where earnest attempts to work through the legacies of colonialism are made. This tendency, I argue, is connected to the significance of the white child in the settler-​colonial Australian imaginary as a figure through which white belonging is established. The white child, conceived of as ‘born and bred Australian’ –​signifying a natural connection to the Australian ecosystem –​is used as a placeholder for the settler community more broadly, to symbolise white belonging. I argue that, in cultivating Australian national identity in the years leading up to federation, the identification of white settler children with nature and native animals served an important rhetorical function.1 Later chapters will elucidate the significances of Aboriginal childhood in the settler-​colonial regime of representation, relative to this primary position of the ‘white’ settler child in that imaginary. Importantly, the white child displaces the Aboriginal child, and in the wake of this displacement, it is the Aboriginal child (symbolising ‘Aboriginality’) whose belonging is brought into question. While Seven Little Australians, Dot and the Kangaroo, and The Adventures of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie are analysed in the first part of the chapter, I will address more recent and contemporary novels in the latter part: Colin Thiele’s Storm Boy, and Inga Simpson’s Nest and Where the Trees Were.

The Origins of Australian Childhood Ethel Turner’s mise en scène for Seven Little Australians reflects a mythology surrounding Australian children of robustness coupled with an impatience for manners and convention glossed as honesty and innocence. The fiction written for children pre-​and shortly post -​federation was concerned with articulating an understanding of Australianness that was both connected to and sharply differentiated from Englishness. These works participated in colonial knowledge production that, following Said, stabilised the coloniser’s world by objectifying the colonised other and their land, such that whatever remains beyond the coloniser’s understanding or control is rendered ‘exotic,’ shallow, fixed, and powerless (Said, 1978). In bringing the new material of

Gumnut Babies and ‘Babes in the Wood’  23 the colonial space into this field of knowledge, Australian children’s fiction thereby recycled and adapted storylines, themes, and tropes from Europe, because these ready-​to-​hand tools resonated with the cultural objects and ideas through which colonial, expat British subjects understood themselves. As Maureen Nimon argues, most literature consumed by settler children pre-​Federation was written and published in Britain, including books about Australia by authors who had never journeyed there. Moreover, the settler-​ colonial Australian mindset is intrinsically connected to England in both simple and complicated ways. British history was seen to be Australian history, since Australia was perceived to have had no history prior to 1770, and England was still referred to as the home country even into the twentieth century (Nimon, 2005, p. 2). Emulation was sometimes slavish, even involving, in one case, a direct transposition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), with the substitution of Australian native animals in the place of the menagerie that populated Carroll’s text.2 By adapting British narratives to the Australian settler-​ colonial context, such authors attempted to domesticate the Australian natural environment, and by investing indigenous plants and animals with European mythology, appropriated the bush to a British cultural circuit of meaning, re-​mapping it to the coordinates of home. They made themselves at home by reimagining the significance of the bush, by calibrating it to British equivalents. This was part of a broader cultural project through which arts and technologies –​including farming and landscaping as well as painting and literature –​were deployed to recreate Australia as a more familiar, domestic place for colonisers (Mayes, 2018). Yet ‘Australians’ had also been transplanted from England and needed to find a way to take root and thrive in new soil and on their own terms. There was a momentum among Australian-​born politicians, intellectuals, and cultural leaders to assert a distinctiveness from the British, as well as from other settler-​colonial states such as America and Canada, to support a burgeoning Australian identity. Authors of children’s books along with other writers and artists of the era (including Henry Lawson, A.B. Patterson, Norman Lindsay, and contributors to The Bulletin) articulated ideals of (white) Australian masculinity and femininity according to discourses available at the time from conservationist and agrarian socialist to feminist, masculinist, and eugenicist narratives. The ‘white Australia policy’3 anchored these discourses circulating in Australia at the time, however, and ‘progressive’ narratives of the day were imbricated with scientific racism and white ethno-​nationalism. While narratives about lost children predominated in the Australian colonies (Pierce, 1999; Torney, 2005), signalling anxiety about settler-​coloniser belonging on the continent (Pierce, 1999; Faulkner, 2016a), the child was also a site for attempts to establish white belonging, both as a figure through which belonging was constructed and as readers who would themselves be shaped as ideal Australians.

24  Gumnut Babies and ‘Babes in the Wood’ Children’s literature can be seen as a heightened ideological field, densely invested with power. As Tony Watkins argues, the “templates through which we articulate experience” are reproduced in the stories we tell children: … the narrative we give [children] to make sense of cultural experience constitute a kind of mapping, maps of meaning that enable our children to make sense of the world. They contribute to children’s sense of identity, an identity that is simultaneously personal and social: narratives, we might say, shape the way children find a “home” in the world. (Watkins, 1999, p. 183) In the case of Australian children’s literature, ‘finding a home’ is more than figurative: these stories staged a struggle between colonisers’ and Indigenous peoples’ sovereign claims. At stake was not only the concern to form a class of new Australians who would identify as sovereign. The child figure of these stories also worked through colonials’ repressed ambivalence regarding their belonging. In ‘the bush’ and ‘the outback’ –​the stereotypical settings in which the ‘real Australia’ was supposed to be found –​children were animated in conversation with wild animals, bushmen, and ‘Aborigines,’ and were lost and found, were rescued, and were seen to perish. As actors in dialogue with that landscape, these children –​little Robinson Crusoes –​worked the environment, and thus appropriated the country to a national imaginary, imbuing it with the Lockean colonial mandate to transform land into property.

Little Robinson Crusoes: Eco-​nationalism and the Australian Children’s Story The construction of ‘Australian’ identity has intrinsically involved the imaginative appropriation of land, as well as the habituation, in imagination, of white settlers to the Australian natural environment. The discursive engine of this habituation was ‘eco-​nationalism,’ or literature and art that promoted nationalism through environmentalism and conservationist politics. As Nicholas Smith argues, the discourse of eco-​ nationalism negotiates debates about immigration and Australian “ethnicity,” where ‘belonging’ is often predicated on the idea that settler Australians are able to “imagine themselves as indigenous” by establishing a certain relationship to the environment (Smith, 2011, p. 3). This ‘imagining oneself indigenous’ is performed in tension with a feeling of being at odds with the environment, in the context of the performative denial of Indigenous peoples in manifold ways. As Araluen puts this, [t]‌he ostensible telos of the national literary sentiment –​which is surmised by John McLaren as the rise “from the hostility of the landscape to man’s efforts to tame it” –​moves anxiously around Aboriginal presence in cosmic, embodied, and negated forms. (Araluen, 2019, para. 10)

Gumnut Babies and ‘Babes in the Wood’  25 Key to the forging of the Australian identity is the triptych “nature –​ native –​nation,” which exerts a particular force in the historical circumstances of settler colonialism (Smith, 2011, p. 7). This eco-​nationalist triad operates dialectically: citizenship is performed through the purposive restoration of ‘nature’ to what is conceived to be ‘native’ –​biota that belong originally to the land –​and “nation” is the result of their synthesis, that is, white settlers’ conscious training of nature back to ‘nativity’ in the realm of ‘culture.’ And according to this Hegelian mindset, Aboriginal peoples fall short of the ‘conscious’ training of nature and are instead categorised as part of nature.4 In the first instance, as Adrian Franklin describes, colonists in Australia –​ unlike those in North America –​had found animals and plants to be so different from those to which they were accustomed that there was a desire to populate the ecosystem with biota from England, to produce a continuity of aesthetics, pastimes, and habits with one’s old life, in order to recreate home (Franklin, 2006, pp. 14–​15). Only with federalism, and once the shift to differentiate the new home from the old became politically and culturally current, did the status of these introduced species alter: the appeal to ‘natives’ demonstrated allegiance to ‘Australia.’ The Australian ‘nation’ was thus asserted through a vigorous and patriotic defence of native flora and fauna and a repulsion of species introduced through the very process of colonisation. This had to be achieved through an exertion of effort –​working the imagination and the land –​to appear as natural. A postcolonial society such as Australia cannot make the claim to descend from the Australian land, for this spot was already taken, but it could embody the role of custodian of the land. To be seen to be ruthlessly upholding the naturally given place of native animals against the encroachment of animals that were out of place, ecologically speaking, was an activity that reinforced Australian national legitimacy and values. (Franklin, 2006, p. 17) The passionate contempt for some introduced species, and particularly those living in the wild, is somewhat unique to Australia, and debates regarding culling introduced animals sometimes uncannily mirror and coincide with calls to restrict immigration (Franklin, 2006, p. 18). Efforts to eradicate carp from the waterways, as well as other “pests” and “feral” biota –​rabbits, cats, foxes, cane toads, prickly pear, lantana –​ are thus framed in terms of a liaison of interests between nationalism and conservation (Smith, 2011, pp. 3–​4). These plants and animals are deemed “unAustralian,” their presence foreboding an unsettling of the natural equilibrium. This anxiety signals, however, a further disquiet regarding coloniser being: that is, a displacement of the ‘invader’ status onto other species introduced by settler colonials. The damage and disruption these species bring to Australian ecosystems echoes the damage colonisers wrought on First Peoples’ lives, lands, and cultures, and the resonance between these invasions

26  Gumnut Babies and ‘Babes in the Wood’ is discomfiting. Like a return of the repressed, the non-​human iteration of the logic of colonisation appears as an automatic, monstrous excess, which is then reabsorbed by the ‘host organism,’ the coloniser, by way of the dialectic of eco-​nationalism. This manoeuvre is therefore double: both defensive and aggressive. The foreign other was repelled to protect the association of Australianness with whiteness, and, concurrently, efforts to erase, diminish, and replace Indigenous peoples were in train. ‘Progressive’ and ‘conservative’ politics alike in turn-​ of-​the-​century Australia were imbricated with a vigorous anti-​immigration agenda; and, arguably, residues of this early association of Australian whiteness and anti-​immigration sentiment through a discourse of environmentalism remain present today in the expression of concerns for ‘population sustainability.’5 Belying this discourse, however, is an indelible fact that is also a blind-​spot in the system, and so invisibly orients the settler-​colonial Australian disposition: white Australians were migrants to the country and had themselves transformed the environment. The recruitment of environmental politics to the elaboration of Australian whiteness was therefore a move suffused with ambivalence. The child figure becomes critical to enacting this replacement because it can deflect these contradictions with an armoury of innocence. Like the story of Robinson Crusoe that held sway over British imperial imagination, these shipwrecked beings could begin life afresh, in a new place. The shocking footprint of the Other can then be encountered for the first time, as if there were no political situation that brought them together on this shore. The Lost Child Narrative: From ‘Castaway’ to ‘Terraformer’ The settler child’s first forays into the bush were not, however, so triumphant as this. Reflecting the uneasiness of early settlers in their new and unfamiliar environment, news reportage and fictional narratives that circulated for colonial readers featured children who had wandered from home and become lost.6 Frederick McCubbin’s iconic painting, Lost (1886), also consolidates the image of the lost white child within the DNA of the national imaginary.7 Peter Pierce draws out a continuous thread between these early years and the present day, where stories and reportage of lost children still capture the Australian imagination, prompting incidental reflection on the relation between non-​Indigenous Australians and the land upon which they live: “[t]‌he figure of the child stands in part for the apprehensions of adults about having sought to settle in a place where they might never be at peace” (Pierce, 1999, p. xii). The ‘lost child’ figure, like the ‘castaway’ of European imperial imagination, is set adrift from the contained vestige of civilisation represented by the frontier cottage, thus bringing to the fore the settler community’s separation from the place they belong. The scene of the lost child and the search party in Australian culture circulates across time and through the media of serialised fiction, news reportage, novels, art, film, and television. In earlier accounts

Gumnut Babies and ‘Babes in the Wood’  27 the Aboriginal tracker also featured: with his uncanny knowledge of the ways of the bush and readings of how the child/​ren had interacted with it (Pierce, 1999, p. 21), he could recover the child from what would otherwise end in their death. Such deeds of rescue were contemporaneously framed as one of the “last heroic acts of a dying race” (ibid., p. 27). Through these actions, the “black tracker” was represented in this literature as a messenger or intermediary, welcoming white settlers to the country and legitimating conquest, before receding into the background to disappear. By the time of federation, non-​human native animals would replace the tracker as intermediary. The lost child is also recruited to the service of rendering settlers at home in the bush, however, and do not simply place their belonging into question. They become industrious castaways, or in more contemporary terms ‘terraformers,’ domesticating and claiming ‘the bush’ to settler-​colonial imagination. Perhaps the most famous case from colonial times of children lost in the bush provides an example of this operation. In the winter of 1864, when the three Duff children wandered into the bushlands of Horsham, Victoria (the lands of the Wotjobaluk, Jaadwa, Jadawadjali, Wergaia, and Jupagulk peoples), they were presumed to be dead. Upon emerging from their nine-​day absence, however, the middle child, Jane Duff, was dubbed a heroine, galvanising proto-​nationalist sentiments by modelling colonial femininity. Reportage of the children’s ordeal focused on Jane’s capacity to make the bush homely for her brothers by sheltering them from the cold with her skirts. The image of Australian girlhood as selfless that Jane personified operated to counter the prevailing impression of currency girls as unruly and unfeminine and can be read as “a convincing proof that ‘proper’ qualities existed in the Australian girl” (Torney, 2005, p. 77). Her story thus prefigured a possible future of good citizenship. Through this attention to Jane, a consistent story of heroic Australian girlhood developed that continues into the present.8 Seven-​year-​old Jane was likely co-​responsible with her nine-​year-​old brother, Isaac, for their survival (the youngest, Frank, was only three). However, Jane’s part in this story fulfilled the public desire at that time for a mother figure and home-​maker. The Geelong Gazette set up ‘subscriptions’ so readers could donate to the Duff family, and thus closed the circuit of consumption, after its sales had surged over the course of the children’s disappearance and then rescue. It also inspired creative accounts and artwork that particularly celebrated Jane’s protective skirts, all of which depicted the children as flaxen babes in the wood. In truth, the family would not have fit contemporaneous ideals of the family or of childhood: they were a mixed family, the children having different fathers; they were poor, living in a one-​room bark hut with a dirt floor; and, far from the cherub-​like beings in artwork depicting the Duff children,9 in photographs they appear more like street urchins of London.10 They would have had to be tough to survive nine days in the bush without food, water, or shelter. Key to the story’s appeal was not only Jane’s ability to represent the civilising influence of white settler femininity, however, but also the significance she

28  Gumnut Babies and ‘Babes in the Wood’ represented regarding settlers’ relationship to the bushland. These depictions of Jane served to rework an otherwise hostile environment, to make it familiar –​a place of belonging, or at least survival. The lost child narrative, which had begun as a cautionary tale about the unviability of settlers in the bush, had now become a story of metamorphosis. From the chrysalis of Jane’s skirts, the Australian native-​born and indigenised child would be able to unfold into being. Seven Little Australians (1894) One of the most powerful attempts to represent this character of Australian childhood is Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians, first published 30 years after the Duff children’s ordeal. In describing this text as an ‘attempt to represent,’ I want to bring into play a critical understanding of representation, not as the depiction of something that exists already and autonomously in a field beyond its representation, but rather as constitutive of ‘reality,’ conceived as already political, that is, as “a site of power and regulation” and “source of identity” (Hall, 1996, p. 271). Particularly, as discussed in the introduction, a representation may be read as a constellation of various nodes of power –​an intersection of interests where they most resonate with each other and are brought into visibility –​which, in turn, shapes possible modes of experience within the scope of a cultural system. Seven Little Australians articulates as it constructs the ‘Australian child,’ and –​in tandem with a host of other cultural equipment –​produces Australian identity through the very desire for Australian difference. Turner’s novel depicts the generation gap between the seven children and their father as the distance between shores of old England and new Australia. Captain Woolcot is an army man: English-​born, stiff, formal, and emotionally distant, he epitomises imperial control and absentee authoritarianism. His expectation that his children should be seen and not heard is continuously frustrated, for they embody the Australian sense of naughtiness that Turner celebrates, and which sets the tone for the book and furnishes the plot with momentum. A key irony of the text –​what the captain exemplifies but cannot apprehend –​is that his children personify the irrepressible spirit of the time, so that his attempts to suppress them will end in tragedy. As with other major literary works written for children that preceded and informed it (Oliver Twist, The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland, and Little Women, to name a few), Seven Little Australians centres children as subjects of experience. According to this construction, children understand something essential (in this case, about ‘being Australian’) that adults miss. Through the child’s eyes the adult reader is appraised of a truth forged through the struggle between adults and children. Importantly, in Seven Little Australians the children are allowed the freedom to develop their own collective voice and perspective because of the vast amounts of time they spend together unsupervised. The world that is elaborated within the book is theirs alone.11

Gumnut Babies and ‘Babes in the Wood’  29 An early scene articulates children’s function to shape a new truth, whilst also highlighting the irrelevance and arbitrariness of the parent’s expectations for their behaviour. The children are confined to the nursery as their father and young step-​mother, Esther, dine with guests. They had earlier had a simple supper and are hungry again, and envious of the adults’ more substantial meal of “roast fowl, three vegetables, and four kinds of pudding” (Turner, Kindle loc. 167/​2151). The oldest son, Pip, takes his plate downstairs to the dining room and, before guests, asks for food, in a scene that references Oliver Twist, although perhaps mockingly –​the Woolcot children are not starving, nor as ‘good’ as Dickens’s young hero, although they feel keenly the injustice of having been served inferior food.12 When Pip is successful, one by one several other children, in dishevelled clothing, traipse into the dining room to beg food from the adults, leaving guests bemused and their father embarrassed and furious. This scene begins a sequence of increasingly escalating episodes of naughtiness and the captain’s attempts to discipline the children. The child who “forms the emotional centre of the novel” (Rossiter,1996, p. 64, cited in Keane, 2012, p. 128) is the 13-​year-​old Judy. Even freer of spirit than her siblings, Judy is a ringleader among the children, depicted as a force of nature. Turner reinforces the representation of the children as “the untidiest, most unruly lot of children in Sydney” (Kindle loc. 243/​2151), through her description of the unkempt, untrainable, grounds of their home; and Judy particularly exemplifies an affinity with unruly nature. One memorable scene shows Judy attempting to win the captain’s favour by cutting the lawn: “brimming over with zeal” and “armed … with an abnormally large scythe” (Kindle loc. 295/​2151), Judy “decapitated” dandelions, the top of a rose bush, lopped off a fragment of her dress, and came close to gravely injuring herself. Judy’s wildness worries the captain, whose unease is in part a promise to his late wife. [The captain] remembered her own mother had often said she trembled for Judy’s future. That restless fire of hers that shone out of her dancing eyes, and glowed scarlet on her cheeks in excitement, and lent amazing energy and activity to her young, lithe body, would either make a noble, daring, brilliant woman of her, or else she would be shipwrecked on rocks the others would never come to, and it would flame up higher and higher and consume her. “Be careful Judy” had been almost the last words of the anxious mother. (Kindle loc. 321/​2151) The language of being “shipwrecked on rocks” suggests the dangers of being a colony and colonial anxiety about belonging. As Jan Keane has argued, one can see Judy as a metaphor for Australia –​a new vital and independent nation which might have a great future, or on the other hand

30  Gumnut Babies and ‘Babes in the Wood’ may find itself facing difficult challenges. The father’s anxiety about his daughter seems to parallel Turner’s concern for the future of the nation itself. (Keane, 2012, p. 128) Like other intellectuals with whom she associated, Turner was preoccupied with developing a national character of resilience and prosperity. A country of unruly children may be engaging and endearing, but does it lead to a healthy body politic? Judy will come to redeem herself, transcending her mischief with an act of true courage, but the fulfilment of this promise is for her terminal.13 At the novel’s climax, Judy exchanges her own young life for that of her baby brother, ‘the General,’ when she rescues him from a large falling tree. The infant represents, then, an even younger and still more innocent future, a truly clean slate. Significantly, the alter of this sacrifice is the untamed and unpredictable bush, which claims Judy and enables her to prove and better herself. The General had already played the part throughout the novel of a ‘transitional object’ in Winnicott’s terminology, between Judy and her father. He is an unattainable object of desire who manages their tense relationship. In cinematic language most associated with Hitchcock films, we might characterise the General as a ‘MacGuffin,’ a device that advances the plot and motivates desire and action but is itself insignificant.14 In this respect, the General is a basic baby, quite amenable but featureless, whose care is distributed among the children. He is never at rest, intrinsically displaced, a white child threatening perennially to be lost, but his movements articulate each new development. It is because of an uncertainty, always at play, regarding the General’s care that Judy is sent to boarding school, after having left the infant unsupervised at her father’s barracks so she and Pip could go on an excursion. The baby as transitional object comes finally to rest far from the captain when Judy saves him from a falling tree. Her back is broken, and she takes several hours to die. Judy’s death significantly, but almost imperceptibly, leads to the father’s transformation qua father: “Judy’s death made his six living children dearer to his heart, though he showed his affection very little more” (Turner, Kindle loc. 2052/​2151). It is also significant that Judy’s place of death is the ‘outback,’ on the frontier where pioneers transform ‘wilderness’ into capital and realise themselves in the assumption of land as property –​and thus ‘the outback’ continues to signify a more authentic Australia than urbanised environments. In Judy’s reckoning with the Australian bush, her essence (and, by Turner’s metonymic logic, also Australia’s essence) is realised as courageous, practical, and faithful. The death scene achieves both objectives of articulating a cultural connection to England and separating settlers from their colonial identity and affiliations to Europe. First, the juxtaposition between Judy and the natural environment is illustrative of this troubled relation between identity and difference. Turner begins the chapter, “Little Judy,” by establishing the out-​of-​place costuming

Gumnut Babies and ‘Babes in the Wood’  31 of her heroine, in her ‘Sunday best’: “[a]‌cross the grass came a little flying figure, Judy in a short pink frock with her wild curls blowing about her face” (Turner, Kindle loc. 1897/​2151). The accident occurs later in the chapter: There was a tree falling, one of the great, gaunt, naked things that had been ringbarked long ago. All day it had swayed to and fro, rotten through and though; now there came up across the plain a puff of wind, and down it went before it. One wild ringing cry Judy gave, then she leaped across the ground, her arms outstretched to the little lad with the laughing eyes and lips straight to death.15 A second point of connection and differentiation between Australia and England for Turner concerns her use of a trope common to nineteenth-​ century novels, the dying child, which Turner adopts ironically, to express an Australian irreverence. The dying child trope is exemplified by ‘Helen Burns’ of Jane Eyre: the child too virtuous for this world, who fades away of consumption or typhus, and whose grace improves those near her. Little Women’s ‘Beth’ provides another model of this sentimental Victorian motif and would have been ready to hand for readers in Australia and England (publicity for Turner referred to her as Australia’s Louisa May Alcott). Turner thus revelled in portraying Judy –​and so also Australia –​as subversive of this ideal: fierce and impatient, protesting death to her last breath.16 More generally Turner’s references to the classics of Victorian literature were tongue-​in-​cheek, even satirical, suggesting a desire to distance her own Australian writings from other national literatures. She deployed the conventions that had been established through these texts with a mocking twist, to delineate a specific ethos of Australian childhood that informs a national character. ‘Pip’ is not the impassive and dutiful innocent of his namesake in Great Expectations, and nor is he the virtuous Oliver seeking justice by asking for more gruel. Judy is pointedly not the otherworldly Helen Burns or Beth (although Turner toys with the reader by giving her consumption in the second act). When her time comes, Judy does not go quietly into that good night; she rages. Judy’s final place of rest affirms her Australianness further: a hill-​top, amid a clump of green and gold wattle (Turner, Kindle loc. 2017/​2151) –​which would soon become Australia’s national floral emblem. It is a place that mixes body with soil and so consolidates belonging, a place from which to contemplate the sunset of youth and a national coming of age (Turner, Kindle loc. 2029/​2151). One final episode worthy of discussion here stands incongruously against the grain of the proto-​nationalist themes and motifs of the text by recognising the prior sovereignty of First Peoples. In Chapter 18, white stockman Mr Gillet tells the impatient children a story owned by the only Aboriginal man in the novel. ‘Tettawonga’ had already been introduced as a “bent old black fellow” (Turner, Kindle loc. 1558/​2151), who –​in a telling revision of his sovereign

32  Gumnut Babies and ‘Babes in the Wood’ being as a First Nations man –​is described as having “earned his right to [a]‌ cottage and daily rations” because he saved a settler family from bushrangers (Turner, Kindle loc. 1560/​2151). Tettawonga’s story of the “laughing jackass” (Kookaburra) is conveyed through the intermediary of Mr Gillet, who tells it “second-​hand … and freely translated” (Turner, Kindle loc. 1743/​2151). It is not the story itself but Gillet’s preface that is of interest, however, where Turner offers a curious parallel to the novel’s opening characterisation of Australia as a nation of children. “Once upon a time” (Judy sniffed at the old-​fashioned beginning), “once upon a time,” said Mr Gillet, “when this young land was still younger, and incomparably more beautiful, when Tettawonga’s ancestors were brave and strong and happy as careless children, when their worst nightmare had never shown them so evil a time as the white man would bring their race, when –​” “Oh, get on!” muttered Pip impatiently. “Well,” said Mr Gillet, “when, in short, an early Golden Age wrapped the land in its sunshine.” (Turner, Kindle loc. 1749/​2151) On one hand, this episode offered a rare vista onto First Peoples’ sovereignty, and a rebuke of terra nullius and of colonisation. It even did so in an untimely manner, as shown by editors’ removal of the section from all editions after the first, until as late as 1994 when it was restored for the centenary edition. On the other hand, in an all-​too-​familiar trope of colonialism, Gillet’s narration renders First Peoples as “careless children,” innocent and hapless, who –​like Helen Burns or Beth March –​would lay down quietly to perish to make place for the new indigenised white Australian child. Dot and the Kangaroo (1899) Ethel C. Pedley’s posthumously published novel followed the publication of Turner’s by five years and is preoccupied with the same issues and themes in the lead-​up to federation, albeit with an explicitly conservationist orientation. Dot and the Kangaroo begins with the following dedication: “To the children of Australia in the hope of enlisting their sympathies for the many beautiful, amiable, and frolicsome creatures of their fair land, whose extinction, through ruthless destruction, is being surely accomplished” (Pedley, 1920, dedication). Attempting to place environmentalism on the legislative agenda leading up to federation, this plea responds to the practices of European cultivation, animal husbandry, and hunting brought to the country by colonisation. It is also, however, imbricated with an embrace of indigenous flora and fauna as an expression of white nationalism. As Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver argue, she was concerned to accommodate native species’ “needs and habitats within the ever-​expanding fabric of the settler colonial project” (Gelder and Weaver,

Gumnut Babies and ‘Babes in the Wood’  33 2020, p. 194). Pedley sought to instil Australian-​born settler children with an ethos of conservation as an essential component of their subjective formation as Australians. Importantly, Dot and the Kangaroo is a near complete iteration of the child figure’s progression through the movement of nativisation, beginning with the lost child narrative, followed by an acclimatisation to the bush, to an atonement for all ‘humans’ and identification with native animals. The final moment of this process of nativisation, also attempted by the novel, is the displacement of First Peoples. Pedley sets her story in the Australian bush, drawing on the powerful trope of the lost white child, but Dot is also found, by the Kangaroo, who, motherly and having lost her joey, adopts the girl in its place. We first find Dot alone in a barren and hostile environment: She was too frightened … to cry, but stood in the middle of a little dry, bare space, looking around her at the scraggy growths of prickly shrubs that had torn her little dress to rags, scratched her bare legs and feet till they bled, and pricked her hands and arms as she had pushed madly through the bushes, for hours, seeking her home. (Pedley, 1920, p. 1) Pedley’s portrayal of Dot in this opening scene highlights her vulnerability and the alienness of her surroundings. As with Turner’s descriptions of Judy’s struggles with the bush, her dress signifies the fragility of white femininity in the Australian wilderness. To underscore the regularity of settler children becoming lost, Pedley describes Dot’s memory of a recent search party for a boy from a neighbouring property. The memory emphasises Dot’s impression of the strangeness of the men in her community: “what a noise they made all talking together in their big deep voices. They looked terrible men, so tall and brown and fierce, with their rough bristly beards” (p. 2). These are the same men who hunt the animals Dot will come to befriend, and who destroy the environment she will be taught to defend. The plot then develops the process through which Dot breaks from these communal norms; a feeling of estrangement from them is established early in the book. As with Turner’s novel, Pedley also establishes a continuity with the literature of the metropole by referencing an English classic, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). The mechanism of Dot becoming lost is the lure of a hare she follows into the bush –​like Alice, who is distracted by a rabbit into an alternate place of wonder. Other similarities include Dot’s consumption of the Kangaroo’s berries that give her the power of understanding animal language (like Alice’s mushroom, enabling her to grow and shrink); and towards the end of the story she is put on trial for the sins of all humans. Nimon frames Pedley’s narrative choices as demonstrating “a nationalist confidence in her willingness to adopt features of a cultural icon such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to enhance her writing, rather than following Carroll’s model as a formula” (Nimon, 2005, pp. 5–​6). For Pedley, however, the significance of the

34  Gumnut Babies and ‘Babes in the Wood’ hare is also that it is an introduced species (Rahbek, 2007). By attracting Dot away from the safety of her cottage, the hare is shown to be a bad influence, whereas the Kangaroo opens the way to a new world and perspective aligned to conservation. While the Kangaroo is motherly to Dot, she also lectures her frequently, as a representative of the humans that kill her loved ones and destroy her habitat. This first occurs when Dot consumes magic berries that transform her from feeling alone in the bush to feeling surrounded by voices and the chattering of animals, “until the whole bush seemed filled with talking” (Pedley, 1920, p. 3). Kangaroo misinterprets Dot’s phrase “I’ve lost my way,” mistaking her for meaning that she has lost something important to her, like her own lost joey. “Well,” said she, after listening to the little girl, “that is just like you Humans; you are not fit for this country at all! Of course, if you have only one home in one place, you must lose it! If you made your home everywhere and anywhere, it would never be lost. Humans are no good in our bush…” (p. 4) Let us leave aside, for the moment, the erasure of First Peoples (as human) this statement enacts. Pedley makes an interesting point here regarding European/​ settler-​coloniser conceptions of place and belonging that follow from the possibility that one might lose one’s way. For Europeans, the land is objectified as property, and through the construction of a permanent dwelling one demonstrates this relationship. Land is mapped and rendered abstract and conceptually separate from its materiality. Thus, mapping reduces a ‘place’ to a coordinate. These are the conditions of possibility for losing one’s way. The lost child motif is thereby a symptom of the flawed conception of place and of belonging that underwrites colonialism. For the Kangaroo, conversely, belonging to the land means having an embodied relationship to its features: waterways and coastline, hills and valleys, plants and animals, and the weather systems that shape it. Place is habitus rather than property. One’s life is embedded in place, which teems with meaning, as Pedley demonstrates by way of the bush-​scape’s transformation to a chattering of voices once Dot eats the berries. Such a relationship to one’s environment entails that one cannot become lost by wandering away from a fixed point on a map called home. Becoming lost would involve, rather, displacement through the intervention of another: an abduction or removal from one’s homelands to somewhere with which one does not share a meaningful relationship, or being forcibly moved on from one’s homelands. Pedley divulges here not only the Kangaroo’s perspective, but also the lifeways of First Peoples, who live with non-​human animals and emulate them in ceremony and lore. Dot’s acclimatisation is represented by a description of the bush in terms that make it more familiar as a dwelling:

Gumnut Babies and ‘Babes in the Wood’  35 Then Dot looked up, and saw there was no sky to be seen, or tops of trees; for they were passing under a forest of tree-​ferns, and their lovely spreading fronds made a perfect green tent over their heads. The sunlight that came through was green, as if you were in a house made of green glass. (p. 18) The Australian bush is thus terraformed, rendered amenable to settler existence through imaginative reworking. Read alongside a depiction of a corrobboree mid-​way through the story, Pedley’s use of an animal medium to induct Dot into her belonging to the bush demonstrates a displacement of Aboriginality –​first by the Kangaroo, then by the child. In the only episode that acknowledges the existence of First Peoples, the Kangaroo and Dot encounter a camp of “blacks” whom they observe at a distance in ceremony. This scene is heavy with ambivalence: the people are at least acknowledged to be humans and to share their humanity with Dot –​the Kangaroo notes that “it would be nice for the little Human to see some other Humans” –​yet, the descriptions of them are dehumanising. Dot nearly screamed with fright at the sight. She had thought she would see a few black folk, not a crowd of such terrible people as she beheld. They did not look like human beings at all, but like dreadful demons, they were so wicked and ugly in appearance. The men who were dancing were without clothes, but their black bodies were painted with red and white stripes, and bits of down and feathers were stuck on their skin. Some had only white stripes over the places where their bones were, which made them look like skeletons flitting before the fire, or in and out of the surrounding darkness. (p. 37) Kangaroo again affirms Aboriginal peoples are humans –​“All Humans are the same underneath, they all kill Kangaroos” (p. 38) –​but only to say they are no less destructive than Europeans. Kangaroo accuses the tribe of reducing her being to a stereotype in their dance, while ventriloquising Pedley’s reduction of Aboriginal peoples to “savages … pretending to be one of those noble animals” (ibid.). Acknowledgement of the part of this ritual in culture and the elaboration of relationships to non-​human and more-than-human others is neglected. An admission of injustice to First Peoples, however, does intrude into Dot’s reflections: … it was quite clear in her little mind that black fellows, Kangaroos, and willy wagtails had a very poor opinion of white people. She felt that they must all be wrong; but, all the same, she sometimes wished she could be a noble Kangaroo and not a despised human being.

36  Gumnut Babies and ‘Babes in the Wood’ “I wish I were not a white little girl,” she whispered to the Kangaroo. The gentle animal patted her kindly with her delicate black hands. (p. 39) The wish not to be a white girl precipitates conscious identification with Kangaroo, as her joey, and an unconscious identification with Aboriginal children, so as to dis-​identify from the practices and mindset of settler-​ coloniser humans. Further, Pedley’s reference to Kangaroo’s “delicate black hands” discloses an identification, perhaps more subterranean, with the black mother. By replacing her lost joey with Dot, the Kangaroo –​as her native animal guide –​authenticates Dot’s belonging, and that of settlers who will be enlightened by her conservationist knowledge. This gesture enables a replacement, in imagination, of First Peoples as a corollary to their replacement through settler violence and colonial law, but not without ambivalence and anxiety. Acknowledgement of the priority of Aboriginal peoples sits in uncomfortable dialogue with their vilification in Pedley’s text. As Affrica Taylor argues, writers such as Pedley drew on European traditions of storytelling that cultivate identification between children and animals to accomplish a displacement of Aboriginal peoples: “In the absence of recognition of Aboriginal people’s custodianship at this time, Australia’s native animals become the proxy mentors and guides for white settler children’s journey towards indigenisation –​towards becoming fully and authentically Australian” (2014, p. 170). The displacement of Aboriginality is, indeed, central to the novel’s plot, insofar as it is animated by the Kangaroo having “lost” her joey: she had hidden it during a kangaroo hunt. This reflects accounts of kangaroo and wallaby behaviour during colonial hunts –​does were sometimes observed hiding their joeys to lighten themselves and optimise speed (Gelder and Weaver, 2020, p. 191). However, it also co-​opts to the narrative a common experience of Aboriginal women, whose children were stolen from campsites and after massacres and through policies of removal until well into the twentieth century. The Kangaroo’s narration resonates with these stories, but, again, places Aboriginal peoples (“blacks”) on a level with “White Humans”: I saw, far off, Humans on their big animals that go so quickly, and directly I hopped into the open, they raised a great noise like the blacks did last night, and I could see by the movement in the grass that they had those dreadful dogs they teach to kill us: they are far worse than dingoes. (Pedley, 1920, p. 49) Indeed, the comparison with “blacks” seeks to degrade the reader’s impression of settler hunters: they are no better than the savages. Rather than reflect openly on this affinity with Aboriginal mothers, an equivalence is drawn between the situation of kangaroos and that of humans through Dot’s reflections on how her mother must be missing her. This transposition of

Gumnut Babies and ‘Babes in the Wood’  37 Aboriginal women’s loss onto surrogates such as the Kangaroo, and including white settler women, began with the lost white child motif, and continues into the present. The Adventures of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie (from 1918) Perhaps most lodged in generations of Australians’ memory and imagination is May Gibbs’s gumnut stories –​especially her illustrations. Gibbs achieved a thoroughgoing assimilation of the Australian bush to early twentieth-​ century settler-​colonial imagination by investing it visually with technologies and meaning that enable settlers to make a ‘place’ for themselves within it.17 By integrating her own childhood impressions of the environment with a moral and social narrative, Gibbs developed an intuitive affinity between European imagination and native animals and plants. My own childhood memories of bushwalking are included in this gathering of national imagination under the rubric of Gibbs’s work, as I recall ‘reading’ the squiggly lines on eucalypt leaves and bark as if they were writing and imagining that gumnut babies had drawn them perhaps only moments beforehand. The bush becomes an enchanted place, full of commerce and meaning, through Gibbs’s storytelling lens. The world Gibbs imagines takes place in bushland surrounding the suburbs established on Sydney’s outskirts at the turn of the century, as havens from the ‘big bad city.’ Its heroes –​‘Snugglepot,’ ‘Cuddlepie,’ ‘Ragged Blossom,’ and ‘Little Obelia’ –​are ‘gumnut babies’: pale-​skinned, wide-​eyed, and cherubic blossoms that spring from Eucalypt buds. As images of white childhood, they rework the lost child rubric by making their way independently through the microcosm of modern Australian society that Gibbs depicts.18 Gibbs thus attempts to resolve tensions signified by the lost child motif: the gumnut babies enact a white childhood that can never truly be ‘lost’ because the bush is home. Her nostalgia-​work also closes the circuit of the domestication of the bush commercially, by producing a readily consumable aesthetic that indigenises the domicile. The books have never been out of print; and Gibbs’s sensually appealing illustrations are marketed on clothing, greetings cards and stationery, and household items such as teaspoons and tea-​towels.19 Gibbs’s gumnut universe is a cornerstone of Australiana ‘kitsch’: a site of both attraction and repulsion, uncritical memorialisation, sentimentality, and patriotism. This dimension of kitsch brings us to the heart of what is at stake for the settler-​colonial project of nativising the white child. For, in its kitsch-​ness Gibbs’s work perforates the boundary between art and use, such that her images permeate the home, infusing it with ‘the bush’ as an artistic creation.20 Gibbs brings the domestication of the bush full circle: the bush is rendered a home for white children, and in turn images of native biota come to adorn and decorate Australian homes. This domestication process neutralises the danger the Australian environment had once represented through Gibbs’s

38  Gumnut Babies and ‘Babes in the Wood’ reworking of it as familiar. In this vein, Evelyn Araluen considers this manoeuvre as a part of a broader cultural effort to invest meaning in a land that resists the settler-​coloniser claim: These recurring narratives of nation-​ building have produced intricate forms of kitsch and cringe, shaping not just Australia, but also Australiana. The over-​determination of these binaries and tropes continues to operate in a dialectic to the perceived horror of the Australian landscape. The operalisation of kitsch in children’s literature can be read as an attempted exorcism of the extant sensation of a profound alienation from the landscape, the tyranny of distance from European pastoral and folkloric traditions. (Araluen, 2019, para. 19) The function of Gibbs’s artwork as kitsch –​and its appeal for Australian children and adults –​is to reproduce everyday settler-​colonial cultural objects, practices, and events through the visual lexicon of ‘the Australian bush’ in a manner that suggests melancholy and nostalgia for home.21 The gumnut oeuvre occupies a central place in the settler-​colonial imaginary precisely because it addresses and ameliorates “profound alienation from landscape,” by inventing a simulacrum of the fairy folklore of home. Remembering that ‘nostalgia’ refers etymologically to homesickness, Gibbs’s nostalgia work reproduces home in the bush in a manner that appears seamless, because it envelops Australian political society. The Snugglepot and Cuddlepie universe is not without threat, however, as again, the presence of First Peoples erupts as a return of the repressed, this time in the form of the wicked Banksia Men. Little has been said about the association of the Banksia Men with Aboriginality, as the most influential interpretation of Gibbs’s lexicon reads them as representing sexual threat and ambiguity: as both phallic and covered in vulva-​like lips (Hamilton, 1975, p. 90). Laurie Duggan suggests a more racially inflected significance: The miniature economy of the Gumnut world may, in part, be an expression of nostalgia for the perfect “settlement.” Its conflicts are always resolved satisfactorily (even though there is room left for further misadventures). However, along with the figures of adults there is a further notable absence in May Gibbs creation which limits these conflicts to levels easier to deal with conceptually: that of Aborigines. The Gumnut Babies are all emphatically pale-​skinned and at home in their natural surrounds. But the “bush” (even the “city in the bush”) is not an altogether benign space and it may be that the repressed other in this landscape reappears in the form of the Wicked Banksia Men. (Duggan, 2001, p. 48) Evelyn Araluen addresses the association with Aboriginality more directly:

Gumnut Babies and ‘Babes in the Wood’  39 [Australian children’s books] exemplify models of mutually-​determined belonging for both settler humans and Indigenous animals in their rejection of the “untameable and thus un-​homely” presence of Aboriginal bodies and practices in the bush … [I]‌n Snugglepot and Cuddlepie [this is] demonstrated through the casting out of the recurring villains, the Banksia Men, who are aligned with savagery, animism, sexual deviancy, and Aboriginality throughout the stories. (Araluen, 2019, para. 18) The Banksia men can thus be interpreted as the uncanny element within Snugglepot and Cuddlepie: the unhomely [unheimlich] moment within the effort to make settlers feel at home (Freud, 1953); the unconscious that haunts the homemaking project of Australian children’s literature. First Peoples are forgotten only to reappear in the shape of a representation, a racialised and sexualised stereotype that continues to keep settler children awake at night. Where the Child Was, the Adult Shall Be The works discussed so far represent a cultural labour of establishing for settler colonisers a relationship to land that they could interpret as natural, through the image of the nativised white child at home in the bush. As we have seen, this ‘home-​making’ [heimlich] narrative encounters resistances or counternarratives that challenge the homeliness of this relation, rendering it unsettled, un-​ homely: unheimlich, uncanny. Bringing to bear the psychoanalytic significances of this term, the moments that erupt and stand out against an otherwise congruent narrative show the way to the unconscious –​to whatever the storyteller has repressed, which threatens the coherence of a story about the self. Here, those uncanny moments unsettle the story of ‘Australia’: that land was peacefully settled, that no other had a prior or rightful place. Tettawonga’s story in Seven Little Australians, the ‘corrobboree’ in Dot and the Kangaroo, and Snugglepot and Cuddlepie’s wicked Banksia Men all interrupt the story of natural homeliness, to breach the surface of consciousness, and yet remain fundamentally unrecognised, unreconciled, and unaccounted for. Each episode is a formation around the unconscious (a symptom), to which the national psyche returns in its ‘dreams’ –​or in the production of a social imaginary. I conclude this chapter with some reflections on contemporary settler fiction that attempts to come to terms with the legacy of colonisation by rehearsing the equation of childhood with nature and native belonging. I therefore touch upon themes and motifs explored already in this chapter as they reappear in contemporary Australian literature. Storm Boy (1966) The first is Colin Thiele’s children’s novella best known in its cinematic adaptation directed by Henri Safran (1976). It is a work that shaped my imagination, and that of many settler Australians’ ‘Gen X’s.’

40  Gumnut Babies and ‘Babes in the Wood’ Ten-​year-​old Mike lives with his widowed father, Hideaway Tom, in the Coorong: a narrow strip of wetland harbouring endangered species in South Australia, designated as a national park in 1967.22 The Coorong is fragile and prone to wild weather, and Mike earns his nickname when campers see him through the mist, picking up shells and walking alone in a violent storm, “calm and happy as you please” (Thiele, 2001, p. 71). This scene establishes his native status, at home in the Australian environment. The story revolves around Storm Boy’s close relationship with a pelican he rescues from poachers and calls “Mr Percival.” Interaction with humans is scarce for the boy and his father, whose relationship is oppressively silent, isolated, sullen: a frontier, ‘Robinson Crusoe’ masculinity that feels acutely the loss of the civilising mother/​wife.23 A third human companion is their neighbour Fingerbone Bill, an Aboriginal man who lives in a humpy and is also in apparent exile. He imparts bush knowledge to Storm Boy, about “the signs of the wind and weather in the clouds and the sea,” and the movements of animals in the Coorong (Thiele, 2001, p. 72). At the story’s climax Mr Percival will be killed by poachers. This culminating event will break the spell of masculine isolation: the child will finally go to school, the duo will move back to town, and the pelican will be transmuted as a symbol of freedom: … always above them, in their mind’s eye, they can see the shape of two big wings in the storm-​clouds and the flying scud –​two wings of white with trailing black edges –​spread across the sky. For birds like Mr Percival do not really die. (Thiele, 2018, p. 100) As we saw in literature from an earlier period, it is through the animal guide’s mediation that the white child’s belonging is authorised. What is new is the presence of an Aboriginal man who (unlike Tettawonga) speaks directly to the child and contributes to his development. An episode in the middle of the story resonates both with Gillet’s preface to Tettawonga’s story and Dot’s reflections after observing the corrobboree, in identification with Aboriginal childhood (and dis-​identification with whiteness): “What’s a midden?” “A camping place where they used to crack their shellfish.” Fingerbone stood for a long time gazing at the great heaps of shells, as if far off in thought. “Dark people eat, make camp, long time ago,” he said a little sadly. “No whitefellow here den. For hundreds and hundreds of years, only blackfellows.” Storm Boy looked at the big heaps of shell and wondered how long ago it had been. He could paint in his mind … the red camp-​fires up the Coorong, the black children, the songs, the clicking of empty shells

Gumnut Babies and ‘Babes in the Wood’  41 falling on the piles as they were thrown away. And, he thought to himself, “If I had lived then, I’d have been a little black boy.” (Thiele, 2018, pp. 74–​75) Fingerbone Bill is a literary descendent of the ‘black tracker.’ In the second half of the twentieth century, and on the precipice of the 1967 constitutional referendum that would include First Peoples in Commonwealth law, reconciliation is signified by the Aboriginal man’s care towards the settler child. Nest (2014) and Where the Trees Were (2016) Inga Simpson locates herself within a tradition of “nature writing” shared with William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, and Tim Winton, which attends to the formative (and recuperative) relation between ‘place’ and subjectivity, or the cultivation of an inner self (Frank, 2017, p. 230; Simpson, 2019, p. 273). Simpson’s writing foregrounds her own identity as a settler coloniser, and the necessarily problematic quality of her relation to place as such. “One of the most obvious characteristics of Australian nature writing,” she writes, “is the tension, for non-​Indigenous Australians, around how to write about our connection to the places we love, knowing that these places were stolen from others, and possibly sites of violence” (Simpson, 2019, p. 277). Integral to this approach is an understanding of ‘nature writing’ as a form of bearing witness and undertaking stewardship of the land and the relationships it supports, according to the responsibilities generated by one’s relationship to place (in Simpson’s case, as a settler-​ coloniser Australian). Simpson’s second and third novels are of particular interest as they focus nature writing through the figure of the child, in a manner that draws this work into relation to the children’s literature discussed already. Nest’s front cover announces it as a “gripping and thought-​provoking novel about the lost child in all of us.” The novel’s plot is structured by the disappearance of two children (historic and present), but this blurb also signals a deeper significance of the lost child to Australian settler identity formation. Jen’s (a nature artist) return to her hometown coincides with the abduction of a local schoolgirl. The reader experiences this event through her childhood memories of her best friend’s disappearance, which happened also to coincide with her father’s unexplained departure. The two disappearances are therefore bookended by the father’s exodus and the daughter’s return. Recuperation of the adult through the child is an undercurrent of Nest. As the dust jacket continues, “[a]‌t last the answers come, like the wet, in a rush –​torrential, drenching, and ultimately revitalising –​and the countryside delivers up its children” –​ suggesting analogy between the natural environment and a national psyche. The lost children settler colonisers had invested in the landscape are returned to them once a personal reconciliation takes place between Jen and nature, and Jen and her past.

42  Gumnut Babies and ‘Babes in the Wood’ The narrative focuses on her everyday interactions with human and non-​ human others: her errands to the post office; art lessons she gives a local boy; gardening. This attention to banality is a feature of Simpson’s writing, indicating her commitment to realism and the telling of story through the prism of one single consciousness. Jane Frank (2017) identifies Simpson’s difference in approach to representing the bush as opposed to the settler-​Australian tendency towards gothic representation (In Picnic at Hanging Rock or Wake in Fright, for instance). Where the convention has been to represent the Australian natural environment as a threat –​haunted by an expunged Indigeneity and/​or colonial violence –​Simpson represents nature as “ultimately a place of recuperation and healing” (Frank, 2017, p. 234). Yet this is at odds with her use of the motif of the missing child, which is a figure of foreboding and haunting. Despite the centrality of the lost child in Nest, and its cultural meaning in Australian settler-​colonial history, there is a determination to find belonging in nature. Indeed, Nest derives its name from the ‘treeboat’ Jen rigs up on her property, of ropes and pullies, which gathers her like a bird in the treetops, allowing her to blend into her surroundings. She builds the nest after having spent a sleepless night worrying, through a storm, that nature would reclaim her abode. She marched down past the house, past the end of the garden, into her forest. She knew the tree already –​the big old bloodwood with a high crown. Her tallest. She stood at its base and placed her hands on the warm trunk. Asking permission. It was intrusive, she was sure, to have a human clambering among your limbs, ropes rubbing away at your skin. She trusted the bloodwood to help her, because it would bleed if she hurt it; it could express its pain … The sky burned orange and then red. She watched until all colour and light were gone and the and the stars started winking. A boobook called from down in the gully and bats chittered and squealed as they fed. The tree rocked her to sleep. She woke to raindrops on her face. Not from the sky, but from the tree, passed from leaf to leaf. She should move, get down from the tree and pack up her gear before it became too damp. Instead, she lay still, swinging free. The tree was whispering. (Simpson, 2014, pp. 236–​237) Jen wanders just beyond the domesticated boundary to experience a sense of oneness with nature. Like Jane Duff, Dot, and the gumnut babies before her, she is a lost child who finds herself at home in the bush. In the interstices of this narrative the existence of First Peoples is gestured towards as embedded within place as its history, but no actual Aboriginal person is present. Where the Trees Were is more overt in its reference to First Peoples and settler colonialism. The narrative shuttles between ‘Jay’ and

Gumnut Babies and ‘Babes in the Wood’  43 ‘Jayne’ (the protagonist as child and adult), and between first-​and third-​ person narrative respectively. While one reviewer has disparaged this technique as disjointed and annoying (McMaster, 2016), it does effectively serve to compel identification with the child’s perspective, the effects of which will become clear shortly. The plot is structured by two ‘crimes,’ one committed in the protagonist’s childhood and the other in adulthood. Jayne is a curator at a Canberra museum who assists in the repatriation –​theft under settler-​ colonial law –​of a marked burial tree (arborglyph) to its cultural community, the Wiradjuri. This is a restorative act. ‘Jay’ had played among a stand of trees that included an arborglyph until her father destroyed it, anxious that it could form the basis of a Native Title claim after the Mabo decision (which challenged the presumption of terra nullius upon which coloniser sovereignty is predicated). Jayne’s adult existence at work is ensconced in the spoils of colonialism, expressed as dead objects; artefacts, tagged, catalogued, and removed from a lived context. Her world is morally grey and marked by complicity: it represents humanity after the fall, whereas the thread of childhood is a prelapsarian existence: girls play with boys in harmony with nature and unaware of gender; white and black children play together oblivious to the social and political structures of colonialism, and without the anxieties, responsibilities, and moral compromise of adulthood. This fall is signalled literally within the novel, when Jay’s best friend, Kieran, falls from a tall tree and is rendered paraplegic. In Jayne’s memory this event marks a break in her life, at which point she becomes aware of her burgeoning sexuality and her parents’ limitations; the trees are destroyed, and the friends drift apart. [Jayne] carried the book inside with more reverence than her drawing skills warranted and placed it on the kitchen bench. The white corner of a photograph nosed out. It was faded now, but there they were, their child selves standing in front of the trees. it was evidence of another place in time, not just the past but when the world was different. Where the trees once were, and their childhood –​before Kieran fell. (Simpson, 2016, p. 170) Key to this shift in the narrative is a loss of innocence –​again, the child lost in the bush. And this also signals the reason for the novel’s structure. For, the childhood episodes, told in first person –​the register of identification –​produce a place of reprieve for the (settler coloniser) reader from colonial culpability. The child protagonist is blameless, whereas the adult is laden with guilt and responsibility for the past. The memories of a childhood spent in communion with nature (climbing trees, swimming, running, camping) are for the protagonist an inner realm of respite, through which she can recreate a scene of primal belonging, unconcerned by the (post-​fall) complications

44  Gumnut Babies and ‘Babes in the Wood’ of colonial plunder. In a passage that resonates with Dot and the Kangaroo’s privileging of childhood, Jayne summarises her sense of loss of a connection to nature with age. The second cup of tea was too strong, but I nursed it by the fire while it went out, and watched the river. I’d seen the platypus again, on the first morning. But only from a distance. She didn’t like to show herself anymore, even to me. As if she could sense I was getting older. She didn’t trust adults –​and I didn’t blame her. (Simpson 2016, p. 220) At stake in the identification with the child is the notion that settler-​coloniser subjectivity might find a relationship with nature outside the structure of colonisation. As much as Simpson’s method attempts to encapsulate a nature that is historical, and takes account of the various relationships to place, the recurrent return of ‘Jay’ and her friends –​before the fall and the arborglyph’s destruction –​produces an ahistorical idyll reminiscent of Pedley and Gibbs, in which settler children are imagined, in their innocence, in a direct relation to nature. As much of the novel is concerned to problematise settlers’ relation to the land –​the environmental effects of farming techniques, as well as destruction of signs of pre-​colonial forms of life –​the predominant impulse (as with Nest) is to resolve the question of settler belonging. Just as Jayne finds a way to reconcile her past by repatriating the arborglyph without, ultimately, risking herself (her crime remains undiscovered and she leaves her job with a large redundancy package), she also pursues an environmental legacy through the management of her family’s farm. As if to endorse this decision, the platypus that had formerly denied Jayne returns: “They watched as a sleek head broke the surface and swam right at them, cutting a vee in the river before diving again” (Simpson, 2016, p. 282). Jayne is reconciled with the land and with herself. And like Dot, her belonging to the land is authorised not by the people who have cared for it over millennia, but rather through intimacy with a native animal.

Notes 1 See also Taylor, 2014. 2 Nimon cites, for example, John Clarke, “Bertie and the Bullfrogs,” a story that was published in The Adelaide Observer in 1873 (Nimon, 2005, p. 5). 3 What is called “the white Australia policy” is a set of policies and laws that excluded non-​ Europeans from migrating to Australia, beginning with the Immigration Restriction Act (1901), which were dismantled by the state and the federal governments between 1949 and 1973. 4 Historically, Australian farming practice has fallen far short of this eco-​nationalist ideal. This will be addressed again in relation to Inga Simpson’s novels.

Gumnut Babies and ‘Babes in the Wood’  45 5 The Australian Greens Party originally centred maintaining a “sustainable population” but has since changed its policy to privilege social justice policies (including a pro-​refugee position) over an anti-​immigration stance (Sloan and Lines, 2003). A segment of the party still maintains that environmentalism entails a commitment to “sustainable population” through immigration policy, however, and a new political party has emerged since this change, the “Sustainable Australia” Party, which frames environmentalism almost entirely in terms of anti-​immigration (www.susta​ inab​leau​stra​lia.org.au/​pop​ulat​ion). See also Jennings et al., 2011. 6 Emma Wilson’s Cinema’s Missing Children (2018) is a seminal text examining significances of the lost or missing child in the field of world cinema, as a vehicle for explorations of nostalgia and memory, mourning, representation, and the cultural status of children and childhood. The current study is limited to the use of the child to articulate settler-​colonial anxieties. 7 McCubbin’s painting is likely inspired by Clara Crosby, who survived having been lost for several weeks in Victoria. The painting is part of the National Gallery of Victoria collection and an image may be viewed at www.ngv.vic.gov.au/​expl​ore/​col​ lect​ion/​work/​5975/​ (accessed 7 September 2020). 8 As one contemporary website describes the Duffs’ situation, “The children had spent over a week without food or water, and walked nearly 100 kilometres. It was Jane’s selfless attitude in caring for her younger brother Frank which sparked the interest of the nation” (Monument Australia, accessed 2020). 9 See an example at http://​han​dle.slv.vic.gov.au/​10381/​41292 (accessed 21 August 2020). 10 See the image at http://​han​dle.slv.vic.gov.au/​10381/​107​858 (accessed 21 August 2020). 11 Jan Keane (2012) points out that Turner’s Pre-​Federation oeuvre featured motherless children, reflecting, she notes, “a country in rapid transition, where the conventional family structure to be found throughout Europe is partly or wholly absent” (p. 128). 12 That Pip shares his name with the protagonist of another Dickens’ novel, Great Expectations –​a novel that bears reference to Australia as a penal colony –​also seems noteworthy. 13 This lesson prefigures the Anzac myth that at the time of its writing it was yet to form an integral element of the Australian national imaginary: the sacrifice through which a nation comes of age. 14 Both the transitional object of Kleinian object relation theory and the MacGuffin have been conceptually identified with Lacan’s concept objet petit a, which is material that the subject rejects and invests into the world of others, and which establishes relations of desire. As the object of desire, it also represents something that can never be attained. The objet a is central to fantasy. As Žižek explains, MacGuffin is objet petit a pure and simple: the lack, the remainder of the real that sets in motion the symbolic movement of interpretation, a hole at the center of the symbolic order, the mere appearance of some secret to be explained, interpreted, etc. (Willke and Höcker, 1996) 15 Susan K. Martin, drawing a connection between the account of Judy scything the grass and her death scene, suggests that this interplay between cultivation and natural wildness characterises the depiction of Australian girlhood –​registering

46  Gumnut Babies and ‘Babes in the Wood’ a burgeoning female sexuality (Martin, 2003, p. 288). Representations of currency girls as morally lax and sexually precocious may have played into Turner’s representation of Judy’s relation to nature, although, insofar as the plot addressed adolescent sexuality, the older sister Meg was its concern. Meg’s path to adulthood appears normative, however, and Judy the ‘tomboy’ is far more a focus of anxiety and threat, figured through the vast power of nature. 16 After she had written this section of the novel, Turner wrote in her diary, “killed Judy to slow music” (18 October 1893, cited in Pearce, 1997, p. 13). 17 The official May Gibbs website explains her influence as follows: “Her bush fantasy world has captured the imaginations of Australians for over a century, creating a uniquely Australian folklore that holds a special place in the hearts of a nation” (‘May Gibbs Official Site –​Classic Australian Children's Books,’ 2016). 18 Images from May Gibbs’s books may be viewed online at www.sl.nsw.gov.au/​stor​ ies/​may-​gibbs/​gum​nut-​bab​ies-​books (accessed 14 September 2020). 19 For a sense of this commodification of Gibbs’s work see the official May Gibbs website at https://​maygi​bbs.org 20 Conventionally associated with bad taste and childishness, a resort to nostalgia and domesticity, for Walter Benjamin, kitsch signals an intimacy that breaks down the clear separation between art and everyday use, rendering the aesthetic object available for easy consumption (Menninghaus, 2009, p. 41). 21 I turn again to the work of kitsch in establishing the settler-​sovereign claim in Chapter 4, in relation to the fetishisation of the Aboriginal child as “piccaninny kitsch.” 22 Like Pedley, Thiele advocates for the conservation of Australian biota through his fiction. 23 Zonn and Aitken argue that the film reinforces “a series of myths of male dominance in Australian culture” through its application of the preferences of the funding body, the Australian Film Commission. They show how the “government-​ supported renaissance of the national film industry” bolstered a vision of the Australian landscape as a space for the expression of (white) masculinity (Zonn and Aitken, 1994, p. 137). I agree that the 1976 film Storm Boy fits this stereotype –​ and even accentuates it through the inclusion of a woman teacher who threatens their bubble by pressuring Hideaway to send Storm Boy to school (though this is not in the novella). However, the text is entirely absent of women except for the dead mother. Thiele portrays their world as ultimately unsustainable: Storm Boy must leave the Coorong, and the death of his pelican friend (echoing his mother’s death, perhaps) catalyses this departure.

3 Amnesiac Recollections The Found White Child

From the development of the lost white Australian child, this chapter formulates a second, more complex articulation of ‘nativised’ white childhood. To further develop the attributes of the settler-​colonial sovereign claim that the figure of the lost white child expresses, I will bring it into a relation with the found white child, drawing on a thin vein of settler narrative within the Australian imaginary, of the white child who is accepted into First Nations community. Whereas the lost white child examined in the previous chapter mediates the settler-​coloniser relationship to land by ignoring, obscuring, and replacing First Peoples, the ‘found’ child representation acknowledges the existence of the colonised ‘other’ through a very specific lens, that is, through the eyes of the white child who is interpellated into Aboriginal society, story, language, and culture. The found white child purports to make visible an equality that, according to Rancière, forms the basis of a shared emancipation among humans: a radical equality that opens possibilities for mutual freedom. The found child, as envoy from coloniser to colonised peoples and then back again, suggests a promise of emancipation that endures in its potentiality precisely because it is unrealised. Upon the child’s return to the settler community, their ‘message’ remains unopened within their own lifetime, ultimately to be read and interpreted (with the benefit of historical hindsight) by audiences in the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries. As a representation within film, literature, and oral history, the found child renders imaginable a potentiality of recognition and reconciliation. Although the found child trope represents the possibility of equal cohabitation and reconciliation, it does so, however, within settlers’ own terms, by achieving a more comprehensive appropriation of the part of the Native. Understood as pluripotent and plastic in its capacities, and not yet constrained by any one culture, the child, within these discourses, learns to master Aboriginal ways, effectively absorbing that culture and enacting an inoculation against it. Retaining an essential kernel of ‘whiteness,’ however, the found settler child returns to the colony having survived and incorporated the Aboriginal other, just as Aboriginality itself is figured as weakened and in decline. The white child as purveyor of knowledge of the Other does the DOI: 10.4324/9781003099666-3

48  Amnesiac Recollections: The Found White Child work of colonialism by objectifying the ‘Native’: ‘Aboriginalised’ as ‘the indigene.’1 Additional significances of childhood are smuggled into the ‘found white child’ to support this imperialist mission, through the child’s capacity to commune with natives, who are themselves represented as childlike: simple and untethered to the pragmatism of the colonial enterprise. Reconciliation is thus imagined through the child idealistically, but not seriously. Like Peter Pan, they must inevitably grow to become a coloniser/​ adult and accept ‘replacement’ as their colonial duty. This chapter first situates the found settler child as an ambivalent figure in folklore and history, before turning to a reading of Manganinnie. I read Jo-​Jo/​Joanna as an avatar for a white settler subjectivity curious to explore Aboriginality in contemplation of what it means to be ‘Australian,’ yet which is less open to exploring the material implications of prior First Peoples’ sovereignty, or even a negotiated coexistence of sovereignties. A settler child who is ambiguously abducted and cared for by an Aboriginal woman in the eponymous novel and film Manganinnie, Jo-​Jo is presented as an opening for settler colonisers to observe an Indigeneity at the time of first contact, without being observed observing. Colonisers’ presence is cloaked in the figure of the child. Especially in the context of Tasmania, where this story is set, this scene of Indigenous life is readily set aside as no-​longer viable, forming, rather, the backdrop to the development of the ‘good’ settler-​coloniser subject. The white nativised child in this context signifies a passage of transition of First Nations sovereignty to settler colonisers. Throughout this chapter, I draw on Rancière’s concept of the distribution of the sensible to analyse the ways in which these various representations, in turn, make visible and invisible First Peoples’ sovereign claim. As a tool of analysis, the distribution of the sensible highlights the extent to which representation is intrinsically political. It is marked by power; yet, representation prosecutes the oppressor’s political objectives.

Shipwrecked: The Historical Found Child The phenomenon of found white children –​or settler-​coloniser children raised by First Peoples –​existed alongside narratives of the lost white child since the early colonies in Australia, although far less numerously or visibly. This narrative is qualitatively distinct from the ‘captive’ white child who is a feature of frontier folklore in North America.2 For, unlike First Peoples in America, Australia’s Indigenous peoples did not take captives as a strategy of war; rather, as broached in Chapter 1, where they were visible in these narratives at all, Aboriginal people were even seen by colonisers as saviours of lost white children rather than as captors –​largely because of the role of black trackers who used bushcraft to locate children who had wandered from home. The captivity narrative is more prevalent, however, for white settler women, as we will see below in relation to Eliza Fraser. Whereas racial prejudice and vilification is given free reign through the fear that Aboriginal men might violate

Amnesiac Recollections: The Found White Child  49 white women (guardians of civilisation), the place of the settler child raised in Aboriginal community is more ambiguous and may even serve as an occasion for hope about potential cohabitation or reconciliation. One little-​known historical account of a found child is Narcisse Pelletier, who, in 1858, was abandoned by the crew of a French ship transporting Chinese passengers to the goldfields, for which he had served as cabin boy.3 Pelletier was rescued by a small group of Uutaalnganu people of Night Island. He had offered a tin cup to one of the men of the group –​presumably in thirst, but this gesture was interpreted as an enactment of protocol and he was welcomed into the community, and adopted by Maademan, who called him “Anco” (Maynard and Haskins, 2016).4 After having lived 17 years with the Uutaalnganu people, and having possibly married and fathered children,5 Anco was ‘rescued’ by the crew of an English pearling lugger in April 1875 and taken against his will ‘home’ to France. He thereupon became a curio, fulfilling a place in the European social imaginary of the enfant sauvage: a category that attracted fascination in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as an experimental field through which hypotheses about culture, memory, and the boundaries of ‘the human’ were tested.6 Individuals like Pelletier/​Anco thus served as limit cases for contemplation of the significance of cultural difference –​and, in the context of scientific racism and colonialism, also biological difference.7 The enfant sauvage is a site of reflection on lofty questions such as what it means to be civilised, and what separates humans from non-​human animals. This comparison, however, assumes that the child has been raised in an asocial environment, either alone or with animals: when, for instance, Charles Letourneau compared Pelletier to the famous case of Kaspar Hauser –​who claimed to have been imprisoned in a cellar with no social contact throughout his childhood –​the implication is that Aboriginal society was equivalent to having no society, beliefs, customs, or relationships at all (Anderson, 2009, pp. 68–​69). And this curiosity in Pelletier as enfant sauvage took the form of the freakshow and not just scientific specimen-​gathering. After refusing an offer to join a travelling show because he learned they were to bill him as the ‘huge Anglo-​Australian Giant,’ Pelletier/​Anco resumed life as a Frenchman by marrying and taking up employment as a lighthouse keeper. He died in 1894 of neurasthenia, which was a catch-​all term of the day for chronic fatigue, depression, and post-​traumatic stress disorder (Macklin, 2019, p. 254). As mentioned earlier, the found child trope that this chapter discusses bears marked differences from that of the ‘captive white woman’ that circulates in settler-​Australian literature and film. In Finding Eliza: Power and Colonial Storytelling, Gamilaroi/​Eualeyai woman and legal scholar Larissa Behrendt locates the most celebrated case of a European living with Aboriginal people, that of Eliza Fraser, as a rich site through which to explore questions of representation and power in the colonial context. Eliza Fraser survived the wreck of the Stirling Castle off the coast of Queensland, in 1836 –​20 years

50  Amnesiac Recollections: The Found White Child before Pelletier lived with the Uutaalnganu. Having lost her husband, the ship’s captain –​and reportedly also her newborn baby, although accounts vary (Behrendt, 2016, pp. 18–​19) –​Fraser lived for several weeks with the Butchulla (Badtjala) people, before she was retrieved by an expedition guided by convict John Graham, who had himself already lived with Aboriginal people for six years after absconding. After rescuing Eliza he was granted his ticket of leave. The stories emerging in the wake of her return to settler community were sensational and compelling to English and American audiences chiefly because of the skilful way she deployed the arsenal at her disposal of colonial stereotypes about Indigenous peoples, as she reported their mistreatment of her as ‘captive.’ Eliza portrayed the men as savages intent on raping her (her story climaxes with her rescue just as she is about to experience a “fate worse than death”) and the women as petty, vicious, and jealous of what was posited as her obvious superiority to them in both race and beauty. Unaccustomed to the physical work her hosts expected her to contribute as a member of the group, she told of being treated as the lowliest of slaves, thus reversing the European racial hierarchy of servitude in a manner that would have scandalised her contemporaries. The image of a modest white gentlewoman surrounded and harangued by brutes drew sympathy and interest. Eliza undertook speaking tours in England and America, and crafted her identity as an innocent victim of savages, tapping into images of white womanhood as exemplary of civilisation and purity. Leveraging this image, she applied for funds from benevolent societies and government, in addition to commercialising her story. Behrendt carefully draws out the motivations and incentives that would shape Eliza’s storytelling, as well as those whose accounts supported her own. But other survivors of the wreck contradicted her narrative, emphasising instead the hospitality of the Butchella and the Frasers’ poor character (Behrendt, 2016, p. 57). And when it was discovered she was not without support, but rather had secretly married the captain of the ship that returned her to England, public sympathy for Eliza waned. Notwithstanding doubts about the veracity of Eliza’s reported experience, Behrendt demonstrates the hold of this story –​by far the best remembered instance of settler cohabitation with Aboriginal peoples –​on the settler-​ Australian imagination, to the extent that prominent artists, novelists, and filmmakers have reimagined it for an enthralled public. Behrendt amplifies the points of uncertainty, ambiguity, and discrepancy in Eliza’s story to draw out lessons about the intersection of power and knowledge that characterises storytelling in societies founded on violent conquest and occupation. She shows, on one hand, how captivity narratives support the colonial enterprise by providing justification for acts of aggression and dispossession; and, on the other, how these stories tap into a deep psychosocial well, to form a field for projection through the construction of tropes (the ‘cannibal,’ the ‘noble savage,’ the ‘compliant native,’ the ‘promiscuous lubra’) that expiate guilt regarding colonisers’ own violence and depravity.

Amnesiac Recollections: The Found White Child  51 The focus on [Eliza’s] “captivity” divests attention from the most common frontier abduction and captivity narrative –​that of Aboriginal women being abducted and sexually abused by white men on the frontier. Eliza’s story replaces the more common story with an exceptional one. (p. 64) Behrendt also shows striking similarities between Eliza’s account of her treatment by the Butchella and testimony in Bringing Them Home of brutality, slavery, and assault suffered by Aboriginal children at the hands of colonial authorities. Thus, she shows how the violence settler colonisers do to those they colonise reappears in stories of their own victimhood. In these stories, we learn much more about the coloniser than we ever learn about the colonised, but by looking at them through different lenses and different perspectives we begin to appreciate the complexities and nuances of our own history. (p. 193) Contemporary accounts of Pelletier continue to frame his life within the genre of colonial adventure along the lines of Robinson Crusoe, as an “extraordinary survival story” of “shipwreck” (Macklin, 2019) or an “incredible tale of a French castaway” (Queensland State Archives, 2016). There is a greater record of interest in him in France than Australia, perhaps because he was claimed as a French national, or because of the exoticism of his life among the so-​called “cannibals” of the great southern land.8 French graphic artist Chanouga, who “dreamed of Robinson Crusoe’s adventures as a child,” has revived contemporary interest in Pelletier through his Narcisse series of bande designée books.9 Narcisse Pelletier’s key significance, however –​today as in the nineteenth century –​has been as a resource: a window into another culture and time. Constant Merland’s Dix-​Sept Ans Chez Les Sauvages (1876) was published hastily after Anco/​Pelletier’s return and was intended to provide him a source of income while he found a place in French society. As Stephanie Anderson has commented in her heavily annotated translation of Dix-​Sept Ans (2009), Merland was a lazy scholar and relied heavily on colonial stereotypes rather than Pelletier’s own descriptions to characterise the Uutaalnganu, intending the book to be a “Robinson Crusoe adventure” (Anderson, 2009, pp. 31–​32; Aillery, 2018; Dortins, 2018, pp. 28–​29). For instance, he draws heavily on the philosophical anthropology of the day to depict their life as pre-​political –​in a state of nature in readiness to be claimed by those who will apply their labour to it: Anyone who comes along can cut and hew and take whatever pleases him, without any fear of being prevented from doing so. The products of the land are for everyone; no-​one can appropriate whatever it might be by claiming any special rights.

52  Amnesiac Recollections: The Found White Child No-​one plants and no-​one sows. The riches of the soil are not exploited by human hand; what man takes from it for his own use grows by itself… (pp. 164–​165) None of this is true, however, belonging instead to an abstract thought experiment to hypothesise the ‘natural’ basis of (European) men’s sovereignty, property rights, and morality, and to justify colonial conquest. Rather, questions of who could hunt, pick, and consume what, who could be where, and methods of cultivation of the land and plants, and rearing of animals were highly regulated by complex social systems, laws, and lore, all of which render Merland’s description both inaccurate and pernicious. Notwithstanding his scholarly carelessness, Merland attempted to extract as much from Anco/​Pelletier as he could, relying on “notes made by Pelletier himself and from their conversations together” (Anderson, 2009, p. 26). Dix-​ Sept Ans includes transcriptions of Anco singing Uutaalnganu songs, and Merland interviewed him about his experiences and the rites and customs of the Uutaalnganu. Anco/​Pelletier shared only scant detail about the latter –​ and this withholding of sacred knowledge indicates his continued fealty to that community and belief in their ontology (Maynard and Haskins, 2016, pp. 3 and 208). Even so, Pelletier, too, tempers his characterisations of his relation to the Uutaalnganu: for instance, he calls them “savages” in letters to his parents from Sydney –​a fact Anderson suggests is due to his unfamiliarity with the French language at this time (Anderson, 2009, p. 31); and he embellishes an account of a punishment Maademan had dealt him, perhaps in order to paint himself as a victim or captive rather than as part of the community (Aillery, 2018).10 In returning to France, he was acutely aware of his proneness to being portrayed as a savage and cast out from the community of his birth. Indeed, his appearance (cicatrices and piercings), as well as his continued observance of the beliefs of the Uutaalnganu, prompted his parents to arrange an exorcism with their local priest (Maynard and Haskins, 2016, p. 204; Dortins, 2018, p. 27). Merland defensively summarises this ambiguity as follows: Transported at the age of fifteen [sic] to a milieu so different from that in which he had lived up until then, Pelletier gradually took on its customs and ways. There are some influences that are like contagious illnesses: they exert their control by proximity and contact without it being possible to avoid them. Once he had learned the language of the savages, which did not take him very long, Pelletier talked with them constantly, and it could not be otherwise as he shared their way of life. (pp. 177–​178) This framing of Anco/​Pelletier’s proneness to take up ‘savage’ ways manages an anxiety –​fear of the de-​civilisation of the white man through proximity, contagion –​by distancing Pelletier from the people who gave him shelter.

Amnesiac Recollections: The Found White Child  53 Naturally, for Merland, Pelletier learned their language quickly, because of his superiority to them, and of course it was no fault of his that he socialised with them: what else was he to do? Merland reassures his reader, however, that whiteness is innate and will recover itself when Pelletier re-​joins the society of Europeans. In the contemporary context of reconciliation, this story acquires another significance. It not only inspires curiosity, but a hope is also nurtured through Pelletier/​Anco that Aboriginal peoples and whites may cohabitate equally and freely, without the baggage of colonisation. These sentiments are often expressed through the pronouncement that finally Australians are coming to terms with the legacies of colonialism. In the opening to Castaway, for instance, Robert Macklin describes his “delight” at discovering Narcisse Pelletier at a moment “when Australia is at last willing to listen to the real story of the colonial treatment of Aboriginal people.” For I knew almost at once that given the time frame of Narcisse Pelletier’s seventeen years with the Aboriginal people of Far North Queensland –​ 1858 to 1875 –​it would be a perfect counterpoint to the Frontier War that raged in Queensland during that period. (Macklin, 2019, p. 9) That the story’s attraction to him was its capacity to counter lever the Frontier Wars is telling: the colony needed a positive story of contact. His next sentence then lets settler colonisers further off the hook for the Frontier Wars, even while it denounces the violence of those conflicts: “And ironically some of its most vicious perpetrators were the officers and men of the Native Mounted Police Force” (p. 9). These men had been driven far from their own country and brutalised by the coloniser forces, but this sentence serves to distance settler colonisers from the violence. An essential component of this reconciliation narrative is that the found child grows to own an integral relationship to land, through living the customs and beliefs of First Peoples; and this accomplishment of sovereignty is then transferrable to white settlers in proximity to him, either contemporaneously or through contemplation of their story. Castaway’s Epilogue performs this work of authorisation by the found child, where Macklin relates ‘Narcisse’ blessing him to tell his story by means of spiritual or magical communication. And, it is implied, he is thus also authorised by the Uutaalnganu (Macklin, 2019, p. 260). I held the camera at eye level but when I pressed the button to take the shot, a familiar image intervened between us. It arrived in the shape of that other photograph I had looked at so often, the one taken by Peigne, with his dark, brooding eyes and posture braced to meet any challenge. I put the camera aside. “Just a minute,” I said. “I just saw Narcisse.”

54  Amnesiac Recollections: The Found White Child I smiled as I said it, but when Norman [the Deputy Mayor of the Lockhart Aboriginal Council] responded he was serious. “That’s good,” he said. “That means he approves of you telling his story.” The elders nodded their agreement. (p. 260) The found white child is a potent figure through which colonisers imagine themselves purified of colonial violence, allowing them to simulate First Nations sovereignty. Cohabitation gives place to reconciliation, which in turn becomes replacement.

The Literary Found Child Remembering Babylon (1993) In settler-​colonial fiction, the found child motif enables reflections on cultural difference and the limit of ‘civilised’ humanity, as well as epistemological anxieties regarding what the child knows, and what the child, as mediator of knowledge about ‘the indigene,’ can communicate with fidelity. David Malouf takes up these themes in Remembering Babylon, in which a white boy (Gemmy) raised in Aboriginal society becomes the site of aggression and anxiety about settler belonging and of ambiguity regarding the colonial binary opposition between ‘civilised’ and ‘savage.’11 Like Pelletier, Gemmy was shipwrecked in adolescence and taken in by Aboriginal people, encountering white settlers around the age of 30. Malouf takes as his inspiration not Pelletier’s story, however, but that of James (‘Gemmy’) Morrill, who, when meeting soldiers for the first time stammered “Don’t shoot, I am a B-​b-​british object” (Maynard and Haskins, 2016, p. 172).12 This evocative utterance formed the kernel of Remembering Babylon (Malouf, 1993/​2009, p. 183), and is spoken by Gemmy when he meets settler children at the perimeter of their homestead. The book constructs Gemmy as a subject –​or more precisely, object: objet petit a –​between settler coloniser and Indigenous worlds. This position in-​between serves the coloniser better than it does Indigenous people or Gemmy himself, who comes to stand for a place of repudiation of settler ambivalence about their presence on the land and their own savagery, and as a proxy for First Peoples. Gemmy can be conceived in this way as neither subject nor object, but rather as a British ‘abject.’ Following Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject as “the jettisoned object [that] is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses” (Kristeva, 1982, p. 2), he is settlers’ repudiated part they cannot recognise as their own, but which nonetheless connects them to their situation in the world, as well as the moment of its collapse: where the white sovereign claim no longer holds. Compare, for instance, the following passages, the first of which is from Powers of Horror, and the others from Remembering Babylon.

Amnesiac Recollections: The Found White Child  55 There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. A certainty protects it from the shameful –​a certainty of which it is proud holds on to it. (Kristeva, 1982, p. 1) It was the mixture of monstrous strangeness and unwelcome likeness that made Gemmy Fairley so disturbing to [the settlers], since at any moment he could show either one face or the other. (Malouf, 1993/​2009, p. 39) From the moment [Jock] saw the fellow he had felt a kind of repulsion, a moral one he thought, though it expressed itself physically. Even now when he was used to having him about the place, and saw what a pathetic creature he was –​how keen to make himself useful and how good with the children –​he could not get past what he had felt on the first day, and so has as he could recall, at the very first sight of him hobbling down the gully with Lachlan driving him. He could not bear to have Gemmy come close to his. If he did, and tried to touch him, out of gratitude it might be for some small kindness, for he was very emotional, he would lose his head. (p. 64) Once ‘returned’ to settler society, Gemmy cannot be integrated, but rather stands in for –​represents in both senses, as political proxy and what renders visible –​the presence of Aboriginal peoples who otherwise appear only as diffuse and spectral, beyond the boundary of the settlement, belonging to the “Absolute Dark” (p. 2). Gemmy unsettles the settler community because he forges a connection to the repudiated part of themselves that is construed as ‘the Other,’ by bringing to the fore the uncertainty or indistinctness of those positions, as supports of white settler identity. Just as Remembering Babylon is an ambivalent text, it has also divided critics between appraisal of it as a post-​colonial work that sketches, through the figure of Gemmy, the possibility of reconciliation (Ashcroft, 1994; Mitchell, 2000; Byron, 2005), and criticism that Malouf’s conception of reconciliation serves only non-​Indigenous Australians (Alber, 2017), or that it excludes an Indigenous point of view and instead replaces indigeneity with a newly constructed, ‘indigenised’ white subject in Gemmy (Perera, 1994; Ingram, 2001; Tilley, 2012). I am also divided in my assessment of this work, having previously argued that Malouf’s reprisal of the lost child trope complicates that figure by showing up the settler community’s repudiated

56  Amnesiac Recollections: The Found White Child knowledge of its own illegitimacy through the lost child motif as ‘uncanny’ (Faulkner, 2016a, pp. 62–​66). I am now also convinced by Tilley’s interpretation that, notwithstanding the complexity of Malouf’s moral landscape, Remembering Babylon “ultimately performs a colonizing, rather than subversive or radical, textuality when employing white vanishing as a narrative vehicle” (Tilley, 2012, p. 291). Malouf’s use of the returned white child, or foundling, provides a mode through which to interrogate settler ambivalence, but it also, as Tilley argues, “doubly displaces” the indigene through the figure of the “white black man.” The fear and desire aroused in whites by the proximity of the black Other [in the guise of Gemmy] are felt vicariously, once Gemmy arrives, through proximity to the white man who is black at one remove. (p. 293) As Tilley shows with reference to Malouf’s extra-​literary remarks about his oeuvre (p. 299), he was very much motivated to develop and legitimise in Australian imagination a deep connection between settler colonisers and the native landscape. Just as May Gibbs, Xavier Herbert, and Ethel Turner had attempted to reimagine the aesthetic of Australian identity to forge an intrinsic relationship to land, Malouf articulates his own work in these terms. As Penelope Ingram (2001) has argued, settler-​colonial whiteness is formulated around anxiety about identity, and especially anxiety about its deficit of specificity: it wants to mark itself, secure itself to something particular rather than the unmarked universal.13 Notably, Malouf’s construction of the ‘black white’ Gemmy reaches for such specificity through its purported hybridity (Randall, 2004; Archer-​Lean, 2014), which allows it, in turn, to operate as a point of communion and transition between whiteness and ‘the native.’ In proximity to Gemmy, Lachlan and Janet (the children who first come upon him) grow to adulthood secure in their belonging to the country (Tilley, 2012, p. 298). They become nativised whites. The reference to the place of Indigeneity in Remembering Babylon as the “Absolute Dark” –​beyond the marked-​out boundary lines that separate ‘white’ from ‘black’ –​is evocative of Rancière’s partition of the sensible: the schema that gives who may be counted and who remains obscure, according to a particular social imaginary. Notwithstanding the effort to reconcile and ‘police’ difference that we find in Malouf’s novel, it is also possible to map how the radical equality of First Peoples is made visible within that text. Again, however, this is an ambivalent moment that closes upon itself: for no sooner than this equality is revealed, it is then recuperated and co-​opted to the settler coloniser. Like the colonial image of the furtive native who is both everywhere and nowhere in the landscape, the indigene becomes visible in Remembering Babylon as what resists the white gaze, and as a residue within the visage of the “white black” Gemmy.

Amnesiac Recollections: The Found White Child  57 Victoria Burrows, for instance, argues that Malouf brings to the fore white shame as an animating dynamic between the settlers in Remembering Babylon –​whites whose exile from the mother country gives each a different sense of their own distance from ‘pure whiteness’: Malouf astutely and evocatively reveals some of the ways in which the settlers’ shame of being white-​but-​not-​quite in terms of a relationship with the imperial centre transmogrified into a kind of anxiety about their status within the safe zone of whiteness. (Burrows, 2006, p. 126) In this context, Gemmy comes to embody settlers’ shame by materialising –​ bringing into visibility –​the futility of their efforts to enact ‘whiteness’ on the frontier against a ‘blackness’ that is represented only as obscure and absent. As ‘white black’ and a ‘parody of a white man’ (p. 128) –​or as Malouf states in an interview, a man who shows settlers that they can lose their whiteness (Papastergiadis, 1994, p. 85) –​Gemmy is made to bear the burden of the community’s shame regarding race, but not regarding violence to First Peoples. This relationship of the ‘visible’ to the ‘invisible’ is also negotiated by means of perspectival staging. Malouf’s methodology is to present multiple narratives of encounter with Gemmy, from the children who first meet him to their mother, to the minister and the schoolteacher, to the bigot who is afraid of him, and so on. Each of these voices refracts one another, showing the finitude and particularity of a single perspective. The Indigenous other is reflected negatively in the spaces between these vignettes. However, this fragmentary, postmodern technique is stitched together by an overarching impersonal narrative voice, and a final culminating chapter that produces an overall impression of apolitical harmony that rises above Gemmy’s probable death, choosing instead to gaze upon a future horizon. While Remembering Babylon contains gestures towards acknowledgement of prior sovereignty and custodianship of Indigenous peoples and their right to exist autonomously, ultimately the Indigenous Other is not ‘seen’ or counted apart from an otherness that threatens. And insofar as an ‘equality’ is represented, it is either figured in gothic terms as what lies just beyond and limits the settlers, or it is assimilated by the settler: as knowledge systems and a connection to the landscape that, according to Malouf, settler colonisers must assume for the sake of a cohesive national identity. Manganinnie Manganinnie positions the white child as less ambiguous than Remembering Babylon in both textual and filmic versions, although each achieves this moral clarity differently. This signals perhaps a greater optimism in both the novelist Roberts and filmmaker Honey, regarding the possibility of resolution or reconciliation through the ‘good’ settler coloniser. Each version attributes to

58  Amnesiac Recollections: The Found White Child Jo-​Jo’s parents (and community, in the novel) an openness to Manganinnie’s humanity and equality that is uncommon to that cohort and produces for the colony a saving power –​all in the context of a plot that, overall, rehearses a false narrative of the elimination of Aboriginal peoples of Tasmania. Manganinnie’s mise en scène is the “black drive” of 1830: a mass mobilisation of all able-​bodied male colonisers to march in an arc (“the Black line”), with the objective of containing the island’s First Peoples onto a ‘reserve’ at its southern-​most peninsula (Clements, 2014, Kindle loc. 125/​276). Governor Arthur’s directive –​which could only compel soldiers and convicts (free settlers and ticket of leavers were allowed to hire a substitute) –​assumed a capacity cleanly and comprehensively to sweep the landmass’s original inhabitants into a corner non-​violently (or at least non-​lethally) by walking across the island in parallel lines, and bespoke a fantasy that proved to be a failure. Well-​laid plans to feed and shelter the men stumbled at the first hurdle, wild weather made the months-​long expedition a miserable affair, and as the men took fright at wildlife barely an Aboriginal person was seen (they were already behind the line, taking the opportunity to raid farms whose men had been mobilised). Nonetheless, the Vandemonian myth that First Peoples had been eradicated from the island persisted well into the twentieth century. Histories both fictional and non-​fictional have perpetuated this myth, and both versions of Manganinnie are exemplary of this tendency. The Novel (1979) Manganinnie is an elderly woman of what Roberts calls the “Big River tribe,” which refers to a group of clans. Knowledge about this place suggest she may have belonged to Makaminirina or Nohereroyerner.14 The novel opens with Manganinnie having been separated from her group “in the commotion,” after which they “completely vanished in the mist” (Roberts, 1979, p. 7). This euphemistic articulation of genocide perpetuates the myth of terra nullius as it came to be elaborated in Tasmania, as an expedient and near total eradication of Aboriginal peoples (Tilley, 2012, pp. 67–​71). Manganinnie is from this point forward a lonely figure, who vigilantly keeps watch for lugga (footprints of her people), befriends animals, and is visited by visions of her husband, long dead, Meenapeekameena, who comes to her at night. He tells her he will send something to bring her happiness, but, he says, “you must give it back again when the time comes for it is not one of us” (Roberts, 1979, pp. 26–​27). It transpires that this ‘thing’ Manganinnie must respect as the property of another is a little white girl from a family that has stolen her people’s land. Later Manganinnie finds herself at this prophesied moment, where she comes across white children playing, and plans her abduction. Roberts deploys a familiar trope of settler-​colonial literature in describing what happens next, by focussing her narrative voice particularly on the contrast between the little girl’s and the old woman’s colouring, as a catalyst of Manganinnie’s desire to have her:

Amnesiac Recollections: The Found White Child  59 She could hear her laughing and she could see her blue eyes now and the face that was pink and white like an early cranberry. Even the hands were pink, but it was the lovely red hair which captivated her. It was beautiful. It was the colour of ballawinne the red ochre which the men rubbed on their woolly hair … Suddenly Manganninnie knew what she must do. She must take this little one with the red ochre hair home to her cave! The feeling grew stronger and stronger. So she watched and planned, her big brown eyes alive with excitement and her old black body as still as a tree. Then she darted out and picked up the little girl and disappeared into the mist as fast as her old black legs would carry her. (p. 39. Emphasis added) The language used to describe Manganinnie –​“old black body,” reinforced, in the next sentence, by “old black legs” –​connects ‘blackness’ to decline, tapping into a settler-​colonial myth of racial destiny. Like the rest of her clan, Manganinnie then disappears “into the mist” –​which, for the settler-​coloniser imaginary, is a special capacity of Tasmanian First Peoples. The supposed innate desirability and luminosity of the white child is developed for the remainder of the novel in connection with the Aboriginal propensity to disappear. And here I want to engage Rancière’s concept of the ‘distribution of the sensible’ to analyse what this enables for Roberts, that is, what of the settler-​colonial Australian situation is brought to visibility, or else recedes into the unconscious, through this representation. As elaborated in Chapter 1, Rancière’s account of aesthetics and representation as intrinsically political enables a reading of texts like Manganinnie, as mapping a political order: a delineation of parts that is implicitly understood within a common culture and which maintains the status quo. Another way of understanding this order –​the partition of the sensible –​is in terms of the social imaginary, through which value is distributed between images and ideas, and time and space are apportioned in a culturally specific and inherently political manner. In this context, reading a text critically means looking for the part that has no part: that is, for suggestions of a subjectivity that is eclipsed within the text, for the unsaid that is suppressed beneath what is overstated or overinvested with affect, and for what jars against established meanings. Reading critically means reading historically, for defensiveness, deflection, euphemism, and displacement. And by naming (or rendering ‘visible’) a subjectivity that had been uncounted (‘invisible’), or the text had allotted only a liminal place, readers can force a disruption of the status quo, to open possibilities for social change and the emergence of new identities. Manganinnie continues to situate the girl as luminous and special: a quick learner, with a keen capacity to absorb Manganinnie’s teachings. Manganinnie renames her ‘Tonytah’ and becomes her Ningermaner (mother), over the three years that they live together. And during this time, being so young, Jo-​Jo/​ Tonytah forgets the English language and all but forgets her family. Her

60  Amnesiac Recollections: The Found White Child luminous quality is articulated in neat proximity to the trope of Aboriginal vanishing in Tasmania. As Tilley notes in this connection, Jo-​Jo/​Tonytah is Manganinnie’s only human company throughout the novel, the absent lugga, for which she continuously searches, signifying the loss of her people. When they do meet Aboriginal people, they are dead or dying, thus they are eclipsed by the healthy white child (Roberts, 1979, pp. 61–​63; Tilley, 2012, p. 67): “Just as she gave the small body to the Earth she saw Tonytah running towards her with Mukerer [dog] close behind and she knelt with her arms outstretched to receive them” (Roberts, 1979, p. 63). Roberts articulates this correlation –​of the living white girl with the dying Aboriginal race –​in a deeper, more spiritual voice, through persona of Meenapeekameena: Last night we came to you in spirit only, for we could see from our camp-​fires in Pyerdreemme [the Milky Way] your great sadness. The time has come when you must know that you will never find another one of us living in Droemerdeene’s [Ancestral Being] Land, so you must stop looking. There are none of us left now in the Bush. Many have died but some live on a distant island, and they are all doomed to die without seeing again their tribal lands. Go now and teach your little white girl the ways of the People so that when she is grown she may tell her own people all these things and we shall no longer be spoken of as savages, but rather as a proud and ancient people living in harmony with all living things. (p. 73) This discourse, which purports to value the lifeways of Indigenous peoples, appears to its intended audience as compassionate and progressive, but only if First Peoples no longer exist –​are invisible as living, surviving, subjects of experience. As an example of ‘Aboriginalism’ (Hodge and Mishra, 1990), Manganinnie deploys a language of expertise, using Palawa Kani language throughout, and even taking the experiential position of the First Nations elder woman to be its centre. And yet this can also be read as a strategy of concealment and co-​option: a ventriloquism of the colonial logic of elimination through the voice of one of its targets. As Clare Bradford puts this, “[t]‌o look closely at the discourses which inform [Aboriginalist] texts is to recognise how the warm glow of Aboriginalism conceals its appropriating and controlling strategies” (Bradford, 2001, p. 110). Tasmania is an attractive theatre for this erasure of First Peoples because, in the first instance, the myth of extinguishment permeates settler-​colonial cultural representations of that place. In the second instance, Tasmania –​along with other landscapes considered by eastern seaboard Australians as remote –​is set at a distance, so that eradication is visible only when enacted by other colonisers: the ‘bad’ ones. Implicit within representations such as this are ‘good’ colonisers, with whom the (white) reader may form a connection of identification. Manganinnie restores Tonytah/​Jo-​Jo to her family after having a presentiment that she,

Amnesiac Recollections: The Found White Child  61 too –​the last of her people –​will not survive much longer. The girl has by now become entirely Makaminirina/​Nohereroyerner: settler-​cultural ways are foreign to her, and she has only dim memories of her family. Over the course of the chapter about this restoration (‘An Answered Prayer’), the narrator subtly shifts the girl’s signifiers, so that Tonytah becomes Jo-​Jo, and then finally ‘Joanna,’ thus assuming her proper settler identity. The local Reverend and neighbours advise her parents that an “old native woman” has been found nearby, and that she was clutching a lock of woven red hair, “which surely must belong to Joanna” (p. 93). The final chapter establishes her community as good colonisers, as apart from the more spectral bad colonisers (Ragina) who man the Black Line. The community resolves to give Manganinnie a proper Christian burial, in thanks to her having cared for their child. Roberts describes Jo-​Jo coming to terms with the passing of her Aboriginal-​mother at the same moment that she reconnects with her biological mother, again through the terms of colour: Like a half-​remembered dream she seemed to know the warm arms and the sweet honeysuckle smell. Yet, like falling leaves, these memories did not quite come together. As if through a highland mist Joanna gazed down at the black face that was so very still; then she looked up into the pale eyes, soft as a blue-​green pool in early spring and the pink and white face so close to her own. A long time ago she felt that she had been near this face and that she had smelt before the hair that was the colour of the gum tips in the Egg Season. In a tiny whisper her lips mouthed the words Wah! Wah! And her eyes lost the fear that had made them wide like the night owl. (p. 95) This reconnection involves an aesthetic reorientation, a reorganisation of her senses and reference points for what gives comfort and pleasure. Jo-​Jo must then come to terms with the presence of white men, whom she had learned to fear, by observing that they are not like the others –​not withstanding that many of them surely would have massacred Manganinnie’s clan. Mourning her death performs their spiritual cleansing, however, and allows Joanna to find strategies to recalibrate her relationship to them. Through half-​closed eyes, Joanna peeped, watching as Ragina the white man arrived, some on horseback and some in buggies and traps, all well rugged against the cold day. Joanna wanted to run from all these Ragina, for it seemed that all her life she and her Ningermaner had been hiding from them; but where was she to go? She heard their voices and knew that they were not angry or wanting to hurt. Somehow she felt that they were only curious like gonnanner the emu and that they would soon all move away. (pp. 95–​96. Emphasis added)

62  Amnesiac Recollections: The Found White Child She may thus resume her place in settler community. By the end of Manganinnie Joanna must realign her aesthetic sensibilities to that of her defined political community –​in Kantian terms, the sensus communis –​so that all she has learned through living with Manganinnie may become ‘objective’ knowledge, regarded as a form of property, rather than a priori knowledge through which all experience is organised and lived. Manganinnie will come to occupy for Joanna the place of a specimen, from which knowledge may be derived but who is not herself a knower (in fact, who no longer even represents a living culture). Joanna will be a living token to a dead people, upon whom is conferred their sovereign authority because she was chosen by them. And in return, they will be remembered not as ‘savages,’ as Meenapeekameena says, but “as a proud and ancient people living in harmony with all living things” (p. 73). In Rancière’s terms, Manganinnie and all First Peoples, by being temporally displaced into the past, are relegated to the part with no part; and Manganinnie contributes to a political aesthetic that gives the greatest part to colonisers who are enlightened to the evils of their forebears, but only once the existence of First Peoples is already only historical. The ‘invisible’ that presses itself into visibility through critical reading is the continued survival and sovereignty of First Peoples, and with it the question of how this fact is to be encountered by the majority part, settler colonials. Roberts poses the rhetorical question when reflecting Joanna’s thought process about the Ragina, and her desire to run from them: “but where was she to go?” Here the little girl represents the perennial question for good colonisers benefited by the theft of land. With nowhere else to go and finding herself in community with those who had previously hunted and stolen from her Ningermaner’s people, Joanna begins to find them curious instead of angry. She will subsequently change her names for things, the colours and smells she finds pleasing, the arrangement of the heavens and earth –​the aesthetic order of her experience. Once this is achieved, she will be able to integrate with her sensus communis, and assume her society’s foundational terra nullius, on the memory of a relationship lost through the mists of time. The Film (1980) Non-​Indigenous reviewers praised John Honey’s adaptation of Manganinnie as a contribution to reconciliation. Ian Mullins declared that “it has a great potential to build understanding and friendship between the Aboriginal and non-​Aboriginal communities in this country” (Mullins, 1980, p. 54). A clear message of the film (after the book), however, is that there is no longer an Aboriginal community with which to build friendship, or that it is at best notional: an image through contemplation of which settler Australians indigenise themselves (Goldie, 1988, p. 63). The white girl, Joanna, is in fact the figure of a reconciliation constrained to colonisers’ comfort: as the innocence through which colonial guilt is expunged (Mishra, 1988, p. 182; Tilley, 2012, p. 70).

Amnesiac Recollections: The Found White Child  63 The cinematic Manganinnie drew in a broader audience and was in some respects more successful in fetishising the white child. As visual, Honey’s adaptation of Roberts’s novel shows more vividly the luminosity of Joanna’s skin and hair and Manganinnie’s attraction to it. For cinematic expedience, however, Manganinnie is herself also rendered visually appealing to the viewer (Moore and Muecke, 1984, p. 42), as a young and attractive woman who has lost her child in a massacre. Manganinnie’s central perspective within the book is displaced in the film by Joanna’s grown-​up self, who narrates key plot points and her relationship with Manganinnie, to paraphrase, as if remembering a dream: a phrase that perhaps references the ‘dreamtime,’ but also places both childhood and the Aboriginal presence into a surreal or imaginary realm.15 In this version Manganinnie does not abduct Joanna, but rather comes across her after she has strayed from her father. The film also links Joanna’s hair to fire rather than ochre, and in so doing develops an additional plotline through which the white girl shows herself to transcend the abilities of Manganinnie and her people: whereas Manganinnine must carry and constantly attend to fire –​something which reinforces the representation of her as primitive (Jennings, 1993, p. 18) –​the child Joanna is able to start fire with technology. This dialectic between the cultures through the white child is rendered credible by the film, which gives Joanna to be older, with language and culturally specific know-​how. The film excludes the chapter with the dead and dying Aboriginal man and girl, inserting instead an episode where Manganinnie is briefly captured by white men: Joanna helps rescue her and takes their flint matches (which she will use later to make fire). All settler colonisers are portrayed as brutal except for Joanna’s own family, who are devout Christians: this is established early, where the father reads the Bible to his improbably attentive children. Later when the redcoats arrive to recruit him to the Black Line, the father avails them his “men” (likely convicts), but when asked if he will join to stop the “treacherous” blacks, he states “there are not many people who would be happy to be removed from their own land.” Thus, a stark distinction is drawn between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ coloniser –​notwithstanding the family’s complicity in the removal from their land of those people and providing manpower to drive them further south. The film does not reprise the book’s constitution of settler community around the Aboriginal woman’s dead body. Rather, the family plans to bury her alone the next day. However, that night Joanna sets Manganinnie’s body alight, to give her a traditional send off. The film closes with the spectacular scene of Joanna, joined by her father, watching the barn ablaze. Joanna’s mourning for Manganinnie is the final mechanism of her indigenisation: a mystic ritual through which she sublimates colonial violence and is conferred Manganinnie’s sovereignty. Singing in language as she watches “dark figures in the sky” that no one else could see, Joanna has absorbed Manganinnie’s indigeneity, and will grow to be a good settler woman, who remembers as if it were dreaming her life as an Aboriginal child.

64  Amnesiac Recollections: The Found White Child Arguably, the cinematic version is less tolerant of ambiguity than the novel, in its attempt to delineate a stark difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ coloniser. While the book employs euphemism about genocide, the film shows a massacre –​but crucially, it places a cordon sanitaire around the girl and her family regarding the colonial violence that surrounds them and supports their presence there. The effect is to provide viewers with a site of identification pure enough to separate them, too, from responsibility for colonisation. The degree of separation from culpability that the film manufactures for Joanna’s father –​that he only sends servants to war against the First Nations rather than going himself; that they have been able to ‘settle’ the land peacefully, a lone island of terra nullius amidst the massacres –​replicates the separation that contemporary Australians manufacture temporally between themselves and the effects of colonisation: because it happened in the past, they are not responsible. The slippage most central to both book and film, however –​which structures many narratives concerning settler-​colonial children –​concerns Joanna’s abduction/​rescue, which echoes a history of abduction of Aboriginal children. Each version in its own way prevaricates around the abduction, and this signals a deeper discomfort about its meaning. For Roberts this evasiveness takes the form of prophesy, in which Manganinnie is told she will take something that doesn’t belong to her, and then must return it. The abduction then has a higher meaning for both cultures, because it forges a connection between them, culminating in the death of the Aboriginal woman, the last of her people, and her commuted survival in the figure of the child. For Honey, Manganinnie’s intentions are reduced to the fetish of Joanna’s colouring –​that her hair is like a flame –​and the occasion for her coming to possess Joanna is obfuscated. Accidental, it is not a real abduction. Qualms about child abduction are displaced onto First Peoples, just as they are also represented as a race in decline: part of the eugenic rationale for formal policies of removal of Aboriginal children from families and communities. We will examine this discourse more extensively in Chapter 5. In the next chapter, we turn to the representation of the mixed-​race (in colonial language, ‘half-​caste’) Aboriginal child as a site of reconciliation, as exemplified by Baz Luhrmann’s 2008 blockbuster film, Australia. We will here explore the work of fetishisation this figure performs, as a mode of mediation between coloniser and an image of the colonised.

Notes 1 The terms “indigene” (Goldie 1989) and “Aboriginalism” (Hodge and Mishra, 1991) operate similarly to designate the colonised other as an object for the coloniser, following Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism. 2 Stories of abduction of settler women and children are abundant in the frontier imaginary and are rehearsed in many films and television shows such as The Searchers (1956), Little Big Man (1970), and more recently Hell on Wheels (2011–​ 2016), which contains a subplot loosely based on the life of Olive Oatman.

Amnesiac Recollections: The Found White Child  65 3 Documented accounts age him at 14, but some accounts say he was as young as 11. 4 Pelletier has commonly been referred to as “Amglo” (Macklin, 2019, p. 54); however, Maynard and Haskins have argued, after Stephanie Anderson, that Anco is more consistent with Uutaalnganu language (Anderson, 2009, p. 44; Maynard and Haskins, 2016, p. 197). 5 It’s uncertain whether Anco was an initiated man. He had cicatrices across his chest, but this was not an initiation practice. Rather, it was for the purpose of enhancing attractiveness. Accounts differ as to whether he was married. Macklin tells of his marriage to ‘Mitha’ (2019, p. 165) and fathering of two children, a boy and a girl named Chuchi and Chilpu (p. 127 and 228–​230). However, Anderson’s account (from Merland) is that he was promised to a girl but was not yet living in a formal marriage with her (Anderson, 2009, pp. 183–​184). 6 Pelletier himself was dubbed ‘le Sauvage blanc’ –​the white savage –​when he returned to France (Macklin, 2019, p. 235); and then later as ‘l’enfant sauvage de Vendée’ (Macklin, 2019, p. 236). Stephanie Anderson points out that the term ‘sauvage’ itself originated in relation to European ‘wild men’ of the woods (Anderson, 2009, p. 28). This cultural category included not only children who had been raised by peoples of different cultures, but also those who had been lost and then raised by animals or as captives deprived of social interaction (for instance, the famous case of Kaspar Hauser). I have written about the cultural role of the enfant sauvage already (see Faulkner, 2016a). 7 There was, for a time, even deliberation regarding whether feral children should be taxonomically classified into a separate category from humans (Candland, 1993, p. 13). 8 Although Uutaalnganu were called “cannibals” by Pelletier’s contemporaries, they did not consume human flesh (Anderson, 2009). 9 See www.edi​tion​spaq​uet.com/​aute​urs/​chano​uga (accessed 19 April 2021). 10 In his first letter to his parents Pelletier states that the “savages” cared for him, were kind to him, and did him no harm; but his story changes in his second and third letters, where he complains “I had much misery with them. They poisoned my leg” (reproduced in Anderson, 2009, p. 300) –​and of the “suffering that I have had since the time I stayed with these savages” (p. 302). 11 I have written more extensively about Malouf’s Remembering Babylon in Faulkner, 2016a. 12 Alice Brittan points out that convicts were considered “objects” and “human property of the crown” rather than as British subjects (2002, pp. 1158–​1159), and so the idea of British objects had currency at that time. 13 Curiously, Ingram excludes the United States from the settler colonial, attributing ‘American’ whiteness (it’s unclear whether Canada is included in this designation) an exceptional status, as secure in its identity. I wonder if, post-​Trump, she would still make this argument. 14 Later Roberts clarifies that Manganinnie had married into this tribe from the “Oyster Bay tribe”: either Waypamunina or Kikatapula. See “Tasmanian Aboriginal Place Names” on the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre website, at http://​ tac​inc.com.au/​tasman​ian-​abo​rigi​nal-​place-​names/​ (accessed 2 February 2021). 15 The first voice heard in the film is: “I was very young then, and though it was so long ago, I remember it as clearly as a dream.” Is it usual to remember a dream ‘clearly’? The last words of the film begin: “I was very young then; I remember it as if it were dreaming” –​which appears more explicitly to reference the dreamtime.

4 The Romance of Reconciliation The Mixed-​Race Aboriginal Child

The previous two chapters have examined the part of the white settler child as mediator between the coloniser and land, in the figures of ‘the lost child’ and ‘the found child.’ From here we move to consider settler representations of Aboriginal childhood: in this chapter, as a site of mediation, or the figure through which settler colonisers establish a sovereign claim. In particular, the so-​called ‘half-​caste’ Aboriginal child sits alongside the nativised white child representation of the previous chapters as a vector for reconciliation. The Aboriginal child figure, as it appears in productions that centre settler colonisers, represents a promise of harmonious cohabitation. Even where they gesture toward past injustices, texts that deploy this figure will stop short of acknowledging the machinery of present-​day colonialism in operation. And, ultimately, they also allow white sovereignty to remain intact. The representation I take to be a paradigm of this figure is ‘Nullah,’ the mixed-​race Aboriginal boy from Baz Luhrmann’s film Australia (2008). Nullah exemplifies this figure in the context of the early twenty-​first century reconciliation movement, at a point when the existence of the Stolen Generations had only recently become visible to a non-​Indigenous Australian public, and when Australian cultural life was saturated with sympathy for Aboriginal people insofar as they could be imagined as children. The representation of what it means to be a light-​skinned Aboriginal child in Luhrmann’s film caters to this milieu specifically: Nullah is a highly attractive child who readily invites sympathy, but also, ironically, invites a non-​Indigenous audience’s desire to commoditise him and take him as their object. It is this ‘fungible’ quality of Nullah’s attractiveness –​that he is allowed to ricochet through the film, exchanged between situations and historical events, drawing the plot ever forward –​that gives him to play the part both as caution against colonisers’ historical wrongs, and as attractor to further wrongdoing in the present. For, when reading Nullah, it must be kept in mind that the removal of Aboriginal children –​i.e., the Stolen Generations –​is a process that is ongoing. As we will visit in more detail in Chapter 6, Australian governments continue to remove First Nations children from their families at alarming rates, albeit under general child protection laws rather than laws developed specifically to apply to Aboriginal people. DOI: 10.4324/9781003099666-4

The Romance of Reconciliation: The Mixed-Race Aboriginal Child  67 The name Nullah stands for terra nullius (Kelada, 2014, p. 88), in the personage of the Aboriginal child who not only may be alienated from land but may also become a token for settler belonging. Although Nullah belongs to the land of his grandfather, ‘King George,’ then, it is significant that he is also represented as occupying a lost identity: as ‘neither black nor white’ and as ‘belonging to no one,’ so that he is readily available to be claimed by the ‘good’ colonisers, ‘Lady Sarah Ashley’ and ‘The Drover.’ In Luhrmann’s film, possession of Nullah symbolises sovereignty, whether it is the ‘good’ colonisers or ‘bad’ colonisers who access him. Furthermore, both Nullah’s attractiveness and the film’s mid-​century aesthetic connect this character to Aboriginal kitsch in the form of the ‘piccaninny’ representation (Conor, 2012; Moreton-​Robinson, 2021), whereby the Aboriginal child becomes an object for settler-​colonial consumption, reflecting back to the coloniser their desire for possession in a ‘purified’ form, that is, in a guise that, in colonisers’ eyes, bears no mark of colonial violence. After discussing Nullah’s part in Australia, I turn to the significance of fetishisation of the ‘half-​caste’ child for understanding how this figure operates as a site of mediation for colonisers that enables passage to reconciliation. This question concerns, on one hand, Nullah’s attractiveness and facility for obscuring the material history of colonial dispossession and viewers’ implication in this history. Laura Mulvey’s account of fetishistic scopophilia will support this analysis. On the other –​and drawing on a more original significance of ‘fetish’ emerging from its beginnings in intercultural trade –​Nullah comes to play the part of an incommensurability in economic exchange between cultures. In the final section, with reference to the work of Moreton-​ Robinson (2021), Liz Conor (2012), and Anne McClintock (1995), I explore the material history of fetishisation of the Aboriginal child in Australia through the phenomenon of piccaninny kitsch, as providing the conditions for the Nullah formation.

Nullah Unlike Honey’s cinematic adaptation of Manganinnie, for Luhrmann’s film there is no urtext as such to which we might compare it. Rather, the film is best described as pastiche, presenting layer upon layer of colonial trope, referencing ‘Hollywood epic’ films such as Gone with the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, Out of Africa, Indiana Jones, and The Wizard of Oz (Donald, 2017), and blending these sources with Australian kitsch (through décor, but also referencing Xavier Herbert’s novels, Jedda, and We of the Never Never) and ‘Ozploitation’ films like Wake in Fright (Papson, 2011). The effect of this ‘play’ is lush, but disorienting: as Stephen Papson argues, this method of pastiche gives the impression of parody by displacing and disrupting cultural norms and “the hegemonic reading position.” And yet didactic realism interrupts parody through the insertion of 1950s-​style intertitles instructing the international audience (and likely also Australians) in the history of the Stolen

68  The Romance of Reconciliation: The Mixed-Race Aboriginal Child Generations. Luhrmann hedges the question of whether Australia should be taken seriously or as a lavish spectacle. While, on one hand, the film pays lip service to the crimes of colonialism, on the other, Luhrmann’s engagement of parody, high camp, and magical realism distracts viewers from their own implication in the film’s more serious content, signals to the audience that it is to be enjoyed rather than critiqued, and reassures them of a just resolution to the story of colonialism, according to the ‘happy ending’ paradigm. At the warm centre of this intensely ambivalent production glows Nullah: a mixed-​heritage Aboriginal child, contest over whom forms the affective core of the film. Nullah –​like the General in Seven Little Australians –​is Australia’s McGuffin (or objet petit a). At once driving the plot and wholly incidental to it, he is a focus of desire that ultimately gives place to a heterosexual union between his white surrogate parents. As with Roberts/​Honey, Luhrmann constructs the drama around a Manichean contest between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ colonisers: white rescuers and unabashedly racist and brutal men. And, as a site of mediation, Nullah articulates the relationship between these apparent opposites, as well as between the land and colonisers’ claim to it. The film begins with narration by Nullah (Brandon Walters): “My grandfather, King George –​he take’em me walkabout... teach me blackfella way. Grandfather teach’em me most important lesson of all. Tell’em story” (Australia; Beattie, 2008, p. 2). Nullah is thus situated here as a Puck-​like character: a dissimulator situated both inside and outside the action, who places its reality into question from the start. This emphasis on storytelling supports the suggestion that Luhrmann attempts to reimagine Australia’s national history. Rather than a history steeped in racism against First Peoples and non-​ British immigrants, he casts Australia’s past in terms of its possibilities for reconciliation and multiculturalism (Papson, 2011). What puts Nullah in the position of leading this journey, for Luhrmann, is not only his child-​being, but also his racial ambiguity or lability: “See, I not blackfella. I not white fella either. Them white fellas call me mixed-​blood... half-​caste, Yea! Creamy” (Australia; Beattie, 2008, p. 2). As Liz Conor (2010) has argued, Luhrmann takes his lead here from the mid-​century Australian novelist Xavier Herbert, drawing on his character from Poor Fellow My Country, ‘Prindy’1: “Though set in different historical periods, both texts are preoccupied with national belonging, and both use a mixed-​‘caste’ Aboriginal child as a redemptive figure of reconciliation” (Conor, 2010, p. 98). Luhrmann mirrors Herbert’s own enthusiasm for the mixed-​race child as a pathway to authentic future Australians, and an authentic national character. ‘The Drover’ in Australia reprises Herbert’s ‘Jeremy Delacy,’ who embodies the more ‘authentic’ settler Australian by rejecting a national affiliation with Britain and taking an Aboriginal wife. As Fiona Probyn-​Rapsey argues, this form of ethno-​nationalism is elaborated according to a finer racial typology, through Herbert’s preference for tanned white skin as opposed to white skin that burns red in the sun: a signifier of unfitness for the Australian environment (Probyn-​Rapsey, 2007, p. 159). It is, however, the siring of “Euroaustralian”

The Romance of Reconciliation: The Mixed-Race Aboriginal Child  69 Aboriginal children –​“a creole nation mothered by Aboriginal women and white outback men” (Conor, 2010, p. 103) –​that motivates Herbert’s vision of Australia (Probyn-​Rapsey, 2007, pp. 167–​168).2 Likewise, ‘The Drover’ is ostracised for having married an Aboriginal woman (since deceased), and (Lady) Sarah Ashley must shed her ‘English rose’ comportment by mucking in with the men droving before she can become a credible love interest for him. The lustrous ‘creamy’ child, Nullah, symbolises the culmination for Luhrmann, following Herbert, of a new Australian identity, ‘at home’ with itself, indigenised. Nullah, positioned as radically indeterminate (both/​neither white and/​nor black), provides passage to settler-​coloniser belonging through the co-​option and ultimate elision of Aboriginality. This passage via the ‘half-​caste’ child takes place in the enactment of a struggle between good and evil: ‘The Drover’ (Hugh Jackman) and Lady Ashley (Nicole Kidman) must vanquish ‘Fletcher’ (David Wenham), who is at once thief (of Lady Ashley’s cattle), murderer (of Lady Ashley’s husband), and rapist (he is Nullah’s biological father). Fletcher is also in the process of arranging for Nullah to be taken from his grandfather, King George (David Gulpilil), into a mission, referencing state policies of removal for eugenic purposes that created the Stolen Generations. Nullah’s mother, ‘Daisy’ (Ursula Yovich) –​a reference, perhaps, to one of the sisters in Rabbit-​Proof Fence (Papson, 2011) –​dies early in the story: drowning in a water tank while concealing Nullah from police to avoid his removal. Daisy’s death –​which is barely mourned and quickly dispensed with –​opens the way for a maternal bond to form between Sarah Ashley and Nullah, to be strengthened by their adventures together. Nullah articulates this bond with Lady Sarah Ashley in peculiar terms, however, both in his manner of address to her (as “Missus Boss”), and in his affirmation of her foreignness (“The strangest woman I ever seen. She’s not from this land.”) As Odette Kelada notes with reference to Moreton-​ Robinson’s concept of white possession, Missus Boss “has a jarring irony given the context of a possessive logic working so closely with a story of love. Is Nullah owned as ‘labour’ or mothered as adopted son?” (2014, p. 93). They are connected through the song “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” which each sings to the other at pivotal moments of the film, and cites The Wizard of Oz, an epic quest for belonging, “there’s no place like home.”3 The music gestures to an ideal of what Australia might be, where races harmoniously coalesce, because all the colours of the rainbow blend to make white. Lady Sarah’s property, “Faraway Downs,” exemplifies such happy multiculturalism –​the Chinese cook, Aboriginal servants, and stockmen –​notwithstanding that the white lady is called Missus Boss. The key points of drama in Australia hang on a movement away from home and a return. Lady Ashley must save Faraway Downs, run into destitution by her husband, whom upon her arrival she finds has been murdered. The police suspect King George of this crime, but the audience (and likely Nullah) knows Fletcher (the bad colonial) is to blame. Fletcher has also

70  The Romance of Reconciliation: The Mixed-Race Aboriginal Child been duffing cattle from the property, increasing the herd belonging to ‘King Carney’ he is employed to oversee. Sarah determines that she must drive her cattle to Darwin for export, in an apparently impossible timeframe and against all odds, in a last-​ditch attempt to save Faraway Downs. The journey is facilitated by ‘dreamtime magic,’ when Nullah stops the cattle from stampeding off a cliff by standing on its edge singing in language, and in psychic communion with tribal man King George. As Kelada notes, when Sarah saves the exhausted child from falling, this mirrors –​and no doubt references –​the culminating scene of Chauvel’s Jedda (Kelada, 2014, pp. 86–​87), to which we turn in Chapter 5. Once the cattle are delivered, the film re-​enacts one of the signal traumatic experiences of Australian colonialism, with a key twist that establishes Lady Sarah’s indigenised status. Nullah is removed into the custody of priests at “Mission Island.” This iteration of the Stolen Generations story, however, places a white woman in the mother’s role, as Nullah is dragged from Lady Sarah’s arms. This scene represents the moment at which Sarah’s maternity of Nullah is consolidated. Where Nullah is a synecdoche for the whole of the Stolen Generations, Sarah takes the place of all Aboriginal mothers through this gesture –​perhaps the film’s most unintentionally ironic moment. Where in Manganinnie Jo-​Jo had replaced the Aboriginal child as inheritor of First Peoples’ lifeways and sovereignty, in Australia indigeneity is conferred upon Sarah through her re-​enactment of the trauma of having her child taken from her. In this respect, Sarah is also a site of sympathetic identification for those settler colonisers who learned for the first time of the Stolen Generations after Bringing Them Home was published in 1997. In the context of the outpouring of sympathy towards the Stolen Generations, and in the immediate wake of the Rudd government’s apology to them in February 2008, Lady Sarah resonated with those viewers and provided them a dramatic and romantic image of themselves. When the hybrid ‘Malthusian trio’ –​Drover–​Lady Sarah–​Nullah –​is finally reunited following the Japanese bombing of Darwin, the connection between Sarah and Nullah is again articulated through ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow,’ in a mystical scene that has Nullah singing Lady Sarah to him again. A final showdown between good colonisers and bad colonisers takes place: Fletcher attempts to shoot Nullah as Drover runs to save him, and Fletcher is speared by King George. When they return to Faraway Downs –​restored to its former glory –​the Drover and Sarah argue over whether Nullah should be allowed to go ‘walkabout’ with his grandfather (again echoing a thread of plot in Jedda).4 King George says he is taking Nullah to see “my country,” but then, looking into Lady Sarah eyes, corrects himself: “our country.” The film’s final message seems to be that the good coloniser will be gifted a more authentic sovereignty than the bad coloniser can take. The movement of settler-​colonial dialectic resolves through Nullah, whereby whiteness becomes sovereign by assuming into itself Aboriginality, and Aboriginality itself is thus overcome.5

The Romance of Reconciliation: The Mixed-Race Aboriginal Child  71 “Two Forbidden Love Stories” Luhrmann anticipated Australia’s poor critical reception when, at its world premiere in Sydney, he said that he “didn’t expect everyone to like it but was hoping it would become a classic. It is between the film and the audience” (Dunn, 2008). Some critics, caught between boredom and overstimulation, described the almost-​three-​hour-​long spectacle as “excruciating” to watch (Bradshaw, 2008; Denby, 2008; Conrad, 2009).6 Conversely, many, including Yiman and Bidjara woman and anthropologist Marcia Langton, found Australia charming and timely: In his fabulous hyperbolic film Australia, Baz Luhrmann has leaped over the ruins of the “history wars” and given Australians a new past –​a myth of national origin that is disturbing, thrilling, heartbreaking, hilarious and touching. At its centre are two forbidden love stories: one a romance between the English Lady Sarah and the Drover; and the other, which carries the film and all its historical and social subtext, is the love of Lady Sarah for the mixed-​race boy, Nullah. (Langton, 2008) The ‘history wars’ Luhrmann is supposed to have transcended refers to a period in the 1990s and 2000s of public and bitter conflict between conservative historians and politicians (chiefly Prime Minister John Howard) and historians and activists on the left, who urged a national reckoning about historical injustices to First Peoples. Historian Geoffrey Blainey had dubbed the latter group as harbouring a “black armband view of history” (Blainey, 1993) in the conservative magazine Quadrant, which was a key battleground of the history wars. The phrase was, however, eagerly adopted by Howard, who extended the ‘war’ into the school curriculum, enforcing a more ‘forward-​ looking,’ “three cheers” approach to history, to celebrate Australians’ achievements and cultivate in children a sense of national pride (McKenna, 1997; Macintyre and Clark, 2003). Langton identifies in Australia an attempt to cut the Gordian knot of “the nation’s past and how it should be represented” (Langton, 2008): to celebrate Australia’s past whilst acknowledging wrongs done to Aboriginal people. In the context of the reconciliation movement, she credits Luhrmann with having reworked a myth of national origin in a way that bridges racial differences, and the “forbidden love” between Lady Sarah and Nullah is critical to the formation of that bridge. It might be said, moreover, that the first forbidden love is only a decoy for the second, as it is consistently placed under erasure as both too ideal and ridiculous. Not only is there no chemistry between Jackman and Kidman, but Luhrmann also toys with cinematic conventions that would signal their irresistible attraction by displacing the female lead as object of voyeuristic desire (Mulvey, 1988): when Lady Sarah’s gaze lingers on the Drover pouring water over his bare torso, for instance. More generally, the heteronormative,

72  The Romance of Reconciliation: The Mixed-Race Aboriginal Child phallocentric line of sight that normally orders cinematic enjoyment is withheld in Australia, and to some extent reversed. It is Lady Sarah’s quest to save Faraway Downs that animates the action, and Jackman is as much –​even more –​a figure of visual pleasure as Kidman. Laura Mulvey suggests that cinema, conceived as a form of voyeurism (Mulvey, 1988, p. 60), re-​presents the ways in which the unconscious structures visual pleasure, by including an ideal ego (the male protagonist) with whom the viewer identifies, and an object of voyeuristic and sadistic desire (a castrated female figure). Pleasure in viewing cinema derives from a simultaneous sense of loss and reinforcement of the ego, through identification with the hero’s triumph, and desire for the woman as erotic object, which thus mediates the relationship between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of the screen –​protagonist and audience. This often implicitly involves the denigration of the woman-​image, conceived as both castrated and castrating (the femme fatale figure, for instance). Film that interrupts this complicity between the viewer and (male) protagonist thereby challenges those ways of seeing, and the gender hierarchies that they support (pp. 59 and 68). The imperative for Mulvey would be to turn away from cinematic enjoyment as conventionally conceived, to invent a new pleasure capable of restructuring desire (“It is said that analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it” (p. 59)). In Rancière’s terms, too, mainstream film and other aesthetic works organise pleasure according to prevalent social hierarchies –​a distribution of the sensible –​to the extent that popular enjoyment is connected to the work’s ability to reflect and reinvest an already-​established order, or what he calls “police”: The police is … first an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise … Policing is not so much the “disciplining” of bodies as a rule governing their appearing, a configuration of occupations and the properties of the spaces where these occupations are distributed. (Rancière, 1999, p. 29) Conventional media ‘police’ the distribution of parts (who is and is not seen; whose speech is credible and whose is pathologised, criminalised, or ignored); and publics derive a pleasure from narratives that affirm the appropriateness of their own allocated part or make them feel ‘seen’ rather than simply objectified. ‘Politics,’ conversely, disrupts the established order in such a way that the uncounted come to be seen, and the line of sight that objectifies them is problematised:

The Romance of Reconciliation: The Mixed-Race Aboriginal Child  73 Political activity is whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it or changes a place’s destination. It makes visible what had no business being seen, and makes heard a discourse where once there was only place for noise; it makes understood as discourse what was once only heard as noise. (p. 30) Australia plays with cinematic conventions regarding who looks, or owns the gaze that organises a field of meaning, in a manner that renders the love relationship between the protagonists uncanny and displaces it for the real romance, between Lady Sarah and Nullah. But is this disruption ‘political,’ in Rancière’s sense? Who does it make visible, for whom? Whose voice is dominant, and what remains silent or is silenced? Whose desire structures the romance, and is given expression through its representation? Mulvey’s account of fetishistic scopophilia provides a useful heuristic to interrogate what this ‘forbidden love affair’ between Lady Ashley and Nullah achieves for settler-​colonial fantasy. As noted earlier, Mulvey’s article focuses on the representation of ‘woman’ in conventional Hollywood cinema as a site through which the bearer of the look –​particularly men –​work through castration anxiety. As such, the woman-​ image represents both castrated impotence and the menace of castration: an object of pleasure that threatens with excess, voracious in her own taking of pleasure. In psychoanalysis, the fetish is a vicissitude of castration anxiety, through which the individual at once acknowledges the mother’s castration and retains the phallic mother. It manifests where the boy becomes fixated on an object he associates with the discovery that the mother does not have a penis. This object –​typically shoes, feet, undergarments, or, in Freud’s text, a “shine on the nose” (Freud, 1961, p. 152) –​is overinvested with libidinal charge, as a means of deflecting from the knowledge that the mother is ‘castrated.’ Through the fetish, the boy/​man can uphold his belief in the phallic mother. [I]‌n his mind the woman has got a penis, in spite of everything; but this penis is no longer the same as it was before. Something else has taken its place, has been appointed its substitute, as it were, and now inherits the interest which was formerly directed to its predecessor. But this interest suffers an extraordinary increase as well, because the horror of castration has set up a memorial to itself in the creation of this substitute. (p. 154) The fetish itself thus contains the ambivalence of his discovery of the mother’s ‘mutilation’: the fetish is intensified by resistances installed by the knowledge that what it conceals is ‘nothing’ –​that is, the mother’s lack. The fetish thus embodies two contradictory currents: the knowledge that the mother does not have a penis and its refusal.

74  The Romance of Reconciliation: The Mixed-Race Aboriginal Child For Mulvey, the “cult of the female star” is an artefact of fetishism, so that the woman becomes “reassuring rather than dangerous” (Mulvey, 1988, p. 64). A further avenue the male viewer may take in negotiating castration anxiety, according to Mulvey, would be through a sadistic voyeurism, wherein “pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with castration), asserting control, and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness” (p. 64). I would contend that both occur in the romance between Lady Ashley and Nullah in Australia, although the latter is largely repressed in favour of fetishism. I will first elaborate the features of fetishism present in the Australia narrative from this psychoanalytic perspective, before turning to a more original significance of ‘fetish’ that sheds additional light on the stakes of this settler-​colonial fantasy as a story of reconciliation, and the Aboriginal child figure’s part in it. Lady Ashley is, according to this reading, the ‘phallic mother’: she drives the action of the narrative and draws the Drover into her story. Moreover, she replaces the other mother –​the defiled, castrated Aboriginal mother –​to become a perfect representation, and ideal ego, for the well-​meaning good coloniser viewer. Nullah is the fetish: the shiny, empty object, distracting the viewer from the knowledge that the phallic mother is flawed and, in fact, has no foundation. Together, the two representations –​the phallic good coloniser and the beautiful Aboriginal boy who loves his ‘Missus Boss’ mother –​enable the coloniser viewer to indulge a fantasy that they can have their sovereignty and reconciliation. The knowledge of castration (that colonisation was violent and illegitimate and continues to implicate non-​Indigenous Australians) is repressed at the point where the luminous child mediates the relation between Lady Ashley and the audience: to exemplify love and forgiveness toward Sarah, conferring upon her a phallic status –​a gift of sovereignty to his ‘mother.’ Where Langton interprets the “forbidden love story” between Sarah and Nullah as enabling the work of reconciliation through acknowledgement of the Stolen Generations story, to the extent that the narrative demands Sarah should displace Daisy as Nullah’s mother, it inhibits appropriate acknowledgement: a highly charged, ambivalent figure that deflects guilt and blame, Nullah provides the audience an alibi to say ‘we weren’t the ones removing Aboriginal children –​we were saving them.’ This repression is evident where Nullah is positioned as an object of voyeuristic sadism, through which the viewer is caught up in the trauma of castration and attempts to manage it by persecuting the object, subjecting it to “punishment and forgiveness” (Mulvey, 1988, p. 64). Such instances of punishment are Nullah’s various near-​death and traumatic experiences: when he almost drowns and loses his mother; when he is almost killed by the cattle stampede; when he is taken to Mission Island; when Fletcher attempts to shoot him. The acts of rescue that animate the plot provide an avenue for redemption. But the Aboriginal is tortured in the first place to satisfy a desire for repetition: to reprise the series of colonial violence in a way that produces both colonial conquest and white saviours.

The Romance of Reconciliation: The Mixed-Race Aboriginal Child  75 Getting Lost to Find Oneself The concept of the ‘fetish’ did not originate with Freud, or even Marx –​for whom it has a similar meaning, albeit in the economic sphere, signalling obfuscation, emptiness, and a crisis in value. It originated on the Mina coast, in the context of trade between the Portuguese and West Africans and was applied to European products Africans were seen to overvalue. As William Pietz has argued, the fetish signalled, in this way, a certain incommensurability between economic systems. The word ‘fetish’ itself derives from ‘felitiço,’ meaning “witchcraft,” referring to the objects’ use in non-​Christian rites (Pietz, 1985, p. 5). It expresses ambivalence attending intercultural spaces, and how this ambivalence pertains to the supposed objectivity of any particular cultural system. It signifies uneasiness about the impossibility of perfect communication, which manifests as derision of the cultural other who ‘misunderstands’ the value of quotidian European baubles.7 For Pietz, the importance of the fetish object is the way it materially registers inter-​cultural interaction and heterogeneity: “the fetish [is] a radically historical object that is nothing other than the totalized series of its particular usages” (p. 7). By considering the settler-​colonial representation of the Aboriginal child as a fetish, it can be seen to bear this load of cultural ambivalence regarding First Peoples –​historical sediments of racism and paternal benevolence –​in ways that affect the lived experience of First Nations children today. All at once magical and untrustworthy, cunning and innocent, independent and hopeless, a symbol of the future and an evolutionary dead end, the Aboriginal child figure serves the interests of settler-​colonial fantasy. As a fetish, it satisfies by not burdening the coloniser, instead showing them the way to their better self: the ideal self, untroubled by castration, for whom the world is still plentiful and whose sovereignty is not in question. Just as Mulvey describes cinema as involving a concomitant loss and reinforcement of the ego, Australia ‘succeeds’ when the viewer is able to get lost in the love story of Lady Sarah and Nullah, and, like Sarah at the end of the film, to allow Nullah to ‘go walkabout.’ The third forbidden love story spills out of the film as its commercial excess, as Nullah goes walkabout for Australia. The walkabout motif –​a site of struggle between the indigenised good coloniser (the Drover) and the foreign good coloniser (Lady Sarah) –​was leveraged in the slipstream of the film’s release through a series of Tourism Australia tie-​in advertisements that continue to normalise settler sovereignty. Targeted to markets in Asia and the United States, two almost identical advertisements depict the Australian outback as an escape from alienating, urban professional life. In each, Nullah appears before a harried office employee, working into the evening. A lure dangled before an ideal self, he whispers “sometimes we have to get lost to find ourselves. Sometimes, we gotta go walkabout.”8 In emulation of a gesture that has come to symbolise the transfer of sovereignty back to First Peoples, Nullah pours desert sands, like fairy dust, into the outstretched hand of the overseas office worker, urging

76  The Romance of Reconciliation: The Mixed-Race Aboriginal Child them to become a tourist.9 The scene then fades into images of Kakadu as a setting for recreation between lovers. Each advertisement closes with text reinforcing the message that one finds one’s authentic self in the Australian outback, which, it is implied, is a place where anyone can find belonging –​ where no one need negotiate their presence with prior owners and custodians. In the US advertisement this text reads: “she arrived as Ms K Mathieson, Executive VP of Sales … She departed as Kate.” Walkabout is thus repurposed as a vector of indigenisation, of finding settler belonging, of getting lost to find oneself. The Aboriginal child leads this journey of loss and self-​discovery, providing the occasion for acts of heroism and rescue that establish the cultural relation as hierarchical: a lure for desire that takes the settler coloniser on a voyage through ambivalence, guilt, and fear, back to the certainty of reconciliation without loss, sovereignty without debt or doubt. What renders the Aboriginal child as a fetish also alienates him from his sovereign birthright, through displacement from land and kin: circulating in a colonial culture as an emblem of authenticity, yet untethered from a meaning-​giving context, like a piece of ‘piccaninny kitsch’ adorning a suburban living room.

Piccaninny Kitsch and the Objectification of the Aboriginal Child To understand the ‘romance’ of reconciliation that the mixed-​race Aboriginal child represents is also to understand that this tie-​ in of the film with Tourism Australia is not incidental. For, Nullah participates in a tradition of representing black and brown children as objects of desire, enjoyment, control, and consumption. Just as Nullah functions to transfer his inheritance to Lady Ashley, the spin-​off advertisements identify him as a site of transmission of sovereignty, through the passage of soil between his and the tourist’s hands, and through the imaginary passage of the tourist from international city to his country. The film and advertisements each rehearses the child’s self-​ dispossession, to deflect the extent to which settler-​colonial laws and practices insist on this dispossession. Representations of Aboriginal childhood such as Nullah continue to perform this wrong, by naturalising and giving permission to white sovereignty, which, as Moreton-​Robinson argues (2016, 2021), operates according to a logic of possession. The Aboriginal child representation is at once a focus of enjoyment-​ without-​risk and a site of rescue. And, importantly, consumption of the spectacle of this representation –​as charming, disadvantaged, and alone –​ satisfies the settler-​coloniser desire to construct possession as rescue: an alibi for dispossession. Piccaninny kitsch is a historical vector for these seemingly conflicted valences. It represents the black child as disinherited and, by way of synecdoche, as the site of disinheritance of a people (Pilgrim, 2000; Conor, 2012; Moreton-​Robinson, 2021). The representation of the black child as kitsch connects back to the multiple significances of the ‘fetish,’ as both overfull and empty of meaning, and

The Romance of Reconciliation: The Mixed-Race Aboriginal Child  77 as an enigmatic object of exchange between incommensurable systems of value. By reading Nullah through the prism of piccaninny kitsch as fetish, we may better understand how the construction of the Aboriginal child as consumable has shaped current opinion about Indigenous children, and the Australian national investment in continuing to configure Aboriginal childhood within the constellation of attraction, domestication, rescue, and disinheritance. This analysis of the appeal of Nullah to Australian and international audiences aims thereby to inform critique of contemporary calls for the ‘saving’ of Indigenous children in remote communities that has become a reflex whenever First Nations sovereignty is raised for discussion within Australian popular media. ‘Piccaninny’ as Fetish The piccaninny and the fetish share a common origin, emerging as siblings from the marriage of patois during early colonial-​ era commerce. Like the word ‘fetish’ (from felitiço), piccaninny also derives from a Portuguese word (pequenino, meaning very small) used in the West Indies and common in the Creole languages of the Caribbean. Like other colonial tropes, however, it gained currency in the colonised territories as a racialised and diminutive name for black and brown children. It was a Jim Crow term, supporting the stereotyping of freed slaves as lazy, stupid, and more animal than human. As David Pilgrim writes, the piccaninny caricature was ridiculous and demeaning: “Piccaninnies had bulging eyes, unkempt hair, red lips and wide mouths into which they stuffed huge slices of watermelon” (2000, p. 1). The piccaninny was represented always as ragged or nude, consorting with animals, ravenously eating watermelon or fried chicken, or chased by alligators. The impression this conveyed was of poverty, neglect, and disposability. The piccaninny representation was conditioned by and set the scene for the real injustices that colonisers perpetrated against Indigenous and trafficked peoples. This representation was so pervasive that it even appeared in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852[1966]), in what is perhaps its most famous iteration. The slave child ‘Topsy’ is proffered as cautionary tale of slavery’s deformation of human character. Stowe exploits readers’ racism, consolidating a dehumanising stereotype to liberate its objects. She was one of the blackest of her race; and her round, shining eyes, glittering as glass beads, moved with quick and restless glances over everything in the room. Her mouth half open with astonishment at the wonders of the new Mas’r’s parlor, displayed a white and brilliant set of teeth. Her woolly hair was braided in sundry little tails, which stuck out in every direction. The expression of her face was an odd mixture of shrewdness and cunning, over which was oddly drawn, like a veil, an

78  The Romance of Reconciliation: The Mixed-Race Aboriginal Child expression of the most doleful gravity and solemnity. She was dressed in a single filthy, ragged garment, made of bagging; and stood with her hands demurely folded in front of her. Altogether, there was something odd and goblin-​like about her appearance… (Stowe, 1966, p. 258, quoted in Pilgrim, 2000, p. 1) This ambivalent picture of racialised childhood –​simple, happy, easy-​going and dirty, inscrutable, potentially dangerous –​is reflected in later representations as a stock character in minstrel shows, to the ‘Our Gang’ series (1922–​1944) and Shirley Temple films (1935–​1936). By the time piccaninny, heavy with these connotations, appeared in the first Australian colour feature film, Jedda (the narration also likens an infant ‘Jedda’ to ‘Topsy’), the trope had already been in use for some decades in Australian popular anthropology, art, and literature. As with the Topsy figure, the Aboriginal piccaninny is both attractive (signifying acquisition) and unkempt (signifying neglect) and is a location at which settler ambivalence and insecurity gathers. This is because, in settler-​ Australian imagination, the Aboriginal child (conceived as Piccaninny) represents the future of indigeneity in a manner that is specifically unsettling. For, the Aboriginal child may be read as representing either the continuity of First Nations sovereign being or, conversely, the last descendent of a dying race: yet the first significance is contained within the second even as it is disavowed. The Aboriginal child proves continuity and the threat to white sovereignty that such survivance entails, even where an effort is made to construe this figure instead as evidence of race degeneracy. The frequent invocation of the Aboriginal child as an alibi for Australians’ failure to address colonial injustice reveals both its implicit valence as continuity of Indigenous sovereignty and the extent of psychosocial denial of this valence in the settler-​ Australian community. Equally, we might say instead that, in its insistence on the continuity of Blak sovereignty, the Aboriginal child represents the emptiness, or baselessness, of white sovereignty, predicated as it is on the fiction of terra nullius. In this respect, the coloniser’s image of the Aboriginal child again approaches the fetish, and its depiction through the colonial trope of the piccaninny condenses its multiple and conflicting meanings into that function. As a symbol to which colonisers are intensely attracted, it registers at once their power and their impotence. The fetishised Aboriginal child as piccaninny is a cipher for colonial ambivalence, and its interpretation as such is key to any prospect of traversing the fantasy of reconciliation. Fetish, Attraction, and Imperialism The close imbrication of imperialism with race, gender, and commodity fetishism is well charted already by Anne McClintock, in her landmark book Imperial Leather (1995). McClintock draws out how advertising –​which itself

The Romance of Reconciliation: The Mixed-Race Aboriginal Child  79 emerged in the context of colonial era Victorian England –​crystallised the prejudices, projections, and desires of the coloniser, through the production of images that both erased domestic work and elevated (fetishised) ‘domesticity’ through the collection of commodities: shiny objects and bric-​a-​brac that miniaturise and contain the dominions within the home. The influx of wealth and commodities that gathered during colonial expansion drove the development of advertising, as the middle classes swelled to absorb it. With reference to Pietz’s analysis of the ‘fetish,’ however, McClintock shows how fetishism within advertising drew to the surface a crisis in value: Soap did not flourish when imperial ebullience was at its peak. It emerged commercially during an era of impending crisis and social calamity, serving to preserve, through fetish ritual, the uncertain boundaries of class, gender and race identity in a social order felt to be threatened by the fetid effluvia of the slums, the belching smoke of industry, social agitation, economic upheaval, imperial competition and anticolonial resistance. (McClintock, 1995, p. 211) The crisis advertising stages expanded into popular culture the scientific racism that had already justified colonial expansion to the upper and educated classes (p. 209). Moreover, advertising created an aesthetic arena through which “the axis of possession is shifted to the axis of spectacle,” which, in turn, “draws on subterranean flows of desire and taboo, manipulating the investment of surplus money” (p. 213). All British classes came thus to invest in the colonial enterprise, materially (through production and consumption) and ideologically, in the way they imagined and bonded to the ‘nation.’ McClintock’s example is soap advertising, which, on one hand, blurred the boundary between public and private spheres so central to the capitalist ethos, and, on the other, gave imperial culture its now paradigmatic expression as ‘civilisation,’ ‘rationality,’ and ‘hygiene.’ It is no accident, in either of these connections, that advertisements by Pears, Sunlight, and Monkey Brand Soap focussed on children as sites of transformation, from uncivilised and unclean to paragons of Victorian domestic virtue. In the first place, children were the cohort associated most with domesticity, at a time when the presence of working-​class children in factories and on the streets was considered problematic and signalled societal distress. An image of childhood purity came to represent empire, and soap ads played a pivotal role in the fetishisation of childhood. Consider, for instance, that John Everett Millais’s painting of his grandson, ‘A Child’s World,’ is now better known as a Pears Soap advertisement, after having been cleaned up and rechristened as ‘Bubbles,’ with the addition in the painting’s foreground of a branded soap bar.10 This painting had already galvanised the idealisation of childhood as a time of innocent reverie –​as, moreover, a period of unproductivity that compensated the industriousness demanded of adults. Through such depictions of childhood,

80  The Romance of Reconciliation: The Mixed-Race Aboriginal Child the private sphere came to be associated with consumption and leisure that formed a reserve for capitalism. It also fetishised domesticity itself as a place of repose rather than of labour. In the second place, the images of children in these advertisements are intensely racialised. ‘Pristine’ and voluptuous white children were juxtaposed against black and brown children, posed as models of racial backwardness: incorrigibly unclean and yet jealous of the white child’s supposed superiority. Soap was attributed powers of whitening, erasing the taint of race, in instances where the colour is washed away from the child’s skin through the administration of soap suds in the bathtub. Soap thus was seen to embody the aims of empire, to civilise and cleanse, extending British values into the most obscure corners of the globe and soul. The image of the black child being bathed –​figuratively cleansed of their race –​is one of the key scenes of Jedda: a film preoccupied more generally with the question of whether assimilation (understood as the casting-​off of one race and absorption into another, ‘superior’ race) is possible or desirable, from the colonisers’ point of view. Insofar as Jedda gathered racial tropes already in circulation in other media in Australia by that time, and continues to be referenced, it is significant that the bathing scene plays such a key role in Jedda’s growing-​from-​child-​to-​ adolescent montage. The exchange between public and private that advertising achieved –​ whereby scenes of domesticity are publicised on billboards and, conversely, “images of colonial conquest” are brought into “every corner of the home” (McClintock, 1995, p. 209) –​led to an ideological saturation of the domestic sphere in the modern era. This was reflected in Australian homes: from ceramics commemorating Jedda, to woven baskets and primitivist art, to ‘concrete Aborigines’ or ‘Nevilles’ (garden figurines).11 As Moreton-​Robinson notes with respect to ceramicist Brownie Downing, this “demonstrates how public and domestic spheres are co-​constituted through colonial relations of race and white possession” (Moreton-​Robinson, 2021, p. 9). As with many mid-​century abodes, ‘Faraway Downs’ is also filled with Aboriginal kitsch objects, but only after the homestead’s transformation under the direction of a civilising white woman. For Australia this change in Faraway Downs –​from ramshackle wreck to modern luxurious home –​signals that an equilibrium has been reached between the domestic space and its hostile outside, as symbols of the ‘Native other’ are brought into a collection, separated from the social ensembles that bestow their power, and instead captured and fetishised as ‘décor.’ While, as McClintock argues, domestic labour (performed by Aboriginal women) is concealed by the new commercial economies of advertising, the work of white femininity in the colony consists of homemaking and interior design that performs the ideological work of colonialism. It is in this context that piccaninny kitsch –​the aesthetic backdrop for the Nullah character –​came to be elaborated. Both Conor (2012) and Moreton-​Robinson (2021) draw out the connection between representations

The Romance of Reconciliation: The Mixed-Race Aboriginal Child  81 of Aboriginal children as piccaninnies, the fetishisation (and acquisition) of racialised child beauty through this figure, and the concomitant disinheritance of Aboriginal children of their sovereign birthright. A key insight that each develops is that representation itself appropriates, and the extent to which the production of cultural objects and texts is an exercise of power. Each addresses a tradition of representing Aboriginal children as piccaninnies –​in popular art and photography, illustrated books, ceramics, and postcards –​that depicts them as bush children, plump and cheerful, barely clad, and usually alone or accompanied only by native plants and animals. Artists and writers such as Brownie Downing, Elizabeth Durack, Charles Barrett, Peg Malty, and Anne Drew depicted Aboriginal children with apparently anthropological authority, yet away from the social structures in which they participate. These representations contribute to the infantilisation of Indigenous peoples so fundamental to colonial narratives about the colonised other, by imagining the Indigene as child. But more than this, these images fetishise the Aboriginal child, by isolating and containing them, and removing them from the forms of power that would be availed to them, culturally and materially, in relationship to their peoples and lands. While Conor does not parse her characterisation of the piccaninny type as ‘fetish’ in relation to the usual theoretical coordinates, her account might be understood, again, in terms of Pietz’s sense of ‘fetish’: as an incommensurable within the economy of meaning between cultures. McClintock emphasised that advertising promoting an image of all-​powerful empire manifested a crisis in value at a point of acute anxiety regarding the potential for whole system collapse. Likewise, Conor also notes that the piccaninny figure’s popularity “peaked over the decades Aboriginal child removal intensified” (2012, p. 56). Indicative of a crisis in value –​and particularly a cognitive dissonance regarding the value of children –​the Piccaninny as fetish is implicated in the circuits of communication and commercialisation that sustain colonialism and dispossess Indigenous peoples. This movement was in concert with a transformation and refinement of culture around the commodity whereby “the axis of possession is shifted to the axis of spectacle” (McClintock, 1995, p. 213). Displaying images of piccaninnies was an expression of ownership of Aboriginal children: “Aboriginal childhood was subject to the operation of the modern spectacle through which the activity of looking became one of having” (Conor, 2012, p. 56). Fetish and Disavowal As Freud makes clear, fetishism involves a movement of affirmation and disavowal. The fetishist acknowledges that the mother has no penis whilst also disavowing this knowledge through fixation on the fetish, which contains the fantasy of the phallic mother (Freud, 1961, p. 156). The representation of the Aboriginal child as piccaninny in this same manner conceals the fact of

82  The Romance of Reconciliation: The Mixed-Race Aboriginal Child colonial violence through the aesthetic elevation to spectacle of black children as objects of beauty: The Piccaninny type encapsulated an acquisitive impulse over colonized children that brought about their disinheritance –​either through their removal from their families or through the dispossession of their homelands. Within this setting, black child beauty as a commodity form for white consumption, in imagery, ceramics, fabrics and popular ephemera, acted as a fetish which disavowed the injury of these children’s disinheritance and delimited their cultural presence to cute domestic and tourist bric-​a-​brac. (Conor, 2012, p. 47) The apparent elevation of images of cherubic black children through décor was a self-​ congratulatory gesture of absorption of First Peoples into a semiotic of Nation; but this nation is nonetheless white, as the relationship between white homeowner and black decoration is clearly one of possession. As Moreton-​Robinson puts this, again with reference to Downing, “[t]‌he semiotic power of these plates enhanced white national sentiment and virtue. White women were the guardians of the domestic sphere and saviours and protectors of neglected children” (Moreton-​Robinson, 2021, p. 11). Moreover, the construction of the Aboriginal child as naked and solitary or in the company only of animals provides the requisite imagery to support policies of removal, where these children are regarded as objects that engender familiarity and home comfort: Downing’s representations of Indigenous children mobilise gendered and racialised strategies of affect and hyper-​realism … to invoke virtue and sentimentality seducing the consumer to fall in love with and possess an imagined cute abandoned native child that can be taken home. (Moreton-​Robinson, 2021, p. 14) As Moreton-​Robinson and Conor demonstrate, this image is implicated in a depiction of colonised peoples –​current in colonial discourse and imagination since antiquity –​as orphaned. As discussed in Chapter 1, native peoples were classified as fillius nullius: children of no one, and thus ineligible to inherit land (Rollo, 2018a, p. 64). This principle underpins the legal fiction of terra nullius upon which settler-​colonial Australian sovereignty is premised. And the piccaninny representation marries this deprivation of rights to land to an aesthetic of cuteness –​pleasing and sentimentalised dispossession. It is thus the affective and conceptual density of the representation of Aboriginal child as piccaninny –​holding within it the contradictory threads of beauty and destitution; homeliness and dispossession; innocence and the mark of a race in decline –​that bestows its luminosity. In Australia, Lady Ashley’s claim to Faraway Downs is predicated on the disinheritance of the

The Romance of Reconciliation: The Mixed-Race Aboriginal Child  83 child whom she adores and protects, and finally allows to ‘go walkabout’ –​ to enact his own sovereignty by tending to obligations to ancestors –​only after King George confers joint sovereignty upon her by saying “our land.” Nullah’s status as orphan not only enhances his capacity to enact the piccaninny type, but in so doing also makes it possible for Lady Sarah to claim his land. Conclusion: Fetish and Reconciliation? The walkabout returns us to the most peculiar episode of the Australia odyssey, that is, the Tourism Australia advertisement, in which Nullah urges international office workers to “go walkabout” on his country. Evelyn Araluen’s reflections on her recently published collection of poetry, Dropbear (2021), shed light on the significance of tourism advertising to questions of settler sovereignty in Australia. In the collection Araluen works through myths and tropes –​the iconography of Australian nationhood –​and disinters from them her own connection to country as a Bundjalung woman. In an interview, Araluen speaks about the term ‘drop bear,’ which inspired the book’s title: I certainly was drawn to the idea of a drop bear as this crypto-​ mythological figure that stands in some kind of place between what is assumed to be native and indigenous to this country (now you don’t have drop bears in the States or in Europe). And then also this weird settler-​ colonial transportation; the role of this spectral creature to haunt and to tease. It’s a part of this whole “larrikin spirit” idea that we have in Australia –​that we’re all kind of here for a joke –​and I find it so fascinating that the drop bear is this kind of acculturation, like you pass this inevitable test where you’re either a tourist or you’re like a local depending on how you buy the drop bear story. (Kulas, 2021, 12:23–​13:13) As Araluen thus indicates, the drop bear is a shibboleth –​a password that admits or excludes its addressee from being Australian. Invented by settler Australians as a joke on newcomers and tourists, the drop bear separates the settler from the un-​settler, or non-​settler –​that is, the non-​Indigenous person, living on or passing through Aboriginal country, whom the settler would exclude from their sovereign claim. As such the drop bear has become a key component of the white Australian national imaginary, occupying a para-​mythological status in emulation of Aboriginal spirit creatures like the Bunyip.12 The drop bear thus joins Snugglepot and Cuddlepie and Blinky Bill, as myths that serve to ‘nativise’ settler Australians, through an image that simultaneously connects them to the land and separates them from their uncanny, doppelganger form –​the tourist or new immigrant. While it is posed as a joke that ridicules those without a sovereign claim, this figure provokes

84  The Romance of Reconciliation: The Mixed-Race Aboriginal Child a nervous laughter, expressing a fundamental anxiety about belonging, and about confusion between the settler coloniser and any other visitor. In the Australia film-​themed tourism advertisements, Nullah acts as a fetish to bridge the gap between settler and tourist, even as the drop bear attempts to separate them, and perhaps thus reveals the marginality of that difference. The mixed-​race Aboriginal child is cast as mediator between cultures, sent to broker a deal between them, to authorise access to land. When compared to the soap ads of empire that McClintock analysed, the campaign that features Nullah appears progressive, affirming his race and heritage. Yet this ‘affirmation’ draws on stereotypes that support colonialism –​the Piccaninny in particular –​as he transforms into a preternatural being, both intrinsically connected to land (even carrying it with him) and able to appear in the dreams of non-​Indigenous people geographically far distant. It is desire for possession of Nullah, the orphaned or abandoned black boy beckoning to be rescued, which harnesses the tourist’s desire. In this way, these advertisements shift the “axis of possession” again to the “axis of spectacle” (McClintock, 1995, p. 213), as surely as those nineteenth-​ century soap ads had done. Nullah materialises to the would-​be tourist, lures them to his faraway land, and welcomes them to country with magic desert dust, in a sequence that apparently pays tribute to First Peoples even as it also disposes of their sovereignty, as if it were Tourism Australia’s property to give. At the time of the film’s release, Nullah had promised an easy reconciliation between First Nations and non-​Indigenous Australians –​as an envoy between coloniser and colonised, a mixed-​race child, neither black nor white, belonging to no one: constitutively orphaned and ready for white rescue. He stood in for the Stolen Generations and thus gave place to settler contemplation of unpaid accounts owed to Aboriginal peoples, yet in a form that was aesthetically attractive and provided an outlet to spectacular enjoyment. Returning to Rancière’s set of questions regarding visibility and inequality (Who does a distribution of the sensible make visible, for whom, and what is thereby rendered invisible? Who is silenced?), Luhrmann’s cinematic recapitulation of the piccaninny arguably subordinates the voice of the Stolen Generations it purports to amplify to the voice of the good coloniser, who wants to possess cute Aboriginal children. Since 2008, Aboriginal children, constructed as piccaninnies –​solitary, neglected, and in need of a home –​have become a mainstay of Australian media, particularly at points of crisis to colonialism: where, for instance, the question of sovereignty has been raised by Aboriginal activists and non-​ Indigenous allies. At such times media attention turns to ‘remote communities in crisis’: communities that are in the thrall of intergenerational trauma wrought by colonial violence and dispossession of lands and children. Stock images and footage of children unshod, grubby, bored, and without their adults emerge on news sites around 26 January (the national holiday) every year, on cue, to repudiate political claims against the settler-​colonial state. ‘If

The Romance of Reconciliation: The Mixed-Race Aboriginal Child  85 you really cared you would be in the outback saving the children,’ goes the mantra. ‘How dare you speak of sovereignty when children suffer!’ As with the figure of the piccaninny itself, the failure to connect history with the present shapes these representations –​as well as the laws and policies that follow media panics. Like any fetish object, Nullah collected the history of the uses of the Aboriginal child as piccaninny and portended the future use of the ‘suffering Aboriginal child’ to deflect First Peoples’ sovereign claims. And like those fetish objects first coined as such at the dawn of the modern colonial era, Nullah was fashioned as a commodity to be traded between cultures that do not share a common system of meaning and value. This figure carries the burden of the intermediary. The relationship he mediates, however, is not equal. For, the piccaninny type is fabricated of the detritus of coloniser fears and anxieties, a trinket or consolation prize to sell back to colonised peoples in exchange for their sovereignty. Many First Nations people are not buying it, as we will see when we turn in Chapter 8 to Alexis Wright’s deconstruction of the fetishised Aboriginal child in The Swan Book. In the next chapter we turn to the representation of the Aboriginal child as site of intervention, a representation that sits alongside, and sometimes at one with, the piccaninny.

Notes 1 Some not-​too-​subtle hints regarding Herbert’s influence on the film are scattered throughout, including the name of Lady Ashley’s horse (‘Capricornia’), rum bottles branded ‘Poor Fellow’ –​both nods to Herbert’s novels –​in addition to a credit to Herbert as ‘chronicling the events of Northern Australia’ (Conor, 2010, p. 98). 2 Probyn-​Rapsey draws out connections and disparities between Herbert’s agenda in relation to that of his contemporary, Cecil Cook, a prominent exponent of the eugenicist program to absorb the Aboriginal race into the white populace. Whereas Cook’s program was to “breed out the colour,” Herbert’s was to breed the colour in (Probyn-​Rapsey, 2007, p. 168). 3 Stephanie Hemelryk Donald (2018) reads The Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy as a trope that reappears and circulates in international post-​war cinema, signifying the homelessness and displacement of the migrant child. In this vein, Nullah might be seen as a Dorothy figure, displaced from home by colonialism. We return to a discussion of The Wizard of Oz in relation to Phillip Noyce’s Rabbit-​Proof Fence in Chapter 6. 4 An earlier discussion of Nullah’s desire to go walkabout explicitly references Jedda, as the dog, named ‘Jedda,’ is called immediately afterwards. 5 This exchange is admittedly equivocal. Felicity Collins interprets this scene differently, as inclusive of Nullah rather than Lady Ashley (Collins, 2010, pp. 72–​73). 6 Other scholars, such as Stephen Papson (2011) and Ella Donald (2017), have focussed on critiquing Australia in terms of its engagement in (or failure as) postmodern parody, which is understood as a political strategy following the work of Linda Hutcheon (2002).

86  The Romance of Reconciliation: The Mixed-Race Aboriginal Child 7 The idea that Indigenous peoples did not understand the value of commodities and ascribed to them mystical qualities is largely constructed by Europeans, to the extent that colonisers and traders filled their ships with baubles –​cut glass, bright pieces of cloth, bells, amulets –​expecting to trade them for things they found valuable. Presumably some of the things they traded for were not considered of much value by those peoples either. McClintock tells of an episode in which Lieutenant James Cook “carped at the local inhabitants’ ungrateful refusal to recognise the value of the baubles he brought them,” insisting instead on items of use value to them (1995, p. 230). This upsets the colonial notion that indigenous people were simpletons dazzled by shiny objects. 8 See the advertisements back-​to-​back at https://​youtu.be/​UxNd​jntd​WPs (accessed 24 February 2021). 9 This scene is reminiscent of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s return of land to the Gurindji people in 1975, in which he poured desert sand into the palm of activist Vincent Lingiari. This was precipitated by over 200 Gurindji people walking off Wave Hill Station, where they were working and living under poor conditions and received unequal pay compared to their white co-​workers. See the image at https://​ col​lect​ion.maas.mus​eum/​obj​ect/​344​580 (accessed 25 February 2021). 10 Millais’s original can be viewed at https://​en.wikipe​dia.org/​wiki/​Bubbl​es_​(paint​ ing)#/​media/​File:Bubb​les_​by_​J​ohn_​Ever​ett_​Mill​ais.jpg, while the Pears’ version can be found at https://​coll​ecti​ons.vam.ac.uk/​item/​O703​217/​bubb​les-​print-​mill​ais-​ john-​ever​ett/​ (accessed 17 May 2021). 11 These statues, once common ornaments to Australian suburban lawns, depicted a traditional Aboriginal man in red loin cloth holding a spear, sometimes standing on one leg with the other propped on his inner thigh. They came to be called ‘Nevilles’ after the 1980s sit-​com Kingswood Country popularised the name –​ likely taken from Neville Bonner, the first Aboriginal Member of Parliament. This demonstrates the way in which such items of décor are mobilised to diminish First Peoples (Stronach, 2008). 12 Bunyips are spirit creatures that live in waterways to capture people who stray across their paths. Although creatures like this are found across the continent, the word ‘bunyip’ belongs to the Wergaia language group in Victoria.

5 ‘Breeding Out the Colour’ in GevaColor Jedda

One of the earliest and most archetypal representations of Aboriginal girlhood is the equivocal figure of Jedda in the 1955 film of the same name –​subtitled “The Uncivilised” for its international release. Jedda has maintained a significant presence in the Australian national imagination and is loved and reviled by people sympathetic to the cause of justice for First Peoples in Australia. This divided response mirrors the ambivalent regard for the mixed-​ race (‘half-​caste’) Aboriginal child, as addressed in the previous chapter. Jedda’s somewhat incoherent narrative attempts to thread the needle through the ambiguous part given to (and withheld from) Indigenous people in Australia, who are represented both as symbols of ‘Australianness’ and as evolutionarily and culturally superfluous and so naturally displaced by white colonisers. This chapter reads Jedda alongside the work of A.O. Neville, who was a long-​serving Chief Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia (1915–​ 1936), thereafter Commissioner of Native Affairs until his retirement in 1940. Neville is widely regarded as the intellectual architect of policies of forced removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families and communities. Texts drawn on include the proceedings of the Initial Conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities 1937 (Canberra Conference), Neville’s later reiteration of its resolutions as Australia’s Coloured Minority (1947), and his scholarly article, “Contributory Causes of Aboriginal Depopulation in Western Australia” (1948), each of which articulates the ideology behind policies of removal. The policies, discussions, and cultural productions considered here reinforce a racist trope identified by Stuart Hall (1997, pp. 243–​245): that Indigenous culture collapses into nature; and the effort to ‘civilise’ the ‘savage’ will ultimately be met with disaster. The ‘half-​caste,’ however, represents the passage from savagery to civilisation. Through the slow labour of miscegenation, the child of mixed heritage becomes a vector through which Aboriginality will be extinguished. Through the figure of the Aboriginal child who could pass as white, settler colonisers imagined peoples with a prior claim to the land had never existed. Conversely, Jedda represents anxiety about atavism that both haunted and motivated the eugenic mindset in Australia: the idea that within the individual and the nation there might lurk a retrograde tendency that upsets the order of DOI: 10.4324/9781003099666-5

88  ‘Breeding Out the Colour’ in GevaColor: Jedda bodies within the polis, and ultimately cannot be controlled or reconciled by European science or governance.

Staging Jedda, ‘Eve’ in Ebony Filming Jedda in 1954 –​only seven years after Neville’s publication of Australia’s Coloured Minority –​Director Charles Chauvel had been keen to make an authentically Australian film that would appeal to a global audience. In gathering material for a screenplay, Charles and Elsa Chauvel (who co-​ wrote the screenplay) travelled to the Northern Territory (NT) to find what many settler artists, in the tradition of the poets Henry Lawson and A.B. Pattison, had designated the ‘real’ Australia: the ‘Outback.’ The Chauvels chose three storylines that served different purposes for the film –​and ultimately sat incongruously together within it –​but which they felt brought a sense of truth to the production (Mills, 2012): as the intertitle at the beginning of the film states, “The story of Jedda is founded on fact.” The first story is domestic. In conversation with the pastoralists they visited in the NT, Elsa was touched to learn the predicament of white women on remote cattle stations, frequently left alone to hear “only the voices of the native women” and the CB radio through which they communicated with the outside world. The equivalence drawn by the film between the Aboriginal women’s voices and the mechanic sound of the radiograph is notable: throughout Jedda, the discourse of the Aboriginal women is referred to as ‘yackaying,’ as if it were not speech at all, but instead only noise. Following Rancière’s analysis of Aristotle’s distinction between speech and voice –​whereby voice is the capacity to vocalise owned by all animals, but only humans, the political animal, can speak (Rancière, 1999, pp. 21–​30) –​the language used by the film to characterise Aboriginal speech as mere noise dehumanises these women. The station wife’s loneliness, however, is meant to underscore the tragedy that sets the scene for the first part of Jedda: Sarah McMann (Betty Suttor) radios out to request a death certificate for her baby, who died while her husband Doug (George Simpson-​Lyttle) was away droving. This first storyline gives place to the second: the story of the Stolen Generations. This second theme is suppressed as such, however, becoming, rather, a story of rescue, and an occasion to debate the relative merits of competing (yet fundamentally similar) approaches to dealing with the ‘Aboriginal problem.’ Just as Sarah had lost her baby, baby Jedda lost her mother: “A native ‘Pintari’ child is born in the dust of the cattle tracks. Its mother dies and the cattle trudge on.” The mother’s death is presented as an unfortunate but almost inevitable fact of outback conditions, to which even the cattle show indifference. The child is now released from the relationships that would secure her being as “Pintari.” A stockman, accompanied by her father ‘Booloo,’ brings the infant to the McMann homestead because Sarah is known to “understand these people.” Jedda is a motherless child without aunties or grandparents or even a father who wants her: Booloo, meanwhile,

‘Breeding Out the Colour’ in GevaColor: Jedda  89 appears to have no attachment at all to Jedda, although, they say, he was very fond of her mother. This characterisation of Jedda’s indifferent parent depicts Aboriginal people as subhuman: incapable of deep emotion, morality, or social responsibility. Thus, the raising of an Aboriginal girl by a white mother invests a white character with moral superiority, covering over the history of violence and deceit that characterised the enforcement of policies of assimilation. Adoption of a black child by a white mother is presented instead as an innocent act of humanitarianism, without which the infant, too, would be left to die on the cattle track. At first Sarah angrily rejects Jedda, declaring “it would live!” and telling the house girls to “get it away.” She says she will foster the baby to one of the nursing ‘lubras’ (black women) on the station, quipping, “Doug will be happy to add another piccaninny to the tribe. He says we haven’t enough for the future.” Sarah’s contrary pronouncements regarding Indigenous children –​ whom she represents as both scarce and too plentiful, in turn –​echoes an ambivalence regarding Aboriginal children of mixed heritage that ran through contemporaneous policy and scholarship. The care of the child is invested with national significance, a burden regarding the future of the nation and of race. Mirroring Neville’s criticism of the governance of Aboriginal populations, Sarah’s care for the child appears ad hoc and benignly disorganised: Jedda, “like Topsy, just growed.”1 She holds onto the girl for a few days, which turn into weeks and months, and then years, until she is determined to raise her [up] as a white girl. But as Joe (Paul Reynall) the ‘half-​caste’ head stockman narrates, Jedda (named by the house girls after the wild magpie goose) has something untameable within her that is repressed and always in danger of surfacing. This is demonstrated when instead of learning her letters Jedda makes animal footprints in the dough, which Sarah quickly removes with her rolling pin, signalling the need to supress such ‘instincts.’ Later, Jedda is overwhelmed with passion while playing modern ‘primitivist’ music on the piano, which then transforms into the sound of digeridoos and clapping sticks. As well turned out as she is, Jedda is always on the precipice of “slipping back,” in Sarah’s terms. And when she expresses her longing to go walkabout, Sarah answers “whatever would you do out there with all those naked monkeys?” Jedda (Rosalie Kunoth-​Monks/​Ngarla Kunoth) demonstrates both resistance and good humour through her tongue-​in-​cheek response: “do what all the other monkeys do I suppose.” Jedda’s internal struggle between ‘savage’ and ‘civilised’ selves is paralleled by the struggle between Sarah and Jedda, which is also repressed; or sublimated as music or humorous repartee. The third storyline is also drawn from ‘fact,’ albeit loosely, and construed in such a way as to underline a colonial narrative regarding the destiny and character of the Aboriginal race. ‘Marbuk’ (Bob Wilson/​Robert Tudawali) enters the scene to catalyse Jedda’s atavistic return to native type through her innate sexual desire for him. He is based on the historical figure Nemarluk (Chauvel, 1973, quoted in Mills, 2012, p. 24; Ivory, 2019, p. 23): a resistance

90  ‘Breeding Out the Colour’ in GevaColor: Jedda fighter and tribal leader imprisoned in 1934 for ‘ringleading’ the murder of three Japanese fisherman after they had reneged on an agreement to pay their Aboriginal workers in tobacco (Ivory, 2019, p. 20). Nemarluk was an impressive figure, and his escape and fugitive status captured the imagination of an Australian public eager for frontier stories from the far North. The notion of “the ‘noble warrior’ defending his country and rights against an unstoppable tide of civilisation” (Ivory, 2019, p. 19) drew sympathy, likely because it was ultimately unthreatening to the audience: pitted against an Asian other, geographically remote, and connected to the trope of the Indigene’s heroic decline. Nemarluk’s story was popularised in the genre of adventure by Ion Idriess (1941), whose novel fictionalised the protagonist’s heroic displays of bushcraft, wrestling of ‘alligators,’ (sic.), and evasion of authorities, and was serialised in schoolboy periodicals (New South Wales Department of Education, 1942 and 1951). The Chauvels picked up on this mode of storytelling, as the second half of the film moves from the domestic sphere to the wild terrains of the NT, shifting genre to adventure of the Tarzan variety (Johnson, 1988). Here Marbuk, cast as authentic tribal man, demonstrates his prowess as a warrior –​even wrestling a crocodile for good measure. The narrative frames him as a dangerous murderer and rapist, however –​and an outlaw according to both his people’s and the coloniser’s systems of law. There is no room in Chauvel’s film for the ‘freedom fighter’ narrative. Jedda is promised to Joe, who is presented as a successfully assimilated ‘half-​caste,’ whose dreams of conjugal fulfilment with Jedda are enclosed within a white picket fence (Jedda, conversely, bemoans that she could not see the stars with a roof over her head). Joe narrates the film in what has been described as an Oxbridge accent, far more refined than that of his white adoptive parents (Mills, 2012; Barnett, 2018). This voice-​over also sets him far apart from Aboriginal people and culture, notwithstanding his reference at the film’s beginning to “my country and the country of the woman I love.” His discourse largely denigrates First Peoples, however. Speaking over footage of Uluru, for instance, this geological formation becomes, for Joe, a metaphor for the past longevity, but ultimate collapse, of his race: Mountains of mystery. Red tombs in Australia’s dead heart which hold the secrets of the Aborigines’ dreamtime. The burial place of the old totem men, a native race so old their laws and religions stretch into a past beyond our thinking. Jedda will be drawn by what is characterised as Marbuk’s ‘animal magnetism,’ away from the more staid, more ‘white,’ Joe. Mystically, he will sing her to his campfire, during a camping expedition as the household droves cattle. The relationship between Jedda and Marbuk is marked by an ambiguity regarding Jedda’s agency in the process of her own seduction and abduction. As has already been signalled by one of the station hands, however, Jedda is the ‘wrong skin,’ and Marbuk violates his tribe’s law by taking her. He drags her

‘Breeding Out the Colour’ in GevaColor: Jedda  91 through various terrains back to his tribe to seek their permission, which they deny, and both are condemned. The elders resolve to sing him to death. All the while, Joe has been in pursuit of Marbuk in the effort to rescue Jedda, but arrives only in time to witness Marbuk drag her with him over a cliff edge. Both perish; and the film closes again with Joe’s voice, as he renders Jedda a spirit bird returned, in death, to her people. Notably, again, he distances himself from Aboriginal people here, referring to ‘us,’ meaning white Australians. I will return to discuss the construction of Joe, as representing both Aboriginal and White cultures, in the final section of this chapter. I next briefly discuss the influence of Jedda on audiences, as it reverberates through various elaborations of the Australian cultural imaginary. Jedda’s Reception The first Australian feature film released in colour, Jedda enjoyed a degree of international attention, if not success, and was screened at Cannes as a contender for the Palme d’Or award. Jedda starred Aboriginal actors and featured Aboriginal characters and has been praised for centring Aboriginal experience –​albeit through a coloniser lens.2 The Chauvels framed the action according to Western archetypes: in promotional material Jedda was referred to as “Eve in ebony,” connecting her to the story of the dual origin of womanhood and temptation. Jedda symbolises the danger of a fall: both her own fall into savagery and the nation’s fall from its civilising mission. The central relationship between Jedda and Marbuk has also been described as a ‘Romeo and Juliet’ affair (Buckmaster, 2015), being forbidden by both cultures, and ending as it does in tragedy. Thus, the film ‘elevates’ that romance using a white cultural frame, or at least renders a white audience more sympathetic to these characters. The use of these frames in representing Indigenous people’s worlds overdetermines their fate, as ultimately they must play a part allocated to them within a story of settler colonialism. Whether or not Jedda privileged Aboriginal experience, however –​and there is plenty in Rosalie Kunoth’s later reflections to suggest this is not the case (Schlunke,1993; Fox, 2009; Mills, 2012) –​the debate remains regarding what the film articulates about the history of Aboriginal affairs in Australia. Luke Buckmaster represents a view shared by some scholars (e.g., Barnett, 2018) that, besides representing Aboriginal characters in a positive light, Jedda also repudiates mid-​century assimilationism: Jedda’s unsubtle political perspective has stood the test of time and resonates 60 years down the track. By having Jedda’s mother killed during pregnancy [sic] and the girl’s addition to a white household as a result, Chauvel softens what could have been a stinging commentary on the stolen generations –​but goes hard with an anti-​assimilationist message highly critical of the idea of a uniform culture. (Buckmaster, 2015)

92  ‘Breeding Out the Colour’ in GevaColor: Jedda Other interpreters, to the contrary, count Jedda as “the quintessential story of savagery and assimilation” (Bryson, Burns, and Langton, 2000, p. 301); and highlight the significance of the film’s denouement –​the clifftop murder-​ suicide –​as signalling ‘race decline,’ or the unviability of Aboriginality in the face of modern European culture (Langton, 1993, pp. 48–​49; Cole, 2016; Rekhari, 2010, p. 126). As Warramungu woman and filmmaker Beck Cole writes, The film, in my opinion, neatly sums up white Australia’s attitude towards Aboriginal people in the mid-​1950s. They are slaves that need “civilising.” As the two Aboriginal leads Jedda and tribal man Marbuk … tumble down the cliff face to their demise at the end of the film, we are reminded (again) that the Aboriginal race is doomed. (Cole, 2016) Indigenous commentators and scholars often express complicated emotions about Jedda. In the article quoted above, Cole describes her excitement at seeing Aboriginal people on the big screen for the first time: “I will never forget us kids being thrilled at the very sight of the Aboriginal baby Jedda and we loved watching her grow and blossom into a young woman” (Cole, 2016). Colin (Mudrooroo) Johnson’s influential paper on Jedda emphasises the film’s inclusion of “the only dignified Aboriginal male lead that has been allowed to exist in films made by white directors in Australia” (Johnson, 1988, p. 48). He interprets the death scene differently, stating that Marbuk must die “because he has offended tribal law rather than because of anything the whiteman has shot at him” (ibid.).3 Conversely, Marcia Langton condemns this plot device as a means of distancing the decline of Aboriginality from colonisers’ actions: “[Jedda] rewrites Australian history so that the black rebel against white colonial rule is a rebel against his own society” (Langton, 1993, p. 45). In virtue of these ambiguities, and not despite them, Jedda has maintained its influence in Australian culture. For my part, I see Jedda as a complex text holding in tension somewhat contrary, but not contradictory, discourses of the day concerning the vicissitudes and ‘management’ of Indigeneity. Read alongside Neville’s writing, the film cannot be positioned unproblematically as “anti-​assimilationist.” Rather, ‘Jedda,’ ‘Joe,’ and ‘Marbuk’ represent distinctions between ‘types’ of Aborigine that accord them different destinies. As Cole indicates above, Jedda is a lens through which racial thinking of the time is magnified. It shows the extent to which the addition of ‘white blood’ was seen as a bright line sorting Aboriginal people and their potentialities. Moreover, the presence of white blood –​and particularly the appearance of white skin –​becomes a fetish, bestowing a potentiality to uplift, which is abandoned in the “full blood.” Jedda staged the emotional struggle of the assumption of responsibility (‘white man’s burden’) for administering a people out of existence.

‘Breeding Out the Colour’ in GevaColor: Jedda  93

From Biological Absorption to Social Cohesion The ‘half-​caste’ child is a figure of excess in twentieth-​century Australian discourse on the governance of Aboriginality. What I call a ‘figure of excess’ is a site of ambivalent identification: a construction that attracts anxiety and serves to accrue and manage the contradictions and excesses of a particular identity formation. In the case of the ‘half-​caste’ child, what is managed is the excess of a settler-​colonial system and national identity that attributes the highest value to whiteness and ‘racial purity.’ In ‘White Australia,’ administrators and academics advocating the absorption of mixed-​race Aboriginal people into the ‘White race’ understood the ‘half-​caste’ as at once a movement towards purification and threat of contamination. For Neville, Cecil Cook, Paul Hasluck, and others,4 this figure both symbolises a problem fundamental to white Australian ethno-​nationalism and holds the key to resolving its antinomies. A figure of anxiety and hope, the ‘half-​caste’ at once reminds settler colonisers of the prior sovereignty of First Peoples and represents the effort to forget that Aboriginal people were ever there. For these authorities, the ‘half-​caste’ embodied the becoming-​white of a nation founded on the assertion of its own whiteness; the erasure of the black skin of First Peoples repressed their very existence –​an existence that destabilised white colonisers’ sovereign claim. In what follows I argue the place of the ‘half-​caste’ in Neville’s thought elucidates its inconsistencies, just as the ‘half-​caste’ as a phenomenon shows up the inconsistencies of settler-​colonial ideology. The ‘half-​caste’ trope both co-​ opted and subverted eugenic thinking, and the uptake of eugenic discourse in Australia was pragmatic, trained to the objective of ‘whitening’ Australia. The notion that the ‘problem’ of miscegenation might be solved by more miscegenation runs counter to eugenics’ usual purity fetishism (McGregor, 2002).5 Yet the invention of the ‘half-​caste’ as a category of human being involved competing objectives and legacies that cannot be contained by any one explanatory framework. On one hand, controlled miscegenation as a method to manage the ‘half-​caste’ population was viewed as kinder than sexual sterilisation, which was key to promoting ‘racial hygiene’ in North America. There, the imperative was purification of the (white) race of ‘lower types’: morally and mentally defective whites seen as downstream products of miscegenation (Wray, 2006).6 Neville’s NT counterpart, Cecil Cook, had applied in 1933 to sterilise ‘half-​ castes’ whom he deemed ‘mentally defective’: children who resisted training as domestic servants, and whose “minds and bodies were never going to be successfully colonised” (Hossain, 2007, p. 457). But this application was rejected; and controlled miscegenation –​a program of breeding out the colour –​was preferred in general, and supported by state Acts of Parliament strictly regulating, according to blood quantum, the movement of Aboriginal peoples, and their access to wages, alcohol, employment, and marriage. The pragmatic bent of this program of absorption through controlled miscegenation can be explained by the fact that it was primarily undertaken by administrators rather than politicians or scientists (although, certainly,

94  ‘Breeding Out the Colour’ in GevaColor: Jedda anthropologists participated in this conversation, and Cook was trained as a medical doctor). The bureaucratic intersection of medical and population health, migration, and Aboriginal affairs in Australia has meant that historically boundaries between these systems were porous. These intersections are determined not only bureaucratically, however, but also because the settler-​ colonial imaginary categorises Aboriginal people as degenerate and unhealthy to the national whole. As Alison Bashford argues, ‘hygiene’ –​the “clean of empire” –​is a key element of the psychology of imperialism, chiefly because of the degree of circulation of “goods and matter, as well as people, within systems of constant communication and exchange” (2003, p. 84), integral to colonial systems. The Australian investment of anxiety and resources in constructing hyper-​ medicalised and racialised barriers to migration, as a ‘cordon sanitaire’ around a healthy and white body politic, extended within the nation’s borders to racialised populations of First Peoples. As with Chinese and South Pacific peoples, Aboriginality was viewed as a vector for disease: leprosy as well as the ‘disease’ of drug dependency (particularly opium). Alongside crime and child protection, poor health remains the issue news reporting most commonly connects to Aboriginal people, according to a deficit model of Indigeneity, that is, as always lagging behind the normative (white) citizen.7 In the early-​to mid-​twentieth century, the ‘half-​caste’ was positioned as a ‘quarantine’ zone between whites and Indigenous peoples: a site of decontamination and potential contamination, through which ‘black blood’ was laundered through white blood. The management of this equivocal class of people, then, differed significantly from eugenics regimes elsewhere in the world, in its specificity to the Australian psycho-​social situation. Importantly, the objective was not to improve or protect the gene pool or cultivate a fitter population in genetic terms –​notwithstanding some suggestions that an Aboriginal-​European hybrid breed would develop resistance to skin cancer (McGregor, 2002, p. 298). Rather, the objective was to whiten the skin of Aboriginal people, so that they would pass as white and forget their cultural heritage and sovereign birthright. The ‘Half-​Caste’ and the Moron Rhetorically, however, there are notable similarities between North American eugenic discourse and the discourse of controlled miscegenation in Australia, and the ‘half-​caste’ is a lynchpin of this similarity. Specifically, the ‘half-​caste’ performs a similar function to the ‘moron,’ which was a category invented by Henry H. Goddard to refine the techniques of power regarding negative eugenics (Goddard, 1912, 1927; Wilson, 2018, p. 43) –​in that case, to inform decisions about forced sterilisation of people deemed genetically unfit, usually children institutionalised because of poverty. A liminal figure within those classed as ‘feeble-​minded,’ the moron signalled a point of differentiation between ‘normal’ and ‘degenerate’ so precise that special instruments of measurement (IQ/​Binet tests) had to be invented to separate the genetically

‘Breeding Out the Colour’ in GevaColor: Jedda  95 fit from the unfit. Goddard explains that he invented the term moron (from the Greek for ‘foolish’) to supplement terms already in circulation, ‘idiot’ and ‘imbecile’ –​which pertained to a far greater degree of ‘feeble-​mindedness’ (1927, p. 42). The moron tested to the level of a ‘normal’ 8-​to 12-​year-​old, according to Goddard (ibid.). But as such, this type was as much an artefact of social change –​particularly the extension of mass education into adolescence –​as it was a fact of biology. Moreover, it was a class he later came to question and all but abandon. Goddard’s portrait of Deborah Kallikak (1912) demonstrates the ambivalence invested in this figure. Deborah had been relinquished to a training school for the mentally defective, as she was struggling at school and her mother was overburdened with poverty and children.8 Goddard explains that Deborah is capable of practical tasks but cannot perform abstract mental activities. Attractive and gregarious, no one would suspect that Deborah was ‘a degenerate’; moreover, Goddard worried that, without the mental or emotional maturity to manage relationships with others, Deborah would be sexually predated upon after leaving the institution (Goddard, 1912, p. 12). The dangers of the moron are thus two-​fold: as potential contaminants of the gene pool, they are a danger to society; and as naïve and vulnerable, society presents moral dangers to the moron –​particularly women. These dangers consist, however, in the moron’s capacity to pass as normal. The problem the moron presents to society –​and which renders them a locus of anxiety –​is that they are practically indistinguishable from the ‘normal’ population.9 Similarly, Neville’s writings circulate around the problem of the ‘half-​ caste,’ which signifies both an ambiguous difference from whites to be carefully managed, and a vector of passage into whiteness.10 Most usually –​and in the view of administrators it would seem exclusively –​the ‘half-​caste’ was the progeny of Aboriginal women and white men.11 As with Deborah, there is a moralistic dimension to the regard for the ‘half-​caste,’ insofar as this category signals illegitimate birth and paternal irresponsibility, and miscegenation ‘in the wild.’ Yet another dimension of this similarity to the moron category is that the ‘half-​caste’ symbolises a danger in its capacity to proliferate through irresponsible procreation. According to Neville and other Protectors and anthropologists of the period, ‘half-​castes’ were forming a ‘new breed’ –​even a ‘race’ –​which threatened to outnumber both European Australians and ‘full-​blooded Aborigines.’ Arguably the focus of Protectors’ anxiety is the ‘in-​ between’ status attributed to the ‘half-​caste’ –​or, more expansively, the ‘coloured’ person (a category that includes within it all ‘blood quanta’ apart from ‘full-​blood’). The coloured person is regarded as culturally and biologically indeterminate, thus embodying a failure of the boundary work necessary to maintain colonialism. Indeed, the management of the ‘half-​caste’ is an exemplary form of the boundary work of colonial administration.12 This failure of boundary work the ‘half-​caste’ shows up brings to the fore examples of whiteness administrators would like to have excluded: the worst

96  ‘Breeding Out the Colour’ in GevaColor: Jedda of the white population –​disreputable men and poor, uneducated whites, who neglected the responsibility to police racial boundaries and undermined the notion of white superiority. In North America, these whites were surveilled under the rubric of the moron. The settler-​colonial context and perceived risk of miscegenation –​of confusion between ‘white’ and ‘black’ –​gave ‘poor white trash’ to be figures of anxiety in North America, because it was vital to the social order which privileged whites that they should be kept ontologically separate from Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples. Likewise, the ‘half-​caste’ reified the challenge to the social order ‘race mixing’ represented in Australia. However, the work of bringing these ‘wild breeds’ into a program of breeding –​of controlled miscegenation –​ameliorated this situation. Neville’s aim was to bring order to what had been disordered in nature, through the enactment of law. His invention of dichotomies for Aboriginal peoples according to blood quantum served this effort to enforce order. Thus, Neville does not call mixed-​race Aboriginal people ‘Aboriginal,’ instead he ontologically separates them from ‘full-​bloods’ to then segregate them socially and biologically.13 In Chapter 1 of Our Coloured Minority Neville reiterates some of the axioms he had pushed to get into the recommendations of the Canberra Conference –​predicated on this stipulated difference between ‘full-​blood’ and mixed-​race Aboriginal peoples: DESTINY OF THE RACE: –​That this conference believes that the destiny of the natives of aboriginal [sic] origin, but not of the full-​blood, lies in their ultimate absorption by the people of the Commonwealth, and it therefore recommends that all efforts be directed to that end. (Commonwealth, 1937, p. 3; quoted in Neville, 1947, p. 27. Emphasis in Neville) The “people of the Commonwealth” are implicitly white, and no analysis of their racial propensities and weaknesses is performed: ‘White’ is taken as the norm against which Aboriginal people are measured, and to which they should aspire. Between themselves, however, Aboriginal peoples are differentiated in substance and destiny according to blood quantum and the ends of a White Australian nation. Neville went on to stipulate that ‘full-​ blood’ Aboriginals should be managed through “the establishment of inviolable reserves” (p. 29) and allowed to engage in tribal ceremony as long as it is deemed “unobjectionable” (p. 28). He argued to include this caveat at the Canberra Conference, stating that “some of the tribal customs … have a deleterious effect on the natives, and they must cease” (Commonwealth, 1937, p. 34). In 1948, Neville would publish an article in the flagship journal of the Anthropological Societies of Australia, Mankind, setting out his thoughts about the place of ‘full-​bloods’ in Australian society. He argued that, according to Darwinian evolutionary principles, it is a culture ill-​suited to survival alongside modern European culture; and the decline of Aboriginal populations is due to

‘Breeding Out the Colour’ in GevaColor: Jedda  97 intrinsic circumstances (that is, damaging cultural practices and conflicts between tribes) rather than actions and behaviours of colonisers. Although he acknowledged some impacts of colonisation, he gave them second place to inherent causes. Rather, Neville cited such examples only to position his own means of managing Aboriginal populations as superior to misguided and corrupt methods of other colonisers. The article’s last paragraph brings together the threads of his thinking with shocking clarity: Indigenous primitive peoples seem to reach a zero hour from which point they are faced either with extinction or their acceptance of new methods which may save them. Our Aborigines have surely reached that stage, and we must see to it that their acceptance of our way of life raises them to new standards of usefulness, health and happiness and the abandonment of all that is evil in a culture which is outworn and often repugnant. (Neville, 1948, p. 13) With ‘full-​ blood’ Aboriginal peoples thus discarded upon the scrapheap of evolution, Neville turns to the group he sees as more amenable to being raised “to new standards of usefulness”: that ambiguous quantity, the ‘coloured’ person. The ‘coloured minority’ augurs to become a majority, however, because it is more fertile than the ‘pure’ blood, both white and black. Consistent with eugenic discourse from the nineteenth to mid-​twentieth century, Neville characterises as a problem high birth rates among a marginalised group compared to the low reproductivity of the most desired (white) population. In North America, this Malthusian trope referred to poor, often white, groups regulated through the introduction of technologies for measuring intelligence: thus, the invention of the ‘moron’ informed government policies of involuntary sterilisation and institutionalisation, to control fertility and train individuals for menial employment in the broader community (McLaren, 1990; Kline, 2001; Wray, 2006; Wilson, 2018). Where Neville draws on the language and argumentation of eugenics to identify a population problem, however, his solutions are in tension with eugenics discourse to the extent that they do not tilt at improving the gene pool of the nation so much as whitening skin tone, without reference to more fundamental attributes and potentialities most usually attributed to genetics (McGregor, 1996, 2002; Charlton, 2001). We next turn to Neville’s construction of the mixed-​ race Aboriginal child as a ‘problem,’ before outlining how the ‘half-​caste’ became for him also a ‘solution’ to the Aboriginal problem. As I will elaborate, Neville’s characterisation of the Aboriginal problem is marked by equivocation and sometimes conflation between genetics and social factors, ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’: slippages that would ultimately characterise eugenic discourse more broadly. Sometimes Neville appears to attribute genetic or innate inferiority to Indigenous peoples, at others he frames the situation as social –​even as an issue of anti-​black race prejudice among white Australians. In any case, the solution involved a eugenic program of breeding out the colour.

98  ‘Breeding Out the Colour’ in GevaColor: Jedda The ‘Half-​Caste’ as Problem Neville framed the ‘half-​caste’ problem in terms of social tensions their existence was seen to have caused. Similar enough to the white working-​class to be able to perform the same work, ‘coloured’ people nonetheless signified otherness and were “regarded as no more than vestiges of old culture and languages, an indication of the passing away of the Aboriginal” (Rowley, 1971, p. 3). However, insofar as this class was seen to tarry –​to form its own ‘enclave’ rather than pressing ever forward towards whiteness –​it was perceived as problematic: the institution of a new underclass that would continue to blight the nation’s future rather than contribute to its teleology of whiteness. Neville wrote Australia’s Coloured Minority at the end of his career, and it reads as a confession-​cum-​apologia, in the spirit of Rousseau. He gives account of himself as a bureaucrat, in the context of not having achieved his objectives, after having been stymied and disappointed by governments and other administrators’ failure to follow through with requisite zeal or resources. The tone is reflective, remorseful, and recriminating in turn (see, for example, Neville, 1947, p. 55). The text should be read with this in mind, as a call to future administrators not to shy away from the vocation of Protector, to deal with the Aboriginal problem steadfastly, consistently, and dispassionately. To this end, Neville characterised the category of the ‘half-​caste’ both as a product of colonisers’ neglect of their responsibility to civilise, and as ‘naturally occurring’: Our men appropriated full-​blood women from the earliest days of settlement, and now their female descendants are acquiring our men, not by force majeure, but through the natural process of mating and marriage based largely upon mutual affection. (Neville, 1947, p. 43) White women being more discerning than their male counterparts, according to Neville, the ‘half-​caste’ was very much a gendered problem: caused by white men’s indiscretion and Aboriginal women’s loose morality and vulnerability to persuasion. Neville frames the ‘half-​caste’ as a demographic problem, and Aboriginal women’s fertility in deprecating terms, as outside their control –​notwithstanding his references elsewhere to traditional practices for the effective regulation of reproduction (Neville, 1948, p. 11). … so long as there are aboriginal [sic] women capable of bearing children left free to roam the country half-​blood children will be born to them. Statistics show that children constitute about one-​quarter of the full-​blood population, while of the coloured people nearly half are children. (Neville, 1947, p. 46)

‘Breeding Out the Colour’ in GevaColor: Jedda  99 Throughout, Aboriginal women are represented as not only deprived but incapable of agency: white men individually hold all responsibility for these more regrettable aspects of colonisation. A few bad men spoiled the genetic pool by inventing a new mixed race, halfway between black and white. [I]‌f white men had been made responsible for their coloured offspring from the earliest days, we should have a different story to tell and have saved much costly effort, because such children, like our own, would have received support, education, and training at the expense of their fathers… (p. 51) The ‘half-​caste’ is thereby constituted as the abject excess of colonialism –​a waste product of white men’s failure to fulfil the promise of their whiteness; the onus placed on them through their participation as supreme beings in the imperial project. Neville also poses the ‘half-​caste’ as a problem in terms of white Australians’ race prejudice against them: In many instances, they struggle to improve themselves economically and socially, but they often give up the struggle very soon. Prejudice is an almost impossible barrier to break down. (p. 12) Colour prejudice is the main stumbling-​block towards assimilation –​ colour combined with ignorance, ill-​health, deleterious living conditions, and such-​like disabilities, ought at least to have a sporting chance of finding its proper place in the community. (p. 72) Moreover, “colour prejudice” is for him an intractable problem, more difficult to address than the colour of people’s skin, which can be whitened over generations: I have found that even where all material conditions are satisfactory the coloured man is seldom able to attain our social status, partly through prejudice but mainly owing to the fact that he is a coloured man. This is one of the greatest difficulties to be overcome, but in time, providing we can prove that the people are worthy of it, it will be overcome if the right corrective methods are adopted. (p. 73) The solution to the problem of racism is thereby to remove those of the offending race. The ‘half-​caste’ person themselves Neville positioned as neither black nor white –​a pariah, and problem for both Aboriginal community and white:

100  ‘Breeding Out the Colour’ in GevaColor: Jedda Many an aboriginal [sic] woman has tried to disguise her coloured baby by all over application of charcoal or boot polish, either to deceive her tribal man or hoodwink the white father, or even in the hope that Authority will mistake her bastard child for a full-​blood. They do not want their children to be half-​white any more than we would wish them to be coloured. (Neville, 1947, p. 46) Neville assumes a lot about the sensibilities of Aboriginal mothers: they see their children as illegitimate and ‘half-​white’ and therefore do not accept them. These assumptions are projections: Neville displaces his own (self)-​ disgust onto the Other, regarding the repudiated part of white men in the existence of these children. He also repudiates his own part in influencing Aboriginal mothers’ behaviour. As has been documented, women darkened their children’s skin to avoid losing them into state custody because of policies Neville himself had enthusiastically petitioned to bring into law, rather than their own misgivings about their children’s paler complexion (HREOC, 1997, p. 111 (‘Fiona’s story’)). These actions are evidence that mothers loved and accepted their children and were performed to keep them safe. Nonetheless, Neville downplays these women’s love for their children, citing it instead as evidence of their ambivalence. Conversely, Neville’s ambivalence, even revisionism, is evident in Australia’s Coloured Minority. In a startling paragraph addressing the difficulty of criminalising sexual commerce with Aboriginal women he palpates the bounds of post-​war acceptability of eugenic laws, thus betraying the book’s rhetorical stakes: to find a ‘community morals’ fig leaf for racist eugenics. It has often been said that you cannot make people moral by Act of Parliament or, as Hitler once put it, you cannot abolish sexual intercourse by decree nor eliminate the instinct to possess. True enough, but laws and punishment are good in their way, to serve to check illicit intercourse and regulate responsibility for the care and maintenance of children. We have attempted to regulate illicit intercourse because of its often very evil consequences, but it is doubtful if such measures could be defended to-​ day upon purely ethnic grounds. (p. 49) In apparent concession to post-​ war public opinion, Neville’s rationale concerns the expense to the public purse of illegitimate children rather than racial eugenics. But then why is the term ‘half-​caste’ used at all, if the objection to their existence were not to do with race? And if the problem was not ‘ethnicity,’ why did Neville go to such lengths to ensure ‘coloured’ children would be removed from their mothers into state care? Notwithstanding Neville’s construction of the ‘half-​ caste’ as a social problem, fundamentally his response to them was visceral, exhibiting qualms

‘Breeding Out the Colour’ in GevaColor: Jedda  101 about the mixing of races. Especially revealing is his language regarding ‘half-​ castes’ who couple with each other as opposed to ‘first-​crosses’ (the progeny of ‘full-​blooded’ black with white) –​and thereby who create a ‘third race’ of coloured people distinct from Aboriginal and whites: Thirty or forty years ago their [sic] existed a better type of half-​caste. These were robust, meat-​eating people –​the women big like the men and as vigorous. The family heads were mostly first-​cross people. They travelled the country with their camel carts, horses, buggies and what not, in family groups, and they were good, hard workers. They were a people apart, and intermarriage was inevitable. The offspring were not equal to their parents; they ran to seed through intermarriage and become lethargic. (p. 68) The use of the phrase ‘ran to seed’ connects to the eugenic science of breeding, which understands itself as an extension of plant and animal husbandry. Note, however, the role for Neville of white blood as a fetish that will correct the lineage. He continues: But with the admixture of further white blood they recovered some of the original traits, acquiring part of the good qualities of both races; physical improvement being notable. (Ibid.) The goal of whiteness penetrates each of its stages, as white blood is endowed with the ability to recover –​or sublimate –​an Aboriginal nobility, by means of eugenic dialectics. The object of Neville’s project is the purity of the Australian nation itself. It was difficult in the first half of the twentieth century to imagine Australia as a multi-​ethnic nation, founded as it was as a white ethno-​nationalist state: the Act of Federation sought to exclude non-​white people (especially Chinese and Pacific Islanders) from migration to Australia. The threat posed by the ‘half-​caste’ was, then, a sovereign threat.14 Certainly, they represented a threat to the colonisers’ authority to possess land, by demonstrating the failure of whiteness to embody superiority; but the threat of the ‘half-​caste’ was more than this. For, if the class of ‘half-​castes’ were to proliferate, they might form a nation unto themselves –​a nation of ethnically ambiguous “white natives, living in the manner of their full-​blood aboriginal forbears, but shorn of all tribal wise inhibitions and limitations” (p. 52). The success of White Australia admitted of no exception: whiteness had to be absolute. If the ‘half-​caste’ were not to die out with the ‘full-​blood’ –​but instead was robust and proliferated –​ they would have to become white.

102  ‘Breeding Out the Colour’ in GevaColor: Jedda The Caucasian Hypothesis and the Spectre of Atavism The Caucasian hypothesis enabled this becoming-​white to take place apparently seamlessly, according to the race science of the day, which combined Enlightenment racial typology with nineteenth-​century evolutionary theory and the classical typology of humours. At the core of this episteme was the notion of four types of race, according to Linnaean taxonomy: the Caucasian (white –​European), the Mongoloid (yellow –​Asian), the Negroid (black –​ African), and the American Indian (red –​American). Each of these types was thought to be native to a different geographical zone, to exhibit specific characteristics, and was ordered hierarchically (with ‘white’ at its apex and ‘black’ as lowest). According to Immanuel Kant’s anthropology, members of the Negroid type could not feel pain keenly because they had thick skin; and this provided a rationale for race-​based slavery (Eze, 1997). Nonetheless, it was Alfred Russel Wallace, co-​originator of the theory of evolution, who gave credence to the theory that, despite their skin colour, Aboriginal people were in fact not Negroid, when he stated in 1893 that “the Australian Aborigines must be classed as Caucasians” (Wallace, 1893, pp. 152–​153, quoted in McGregor, 1996, p. 12). Aboriginal peoples were thus understood as Caucasian, but evolutionarily prior to whites. They were classed as “low-​grade Caucasians” (Lydekker, 1908, p. 14, quoted in McGregor, 1996, pp. 12–​13), and so lacking the potentialities of modern Europeans. But crucially, Aboriginal peoples were seen to share with Europeans their genetic ‘root stock,’ and thus were not entirely ‘other.’ The implications of this shared lineage were manifold. As Russell McGregor elaborates, for anthropologists, this gave Aboriginal peoples a significance as specimens of Europeans’ prehistoric past, to be studied as a precursor species and window onto themselves (McGregor, 1996, p. 13). Groups such as the Australian Aborigines Ameliorative Association drew on the notion that ‘we are all Caucasians’ to argue for full rights of participation for First Peoples: “Since the fundamental tenet of white Australia was that race and nation were –​ideally –​coterminous, integration of the whites’ racial cousins posed no threat to this ideal” (p. 14). Activists made this appeal to race pragmatically to argue for full citizenship rights for Aboriginal people. For Neville, however, the notion that Aborigines and whites were of the same ‘root stock’ supported his program of genetic and cultural absorption. For instance, at the Canberra Conference he argued: The Western Australian law to which I have referred [to remove children for the purpose of biological absorption] is based on the presumption that the aborigines of Australia sprang from the same stock as we did ourselves; that is to say, they are not negroid, but give evidence of Caucasian origin. (Neville, 1937, p. 10)

‘Breeding Out the Colour’ in GevaColor: Jedda  103 Neville’s certainty that whites and Aboriginal peoples shared an origin had softened by the time he wrote Australia’s Coloured Minority, yet his insistence on its key implication –​that they are not ‘negroid’ –​remained firm: We do not know the origin of the aboriginal people, but do know that there are certain things they are not. They are not, for instance, negroid, though perhaps the strain was in them once, but has long vanished down the ages. Neither are they Mongolian. The scientific conclusion is that they migrated to the Australian continent and are not akin to us in any useful classification sense, but it has to be said, too, that they predate us in some vague Caucasian direction … Whatever may be the truth as to this, the mingling of their blood and ours presents no marked antagonistic features. On the contrary, the more they mix with us the more like us they become, the less the likelihood of reversion to aboriginal type. (Neville, 1947, pp. 62–​63. Emphasis added) The key significance for Neville was to avoid the threat of atavism. ‘Antagonistic features’ is a euphemism signalling the fear of re-​emergence in later generations of the race that was supposed to have been genetically dispensed to history. It bears a derogatory resonance, that a second appearance of features of blackness (or Asian-​ness) would be disadvantageous: unruliness, laziness, intellectual defectiveness, blackness, and animalistic features. ‘Atavism’ belonged to an ontology that structures difference hierarchically; and in the context of Darwinism, difference signalled a return to an evolutionarily prior moment. As Deanna Gross Scherger writes, atavism “was primarily concerned with evolution gone wrong, gone backwards more specifically, exemplifying the threat that humans’ distant animal nature might infiltrate the modern body and civilized society” (Scherger, 2017, p. 99). The signifier of most singular importance to Neville was darkness of skin, which operates in his writing as a proxy for other ‘antagonistic features’ that are not so much spelled out as assumed, esoterically or at least implicitly.15 In a study of the figure of the ‘atavistic child’ in fin de siècle American fiction, J. Michael Duvall and Julie Cary Nerad argue the modern fascination with atavism responds to the possibility of racial passing –​and thus the destabilisation of race as a technology of social hierarchy. Atavism –​or the recurrence of black skin from past bloodlines –​operates to discipline racialised subjects and prevent miscegenation, to maintain the ‘colour-​line.’ The belief that atavism would reveal black blood through embodiment (falsely) guaranteed whites some measure of assurance: blacks passing as white would eventually be identified, if not by their actions or physical minutiae, then by their children’s skin. The irrepressibility of black blood thus also served as a warning to blacks and to any individuals knowingly contemplating an interracial union. (Duvall and Nerad, 2007, p. 53)

104  ‘Breeding Out the Colour’ in GevaColor: Jedda The ‘reassurance’ the spectre of the atavistic child in the United States offered was connected to the ‘one drop rule,’ which held any ‘contamination’ of white blood rendered a person legally black. The transatlantic slave trade incentivised the maintenance of a black lineage, as commodified black bodies were a valuable source of labour. Conversely, in a settler colony that operated according to a logic of elimination of black bodies to bolster the fiction of terra nullius (Wolfe, 2006), the incentive was to negate black blood rather than maintain it in perpetuity. Far from reassuring, the possibility of atavism signalled to Australian administrators like Neville an obstacle to the national project to absorb (and thus eliminate) Aboriginality into whiteness. The Caucasian hypothesis thus provided the reassurance Neville and others had been looking for, that a program of controlled miscegenation would dilute the skins of Aboriginal people, over successive generations, without the uncanny reminder of their prior existence on the land through the monstrosity of the black baby born to white parents. Atavism operated in Australia as a spectre of return –​not of illegitimate birth or interracial marriage, but rather of Blak sovereignty. The ‘Half-​Caste’ as Solution In the context of this incentive to forget Blak sovereignty by ‘breeding out the colour,’ the ‘half-​caste’ transformed from pariah to solution, as a key player in eliminating the problem it had previously embodied. The ‘half-​caste’ may thus be conceived as a Pharmakon with respect to the construction of a White Australia: all at once a poison, remedy, and scapegoat. Jacques Derrida’s account of the Pharmakon in “Plato’s Pharmacy” illustrates well the operation, in purity discourse, of ambivalent terms such as ‘half-​caste.’ In the Phaedrus, Socrates tells a myth to supplement his account of the primacy of speech over writing. Theuth, the god of written letters, presents to the Egyptian King Thamus the gift (or remedy; pharmakon) of writing, proffered as a technology to improve memory. Socrates’s argument turns on the polyvalence of pharmakon, which means not only ‘remedy’ but also ‘poison,’ ‘charm,’ and ‘drug,’ and is closely related to pharmakos, meaning ‘magician,’ ‘poisoner,’ and “one sacrificed in expiation of the sins of the city” (scapegoat) (Derrida, 1981, p. 132, n. 59). Derrida draws out the necessity of ambivalent terms to discourses of purity, which rhetorically hinge on an agent of contamination from which the object of purity must be protected: that which must be cast out of the city; the scapegoat (p. 128). Socrates’s discourse immunises itself using this ambivalent term, which is not an accident, but rather, is central to his argument’s operation. Socrates’s description of speech as “written in the soul” (p. 148. Emphasis added) erupts from the text like a symptom to betray the priority of writing, and the necessity of contamination to any purity discourse. Within Neville’s text, the ‘half-​caste’ is the term of ambivalence and efficient cog of his technology of race purification. Embodying the evils of

‘Breeding Out the Colour’ in GevaColor: Jedda  105 miscegenation and race contamination, over successive generations the ‘half-​ caste’ becomes an agent of purification in Neville’s system of blood titration. It is to the benefit of our race that the full-​blood should not any longer be encouraged to mate with other than full-​blood; on the contrary, he should be rigidly excluded from any association likely to lead to any other union. It would be contrary to our view of assimilation to do anything which might force our coloured black people back to the black, and moreover their continued mating with full-​bloods is liable to prolong the process of absorption until after there are no more virile full-​bloods remaining alive. (Neville, 1947, p. 56) Although his descriptions of what he calls the Aboriginal problem focus on issues affecting adults, his recommendations are the institutionalisation of children and procreation; and so, a fetishised image of the ‘half-​caste’ child supports his project of assimilation. This fetishisation is evident in one oft-​ reproduced photograph, labelled ‘Three Generations,’ which shows a ‘half-​ blood’ mother aside her ‘quadroon’ daughter and ‘octaroon’ grandson (Figure 5.1). Each successive generation has lighter skin, and in the last Aboriginality is presumed to be entirely effaced.

Figure 5.1 “Three generations” from A.O. Neville’s Australia’s Coloured Minority (1947). This image is in the public domain and was sourced from the Museums Victoria website: (https://collections.museumsvictoria.com.au/items/1496210). Author: A.O. Neville.

106  ‘Breeding Out the Colour’ in GevaColor: Jedda …the children would be lighter than the mother, and if later they married whites and had children these would be lighter still, and … in the third or fourth generation no sign of native origin what-​ever would be apparent. (p. 59) The mixed-​race child, by this logic, is a site of occlusion of an Aboriginality cleansed by white blood. The child appears miraculously disconnected from the relationships and lifeways that make them Aboriginal; and their skin, in its creamy luminosity, becomes itself a fetish for a people and culture. Neville continues to elaborate the processes of removal of children into institutions that would recondition them as white. Aboriginal children are thus installed as commodity fetishes in the colonial economy through their institutionalisation, which erases their place within the extensive network of social relations through which they would otherwise derive strength, knowledge, and power. By severing children from the context in which they are conferred value and cultural understanding of who they are, they were brought into the colonial economy as indentured servants, to be absorbed into a white underclass. Under Neville’s assiduous supervision, the child of mixed heritage would be “advanced to white status to be eventually assimilated into [the white] race” (p. 54). This fetishised social elevation confers upon the child, within the colonial economy, an abstract value as a measure of its part in the perpetration of terra nullius. The future promised to such a child, however, is assimilation to a capitalist economy that would place them at the very bottom of the social order, at the price of obliterating that child’s part in a rival social economy: their connection to their First Nations heritage, language, relationships, and sovereignty. The light-​skinned Aboriginal child of Neville’s eugenic economy was viewed as attractive and fetishised to the extent that it was able to obscure the materiality of its production. A sleight of hand gives the illusions that the child is not Aboriginal and there was never an Aboriginal presence in Australia. The child in the photograph operates like the pharmakon of Plato’s text, precisely by holding in abeyance all its potential and contrary meanings: as at once Aboriginal and as the erasure of Aboriginality; as problem and solution; and, finally, as scapegoat –​the part cast out of the community to guarantee the community’s purity. This capacity to keep in reserve these rival significances confers to the coloured child its heightened power as a signifier within the settler-​colonial imaginary. Neville and other Protectors award the fair-​skinned Aboriginal child significance as a site of conveyance, a shuttling back and forth of meaning, and of passage from black to white. The child who ‘succeeds’ in their role as passage only passes as white, which is good enough for Neville, who is concerned with surfaces and appearances rather than essences. It is assumed a child of fair complexion would want to pass, but the violent enforcement of forgetfulness of their Aboriginality by

‘Breeding Out the Colour’ in GevaColor: Jedda  107 institutions undercuts the truth invested in surfaces. The notion of passing implies deception –​the denial of an internal truth or identity at the kernel of one’s being and the opening of a gap between self-​image and image-​for-​ others –​for the sake of “assimilat[ing] difference into a generalized white ‘face of the nation’ ” (Ahmed, 1999, p. 93). It is also implicitly threatening to the white nation, the onus of which is to scan its citizens continuously, reading for signs of Aboriginality, which, with each generation, becomes more spectral –​ haunting the populace as an uncanny disturbance, an atavism or reversion to Aboriginality barely registered or registered only in its denial. What Neville did not anticipate –​could not anticipate –​is that passing as white would shift and unsettle the meaning of whiteness, and not only of Aboriginality (Bhabha, 1994; Ahmed, 1999). It is here that we return to Jedda, as a film about passing and the spectre of atavism.

Jedda and the Vicissitudes of Colour As noted earlier, Jedda is a deeply ambivalent film that attracts contrary responses. It is heavy with the significances of its historical moment, which, in turn, are continuously refracted through multiple cultural works created in its wake. Barbara Creed (2001) was the first to draw out the connection of the film to the stories of the Stolen Generations. Significantly, Creed reads the film as a ‘double captive narrative,’ through which the first captivity –​what she calls a ‘reverse captivity,’ of baby Jedda to the white family –​is obscured by the second, ‘classic’ captivity tale, of Jedda (encoded as white) to the tribal man Marbuk. Jedda is thus multiply imagined as full-​blooded Aboriginal woman displaced into a white settlers’ home, and as an ‘Eliza Fraser’ figure, consigned to a ‘fate worse than death,’ as a white woman fallen into the hands of savages (Behrendt, 2016). This equivocation between black and white within Jedda’s identity maps to competing discourses of assimilation, of Neville, Cecil Cook, and Paul Hasluck on one hand, and anthropologist A.P. Elkin on the other (McGregor, 1999; Barnett, 2018). The former sees little value in Aboriginal culture, depicted as at best archaic and at worse dangerous. For instance, comparing Aboriginal peoples –​as “Black Caucasians” –​to British “White Caucasians,” amateur anthropologist Daisy Bates wrote, “[t]‌he level of culture of the [Indigenous] Australian of to-​day is just a ‘rational’ degree above that of the animal” (Bates, 1922a). Accounts provided by this ilk emphasise the parts of infanticide and ‘cruel’ initiation rites in Aboriginal society and disparage the culture as ‘communist’ and ‘superstitious’ (Bates, 1922a, 1922b; Neville, 1948; Hasluck, 1953). For Hasluck this did not hinge on skin colour as much as culture, and Aboriginal people who proved themselves exceptional (willing to abandon Aboriginal ways) were permitted to become citizens (McGregor, 1999). For this strand of assimilationism, however, the imperative was to expunge Aboriginality as expediently as possible, with the caveat that such methods should be ‘humane’: the phrase to “smooth the pillow of a dying

108  ‘Breeding Out the Colour’ in GevaColor: Jedda race” (Bates, 1938, p. 243) summarises this attitude.16 In Jedda, this view is represented by Sarah, who strives to ‘raise up’ Jedda to the level of a white girl. Elkin and in the literary field Xavier Herbert exemplify an alternative strain of assimilationism that finds positive value in Indigenous lifeways and philosophies, but remains committed to incorporating First Peoples into Australia’s future as citizens through a modernisation of Indigenous culture. Certain aspects of Aboriginality are incompatible with Australian citizenship; and Aboriginal culture is framed in terms of its benefits for white society. Elkin and Herbert idealise the blending of white Australian and Aboriginal cultures –​Elkin through mutual education and hybridisation (McGregor, 1999); Xavier through genetic hybridisation, and the indigenisation of the bushman (Probyn-​Rapsey, 2007; Conor, 2010). This strand of assimilationism aligns to some contemporary representations of reconciliation (for example, the film Australia) and is represented by Doug McCann in Jedda. The debate between positions is played out in a discussion between the settler couple about whether to allow Jedda to go walkabout with the ‘station blacks,’ which stands in for a larger disagreement between them about Sarah’s decision to raise Jedda as her own white child –​a decision coterminous with her announcement of the termination of the couple’s sex life (when Sarah declares “never again” in response to Doug’s suggestion that they try to have another child). Whereas Sarah’s dialogue is predictably disparaging of Aboriginal culture (“I’m not going to let that child slip back … They go bush on this wretched walkabout and come back to me like bedraggled skeletons”), Doug’s speech is more ambivalent: It might shock your staid little heart if you did [know what they get up to on walkabout]. I’ll tell you what they do, Sarah. They breathe. They live like their forefathers, regaining their tribal status and pride of race. We all have our pride, Sarah. You in your home, me in my work. And these people in that once-​a-​year time when they become “big fella man.” Doug’s underlying motivations, as a manager of human resources, are clarified when he concludes this speech by affirming the importance of allowing Aboriginal observance of cultural practices because “they come back to us better stockman.” Like Elkin, Doug acknowledges the nobility of Aboriginal nations, the better to enfold them into the settler economy. Regarding Jedda, a ‘full-​ blood’ Aboriginal girl-​ woman, this means she should have been allowed inside the house only as a servant, sleeping with the other ‘station lubras’ in temporary structures on the property. She would thus live her excluded-​inclusion within white society appropriately, as a labourer, allowed to enjoy culture as long as it contributes to her productivity. Thus, Sarah’s (to contemporary audiences, more intolerant) position is portrayed as ‘soft’ and overly sentimental; Doug represents the (masculine) voice of realism.

‘Breeding Out the Colour’ in GevaColor: Jedda  109 Doug’s position in the assimilation debate is complicated by his attitude towards Joe the ‘head stockman,’ however. Joe establishes within his own narration of the film his ‘half-​caste’ status. His parentage is declared Aboriginal on his mother’s side, while his father was an ‘Afghan teamster.’ Yet he was raised by the McManns, and Doug confers on him the privileges of an heir apparent, training him from boyhood to manage the buffalo station. Several scholars have guessed at Joe’s paternity considering Doug’s affection for him (Johnson, 1988; Creed, 2001; Mills, 2012), making sense of Doug’s rejection of Jedda and partiality for Joe.17 Doug thus represents the kind of white Australian masculinity exemplified by Xavier Herbert and ‘the Drover’ in Australia. He is the rugged man of the outback, who ‘mucks in’ with the natives yet with firm boundaries in place so he can confidently wield power over them (Watson, 1996; Barnett, 2018). When we consider more closely Joe’s part in Jedda, the claim it is an ‘anti-​ assimilationist’ film is difficult to maintain; and Doug’s position regarding the assimilation debate becomes even more uncertain. Joe is an extremely ambivalent character. Perhaps he even represents an essential ambivalence within the film and the national imaginary regarding assimilation and the Aboriginal problem. As Jane Mills (2012) and Chelsea Barnett (2018) have each argued, Joe both speaks on behalf of Aboriginality and exemplifies its passage into whiteness, according to policies of assimilation. His locutions hover between alienation and identification, and his voice itself is jarringly disconnected from the context in which he was raised: he grows from a child with an inexplicable cockney accent into an adult with the educated tones of a British stage actor. The casting of a white British actor dressed in blackface to play an Aboriginal man raised to pass as white is particularly ironic. Joe appears, indeed, to be almost too successful in his assimilation, aspiring to the Menziean dream of individual responsibility and surpassing his white adopted parents in refinement of language and manners. The film gives no attention, however, to the fact or process of Joe’s assimilation, nor to his estrangement from Aboriginal culture and people, through which he derives the privilege of speaking for Aboriginality to a white audience. Once Joe is put into the frame, we find a more orthodox –​even Nevillean –​presentation of the vicissitudes of Aboriginal people according to blood quantum. If we refer to assimilationist literature, then Jedda’s failure to assimilate does not represent a failed assimilationist policy, but rather its misapplication to a ‘full-​blood’ girl. Her death with Marbuk aligns to that discourse, and the destiny it attributes to Aboriginal people who cannot civilise because they are of an ancient race unable to compete with settler society. Recall that Jedda’s subtitle for international release was “the uncivilized.” Sarah’s project to civilise Jedda would thus have found support had she been of mixed descent, just as Doug’s project to civilise Joe triumphed. Joe’s match with Jedda was likewise tragic –​in the sense of its being ill-​fated and contrary to the prescribed methodology for breeding out Indigeneity –​which is why his pursuit of Jedda and Marbuk had to end with his witnessing their deaths.

110  ‘Breeding Out the Colour’ in GevaColor: Jedda This fealty to the rigors of controlled miscegenation produces some uncanny elements of sound and vision that disrupt the film’s verisimilitude and connect it to the global context of colonisation. For instance, the voices of Aboriginal actors were dubbed over in post-​production with Jamaican-​ sounding accents; and both Joe’s and Jedda’s faces were darkened: while Reynall was literally in blackface, Rosalie Kunoth’s lighter skin was made up to match Bob Wilson’s ‘full-​blooded’ tone (Kunoth’s paternal grandfather was German). Moreover, rendering art more authentic than life, Elsa Chauvel urged Wilson and Kunoth to take on Aboriginal names (Ngarla and Tudawali) in order to support a publicity narrative for international audiences about the film’s Australianness (Schlunke, 1993). The effect of this was, on one hand, to represent cultural differences between Aboriginal people of diverse blood quanta as more marked than they were in reality; and, on the other, to present ‘authentic’ Aboriginal people as curiosities, as the ‘last of their kind.’ This mode of representation is a feature of colonialism since Europeans first invaded other lands and toured Indigenous people as museum exhibits.

Conclusion: The Taming of the Wild Goose I want to conclude this chapter by returning to the words that also conclude Jedda, to reflect on their significance in light of the preceding discussion. These final lines of narration are Joe’s: Was it our right to expect that Jedda, one of a race so mystic and so removed, should be of us in one short lifetime? The Pintaris whisper that the soul of Jedda now flies the lonely plains and mountain crags with the wild geese, and that she is happy with the great mother of the world in the dreaming time of tomorrow. Significantly, they echo within them words spoken earlier by Doug McMann as he debated the merits of allowing Jedda to go walkabout. Still trying to turn that wild little magpie into a tame canary, Sarah? Well you won’t do it by shutting her windows at night to keep out the cry of the corroboree, dance and didgeridoo and you won’t wipe out the tribal instincts and desires of a thousand years in one small life. Joe thus vindicates Doug’s view that Jedda could not be ‘tamed,’ which is a euphemism for assimilated –​and this lesson is spoken as a lesson to himself and not only to the white audience. Joe comforts himself with this ‘dreamtime’ consolation, that Jedda –​of a race so “mystic” and “removed” –​escaped being caught between two worlds by turning into a wild goose ghost because she could not become “one of us,” as Joe himself had done. The poēsis of this abrupt ending takes the edge off. It gives the demise of a race a place in a grander scheme of race destiny.

‘Breeding Out the Colour’ in GevaColor: Jedda  111 What is most unsettling about these parting words, however, is the position of their narrator within the racial schema that the film maps. For he is the ‘half-​caste’: both problem and panacea, in whose very body Aboriginality begins its route to eradication. That Joe receives and then enthusiastically relays Doug’s words demonstrates his own partition from his Aboriginal part; the part within him that does not count, or that he does not count, or that is only counted when he represents but not as what is represented. His description of Aboriginality as a ‘race so mystic and removed’ evinces his removal from it, which is also a disavowal. Such disavowal is what was asked of removed children, who were trained to find Aboriginal people unappealing and extinguish the Aboriginal part within themselves. In relinquishing Jedda so poetically, so easily, Joe fulfils this mandate, thus showing his fitness to be a head stockman and Doug’s model son. We turn in Chapter 6 to the legacies of these discourses of colourism and assimilation in institutional forms of colonisation of the Aboriginal child as they continue to operate through the child protection system.

Notes 1 The film references Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist text Uncle Tom’s Cabin; but, as Benjamin Miller notes, given the specific locution “just grow’d,” it is likely a reference to the minstrel shows that were based on the serialised novel, and which traded in demeaning stereotypes, such as the piccaninny (Miller, 2007, p. 150). This citation references both the piccaninny and the notion of a child without origin or parentage: in the novel, Topsy is asked “who made you?,” to which she answers “I spect I grow’d. Don’t think nobody never made me” (Stowe, p. 277, quoted in Miller, 2007, p. 150). 2 On the National Film and Sound Archive website, film critic Paul Byrnes says of Jedda that it “is arguably the first Australian film to take the emotional lives of Aboriginal people seriously”; see https://​aso.gov.au/​tit​les/​featu​res/​jedda/​notes/​ (accessed 24 August 2021). 3 Johnson’s identification as Aboriginal came into question in 1996 after he was unable to substantiate his kinship to the Kickett family, and therefore his claim to be Nyoongah. 4 The views and ambitions of ‘Protectors of Aborigines’ Neville (Western Australia), J. W. Bleakley (Queensland), and Cook (Northern Territory) were supported by Paul Hasluck (Minister for Territories under Prime Minister Robert Menzies) and academics N. B. Tindale (anthropologist) and J. B. Cleland (Professor of Pathology). Cleland attended the Canberra Conference as a member of the South Australian contingent. 5 While the discourse of biological absorption that informed policies of removal appears to participate in eugenics, it does so neither holistically nor integrally. In Australia these policies were driven by bureaucrats rather than politicians and academics (although there was interaction and cooperation with anthropologists). Neville and other participants of that discussion cited eugenics to garner intellectual legitimacy for what they wanted to do, without reference to the key objective of eugenics –​to produce a ‘healthier’ population through genetic exclusion and

112  ‘Breeding Out the Colour’ in GevaColor: Jedda control of breeding. Instead, in Australia this discussion was oriented to race, culture, and skin colour rather than characteristics attributed to the genetic makeup of Aboriginal peoples or individuals. 6 For the most part, eugenic sterilisation ran alongside and peripherally to the Aboriginal problem in discussions of the fitness of the Australian nation and was used in Australia on people with disabilities and intersex people, under the rubric of sex normalisation –​particularly girls and women. This took place from the mid-​twentieth century and “is an ongoing practice that remains legal and sanctioned by Governments in Australia” (DPOA, 2018; see also Goldhar, 1991). 7 The name that is given to Indigenous health policy, ‘Closing the Gap,’ itself evokes this deficit framing (Bond, 2005, p. 40). For accounts of strength-​based approaches to Aboriginal health, see Askew et al., 2020 and Bond et al., 2021. 8 Goddard’s study of Deborah appears within a broader portrait of the entire Kallikak family –​which is a made-​up-​name from the Greek words for ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (Kline, 2001, p. 25). The family study looks at a root descendent, Martin Snr, who has two families, one legitimate and the other illegitimate, the latter with a woman who is ‘genetically inferior.’ The family tree shows ‘normal’ on the legitimate side and a disproportionate number of ‘feeble-​minded’ descendants on the illegitimate side. 9 In ‘Who Is a Moron?’ Goddard began to question what the Intelligence Quotient measures when it identifies the moron. Specifically, he reflected that many who were institutionalised after having been designated as moron (and sterilised) become productive members of society (1927, p. 44). He was shaken to discover that when IQ tests were introduced into the army, 45% of soldiers tested as ‘morons,’ and surmised that this may be extended to the general population. By reductio ad absurdum, Goddard concludes that “if a moron is a feebleminded person [then] it is evident that these people are not morons” (p. 42). 10 I am unaware if Neville read Goddard’s work. My comparison of these concepts demonstrates discursive parallels in the deployment of eugenic notions between the two countries rather than influence. 11 This is in part due to demographic circumstances –​white men working in remote communities –​but also reflects resistance against seeing Aboriginal men as sexually appealing to white women. 12 According to Matt Wray, “Boundary work is a shorthand term for any of the activities that go into the formation, maintenance, or transformation of boundaries” (2006, pp. 13–​14). Arguably, it is pursued especially vigorously in dynamics of power that are precarious. 13 In his introduction to Neville’s book, anthropologist A. P. Elkin, who did not advocate a biological or social absorption, states Neville’s position in this way: The use of the term caste (half or other) … is effective if it reminds us that we divide our population into Australians proper (that is our white selves); full-​ blood, who incidentally, are not included in the general census figures; and thought and social behaviour, the Aboriginal castes or mixed-​bloods. The last are in our midst, and partly of our blood, but they are not yet “of us.” (Elkin in Neville, 1947, p. 11) 14 I address the conceptions of Indigenous sovereignty more squarely in Chapters 7 and 8.

‘Breeding Out the Colour’ in GevaColor: Jedda  113 15 This Australian atavism anxiety often referred to the United States, where instances of black babies born to ostensibly white parents had been noted, and racial atavism was the subject of fiction and spectacular reporting. Dana Seitler situates ‘atavism’ –​a word in common usage at the turn of the century –​as a figure of thought that structures ‘modernity’ as a recursive subjectivity that at once strives to press forward into the future and is anxious about severing connection with the past. Referring to “ ‘recurrence’ of the past in the present … specifically one of ancestral prehistory,” Seitler argues atavism “posits a notion of the individual self as constitutionally affected by the past” (Seitler, 2008, p. 2). Notably, not only evolution but also psychoanalysis conditions this idea. The movement of evolutions and atavism in biology mirrors the movement of repression and symptom in psychoanalysis: each marks a return to a previous self, unwanted or unrecognised as such. And atavism anxiety can itself be understood to connect to unacknowledged or repressed truths of settler colonialism. 16 In almost the same breath, Bates also vilifies mixed-​race Aboriginal people, stating that every “effort should be made to ‘keep the dreaded half-​caste menace from our great continent’ ” (Bates, 1938, p. 243; quoted in Hiatt, 2006, p. 112). 17 Barnett notes, additionally, the contrast between the “embodied excitement of the Aboriginal women on the station” (2018, p. 57) when he returns from long absences, and Sarah’s coolness toward him.

6 Finding ‘Home’ Through the Child Bringing Them Home and Assimilationism’s Present

We saw in Chapter 5 how Jedda reflected and refracted the discourses of colonialism in the mode of Australian assimilationism. The relation of the film to policy and the recorded ruminations of bureaucrats was not simply mimetic: cinema engages its viewers in the critical imagination that allows the playing out of a set of codes to their logical conclusions, dramatising, in this case, a seeming inevitability of the passing of the Aboriginal race. Film occupies an intimate and moral, rather than legal or administrative, register. Its meaning is co-​produced in the relation between those who stage it and its audience, who interpret according to the historic moment and their preconceptions about ‘race,’ ‘nation,’ ‘childhood,’ etc. In the case of Jedda, in 1955 it reassured its (white) audience that settler colonialism was a good thing, or at worst a necessary evil: an innocent bystander to the realisation of terra nullius. Today Jedda’s reception is more ambivalent, yet these significances still linger and continue to resonate. Contemporary representations of Aboriginality and Aboriginal childhood in cinema, literature, and news media are further complicated by the formal recognition –​through Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s national apology to the Stolen Generations (Rudd, 2008) –​that assimilation was a failed and flawed, even immoral, policy. Governmental discourse takes pains to put a distance between now and a colonial past. It is forward looking, genuflecting to the past only to repudiate the policies and actions of previous governments. Acknowledgement of the damage perpetrated against First Peoples by past governments and bureaucracies is routine within contemporary texts of government, whether outward and public facing or internal policy and training documents. The need to consider the impact of intergenerational trauma on Aboriginal ‘clients’ is also repeatedly counselled in material child welfare officers and caseworkers use. After the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families produced its report, Bringing Them Home (1997), governments incorporated its language, if not its recommendations. Yet, the gap between government rhetoric and practice is stark, as contemporary removals continue to match numbers of children taken during the assimilation era. DOI: 10.4324/9781003099666-6

Finding ‘Home’ Through the Child  115 The past cleaves to popular media representations more stubbornly and insidiously. The language and imagery of assimilation regularly reappears in news and variety media as the subtext, and sometimes even openly as a nostalgia for the ‘Stolen Generations’ era. This chapter addresses the disconnect between government rhetoric and practice, alongside relative connectedness of past and present settler-​colonial narratives about ‘Aboriginality.’ That Jedda is still referenced by new cultural works furnishes a measure of present-​day sympathies with its messaging about race relations in Australia. Yet today this imagery is contemporaneous and interacts with the awareness of past wrongs and a language of Aboriginal self-​determination and human rights for Indigenous peoples. Present-​day settler-​colonial culture holds a space for competing discourses and discursive frames, which Child Protective Services (CPS) workers must navigate in their life and work, and which shapes them individually and institutionally. This chapter sets the stage by elaborating the business of the day in Parliament when Bringing Them Home was tabled in the Lower House, which I present as a thumbnail sketch of the issues and anxieties of Australian political culture into which the Report was received. Notwithstanding its key purpose –​to give voice to the Stolen Generations and prevent the removal of future generations of children –​the government would later draw upon the imagery of Bringing Them Home to legitimise new deployments of colonial intervention into Aboriginal childhood in the Northern Territory. We turn to these events in Chapter 7. Yet, while Bringing Them Home symbolised for many Australians the beginning of a process of reconciliation through the figure of the child who is brought home –​reunited with family and community –​a question implicitly or subconsciously posed after Bringing Them Home by cultural productions and government agencies alike, has been ‘can the Aboriginal child have a proper home? Or is the Aboriginal child rendered essentially homeless –​“out-​of-​home” –​by settler colonialism?’ After surveying significant works of literature and film from the post Bringing Them Home and post-​apology periods, I turn to colonialism’s present, to consider the high rates of removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children by contemporary CPS systems, as reflected in Cobble woman and Professor Megan Davis’s 2019 review of the NSW CPS, Family Is Culture. The chapter concludes with a discussion of media incidents that manifest the settler-​Australian disposition of unrepentance about the Stolen Generations.

26 May 1997: A Day in the Life of Parliamentary Democracy Indigenous organisations such as the Secretariat of the National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care (SNAICC), Link-​Up (which reconnects removed children and their families), and Aboriginal Legal Services (ALS) had pushed for an inquiry into the state removal of Aboriginal children for some time and had collected evidence of the existence of Stolen Generations (HREOC, 1997, p. 15). In 1995, then Attorney General Michael Lavarch commissioned a

116  Finding ‘Home’ Through the Child National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families, which was jointly led by Sir Ronald Wilson (then President of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission) and Yawuru First Nations man Mick Dodson (then Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner). The inquiry’s terms of reference included mapping a history of “laws, practices and policies which resulted in the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families,” investigating the effects of practices and policies on Aboriginal families contemporaneous to the inquiry and advising on principles relevant to compensation for Stolen Generations survivors (p. 2). Modelled on Truth and Reconciliation processes such as those established in Chile, El Salvador, Honduras, and South Africa (p. 255), the inquiry proceeded as a schedule of hearings across the country, receiving oral testimony by Indigenous organisations and individuals, government and non-​government agencies, church representatives, former mission employees, and private citizens (p. 15). Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander survivors were able to provide testimony in camera if confidentiality was preferred, and the inquiry also received written submissions. The Report’s first recommendation was the creation of an archive of materials, modelled on the Shoah Foundation’s oral history collection documenting Jewish experiences of the Holocaust; however, no such archive was created –​nor does the National Archive hold a store of evidence provided to the inquiry. This was not the only recommendation that would land on deaf ears. The report of the findings of this inquiry, Bringing Them Home, was tabled in Parliament on 26 May 1997 –​a date which has been commemorated each year since as ‘National Sorry Day.’ The sitting coincided with the national Aboriginal Reconciliation Convention, and leader of the opposition, Kim Beazley, told of his attendance at the Convention, and that participants had stood for a minute’s silence “to reflect upon the concerns and problems that have been endured by many indigenous Australians [sic] over the years and particularly as reflected by the report that will shortly be forthcoming from the government” (Hansard, 26 May 1997, p. 3952). Not to be outdone, the Prime Minister stated that he also saw the issue as important, and the Speaker of the House asked all present to observe a minute’s silence (p. 3953). The Report was introduced late in the sitting, and discussion of it adjourned until the following day. For the remainder of the day the House discussed a range of issues, international and domestic, that conditioned the place of Bringing Them Home in Australia’s political imaginary, and how it would be received both politically and culturally. One matter concerned cuts to the migration program: reducing the number of immigrants annually and introducing a “skilled migration program” that would calibrate distribution of visas to domestic employment priorities and demand (p. 3965). The ‘immigrant question’ –​particularly unwanted immigrants from China –​was constitutive of Australia as a nation with a federal system of government; and this question continues to hold a prominent

Finding ‘Home’ Through the Child  117 place in the national public discourse. Whether the discussion concerns refugees, employment, social cohesion, or foreign influence, politicians toe a fine line on immigration. A backbencher (independent) raised concerns with the Minister of Foreign Affairs Alexander Downer that the ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) –​in 1990! –​would interfere with parents’ rights, where they conflicted with children’s rights to freedom of expression and association, education, religion, and privacy, as enshrined in the UNCRC (p. 3961). “Has the Minister … lodged … reservations?” he asked. Downer clarified later in the sitting that the only reservations Australia had lodged concerned article 37(c), regarding torture and deprivation of liberty. Particularly, the Australian government had held that the obligation to separate children from adults in prison is accepted only to the extent that such imprisonment is considered by the responsible authorities to be feasible and consistent with the obligation that children be able to maintain contact with their families, having regard to the geography and demography of Australia. Australia therefore ratifies the Convention to the extent that it is unable to comply with the obligation imposed by article 37(c). (Hansard, 26 May 1997, p. 3972) The Australian government’s reservations about applying limits to how they imprison children is most pertinent to the justice system’s treatment of Aboriginal children as, nationally, they are 17 times more likely to be incarcerated than non-​Indigenous children (Allam, 2020a).1 As we will see in Chapter 7, this issue was highlighted by incidents at the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre, and today there is a movement to #RaiseTheAge of incarceration from ten-​years-​old that is being resisted by most state jurisdictions and the Commonwealth.2 A ‘work for the dole’ bill (Social Security Legislation Amendment [Work for the Dole] Bill 1997) was presented for its second reading, and one National Party backbencher argued at length –​along the lines of ‘idle hands make the devil’s workshop’ –​that programs like this (he names the Community Development Employment Projects [CDEP] program) “have great merit because they get the crime rate down” and “stop vandalism” in towns with significant Aboriginal populations (Hansard, 26 May 1997, p. 4021). When first introduced in 1977, the CDEP was administered by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), and provided much needed, and Aboriginal-​controlled, economic and employment opportunities to remote communities (homelands) in the Northern Territory (Altman, 2000; Jordan, 2012). However, after the Howard government dismantled ATSIC in 2004 and then launched the Northern Territory Intervention in 2007, the CDEP was abolished and replaced by a mainstreamed ‘work-​for-​the-​dole’ scheme, emphasising ‘mutual obligation’ and individual responsibility rather than the

118  Finding ‘Home’ Through the Child development of skills and industry on homelands. Advocates of mutual obligation such as Patrick McClure (2000) and Guugu Yimithirr First Nations man Noel Pearson (2000) argued that Aboriginal people need to participate in the ‘real economy’ –​which often means having to leave homelands and community for cities or work for mining companies.3 Finally, two petitions were tabled that drew the battle lines according to which Aboriginal affairs would be managed by governments from that point until today. The first petition, referencing the Racial Discrimination Act, cautioned Parliament that introducing legislation to extinguish Native Title would “breach Australia’s international obligations,” “severely impede the reconciliation process,” and would “rob Aboriginal people of their dignity and right to self-​determination” (Hansard, 26 May 1997, pp. 3982–​3983). It was signed by 11 citizens. The second petition of 61 citizens addressed “uncertainty” caused by the “Wik Decision” of the High Court (Wik Peoples v. the State of Queensland) in December of the previous year (p. 3984). The proximity of debate about the Wik Decision and the tabling of Bringing Them Home is critical to how the government would frame and then leverage the inquiry’s report. The High Court had decided in favour of the Wik Peoples of the Cape York Peninsula, that statutory leases could not be held exclusively where Indigenous peoples had a prior claim to land –​the implication being that Native Title rights coexist with pastoral leases. Farmers, miners, and other claimants would therefore be required to negotiate with holders of Native Title over their land use. The concept of ‘Native Title’ had already been established through the Mabo Decision (Bartlett et al., 1993), which overturned the presumption of terra nullius where Indigenous peoples continue to engage in traditional practices and lore relating to a contested place. Wik therefore did not invent Native Title but laid out its implications more concretely and in relation to named interests: that is, the Wik Peoples, Comalco Aluminium Ltd., the State of Queensland, and the Commonwealth of Australia. The Mitchellton (pastoral) Lease was held by the respondents to have extinguished Native Title, although it had been forfeited for non-​ payment of rent in 1918, and then the subsequent lessees failed to take up possession, so that in 1922 it was “reserved for the benefit of Aborigines or held for and on their behalf ” (Brennan et al., 1996). The Wik Decision provoked panic among farmers, miners, and governments, and after losing an appeal, the Howard Liberal government would draft legislation to “swing back the pendulum” towards pastoralists’ interests (Robbins, 1998, p. 158). The Native Title Amendment Bill 1997 (Cth) would later implement Howard’s ‘ten-​point plan,’ which contained and limited “the possibility of native title claims on pastoral leases … in order to provide greater ‘certainty’ for farmers, and to achieve a reasonable and fair balance of interests” (p. 156). The Amendment listed actions and circumstances with the power to extinguish or partially extinguish Native Title. What might thus have been an opportunity for meaningful negotiation –​even practical reconciliation –​ between settler colonisers and Native Title holders was itself extinguished.

Finding ‘Home’ Through the Child  119 The Commonwealth’s crisis management of farmers’ and miners’ ‘uncertainty’ transformed a moment of potential treaty making into a reassertion of terra nullius. This reassertion of terra nullius would later be consolidated by the Members of the Yorta Yorta Aboriginal Community v The State of Victoria (1998) Decision, which upheld that Native Title had been extinguished by the “tide of history,” placing the onus on First Peoples to demonstrate their unbroken observance of traditional laws and customs and that they had never ceased to occupy those lands. Thus, settler law pled ignorance of colonisers’ forced removal of Aboriginal peoples from their lands and of laws that had prohibited the practice of language and customs (Watson, 2015, p. 130). Settler-​ coloniser courts privileged written over oral history, thus embedding coloniser advantage (p. 125). Moreover, this judgment fundamentally mischaracterised Aboriginal people’s connection to land by imposing a British common law interpretation of property. Conversely, as Moreton-​Robinson describes, “[t]‌he relationship between people and their country is synonymous and symbiotic. This is why the connection to land is never broken and why no other Indigenous group claimed or could claim Yorta Yorta country” (2004, para. 12). On 26 May 1997 this was all yet to be played out. Bringing Them Home was received into a Parliament anxious about property claims settlers had always taken for granted. Prime Minister Howard was concerned to limit the challenge the Report, Mabo, and Wik together represented to the happy national story of progress and settler sovereignty. The publication of detailed accounts of First Nations children being removed from their mothers for no better reason than that they were ‘half-​caste’ would, to borrow Howard’s own metaphor, swing the pendulum of public sympathy too far towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. In this context, the following day, 27 May 1997, Howard began the sitting of Parliament by moving to recognise the thirtieth anniversary of the 1967 referendum. The referendum had sought to change two sections of the Constitution that referred to First Peoples: section 51(xxvi), which had bestowed power on the Commonwealth to make laws with respect to “people of any race other than the Aboriginal race in any state, for whom it was deemed necessary to make special laws,” and section 127, which stated that Aboriginal peoples “shall not be counted” in the national census. Before the referendum Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were governed under the jurisdiction of the states, which had enacted oppressive Protection Acts under which children were removed from their families and the living and working arrangements and movements of Aboriginal people were tightly controlled. Over 90% of Australians voted in favour of change, which is the most decisive ‘yes’ vote in Australia’s short history of referenda. Poignantly, the ‘Yes’ campaign’s poster featured a small and vulnerable-​ looking Aboriginal child, unclad, and pictured from the shoulders up (Figure 6.1). The text of the poster, issued by the Federal Council for the

120  Finding ‘Home’ Through the Child

Figure 6.1 A poster for the ‘yes’ case in the 1967 referendum. This image has been determined to be an ‘orphan work’ by State Library of South Australia, from which it was sourced. I reproduce it here in good faith, and encourage the rights owner to contact me should they have a problem with its use in this book.

Finding ‘Home’ Through the Child  121 Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, reads “Right Wrongs, Write Yes for Aborigines! On May 27,” so that the Aboriginal child appears as a synecdoche for all Aboriginal people. In the context of the tabling of Bringing Them Home the previous day, and of the feelings of ‘uncertainty’ expressed by farmers and miners, the government’s motion to recognise the anniversary of this referendum articulated the Liberal Party’s approach to Aboriginal affairs, ironically, as future-​oriented rather than ‘backward-​looking,’ and as practical rather than symbolic. This symbolic gesture was to reinstate the Federal government’s right to intervene in the lives of Aboriginal people through their children, in the guise of what Howard called “practical reconciliation.” Practical reconciliation addresses Indigenous peoples as a mode of bare life, determined by life’s necessities, the lowest levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Aboriginal people were thus understood, as a group, only in terms of ‘disadvantage’ as regards healthcare, employment, and education, which, according to this view, can only be ameliorated through the cultivation of individual responsibility. Howard’s motion deploys the 1967 referendum to this purpose by limiting the use of the race powers to “address the profound economic and social disadvantage continuing to be suffered by indigenous Australians [sic] –​with specific emphasis on practical measures to address health, housing, education, and employment” (Hansard, 27 May 1997, p. 4110). Howard’s speech commending the motion joins the dots between the authority bestowed on his government by the referendum and the enactment of his own brand of neoliberal paternalism:4 If the 1967 referendum was about anything it was about giving power to the Commonwealth government on behalf of the Commonwealth parliament to do practical things to address the disadvantage of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The people of Australia made a judgment in 1967 that the then existing arrangements to assist Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were not working effectively and that they could only be made to work more effectively if the Commonwealth parliament were given the power. (p. 4111) This framing of the purpose of the referendum and what it authorised the Commonwealth to do resonates strongly with Neville’s lamentations about the limits of his powers to control Aboriginal people in Western Australia that we saw in Chapter 5. Neville’s complaint, expressed in both the Canberra Conference and Australia’s Coloured Minority –​that if only the Commonwealth had provided support his programs might have achieved their objective of assimilating Aboriginal people into the white majority –​ had finally found its audience in John Howard. In this case, Howard used the authority conferred by the referendum to draft his ‘Wik 10-​point plan,’ point four of which declared that native title rights would be “permanently

122  Finding ‘Home’ Through the Child extinguished to the extent that those rights are inconsistent with those of the pastoralist” (Commonwealth, 1997). Opposition leader Kim Beazley moved amendments to Howard’s motion to include that “the power conferred on the Commonwealth only be used for the benefit of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people” (Hansard, 27 May 1997, p. 4114). Connecting the referendum’s significance to the Stolen Generations, Beazley’s amendments emphasised the ongoing work of reconciliation and of a national accounting of the history of colonisation and its effects on First Peoples. Howard, conversely, invoked the referendum to establish what would be a lasting position for his government: that there is no place for ‘symbolism’ such as a national apology to the Stolen Generations, because (1) symbols are imaginary and only purely practical actions are real; (2) present-​day citizens cannot be held accountable for the actions of their forebears; and (3) historical settler Australians meant well and any harm their actions caused were unforeseen. Howard’s refusal to offer a national apology to the Stolen Generations and disparagement of symbolism more broadly, together with his emphasis on ‘practical reconciliation’ and neoliberalisation of welfare, culminated a decade later in the NT Intervention, which would reshape life on homelands in the Territory into the present. Despite the potential opening to a real process of national accounting that Beazley’s (defeated) amendments represented, the Labour government following Howard’s did not rise to that occasion. Instead, it rebranded the Intervention with its ‘Stronger Futures’ Legislation. The Bringing Them Home report bore witness to this shift, and even furnished the imagery that would mobilise further intervention into Aboriginal lives through the child. For, despite his remonstrations to the contrary, Howard was a master of symbols. To the extent that he could act against the recommendations of multiple reports while representing those actions as having been taken only at their behest, he mustered the symbolic architecture of Bringing Them Home, as well as the Little Children Are Sacred Report of the Northern Territory Board of inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse (Wild and Anderson, 2007), to achieve very different objects from those reported by the Inquiries.

Bringing Them Home? The Constitutive Homelessness of Aboriginal Childhood in Settler-​Colonial Imagination Bringing Them Home made 54 recommendations to address past and present harms to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families: from acknowledgement and apology by governments, churches, and NGOs with responsibility for implementing policies of separation; to monetary compensation to survivors; to the funding of language, culture, and history centres; to cultural sensitivity and trauma-​informed training of frontline workers; to negotiation with, and support of, Aboriginal-​run bodies (ATSIC, SNAICC, ALS) so that genuine self-​determination may be possible in future decisions regarding

Finding ‘Home’ Through the Child  123 the care and well-​being of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. While members of the government of the time argued against the implementation of recommendations such as formal apologies or the teaching of Aboriginal history on the basis that governments’ focus should be practical reconciliation rather than symbolic, it is worth noting that many practically oriented recommendations were also overlooked. Most notably, solutions under the rubric of ‘self-​determination,’ which would involve negotiating with Aboriginal-​ led organisations and power-​ sharing arrangements with Indigenous peoples, were ignored. For the remainder of their time in government, the coalition dismantled advisory bodies and defunded independent organisations, in favour of a new form of paternalism through the lens of neoliberalism, which culminated in the Emergency Northern Territory Response (2007) legislation and NT Intervention that the Act enabled. It is also worth interrogating progressive responses to the Bringing Them Home report, however, for the mode of affective engagement performed by non-​government members of parliament and senators and how it tempered their responses. This engagement was anticipated by the Report’s authors, who wanted Bringing Them Home to galvanise a sympathetic identification of its readers with the children and family members who gave testimony.5 A feature of the report’s presentation was its inclusion of transcripts of testimony, to bear out the material effects on survivors of particular practices or policies in each state and territory. Senator Cheryl Kernot (Australian Democrats) was the first of several MPs and senators to read testimony from the report into Hansard to protest the government’s refusal to apologise or accept the report’s recommendations. Here she counsels the appropriate cultivation of sentiment that the report should inspire. How can we listen to these stories and turn away with a cold heart? How can we forget the way in which humanity can touch humanity? Are we not parents ourselves? Are we not somebody’s children? How can we deny our humanity and say “Well, it is all their fault”? That is one of the real strengths of this report –​the opportunity to acknowledge, and I think the other choice is to open our hearts and to care. (Hansard, 28 May 1997, p. 3896) Kernot and others emphasise the act of reading the report as itself reparative, as the affective precondition to a process of conciliation, rendering the material compensations to survivors secondary. What is primary, rather, is the production of a disposition, or receptivity: the formation of the kind of subject disposed to act in ways appropriate to the process of reconciliation. [T]‌ he report focuses on reparation, not compensation. I think it is important to note that because reparation involves a multitude of options which may not cost much money. I personally think that we need to set aside financial compensation … But more than anything, I wish the best

124  Finding ‘Home’ Through the Child response to this report will be that people read it, that people listen, that people hear the stories and that they open up their hearts so that they can forgive us –​that true reconciliation is possible and we can start a new century together. (p. 3897) This affective engagement came to be central to progressive non-​Indigenous responses to the report and the identity it had apparently coined, the Stolen Generations.6 The government’s position conversely was summarised by Senator Herron, Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs, when he said, “the government is committed to developing a practical response based on a common-​sense approach that addresses the present and the future” (Hansard, 28 May 1997, p. 3892). While the government’s emphasis lay on a present and future apparently unconditioned by the past –​particularly past injustices at the hands of white settlers –​progressive settler-​coloniser responses tended to focus on the past at the expense of the present and offset by the vision of Australians of all races marching to reconciliation hand in hand over the Sydney Harbour Bridge. That is to say, whereas the last quarter of Bringing Them Home is dedicated to describing and analysing the wrongs of contemporary child protection and carceral systems, the focus of progressive Australians was on historical removals rather than on the way in which the past continues to reverberate through present practices. Moreover, whereas some did read at least selections from the 524-​page report, most non-​Indigenous Australians learned of the Stolen Generations through their consumption of film, television, and children’s literature, which elaborated the histories of removal through emotionally stirring aesthetic works, and so participated in a redrawing of the Australian imaginary to accommodate knowledge of past practices of colonialism within it. The voices of the Stolen Generations would come to be represented in these works, as an object of care, by a novel figure within the settler-​coloniser imaginary: the removed Aboriginal child. As we saw in Chapter 1, the ‘child’ had already become a figure of sympathetic identification through the social and economic shifts precipitated by the industrial revolution. It was hoped that, in identifying with the figure of the removed child –​and the mother from whom the child was taken –​readers would become invested in the effort to seek justice for the Stolen Generations. Rather than condition a practically oriented responsiveness, however, I argue that this identification would be recuperated to the objects of settler colonialism. The Aboriginal child would come to operate as a cipher for the search for home or, more critically, as displacement from home and Indigeneity as homelessness. At the level of the settler-​colonial unconscious, this figure, rather than inspiring a disposition to participate in the struggle for justice and reparation for Indigenous peoples, is instead co-​opted to settler-​colonial fantasies about home and domesticity.

Finding ‘Home’ Through the Child  125 In Chapter 4 we saw the inclusion of a Stolen Generations story, however perversely, in Baz Luhrmann’s Australia, through plot as well as an explanatory intertitle; and, in Chapter 5, Jedda, which prefigures the Stolen Generations storyline, is viewed more knowingly after 1997. The film Rabbit Proof Fence (2001), released in the decade between Bringing Them Home and Prime Minister Rudd’s apology to the Stolen Generations, appeals to its non-​Indigenous Australian audience to imagine the loss experienced by Aboriginal children and parents because of policies of removal, and through that imagining, to modify their dispositions to the nation’s colonial past. It moves the viewer, and through this ‘movement’ seeks to transform them, reorder their sentiments, to predispose them to reconciliation. Rabbit-​Proof Fence Rabbit-​Proof Fence is the film adaptation of Doris Pilkington Garimara’s novel, Follow the Rabbit-​Proof Fence (1996), which creatively retells her mother Molly’s journey in 1931, with her sister and cousin Daisy and Gracie, back home to Jigalong after having been removed from their families and placed into Moore River Native Settlement –​an internment camp near Perth –​under the legal guardianship of Chief Protector A.O. Neville. The film was made in consultation with Pilkington Garimara, and a well-​crafted international publicity campaign emphasised its status as a ‘true story’ of an “extraordinary journey back home” (Screen Australia, 2018). The film brought to life for a non-​Indigenous viewing public the lived experience of children and adults living under the Protection Act (in this case, of Western Australia). At the end of the film footage of Molly and Daisy, by this time elderly women, walking together around their homelands, punctures the mythic dimension of the film, again reminding the viewer that it is a true story. Director Phillip Noyce and screenwriter Christine Olsen also anticipated the ‘real life’ controversy the film would stir up in right-​wing media outlets (which, predictably, questioned the veracity of the story),7 and so incorporated this response into their publicity campaign strategy (Laycock, 2017, pp. 111–​112). Prior to Rabbit-​Proof Fence Noyce had made a handful of films set in Australia (Backroads [1977], Newsfront [1978], Heatwave [1982], Dead Calm [1989]) before enjoying international success for Hollywood productions (Patriot Games [1992], Clear and Present Danger [1994], The Bone Collector [1999]). Rabbit-​Proof Fence was thus for him itself a return home and a departure from the trajectory his career had been taking. He made much of this in media interviews and the narrative that develops about the film’s conception is revealing. As Noyce tells it, he was not attracted to the project initially, eventually yielding to Christine Olsen’s pressure. Noyce says he had been warned that the project would be “box office poison”: [Co]ntent-​wise, the whole idea of going and making a film that would star nobody, no one that anyone had ever known, about a story not many

126  Finding ‘Home’ Through the Child people knew about, that everyone said “don’t do it, you’ll destroy your career,” “no one wants to see black Australians on the screen.” (Urban, 2006) In another interview he discusses how he connected with the subject matter, having grown up in a town in NSW prior to the 1967 referendum alongside “people who officially don’t exist,” or exist like ghosts, as an unacknowledged population (Stratton, 2002). Appreciating its importance, Noyce was mindful that, for the project to be successful, he would also need to render the story palatable to a settler-​coloniser audience: It was very important that in our portrayal of the white characters we didn’t lock “white Australia” out of the story. There were massacres, poisonings and pitch battles fought between Australian Aboriginals and white pastoralists and settlers, but for the most part the Stolen Generation was perpetrated by people who “killed with kindness,” who thought they were doing the right thing. (Stratton, 2002) It is certainly the case that the discourse of assimilation intersected with humanitarian as well as eugenic discourses, as discussed in Chapter 5. It is nonetheless notable that the first and what remains best-​known feature film addressing the Stolen Generations centred the white viewer. Noyce explains that this was necessary so he could position the film as the occasion for reorienting white Australian historical awareness. In the face of box-​office annihilation, then, he describes the film as “a risk,” … but a risk that I think is justified by the moment in history that we find ourselves in because I really do think that white Australia is ready for this film; they want a vehicle that will allow them to reach out and acknowledge the past and move on to the future. (Stratton, 2002) Rabbit-​Proof Fence is thus characterised as a vehicle to transport good colonisers through the critical present moment, to a more just and equal future that would be achieved by acknowledgement and apology. The journey of three Aboriginal girls becomes an allegory for white Australia’s journey to acceptance and recognition of the colonial past. Along the way of this journey, however, the complexity that muddies distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ coloniser threatens to interrupt successful viewing of the film –​itself a metonym for the nation’s transition through truth to reconciliation. Noyce’s publicity campaign was so successful that the litmus test for, and signifier of, the good coloniser had become whether one had seen Rabbit-​Proof Fence and subjected oneself to highly sympathetic scenes of forced child removal.

Finding ‘Home’ Through the Child  127 I have argued elsewhere (regarding Bringing Them Home) that the royal road from sympathetic identification to justice is readily diverted into the self-​soothing appropriation of social others’ stories and investment in their suffering (Faulkner, 2014). Likewise, Tony Hughes-​ D’aeth draws out a connection between “liberal imperatives of empathy” and the discourse of assimilation with reference more specifically to settler-​ coloniser viewers’ engagement with Rabbit-​Proof Fence: The empathetic investment on which the film is so heavily reliant constitutes in my view something of a Trojan Horse. There is no intrinsic thoughtfulness or ‘thinking into’ that is brought about by the use of first-​ person camera shots or other immersive film techniques. The arrogance of the discourse of assimilation can live just as easily within the polite filmic regimes of Hollywood cinema. (Hughes-​D’aeth, 2002, p. 8) Techniques that draw viewers into a sympathetic engagement with Molly, Daisy, and Gracie are successful precisely because they activate the very practices of imagination that supported policies of assimilation in the first place: the impetus to be a good coloniser or white saviourism. First Nations author Tony Birch recalls a scene in the foyer of the cinema where he viewed an advance screening of Rabbit-​Proof Fence, which uncannily exemplifies Hughes-​D’aeth’s concerns: I witnessed what looked like three retired white charity queens in cocktail dresses, about to have their photograph taken with the girls [who had played Molly, Daisy, and Gracie], placed strategically on the knee of each of the overdressed women in an image frighteningly similar to many of those taken over the decades at “half-​caste” institutions across Australia, whereby local members of various ladies’ auxiliaries and church groups would document their “good works” in assisting government institutions. (Birch, 2002, p. 127) Yet, while these identifications give settler viewers room to evade confronting their own complicity, the theme reiterated throughout the film that binds it most to settler fantasy is the idea of home. As Hughes-​D’aeth again points out, Olsen had attempted to fit the story to several Western genres –​the classic fairy tale, the war story –​before eventually coming “to realise that my story/​ Molly’s story was about home” (Olsen, 2002, pp. vii–​viii, quoted in Hughes D’aeth, 2002, p. 3). Leaving aside Olsen’s equivocation between Molly’s story and her own (Faulkner, 2016a, p. 122), her thematisation of it as a story about home not only “echoes the title of the Bringing Them Home report” –​which “is itself invested strategically in the white-​picket fence vision of normality that underpins the Howard years” (Hughes-​D’aeth, 2002, p. 4). Moreover, it self-​consciously invokes a motif Olsen and Noyce designate as “universal”

128  Finding ‘Home’ Through the Child rather than particular to the obscure experience of three Aboriginal girls from the West Australian desert. Rebecca Laycock’s account of the importance of home in Rabbit-​Proof Fence, summarised in her ‘in conversation with Phillip Noyce’ piece, draws out well the stakes of this claim upon universality: [W]‌hat is perhaps most moving about Rabbit-​Proof Fence is that, as viewers, we see beyond the Indigeneity of its protagonists. Noyce broke down barriers and inspired mainstream audiences to become swept up in a story about Aboriginal Australians, allowing the universality of Rabbit-​ Proof Fence’s story to transcend perceived cultural barriers. The film touched the hearts of millions and contributed to much-​needed political discourse; it made viewers feel immense empathy for the children who just wanted to return home. (Laycock, 2017, p. 112) The film’s international success depended on its capacity to touch millions. But there are dangers to generalising Stolen Generations members’ experiences, packaging them as a universal ‘longing for home,’ and then leveraging their particularity into a multimillion-​dollar production with global reach. Noyce’s characterisation of his personal impetus to make the film, as précised by Laycock, highlights the risks of this appeal to universality. It was in the US that he became drawn to the theme of home: upon reading Rabbit-​Proof Fence’s script, he felt Australia –​as his home –​ pulled him back. Noyce muses that, without this deep yearning to find his home again after many years abroad, and to reaffirm it, he would never have started out on the journey of Rabbit-​Proof Fence. He compared it to the yearning that Molly felt when she was all those miles south of Jigalong: “I don’t belong here –​I need to go home.” (Laycock, 2017, p. 112) If nothing else, the breathtakingly problematic equivalence drawn between Noyce’s ‘captivity’ to the Hollywood scene and Molly’s to Moore River Native Settlement reveals the limits of her story’s universality. The story arc of journeying home resonates particularly well in settler colonies such as Australia and the United States, the film’s two key markets. The story of Molly and her companions following the rabbit-​proof fence dimly echoes Dorothy’s journey along the yellow-​brick-​road to find a home from which she has been wrenched by the Wicked Witch of the West (Mr Neville, whom the children call “Mr Devil”). Baz Luhrmann drew heavily on the journeying-​home arc for Australia, even referencing The Wizard of Oz explicitly, and thus internationalising what was promoted as the essential Australian national story.8 As we have seen in previous chapters, however, the story of the child’s journey home traces the desire lines of the settler-​colonial

Finding ‘Home’ Through the Child  129 fantasy. More specifically, the return of the lost child is preceded by an adventure in the bush where an encounter with natives (human or animal) had indigenised them. The child’s return home thus represents the coloniser’s labour to make home of land they have colonised. The appeal of Rabbit-​Proof Fence is that –​despite its status as the true story of the Stolen Generations –​it recapitulates the formation of settler belonging. In its subtext, in the very movement of its story, it plants the flag of settler sovereignty in the settler-​colonial imaginary. For, Rabbit-​Proof Fence is not only or even predominantly a story of the journey home; rather it is a story of loss for First Nations peoples. It is a story of their displacement, and of the attempted destruction of their relationship with place, with home. Precisely in that place of displacement the coloniser settles, albeit with some moral discomfort. Speaking temporally, the story of colonisation is represented as past, an unalterable fact of the nation’s history. We might, like High Court judges, express regret that native title has been extinguished. We might tell ourselves sorrowful stories about the process of its extinguishment –​how the continuity of Indigenous occupation and lore was broken. To become a ‘universal story’ –​a story about home that all may share and with which any may identify –​the story of the Stolen Generations must also be temporally displaced. ‘The children were stolen’ drowns out news that ‘the children continue to be stolen in the present,’ the implication being that contemporary settlers are no less responsible for the Stolen Generations than were their predecessors. Jasper Jones This motif of the Aboriginal child’s displacement from home, or homelessness, also resonates in the more recent book and film, Jasper Jones (Silvey, 2009; Jasper Jones, 2017). Craig Silvey’s second novel transports the reader over 30 years after Rabbit-​Proof Fence to 1965. The referendum has still not taken place and Protection Acts continue to regulate the lives of Aboriginal people, but the anti-​war movement is emerging, and young people (‘baby boomers’) are beginning to question authority and old-​fashioned standards. Jasper Jones is a self-​conscious attempt at ‘the great Australian novel’: Silvey references Mark Twain, Truman Capote, Harper Lee, and the resulting text is a cross between Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird, with an Australian twist. The common thread between these texts is that each centres on the expanding consciousness of a cosseted white child, who grows in proximity to an ‘other’ who is ‘freer’ from social mores, but is also socially excluded. The story is told from the point of view of Charles Bucktin, a 13-​year-​old ‘bookish’ white boy who lives with his parents in a fictitious country town called Corrigan. ‘Charlie’ lives large in his own imagination but had existed beneath the threshold of others’ attention until the book’s eponymous hero, Indigenous boy Jasper Jones, tapped on his window, dragging him from

130  Finding ‘Home’ Through the Child slumber to the scene of local girl Laura Wishart’s death by hanging. Jasper elects Charlie to bear with him the secret of his only friend’s death (and suspected murder by local hermit ‘Mad Jack Lionel’) because he recognises in him a kindred spirit: they are both outsiders. He recruits Charlie –​whose timidity is illustrated by his neurotic internal monologue and fear of insects –​to investigate the death with him. But first they must sink the body into the lake adjoining the place where she was found: it is Jasper’s sacred and secret place, and should the body remain there he will be suspected of her murder. Colluding to conceal the girl’s body binds them to each other, and Charlie anxiously awaits each interaction he and Jasper share; in secret and usually after dark, Jasper comes to his window, and they talk and drink together. Charlie loses an innocence Jasper never had the privilege to own that summer: his mother is first overprotective but by the end of the novel has had an affair and left for the city; Charlie’s awareness of the townsfolks’ racism –​both to Jasper and his best friend Jeffrey Lu –​grows, and he develops a romance with Eliza, Laura Wishart’s sister. As the town’s hysteria about Laura’s disappearance crescendos, and townsfolk hold their children closer, Jasper tells Charlie he plans to leave town, and when he does no one will notice his absence. At the novel’s end it is revealed Laura had committed suicide and that her father –​a big man in Corrigan –​had impregnated her. Eliza sets her house alight in protest of her father’s abuse and mother’s negligence (she disbelieved Laura’s disclosure to her). After some weeks, Charlie is the only person to notice Jasper has left Corrigan. Jasper Jones is a bestselling and critically acclaimed novel and has been included in high school Australian English syllabi to teach literacy, critical thinking, ethical understanding, intercultural understanding, and Aboriginal histories and cultures. It is also often given the moniker of ‘the great Australian novel’ in the ‘Australian gothic’ genre, and thus is seen to capture the hidden and uncanny registers of the Australian national character. It was adapted to film by Rachel Perkins, Arrernte and Kalkadoon woman and daughter of Charles Perkins –​a well-​known activist who organised the Australian ‘Freedom Rides’ of 1965 (the year Jasper Jones was set), a bus tour of NSW that exposed small-​town racism against First Peoples. Rachel Perkins’s endorsement of the novel and its author (Silvey co-​wrote the screenplay) is meaningful. Jasper Jones is also noteworthy, I would contend, as a post-​apology text that further entrenches the significance attached to ‘Aboriginal childhood’ as homeless, and whose displacement gives place to settler sovereignty. It is established early that Jasper’s homelife is volatile: his (white) father is an alcoholic who has never recovered from the loss of Jasper’s mother. Jasper’s secret glade by the river is the only place he feels safe and at home, and Charlie feels its charge, its sacredness, when he is there with Jasper: “It’s always strange to walk in this space. The air is different. Everything is utterly still and timeless” (Silvey, 2009, p. 248). When Charlie is there without Jasper, he notes that he feels he is trespassing.

Finding ‘Home’ Through the Child  131 But it’s strangest tonight, being here with Eliza. Being here without Jasper. It feels like I’m trespassing. It’s so hot and quiet and eerie. It’s emptier without him in it. I get the sensation we’re being watched. (p. 248) It’s so private and sovereign here, so timeless and hushed and sheltered, it’s easy to forget the cold inclemency you’ve stumbled in from … She crawls inside, still holding my hand. I follow, feeling as though I’m encroaching. Like I’m stealing a space that isn’t mine. (p. 266) That Laura has died –​Jasper believes, was murdered there –​invests his place with sorrow and danger. It has been trespassed against by a terrible wrong, like a massacre. Jasper is also troubled by an inscription carved into the enormous Jarrah tree from which Laura was found hanged: ‘Sorry.’ ‘Sorry’ is also scratched onto a deserted car on Mad Jack Lionel’s property –​which adds to Jasper’s ledger of evidence against him. After the apology to the Stolen Generations, it is difficult not to read into this inscription, which was associated from 1997 with the movement for reconciliation. ‘Sorry’ was associated with ‘sorry books,’ banners at protests, and was emblazoned across the sky in skywriting. Its meaning and addressee, the Stolen Generations, was always implied and understood. For Jasper these inscriptions were a perverse sign from his girlfriend’s murderer that they had killed and may kill again. Notably, this parallels the failure of governments after Bringing Them Home and after the national apology to stem the tide of removals of Aboriginal children into state care. As the protest chant goes, “sorry means you don't do it again.” It transpires that Eliza had written ‘sorry’ after witnessing her sister’s suicide; Jack Lionel (Jasper’s grandfather) had scratched ‘sorry’ into the Duco of the car in which Jasper’s mother was accidentally killed years earlier. The authors of this drifting signifier –​‘sorry’ –​mean well, but this word in its abstraction from deed haunts Jasper. Once the mysteries of the apologies and of Laura’s death are solved –​and Charlie has learned to face his fears –​he takes Jasper’s place, both figuratively and literally: he moves through the world as expertly as Jasper, and, with Eliza by his side, assumes a comfort in Jasper’s sacred place: She and I, we go to the glade in the dead of night, like Jasper and Laura before us. I’ve devised a route to her window that means I’m unlikely to get caught. It’s the next best thing to digging a tunnel under Corrigan all the way to her street. I tap the glass with my knuckle like I always dreamed of doing, and she swipes the curtain back, pleased to see me. She even has sunflowers on the windowsill. And we walk together, hand in hand, to that island in the bush, and it no longer feels like we’re trespassing. (p. 283)

132  Finding ‘Home’ Through the Child Jasper’s departure and Charlie’s assumption of his place, his sovereignty, brings Jasper Jones into the fold of other Australian literature that invests the white child with belonging by displacing First Peoples. Once again, the Aboriginal character acts as the white child’s guide into their sovereignty, and then conveniently vacates, emptying the land of their presence.

Family Is Culture On 27 May 2016 –​the day after National Sorry Day –​the NSW Minister for Family and Community Services (FACS)9 commissioned Cobble woman, Professor Megan Davis to conduct an Independent Review of Aboriginal children and young people in out-​of-​home care (OOHC), to examine why Aboriginal children are overrepresented and their numbers increasing in OOHC. The rate of First Nations children to be under permanent care orders in NSW is double that of other states and territories (Allam, 2020b), making the state the most aggressive by a wide margin. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are 11 times more likely than non-​Indigenous children to be in OOHC (Chamberlain et al., 2022, p. 3). Even more disturbingly, this increase is driven by removals shortly after birth (23.5%) or in the first year of a child’s life (Davis, 2019, p. 203), “often with notifications to Child Protection Services (CPS) before the child is born” (Chamberlain et al., 2022, p. 4; Davis, 2019, pp. 184–​203), and without having been subject to risk assessments or given opportunities or support to demonstrate readiness for parenting (Davis, 2019, p. 204). These trends are especially concerning some 20 years after the Bringing Them Home report had warned of the continuity of the Stolen Generations into the present under the guise of mainstream CPS. Davis notes in the review report, Family Is Culture, that Aboriginal organisations have grown sceptical of reviews and commissions of inquiry, as information-​gathering and official apologies have seen little change. For instance, Davis includes entries on seven inquiries and discussion papers in NSW alone since 2007, and six national inquiries into CPS and OOHC since Bringing Them Home; and these lists are not exhaustive. Despite there being ample evidence that government child welfare departments are not serving the interests of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, there is little public scrutiny or pressure on governments, because the Stolen Generations are publicly understood as historical rather than of the present. And this idea is difficult to shift. The response to the Bringing Them Home Report was “sustained and intense.” It generated widespread public, political and media discussion and debate. However, debate about past removals tended to overshadow that relating to the contemporary removal of Indigenous children. As the 1998 Social Justice Report stated, “people find it easier to acknowledge and confront historical wrongs which do not implicate them personally.” (Davis, 2019, p. 11)

Finding ‘Home’ Through the Child  133 For this reason, Davis and her team devoted considerable attention to diagnosing the root causes of CPS intransigence and how this might be addressed. One cause the review team identified is ‘regulatory ritualism.’ Regulatory ritualism refers to an institutional culture that is resistant to change and in which non-​compliance flourishes; staff apply a tick-​box lens to regulations but lose sight of the reasons they are in place. Bureaucracy is a large beast that, we know from the research, takes on a life of its own, with its own practices, norms, and culture. Often this culture can be indifferent or resistant to the intentions of legislators. This means that the regulatory framework –​the laws and policies that govern a bureaucracy –​often compete with, or are neutralised by, the dominant culture of a department. (Davis, 2019, p. xiii) This inertia is cultural, but embodied by individual officers, through what the report characterises as a dulling of their instincts and intuitions, and conformity to the disposition of the group. In CPS the default disposition is risk aversion. In such a culture, removal of children is easier than the careful and deliberate provision of support for families that experience difficulties meeting their child’s material or psychological needs on their own (p. xiv). The report identifies the Aboriginal Child Placement Principle (ACPP),10 specifically, as a policy that CPS workers consistently fail to implement, despite its centrality to Aboriginal self-​determination and remediation strategies recommended repeatedly by reviews and inquiries. With respect to the ACPP, “the outward appearance of compliance –​formal participation in a system of regulation –​shields a culture of non-​compliance” (p. xiv). Failure to apply the ACPP is frequently due to carelessness in identifying children as Aboriginal (Davis, 2019, pp. 258–​264). This reflects the aftereffects of past policies of forced removal for the purpose of assimilation, where non-​ Indigenous Australians don’t see the Aboriginality of fair-​ skinned Aboriginal people. A second cause concerns jurisdiction: child welfare remains the exclusive province of the state and territory governments that implemented policies of removal under Protection Acts repealed after the 1967 referendum. Without a decisive break from past governments and agencies responsible for effecting those removals, detrimental practices continue under other names. While social workers since Bringing Them Home are educated about the effects of intergenerational trauma and high incidence of removal where the parent was also in OOHC, the review found evidence that this information often reinforces decisions to place a child into care rather than conditioning a more critical attitude that would resist such trends. Far from implementing additional precautions and supports for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families, such information is instead weaponised against them and counted as a reason for assumption of care.

134  Finding ‘Home’ Through the Child It is therefore significant that the predominant reason by far given by FACS to remove Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children is ‘neglect,’ a concept that is subjective, historically specific, and highly prone to cultural bias. In its consultations, the review was informed that cultural bias affected the way in which caseworkers approached the assessment of risk with Aboriginal families. For example, one stakeholder noted that “Aboriginal” was often used as a standalone risk factor. Another noted that caseworkers viewed poverty as a risk factor, and equated poverty with abuse. A number of other stakeholders noted that caseworkers assessed risk through their own cultural lens, viewing things that were considered normal for Aboriginal people, such as mattresses on the floor, or “overcrowded” houses as risk factors. (p. 214) The metonymic structure of the settler-​colonial imaginary renders ‘Aboriginal,’ ‘poverty,’ ‘neglect,’ and ‘abuse’ interchangeable. Such bias conditions caseworkers’ decisions to assume Aboriginal children into state care rather than consider less intrusive options such as family conferences or parental responsibility contracts (p. 204, pp. 206–​208). The review noted cases in which the only reasons for removal might have been solved by providing the family with adequate housing (pp. 192–​193). Given that FACS is also responsible for public housing, this is particularly egregious. To the extent that individual staff members are not subject to regulation by professional bodies and so lack accountability (pp. 93–​142), there is scope for prejudices endemic to the Australian settler-​colonial imaginary to override more critical approaches to social work. Yet even if ‘street-​level bureaucrats’ (case workers) do not recognise in their own conduct the actions of ‘Protectors,’ Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families experience strong resonances between the protection-​era past and present-​day CPS practices. When police are used for removal, especially riot police, this has historical continuity. When babies are removed from hospitals or a pre-​natal risk notification is made because a mother is Aboriginal, this has historical continuity. When siblings or twins are separated in care, this has historical continuity. When families reach out to FACS for a carer assessment and are ignored and telephone calls go unreturned, this has historical continuity. When mums and dads are given unrealistic, unachievable goals in order to have their children or grandchildren restored to them, this has historical resonance. (p. xvi) The evidence presented in Family Is Culture strongly suggests that many FACS employees read Aboriginality itself as neglect and Aboriginal children as constitutively neglected.

Finding ‘Home’ Through the Child  135 After the Apology Larissa Behrendt’s feature-​length documentary film After the Apology (2017) dramatises the continuity of removals into the present that Family Is Culture describes.11 It follows the women who worked together to form Grandmothers Against Removals (GMAR) in NSW, which has become a key group working to publicise the failures and inequities of Australia’s child protection systems and bring pressure upon FACS to apply the ACPP.12 The film deploys a number of storytelling techniques to show the despair of families attempting to navigate the system and the hope that community organising can succeed in restoring children to parents and kin. The film shuttles between techniques to build a holistic picture of the extent of systemic discrimination experienced by First Nations families. Line-​drawn animation accompanies the voiced testimony of mothers narrating their child’s removal by police. This mode anonymises the ‘case’ and interacts poetically with the figurative language these women use, to intensify and render concrete their emotional states. The stories demonstrate the findings of the report in a personal register: how the CPS is used to penalise or retaliate against Aboriginal people; incidences of fabrication of evidence in affidavits; interactions of the CPS, health, housing, and legal systems, which brings Aboriginal women under relentless scrutiny of the state; failure to assess kin carers, despite their attempts to contact the department; unfounded allegations by caseworkers derived from racist stereotypes of Aboriginality. These vignettes are connected back to the historical Stolen Generations by the dramatisation of Bringing Them Home testimony that resonates with contemporary removals. As Wiradjuri woman and Member of Parliament Linda Burney says in an interview included in the film, the national apology to the Stolen Generations was “an acknowledgement that [the Stolen Generations’] experiences were real.” It was an important intervention in the national imaginary –​the distribution of the sensible, in Rancière’s terms –​because it brought the existence of those people and the injustice done to them into visibility. It accounted for the part that had had no part. By also bringing the women of GMAR into visibility, After the Apology creates cognitive dissonance in Australians who had assumed that apology had meant the practices it addressed belonged only to the past. A recent statement by then Liberal Prime Minister Scott Morrison demonstrates this assumption, when, on the anniversary of the national apology, he said: “Sorry is not the hardest word to say. The hardest is ‘I forgive you’.” As Aboriginal activists and commentators pointed out, “[f]‌orgiveness requires more than just an apology. It requires action” (Blackwell, 2022). When we reflect on the role the Aboriginal child figure plays in the settler-​ colonial imaginary as essentially displaced, or homeless, it is less surprising than it ought to be that First Nations parents are read by CPS workers as neglectful, their children as neglected. In the final section of this chapter, I draw out this significance of Aboriginal childhood with respect to three

136  Finding ‘Home’ Through the Child media events that took place on the boundary between bureaucracy and popular culture and may go some way to explaining how the race bias of FACS caseworkers is culturally overdetermined.

Saving Children and Infantilising Adults The following vignettes of Australian media’s management of Aboriginal content feature influential women, much like the ‘white charity queens’ of Tony Birch’s anecdote about the preview screening of Rabbit-​Proof Fence. I want to explore two morning television incidents and an opinion piece in a major daily newspaper to highlight their resonances with the eugenic and assimilationist discourses of the mid-​twentieth century. None of these examples diverge radically from the kind of speech in which average settler Australians might engage, and each exposes a thread of racism that runs through settler-​ colonial culture. In March 2018, the host of Sunrise on Channel Seven, Samantha Armytage, and two panellists, Prue MacSween and Ben Davis, discussed, quoting from the network’s Twitter account: Should WHITE families be allowed to adopt abused aboriginal [sic] children? [thinking emoji] One Government Minister thinks so, and it’s causing quite a stir. Currently they can only be placed with relatives or other indigenous [sic] families. (Wilkie, 2021) The all-​white panel had no expertise in child protection or life in Indigenous communities, yet their views were put forthrightly. The panellist to delve deepest into the repository of Australian racism was social commentator Prue MacSween, who responded: Of course, it’s a no brainer as far as I’m concerned. You know, we can’t have another generation of young Indigenous children being abused in this way and this conspiracy of silence and this fabricated PC outlook that, you know, it’s better to leave them in this dangerous environment? I mean it’s just crazy to even contemplate that people could be arguing against this. I mean, we have a responsibility. (Carmody, 2018)13 Later MacSween expanded, “[j]‌ust like the first stolen generation who were taken for their well-​being, we have to do it again, perhaps.” An unquestioned assumption of this discussion was that ‘white’ families are denied the opportunity to foster or adopt Aboriginal children, and –​using unrelated footage of people living in a remote community –​it was implied that child abuse is

Finding ‘Home’ Through the Child  137 a feature of Aboriginal family life. The Seven network later settled a suit for defamation with Yolngu Traditional Owners (Dye, 2019). As Darumbal and South Sea Islander woman and journalist Amy McQuire (2018) pointed out, the sole authority these commentators had to pronounce on this issued from their whiteness. The ACPP, to which the discussion obliquely referred, is in practice not applied with any degree of rigour in most states and territories of Australia. A large proportion of carers of Aboriginal children are already non-​Indigenous. Moreover, MacSween’s screed trades in a common trope of settler ideology: that violence, alcoholism, and abuse are inherent to Aboriginal culture rather than artefacts of intergenerational trauma due to colonisation. Yet historically, as the Bringing Them Home report details at length, abuse of Aboriginal children has also –​even predominantly –​taken place at the hands of settler-​coloniser guardians. Later in the month, after issuing an apology, Sunrise was compelled to air a ‘mea culpa’ panel of Aboriginal experts to educate viewers about the errors of the original panel (Knox, 2018). CEO of Danila Dilba Health Service Olga Havnen, Aboriginal health expert James Ward, and NACCHO Chief Executive Patricia Turner spoke to Armytage’s co-​host David Koche about how the ACPP and CPS work in the Northern Territory. The damage was already done, however, and the ideas that segment had perpetuated are too deeply embedded in settler-​colonial imagination to be dislodged by fact checking. The second incident again rails against the ACPP, although this time through a discourse apparently scrubbed of all reference to race, subtly encoded in a ‘colour-​blind’ discussion of adoption. This episode received no secondary media coverage, but instead slipped into the morass of daytime television unnoticed. In May 2018, the NSW Minister for Families and Community Services (FACS), Pru Goward, appeared on The Today Show (9 Network) with the CEO of Adopt Change, Renée Carter, to discuss a partnership between FACS and Adopt Change, to provide a pipeline of children from OOHC into adoption. For context, Goward’s portfolio included CPS, Social Housing, and the Prevention of Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault. She had previously served as NSW Minister for Women. A disproportionate number of ‘clients’ for these portfolios were Aboriginal and/​or Torres Strait Islander. In June of 2018 she would reject a call from the Aboriginal Child, Family and Community Care State Secretariat (AbSec) to appoint an Aboriginal child and family commissioner, stating that she did not agree with the principle that there should be a separate system for Aboriginal people (Allam, 2018a). This is so even though First Nations families are not well served by the mainstream system –​otherwise their children would not be 11 times more likely than non-​ Indigenous children to be in OOHC. So, while the race of these children was not stated, a high proportion would be Aboriginal and/​or Torres Strait Islander. Moreover, Goward clearly

138  Finding ‘Home’ Through the Child references the Stolen Generations when addressing the “sensitive topic” of adoption, assuring her interviewer that, although “the history of adoption was ugly … we have to remember that now we have open adoption, so that you do have contact with birth parents, there is no stealing of children…” (Goward, 2018a).14 Goward and Carter extoll the virtues of ‘open adoption,’ which theoretically retains the child’s connection to their birth family during the course of their upbringing. Carter says, “there are too many barriers to adoption,” and is explicit that the joint program will divert children from the foster and OOHC system, to increase the supply of children for adoption. Goward continues, “you have to remember that this is about children, and the importance of a child having a family and a home for life, and you can’t do that in the foster system.” Moreover, she says, when children raised in foster care leave at 18 years of age, “so many of them are homeless, many of them go onto lives of unemployment, drug addiction, and repeat the patterns of their parents.” In this highly uncritical seven-​ minute interview, Goward spruiked an idea that was yet to be legislated in NSW. When passed, the Children and Young Persons (Care and Protection) Amendment Bill 2018 would fast-​track adoption without parental consent of children within two years of their being taken into OOHC (Allam, 2018b; Sky News, 2018). Goward’s contemporaneous media appearances waxed lyrical about the “child’s need for a real childhood and a real family” (Goward, 2018a) and a “forever home” (Goward, 2018b). These lofty sentiments concealed a more practical aim, however, for a portfolio beleaguered by statistics showing failures in reducing the number of removals of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in OOHC. For, once a child leaves the OOHC system through adoption, they no longer receive government support for their upkeep and specialist needs, and birth parents’ access is no longer facilitated by providers or regulated by the courts. Adopted First Nations children would also no longer appear as statistics in the CPS, so that the Aboriginality of children taken into CPS is again invisibilised. The third event again involves Goward, who, after retiring from political life, publicised her deep contempt for people for whom she had previously been charged with responsibility as Minister of FACS, by publishing an opinion piece in the Australian Financial Review with the headline: “Why you shouldn’t underestimate the underclass” (Goward, 2021). She is at pains to associate her thinking with George Orwell and with Kenneth Grahame (Wind in the Willows). However, her language to describe the problem of “the proles” resonates most strongly with the eugenic discourse of Galton and Neville. And, like Neville, her rear-​view mirror accounting takes aim at others in the field at cross purposes with her own agenda. Social workers, traditionally good young men and women who thought it would be nice to be kind for a living, despair of their appalling housework,

Finding ‘Home’ Through the Child  139 neglect of their children and, notably, their sharp and unrepentant manner when told to lift their game by the patronising do-​gooder … Despite the billions of dollars governments invest in changing the lives of proles, their number increases. Their birth rates far outstrip those of professional couples and they are now a significant potential contributor to our workforce. While Goward does not refer to race in these passages, she would know that First Peoples are vastly overrepresented within the child protection and social housing portfolios she oversaw.15 Moreover, the correspondence between this text and Neville’s descriptions of ‘half-​castes’ born by ‘natural miscegenation’ is striking. Within the metonymic economy of the settler-​colonial imaginary, given free rein in this opinion article, class readily substitutes for race, and poverty for neglect. Goward thus endorses the association of poverty with neglect that Davis’s inquiry found in caseworkers, whilst also disparaging these same workers as ineffective. Unlike Neville, Goward does not hang her hopes on government’s capacity to ‘breed out the prole.’ The note of optimism she strikes at the end of the piece hangs on the figure of the child nonetheless: So long as we keep looking at the billions of dollars they cost us, we will continue to dislike them, reject them and write them off. Yet, in an age when cultural hegemony is now as strong as it was 70 years ago, only different, never have we needed them more to challenge modern meekism. The child who cried “look at the King” in The Emperor’s New Clothes was surely a member of the underclass. Goward’s praise of the ‘underclass’s’ childlike candour might be mistaken for an expression of admiration; but rather it is a rhetorical device to disparage ‘modern meekism’: in other words, political correctness and ‘do-​gooderism.’ The political current her article taps chooses to discard rather than intervene. And it is to this strain of thought, which represents Aboriginal childhood as an impasse, that we turn to in Chapter 7.

Notes 1 This ratio differs widely between the states and territories, depending on carceral systems and Aboriginal population. In Queensland the ratio is 23 times, in Western Australia 21 times, and South Australia 20 times. In the Northern Territory, with the largest population of Aboriginal people –​and a population that skews young –​ the proportion of Aboriginal children in prison is 43 times that of non-​Indigenous children (Allam 2020a). 2 More about the “raise the age” campaign can be found at www.rais​ethe​age.org.au/​ about (accessed 11 February 2022).

140  Finding ‘Home’ Through the Child 3 Patrick McClure was chairperson of the Reference Group on Welfare Reform, commissioned by the Federal Department of Family and Community Services to provide advice on overhauling the welfare system. Noel Pearson is a prominent Aboriginal lawyer and founder of the Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership, who promotes neoliberal solutions to economic and social problems in Aboriginal communities. Pearson was especially prominent during the Howard Liberal government. 4 For an account of neoliberal paternalism see Soss et al., 2011; and for its use in Australia see Parsell and Marden, 2016, and Staines, 2021. See also Moreton-​ Robinson, 2009, for a discussion of the use of neoliberal policy to discipline First Peoples. 5 The report opens: Grief and loss are the predominant themes of this report. Tenacity and survival are also acknowledged. It is no ordinary report. Much of its subject matter is so personal and intimate that ordinarily it would not be discussed. These matters have only been discussed with the Inquiry with great difficulty and much personal distress. The suffering and the courage of those who have told their stories inspire sensitivity and respect. (HREOC, 1997, p. 4) 6 The term ‘Stolen Generations’ had already existed as far back as the 1980s, coming into circulation in the scholarship of historian Peter Read (2006 [1981]). 7 Andrew Bolt, Piers Akerman, and, later, Keith Windschuttle were the most vehement critics of the film. See Bolt (2002a, 2002b), Akerman (2002), and Windschuttle (2009). 8 See Stephanie Hemelryk Donald (2018) for a comprehensive study of the significance of Dorothy in post-​war cinema, as figurative of the migrant child in search of home. 9 FACS was the acronym used from 2011 until July 2019, when the department was merged with Justice, to become the Department of Communities and Justice (DCJ), unfortunately reflecting the trajectory from OOHC to prison. Prior to 2011, CPS was within the Department of Community Services (DoCS), and so is often still referred to as DoCS by members of the Aboriginal community. I use these terms interchangeably, but will most often refer to FACS, as the department was known during the scope of Davis’s review, which reviewed case files of 1144 children from 1 July 2015 to July 2016. 10 As with other settler-​colonial jurisdictions such as Canada and the United States, in Australia the Aboriginal Child Placement Principle guides government agencies to place Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children whom a court determines cannot remain with their parents first with kin, or with Aboriginal members of their community, or with an Aboriginal carer, before they can be placed in non-​ Indigenous care. Although this principle has been adopted by all jurisdictions in Australia in both legislation and policy, around 35% of children identified as Aboriginal are placed in non-​Indigenous care (AIFS, 2019). The review report states: The ACPP was recognised in the primary child protection statute by our democratically elected legislators as a commitment to keeping Aboriginal children with family. Yet this review has found it is poorly implemented and

Finding ‘Home’ Through the Child  141 misunderstood. The commitment, the language, the implementation of the ACPP is replete with ritualism. Ritualism takes the form of compliance manifest in endlessly changing policies espousing departmental commitment to ACCP, meetings (where minutes are more important than substance), glossy brochures, tick-​ a-​ box forms etc. Despite this, the outward appearance of compliance –​formal participation in a system of regulation –​shields a culture of non-​compliance. (p. xiv. Emphasis added) 11 A preview of the film can be viewed at https://​vimeo.com/​365441​546 (accessed 28 February 2022), and may be available to view in full in Australia on SBS on demand and Kanopy. 12 GMAR has since established branches across the continent. 13 See the video embedded within Carmody (2018). 14 In a separate interview with Peta Credlin on Sky News, Goward criticises the Greens for “scaremongering” and stirring up dissent among Aboriginal people, saying: We know about that Stolen Generation. I know how terrible it was. I have heard and read the stories of what happened to them, and nobody wants to see that again … [it’s] not about the stolen generation, quite the reverse, it’s about preventing another lost generation. (Sky News, 2018) 15 The Independent Review of Out of Home Care in New South Wales Final Report by David Tune (known as the ‘Tune Report’), competed in 2016, had already highlighted the overrepresentation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in NSW CPS. This report was withheld by the NSW government for two years before being released to the public. One of its key findings was that cost blowouts were due to the privatisation of OOHC, through delegation of care arrangements to third-​party providers (Tune, 2016, p. 14). This also has implications for the transparency of OOHC arrangements.

7 En-​Gendering Failure Sexualised Girls, Criminalised Boys, Through the Colonial Apparatus

Conceptions of ‘gender’ are not only culturally and historically specific, but its enforcement has also been a key component of colonisation (McClintock, 1995; Moreton-​Robinson, 1998; Ghosh, 2004; Glenn, 2015). Liz Conor’s scholarship on the vilification of Aboriginal women, Skin Deep, has been critical to understanding the imbrication of gender with colonialism in Australia (Conor, 2016), as has Finding Eliza, where Larissa Behrendt unpicks representations of Indigenous women, examining how ‘white femininity’ was used to malign them (Behrendt, 2016). Gendered violence and the misapplication of culturally specific ideals are common components of colonisation: from rape and sexual slavery (Kidd, 1997; Behrendt, 2016); to naming of Aboriginal women as ‘gins’ or ‘lubras’ (Conor, 2016); to stereotypes of black men either as weak objects of ridicule or oversexualised brutes (Hall, 1997); to white saviour discourses that pit black women against black men (Huggins et al., 1991; Moreton-​Robinson, 1998, 2003; Stringer, 2012). Policies and practices of forced removal also separated children into training and work according to how they were gendered. Colonisers’ imposition of the Western gender binary onto colonised peoples is therefore a dimension of colonial violence. Insofar as a conception of ‘whiteness’ is always already deeply embedding in European notions of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity,’ their enforcement oppresses, setting off a cascade of other binary oppositions that place Indigenous peoples always on the side of repudiation. Where colonial narratives frame white womanhood as civilising, clean, abstemious, and gentle, Indigenous women are often represented as sites of abjection, and as gender failures: savage, slovenly, promiscuous, unwomanly, neglectful. Likewise, Indigenous men receive the repudiated part of colonial masculinity –​the ‘Mr Jekyll’ to white man’s ‘Doctor Hyde’ –​as colonisers’ violence is projected onto their image. Western concepts of gender thus participate in the dehumanising processes of othering with which colonisers authorise themselves to commit violence against colonised peoples. Furthermore, colonisers divide the labour of colonisation according to gendered roles: between the ‘care,’ ‘education,’ and ‘regulation’ of feminine work and the masculine work of ‘intervention,’ ‘retribution,’ and ‘the implementation of common sense.’ DOI: 10.4324/9781003099666-7

En-Gendering Failure Through the Colonial Apparatus  143 While the historical weaponisation of gender conditioned the colonial past, this chapter is concerned with new deployments of ‘white gender’ that expand the scope of settler sovereignty in twenty-​first-​century Australia. The NT Intervention1 rebooted old narratives of white saviourhood that set Indigenous men against Indigenous women and children. Emerging from the ‘ground zero’ of the Intervention are media representations of Aboriginal children as sexualised girls and criminalised boys. Like the Stolen Generations, such depictions sever children from ties to family in settler-​colonial imagination. They are represented as bedraggled piccaninnies and waifs, loose ends of unfinished colonial projects. A figure of especial anxiety is the child subjected to intervention and then found irredeemable: a site of impasse. We saw expressions of this figure in Neville’s and Cecil Cook’s writings, where they were classed as hopeless cases, bad seeds, and (for Cook) candidates for sexual sterilisation. These articulations of the ‘failure to civilise’ are nowadays cast as tragic and in terms of family dysfunction. The tragedy of failure rests on the most vulnerable, and is elaborated in terms of the gender binary and the ideal Malthusian family. They are depicted as boys who will never become breadwinners and girls blighted as objects of attraction. In the words of Pru Goward, the narrative dictates that “many of them go onto lives of unemployment, drug addiction, and repeat the patterns of their parents” (Goward, 2018a). According to this construction, the best these children could hope for would be a form of white rescue that delivers them from their destiny as adult perpetrators or victims of (black) violence. This chapter returns to the Howard government’s refusal of the recommendations of Bringing Them Home to analyse the logics of the Commonwealth’s re-​imposition a decade later of assimilationist policies in the name of the abused Aboriginal child that framed that report. I characterise the intervention as an ‘anthropological/​gynaecological’ machine –​that is, as a device that re-​presents gender as a tool of colonisation. To prepare this argument, I begin with a controversy that was contained to the academic sphere, but which nonetheless rehearsed the moves and divisions played out later by the NT Intervention. Anthropologist Diane Bell’s response to ‘urban’ Aboriginal women represents a new articulation of white saviourism that comes ready to defend itself against the charge of racism. In this case the good coloniser attempts in advance to suspend considerations of race and to neutralise colonisers’ implication in Indigenous poverty and lateral violence, by declaring that so-​called “intra-​racial” rape within Aboriginal communities is “everyone’s business” (Bell, 1989). Some years later, asserting the referendum-​given right to govern Aboriginal people, the Commonwealth would suspend the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 to intervene in a reported epidemic of child abuse in remote NT communities. Following this analysis, I turn to images of Aboriginal childhood in news media that emerge from this ‘crisis,’ to examine their representation as gender failures.

144  En-Gendering Failure Through the Colonial Apparatus

What ‘We’ Speak about When ‘We’ Speak about Rape In 1989 feminist anthropologist Diane Bell published an article in a women’s studies journal called “Speaking about Rape Is Everyone’s Business.” Bell claimed to speak with the authority of traditional Aboriginal woman Topsy Napurrula Nelson, who was impatient for action about the rape of women in her community by Aboriginal men, and so, according to Bell, “instructed” her to publicise that situation (Bell, 1989, p. 404). Bell lists Nelson as her collaborator and co-​author, despite it being clear she was, rather, a “chief informant” (Huggins et al., 1991) –​who likely was not appraised of her audience, or of the specific professional interests or agenda of a white feminist academic working at an American university. Bell articulates these interests in a way that is legible to other academics but is almost certainly not clear to women living on homelands for whom English is a second or third language. Until recently intra-​racial rape has been a taboo topic for those who advocate self determination and self management; it places radical feminists at logger heads with both socialist feminists and the broad left; it generates charges of giving sexism priority over racism from black activists, of opportunistic whites creating new divisions within the Aboriginal community –​a fraught area indeed. But who speaks of the anguish, shame and risk for the Aboriginal women victims? (Bell, 1989, p. 404) As she prepared to publish her work Bell anticipated censure, writing of the silence and ‘taboo’ surrounding rape in Aboriginal communities, and the bravery of speaking up in a chilling atmosphere of cultural relativism that excuses rape by appealing to traditional customs. She also anticipated the charge of being an ‘opportunistic white’ ‘creating new divisions within the Aboriginal community.’ As a radical feminist, Bell rests her authority to speak on the shared ground of ‘womanhood’ –​and particularly, the situation shared by women of being vulnerable to rape by men.2 This trumps race or class, according to Bell, who ventriloquises Nelson throughout her paper, establishing her authority to speak. For instance, she relates a conference panel at which she presented a prior version of the paper with Nelson, on the topic ‘white women writing about black women.’ Significantly, in her retelling of their ‘hostile’ reception (the audience included Audre Lorde, Jackie Huggins, and Jo Willmot), Bell positions Nelson as a shield for criticism directed at herself: Topsy, facing hostile urban Aboriginal and radical black American women, explained it was the quality of the relationships that individuals might form which provided the bridge. In our case, woman to woman, Topsy explained, we shared concerns about our children, our families, our safety, our place, our work. (p. 405)

En-Gendering Failure Through the Colonial Apparatus  145 When the piece was published in the Women’s Studies International Forum, and –​excepting the defensive stance of the piece –​without consideration of the critique Bell had received at the conference, a group of 12 Aboriginal women wrote to the journal’s editor to express their anger and distress. Noting the rhetorical tactic through which Bell had marginalised their voices –​by referring to them as “hostile” and “urban” –​Huggins et al. then stated their key grievance: the claim of the article’s title, that the rape of Aboriginal women can and should be ‘everyone’s’ business. Rather, they argued, though a matter of urgency, there are cultural protocols for speaking and acting on rape within the community, established over millennia; and in the context of colonisation, calling for the intervention of white law would likely do more harm than good. They characterise Bell’s gesture in claiming ‘everyone’s business’ as itself a signature of colonial imperialism: We dispute the central proposition that rape is “everyone’s business.” What this reflects is white imperialism of others’ cultures which are theirs to appropriate, criticise and castigate. One may well see rape as being everyone’s business from a privileged white, middle-​class perspective, however, when you are black and powerless it is a different story. Blacks have to face the individual, communal and societal consequences that whites don’t have to endure. (Huggins et al., 1991, p. 506) More specifically, they pinpoint the issue core to Bell’s intervention and their profound discomfort with it: that the way in which she positions herself is continuous with the role of white women as agents of colonisation from the colony’s first establishment –​maintaining colonialism’s moral veneer while exploiting the bodies of black women. For this reason, Huggins et al. do not find an easy solidarity with white women, particularly where they present themselves as saviours. We realise that our internal conflicts have been exacerbated by colonisation and white women have always been a part of that process. So just because you are women doesn’t mean you are necessarily innocent. You were, and still are, part of that colonising force. Our country was colonised on both a racially and sexually imperialistic base. In many cases our women considered white women worse than men in their treatment of Aboriginal women, particularly in the domestic service field. (Ibid.) The authority Bell claims rests on the elision of her position within the colonial structure. It also necessitates the invention, in settler-​colonial imagination, of an apolitical space –​a sphere of bare life –​in which only aggressors and their victims exist, and whose saviours intervene from without that hermetic realm instead of owning to the complications of complicity. The apparent

146  En-Gendering Failure Through the Colonial Apparatus simplicity of Bell’s appeal speaks directly to the imperatives of settler-​colonial fantasy. Her failure to reflect on her own part within the structure of settler colonialism, and her enthusiasm to conflate the diverse experiences of white and Indigenous women, disqualifies her from speaking on their behalf. Tiddas Speak Up: Moreton-​Robinson’s Intervention Aileen Moreton-​Robinson has provided the most incisive analysis of these texts and their contexts: from Bell’s use of the adjective ‘hostile’ to discredit her interlocutors; to the editors who cited legal issues to delay publishing the letter, belittled it as unscholarly, and marshalled a wrap-​around defence of Bell with which to include it; to the use of white women’s privilege to speak authoritatively “on the limitation and extent of Indigenous women’s intellectual capacities” (where Bell criticises their aversion to radical feminist theory); to the meaning of ‘representation’ and its complications when the ‘represented’ and ‘representative’ occupy different positions in relations of power (Moreton-​Robinson, 2003). I return to this last question in Chapter 8. Moreton-​Robinson (1998) has written more broadly about the special part of white women in colonisation, and the groundlessness of their claim to ‘speak for’ First Nations women. Addressing the role of female anthropologists in the objectification of Aboriginal women, Moreton-​Robinson critiques their use of problematic dichotomies and measures of authenticity such as ‘traditional’ versus ‘contemporary’ or ‘urban.’ These dichotomies, she argues, conflate culture and biology, conserving classifications with which colonisers historically alienated Indigenous peoples: where ‘traditional’ is code for ‘full-​blood’; ‘contemporary’ or ‘urban’ for the contemptible ‘half-​caste.’ As Moreton-​Robinson writes, this “methodology allows for an illusory absence of colonisation which is nevertheless preserved” (1998, p. 277). In this way, it very much does matter ‘who’ speaks for ‘whom’ and about what. The special pleading for the case of ‘intra-​racial rape’ (itself a term that borders on eugenicist) is an attempt to create “an illusory absence of colonisation,” and in so doing produce afresh the conditions of ‘rescue’ under which imperialism thrives. A third essay by Moreton-​ Robinson (2009) addresses the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER); and here the correspondences in rationale for intervention are rendered most clearly. In the case of the NTER, Diane Bell’s equivalent was Nanette Rogers, a public prosecutor credited with having ‘broken the silence’ about widespread child rape in remote Aboriginal communities.3 Rogers had appeared on the national television broadcaster’s flagship news programme, Lateline, airing essentialising stereotypes of Aboriginal culture as violently patriarchal, archaic, and resistant to critique and change. For instance, when asked why she thought there had been a long silence about the rape of children and babies, Rogers responded:

En-Gendering Failure Through the Colonial Apparatus  147 The first [reason] is that violence is entrenched in a lot of aspects of Aboriginal society here. Secondly, Aboriginal people choose not to take responsibility for their own actions. Thirdly, Aboriginal society is very punitive so that if a report is made or a statement is made implicating an offender then that potential witness is subject to harassment, intimidation and sometimes physical assault if the offender gets into trouble because of that report or police statement. (Jones, 2006) Paraphrasing Bell’s invocation that ‘intra-​racial’ rape is “everyone’s business,” Rogers says, “I feel very strongly that everybody needs to know about [child rape].” As Moreton-​ Robinson points out, however, it is not only Indigenous cultures that are secretive about sex abuse. Rather, “sexual abuse operates through repression … silence operates as part of the cycle of sexual abuse in white communities whether they are remote, rural or suburban; it is not openly discussed, easily reported or prosecuted” (Moreton-​Robinson, 2009, p. 71). As the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2013–​2017) demonstrated, child sexual abuse is endemic within the broader Australian population. Yet, the government response to rumours of abuse within First Nations groups led to interventions affecting entire communities and attributed criminal behaviours to individuals based on race and culture: Child sexual abuse in white homes is dealt with by government as though it is something aberrant that requires intervention on an individual case-​by-​case model. There is no intervention into the whole community where the perpetrators reside; instead, the civil rights of perpetrators are respected. In contrast, child sexual abuse is treated as being normative within Indigenous communities, requiring everyone to be placed under surveillance, scrutinised and punished. In this way the receipt of welfare payments, which is a social right, enables the regulation and disciplining of Indigenous people at the margins of Australian society. (p. 71) As Moreton-​Robinson argues, the NT Intervention represents the ultimate extension of a process of the rolling back of gains in Indigenous rights to land and self-​determination by the Commonwealth, through strategies of racialisation and by pathologising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and organisations (2009, pp. 66–​67).4 Moreton-​Robinson argues the mechanism of this pathologisation is the declaration of a ‘state of exception’: “The crisis [of rampant child abuse] was constructed as something extraordinary and aberrant requiring new governmental measures” (2009, p. 61).

148  En-Gendering Failure Through the Colonial Apparatus The use of the term “emergency response” by government signified that it was life or death situation requiring a response out of necessity; it was a state of exception … The discourse of Indigenous pathology provided the rationale for the containment of people within specific regulated areas and the Northern Territory became the new laboratory for an experiment in Indigenous civility. (Moreton-​Robinson, 2009, p. 68) Agamben’s theorisation of the state of exception as the site of production of ‘bare life’ provides a useful frame for understanding the NTER. The public was already conditioned to the creation of zones of exception in the context of the ‘war on terror.’ Moreton-​Robinson’s discussion of the NT Intervention as a ‘race war’ draws out parallels between strategies of power and modes of governance through which a class of person (an exception) is abandoned and scapegoated. Yet, importantly, Moreton-​Robinson argues this exception is only a new iteration of the same colonial logics that establish settler sovereignty through the production of terra nullius. And the characterisation of the Indigene (particularly the Indigenous child) as homo sacer, deprived of a form of life –​culture, language, identity –​was underway in Australia long before the Intervention.5

‘To Stabilise and Protect’ Prime Minister Howard responded to these reports of abuse by inaugurating a military response predicated on making an exception of black people living on homelands in the NT. This response was prefigured by global responses to the threat of terrorism. On the coattails of the US Patriot Act, the government legislated special measures that involved stripping civil rights from othered minorities. However, this shift in argot also obscures embedded racial tropes that connect Australia’s present to its past. The NTER brought to light the NT’s status as the colonial frontier: with over 30% of its population identifying as Aboriginal and/​or Torres Strait Islander (AIHW, 2020) the fact of colonisation is foregrounded there rather than invisibilised and forgotten. For many Australians, the NT is synonymous with Indigeneity, as the place where Aboriginal people live. Those who live in cities and suburbs are invisible. I want to take time in this section to read closely a speech Howard presented to the Sydney Institute: ‘To Stabilise and Protect.’ The speech represents his attempt to persuade Australians to support radical interventions in the NT he would seek to pass into legislation. This effort was largely successful, as vocal opposition to the NTER legislation came only from Aboriginal-​run NGOs, the United Nations special rapporteur, and some non-​Indigenous allies. The legislation subsequently received bi-​ partisan support in both houses of Parliament. The speech is a study in political communication and dog whistling, rallying a righteousness that forced any opponent onto the side of ‘dithering lotus-​eaters’ and ‘paedophiles.’

En-Gendering Failure Through the Colonial Apparatus  149 Howard began by referencing Australians’ sense of patriotism, before juxtaposing the nation’s ‘richness and beauty’ to the plight of children. Disavowing racist intent, Howard set the stage to galvanise in Australians a special sense of duty towards Indigenous children –​to reawaken the white man’s burden, the colonial imperative to civilise. Referring to the Commonwealth as the collective will of the people in a manner that strangely both includes and excludes First Peoples, Howard echoed Bell, arguing that intervention in child abuse is everyone’s business –​even and especially when those abused are Aboriginal: Tonight, in our rich and beautiful country, there are children living out a Hobbesian nightmare of violence, abuse and neglect. Many are in remote Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory. To recognise this is not racist. It’s simply an empirical fact. If anything, our duty of care is greater because of who and where they are. (Howard, 2007, p. 69) The reference to a “Hobbesian nightmare of violence” characterised NT homeland communities as lawless, dangerous spaces, invoking the philosopher’s hypothesis of the ‘state of nature’ that precedes institution of laws and precipitates the conferral of sovereignty to a king. That Howard harnessed his gambit to Hobbes rather than Locke or Rousseau is significant. Whereas Locke’s state of nature conjures idylls of families tilling earth together (images with which settler colonisers readily identify), and Rousseau’s state of nature idealises the freedom and solitude of the rugged individual, Hobbes’s state of nature is intolerable: a war of all against all. The state of nature exposes its residents to perpetual threat of death: “the limitless right of everybody over everything” (Agamben, 2000, p. 5). They are drawn to contract away their freedoms to the sovereign by fear of imminent death. Howard thus characterised the coexistence of native title with farming and mining rights as an intolerable “limitless right of everybody over everything,” and positioned himself as sovereign, bringer of law and peace, but whose authority rested on their agreement to divest individual rights to the Commonwealth. This invocation of Hobbes speaks to the degree of threat Howard saw native title to represent. The sovereign brooks no rival: his power must be absolute. Reference to Hobbes also prepared the ground for state intrusion into the lives of a cohort of the community. The Racial Discrimination Act 1975 would be suspended to implement the emergency response. The theatre of national emergency included the spectacle of army and police personnel, seconded from other states, so that remote communities looked like militarised zones. Howard suppressed criticism of the legislation by characterising the dissent he anticipated as highfalutin pontification. He positioned himself, in contrast, as a man of action. We can debate root causes until the cows come home. Governments and NGOs at all levels can consult and search for a cherished consensus on

150  En-Gendering Failure Through the Colonial Apparatus what to do and the order in which to do it. We could all declare with abject timidity that by 2020 indigenous [sic] and other Australians should all be equal. Frankly, that would be the easiest thing in the world. We can do all this in the sure knowledge that, without urgent action to restore social order, the nightmare will go on –​ more grog, more violence, more pornography and more sexual abuse –​as the generation we’re supposed to save sinks further into the abyss. (Howard, 2007, p. 69) This diversion from ‘root causes’ achieved three aims. First, it neutralised opposition to his NTER legislation, positioning his response as morally urgent and more efficient than consultation with Indigenous communities. Second, consistent with his approach to Bringing Them Home, it was ‘forward-​ looking,’ avoiding acknowledgement of unsavoury truths about Australia’s history. Third, separating abuse from its causes gave the impression of dysfunction of First Peoples rather than of the state. More subtly than Nanette Rogers, Howard exploited the equivalence in many Australians’ minds of Aboriginality with addiction, violence, and abuse. Careful not to attribute these values to Aboriginal culture, Howard focussed instead on ‘welfare dependence’ (used as a proxy for Aboriginality). The NTER would introduce neoliberal welfare reform to homelands before expanding it to other populations. As Moreton-​Robinson writes, the NT is a “laboratory for an experiment in Indigenous civility” (2009, p. 68). It is the state of exception in which “patriarchal white sovereignty” performs its drills. Howard positioned the Intervention as beyond politics, and himself above the fray in which other politicians become enmired: “If people want to interpret this as a political act so be it. I’ll cop those accusations if it galvanises all governments and responsible authorities into action.” Referring to the 1967 referendum, he represented political rights of self-​determination and to land as in conflict with Indigenous people’s well-​being: We should not lose sight of progress that is being made, slow and uneven as it is. Just a month ago, our nation recognised the generation of patriots who pricked our national conscience 40 years ago and inspired the most resoundingly successful referendum ever in Australia. I said then that the right of an Aboriginal Australian to live on remote communal land is no right at all if accompanied by grinding poverty, overcrowding, poor health, community violence and alienation from mainstream society. (Howard, 2007, p. 75) Characterising political claims as impractical and abstract in relation to food and security reduces Aboriginality to bare life. This would become a well-​ rehearsed argument for Australian conservatives after the Intervention. Howard concluded by declaring that Australia is a post-​racial society, as if there could be no racism where race were not acknowledged. Buried within

En-Gendering Failure Through the Colonial Apparatus  151 this frame Howard’s true target is native title and the implications of the Mabo and Wik decisions. As discussed in Chapter 6, Howard’s first concern a decade earlier was that native title should not coexist with the rights of pastoralists and miners. When he says, “[a]‌truly colour-​blind society must recognise that Reconciliation has little meaning in a narrative of separateness from that society” (Howard, 2007, p. 76), ‘separateness’ refers to a rival sovereignty, with its own laws and authority. For the Howard government, sovereignty was a zero-​sum game. Howard’s ‘Hobbesian nightmare’ was the coexistence of crown and native title, which symbolised for him a war of all against all. Interwoven throughout the speech are melancholic references to the lost childhoods of Aboriginal children, as the noble justification for the illiberal and spectacular assertion of sovereign power the government was about to launch. With the above considerations in mind, the subconscious connection in settler-​colonial imagination between the image of the Aboriginal child and the challenge to settler sovereignty rises to the surface of Howard’s discourse: This is not an Aboriginal problem or a Northern Territory problem. It’s an Australian problem that calls for national leadership. I believe the Australian Government’s obligation to the vulnerable Indigenous children of the Northern Territory is clear, compelling and paramount. Where possible, it’s to give them the chance of a childhood and some hope for the future. (Howard, 2007, pp. 69–​70) It’s largely been hidden from the public –​in part by a permit system in the NT that kept communities out of view and out of mind. ... At least in the near term, I believe the level of extreme social breakdown in some communities demands a highly prescriptive approach centred, in the first phase, on restoring law and order. Freedoms and rights, especially for women and children, are little more than cruel fictions without the rule of law and some semblance of social order enforced by legitimate authority. (Howard, 2007, pp. 70–​71. Emphasis added) A truly colour-​blind society must recognise that we are dealing in this crisis with a group of young Australians for whom the concept of childhood innocence has never been present. And on that basis, a truly colour-​blind society must take exceptional measures to deal with an exceptionally tragic situation. (Howard, 2007, p. 76. Emphasis added) Yet the supposed catalyst for the NTER plan –​Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle “Little Children Are Sacred” –​was hardly reflected in the legislation. Little Children Are Sacred was the Report of the Northern Territory Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse 2007, steered by Rex Wild QC and Alyawarre woman Pat Anderson.

152  En-Gendering Failure Through the Colonial Apparatus Each has since published accounts of their dismay at the Commonwealth’s ‘response’ to that report (Wild, 2007; Anderson, 2011, 2015). Howard and Minister for Aboriginal Affairs Mal Brough did not engage with its diagnosis of these problems, which cites poverty and the impact of “past forced separation of Indigenous children from their families and communities that has resulted in a loss of parenting skills” (Wild and Anderson, 2007, p. 224). Nor did they refer to the report’s recommendations, which emphasise “genuine consultation with Aboriginal people in designing initiatives for Aboriginal communities” (p. 22), and early intervention and support to families to prevent cases of abuse and neglect, rather than more intrusive forms of emergency intervention (pp. 23, 97–​105). Anderson’s assessment of the legislation’s capacity to respond to the issues in the report is summarised: “CONCERN PLUS IGNORANCE EQUALS PATERNALISM” (Anderson, 2015, p. 38. Capitalised in original). Under the NTER legislation, restrictions were imposed on Indigenous people living in prescribed communities, including the prohibition of alcohol and pornography, strict controls over spending of welfare payments to all Aboriginal recipients, linking of income support to children’s attendance of school, compulsory acquisition of townships, termination of the permit system through which communities could regulate access to land (depicted as antagonistic to the state’s capacity to protect children), and the introduction of market rents and tenancy agreements. Some First Nations commentators drew a connection between these measures and mining interests, as access to land had been stymied by the permit system (Turner and Watson, 2007; see also Stringer, 2007). Given Howard’s resolute focus after Wik on pastoral and mining interests, and the indifference of governments to past calls for support of families dealing with intimate violence in communities (Atkinson, 1990; Robertson, 2000; see also Atkinson, 2007), it does not seem far-​fetched that he would fashion a “Trojan horse” from this legislation. This suspicion is reinforced by the paucity of reference to the report that was supposed to have galvanised the federal response. As Behrendt notes, the Intervention and discourse surrounding it “overlooked … the fact [raised in Little Children Are Sacred] that a large number of perpetrators of abuse of Aboriginal children were non-​Aboriginal” (Behrendt, 2015, p. 67). There was no increase in prosecutions for child abuse after the NTER’s implementation (Anthony, 2009, pp. 95–​96), suggesting that the Intervention was at least ineffective in what it purported to achieve, and perhaps even designed to produce other outcomes: shaping the “good Indigenous citizen” (Moreton-​ Robinson, 2009) by assimilating NT Indigenous people to settler-​Australian culture through their relationship to land and property (Turner and Watson, 2007; Keenan, 2013), undermining processes of self-​determination and cultural integrity (Anaya, 2010, pp. 4 and 6) –​even opening land up for mining (Stringer, 2007; Watson, 2009a, p. 46). Most controversial were compulsory health checks of children for evidence of abuse. This announcement attracted criticism from health professionals on

En-Gendering Failure Through the Colonial Apparatus  153 the basis that the government’s purpose for the checks was forensic rather than for health reasons and would likely traumatise children (Fogarty et al., 2018, p. 24). Subsequent reports noted the deficit of policy development process and consultation with relevant bodies and departments such as the Department of Health and Aging (Fogarty et al., 2018, p. 25; Allen and Clarke, 2011, pp. 6 and 44). This led some to conclude that the NTER was “motivated by political interests rather than by the development of appropriate policies to address child abuse” (Fogerty et al., 2018, p. 25). After pressure from medical peak bodies health checks became voluntary. It is certainly true that the ‘targets’ of power in the NTER were First Nations adults, who felt racialised, pathologised, criminalised, and traumatised by the blanket application of measures and allegations of abuse and paedophilia (Djiniyini et al., 2015). For the remainder of this chapter, however, I turn to the way in which this legislation targeted Aboriginal children and childhood as sites of biopower using gendered and racialised tropes. The Intervention constructed the Aboriginal child as abused and potential abuser, at once a site of sympathy and antipathy, through which settler Australians measured their own humanity. Their vulnerability was charged with urgency because they were ideal vessels for the further development of techniques of colonial power and articulation of settler-​colonial identity. Neoliberal ideology and the language of personal responsibility provided the modes of assimilation, but its means were crude and sometimes brutal: the detention centre and the health check.

The Intervention as Anthropological/​Gynaecological Machine Following Moreton-​Robinson’s elaboration of the NTER as a state of exception through which the “good Indigenous citizen” is imagined, I will draw further on Agamben’s work to articulate how the Intervention developed the image of the Aboriginal child in settler-​ colonial imagination. First, I modify Agamben’s concept of the ‘anthropological machine’ to draw out the implications for gendered representations of Aboriginal childhood. Second, I draw on Agamben’s account of consecration and profanation to analyse cultural differences in significances of the phrase: Little Children Are Sacred. This deepens understanding of how the Aboriginal child image supports the latest iteration of colonialism in Australia. Apparatus The anthropological machine is an example of what Foucault called a dispositif or apparatus. As it responds to a crisis or urgency, Foucault says, … the nature of an apparatus is essentially strategic … we are speaking about a certain manipulation of relations of forces of a rational and concrete intervention in the relation of forces, wither so as to develop them

154  En-Gendering Failure Through the Colonial Apparatus in a particular direction, or to block them, to stabilize them, and to utilize them. The apparatus is thus always inscribed into a play of power, but it is also always linked to certain limits of knowledge that arise from it and, to an equal degree, condition it. The apparatus is precisely this: a set of strategies of the relations of forces supporting, and supported by, certain types of knowledge. (Foucault, 1980, pp. 194–​196; quoted in Agamben, 2009, p. 2) For Agamben, the apparatus is “the network that is established between [heterogenous] elements” (2009, p. 3) –​such as institutions, laws, discourses, etc. –​which shapes and captures ‘subjects.’ I shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviour, opinions, or discourses of living beings … I call a subject that which results from the relation and, so to speak, from the relentless fight between living beings and apparatuses. (Agamben, 2009, p. 14) We can see already how the Intervention forms and captures the subjectivity of Aboriginal people living on homelands by restructuring their lives at a granular level (Moreton-​Robinson, 2009). Through laws and prohibitions, by quarantining income, through work-​for-​the-​dole schemes, by scrapping the permit system and introducing market rents and tenancy agreements, and by linking welfare payments to school attendance, the apparatus of the Intervention-​served government strategies to ‘civilise’ First Peoples who had retained cultural ways and language, and for whom property and education had meanings incongruous with the majority of contemporary Australia. Where the Protector systems failed to capture First Peoples living in NT, the Intervention was designed to override the traditional cultural apparatus of relational systems of kinship and obligations to land and ancestors, by reordering the subjectivity of people living on homelands. While the ‘crisis’ was ostensibly child sexual abuse, the urgency this assemblage of strategies addressed, rather, concerned suppression of a rival sovereignty. Its strategic objective was to produce a subjectivity responsive to the values and aims of settler sovereignty. The state of emergency to which the Intervention responds is the artificial space –​or laboratory (Moreton-​Robinson, 2009, p. 68) –​to produce bare life. Agamben argues, state (settler) sovereignty asserts itself “only by separating in every context naked [bare] life form its form[-​of-​life]” (2000, p. 11), that is, by separating in each individual a notional corporeal life of animal needs and desires from a life shaped by meaning-​giving political, social, and familial cultures. In this way, the state of nature does not precede the social contract, as Howard (via Hobbes) had suggested; rather, the state (sovereign) produces a state of nature ipso facto through the threat to exclude or expose life to

En-Gendering Failure Through the Colonial Apparatus  155 death. The Intervention produces Indigeneity as bare life, as an example to all Australians, who see their own bare life reflected in ‘the Indigene.’ Sensational media imagery of Indigenous life in the NT stages a white settler-​colonial fantasy of violence and abuse, victim and abused, through which colonisers’ bare life –​their own vulnerability –​is objectified and set apart, projected onto the Aboriginal other. Settler sovereignty gives the fantasy of life stripped of its form to extract compliance; to produce docile bodies, that is, “bodies that assume their identity and their ‘freedom’ as subjects in the very process of their desubjectification” (Agamben, 2009, pp. 19–​20). In the absence of docile bodies, the apparatus cannot govern, but rather, “is reduced to a mere exercise of violence” (p. 19). The Anthropological Machine As apparatus, Agamben’s concept of the ‘anthropological machine,’ specifically, produces the modern subject by articulating the difference, so critical to Western notions of sovereignty, between ‘human’ and (non-​human) ‘animal.’ While a great deal is invested in this difference, the urgency to which the anthropological machine responds concerns an inherent ambiguity between human and animal. According to eighteenth-​century biologist Carl Linnaeus, Agamben writes, “man has no specific identity other than the ability to recognize himself ” (2004, p. 26). Put in Agamben’s terms, the taxological category “Homo sapiens … is neither a clearly defined species nor a substance; it is, rather, a machine or device for producing the recognition of the human” (ibid.). The puzzle to Linnaeus and his contemporaries formulated as the difference between human and animal was an abstract expression of the internal separation that produces bare life. Whereas apes appear human-​like but were understood as missing something essential –​a soul, language, or reason –​conversely, the enfant sauvage (feral child) that so fascinated moderns produced ambiguity in the other direction. As a point of opacity between man and beast, enfants sauvages were studied as human life without the specific quality that gave them to be human: naked life, reduced to its animal function. But, “[i]‌n identifying himself with language,” against the ape or the feral child, “the speaking man places his own muteness outside of himself, as already and not yet human” (pp. 34–​35). The other rendered as bare life carries the burden of the subject’s vulnerability. The anthropological machine is the network of knowledges, institutions, and practices that separates human from ‘inhuman,’ psyche from body, speech from voice, form-​of-​life from bare life. As anthropological machine, the Intervention produced a spectacle of bare life through which settler-​colonial Australians could enjoy the separation of bare life as an assertion of sovereignty. The declaration of national emergency was a strategy through which colonialism replenished itself –​gaining a lease of life fed on imagery of abused Aboriginal women and children, violent Aboriginal men, all reduced to naked existence –​bare life.

156  En-Gendering Failure Through the Colonial Apparatus Storm in a Hermetically Sealed Teacup In 2006 a series of events sparked the media conflagration that would precipitate the NTER. In May, Crown prosecutor Nanette Rogers presented a ‘dossier’ to police, followed by an interview on ABC’s Lateline programme, detailing claims of widespread and serious sexual abuse of children and women in Aboriginal communities (ABC, 2006). Rogers levelled accusations of violence and secrecy at the culture of homeland communities in the NT and traditional culture more broadly: TONY JONES (HOST):  Let

me ask you this –​It’s an almost impossible question to ask a prosecutor and I appreciate that before I start –​how do you actually deal with this without pulling apart the traditional culture which is sustaining it? NANETTE ROGERS: Well, I think it’s important to recognise that sometimes Aboriginal culture practices do not benefit the victim. They benefit, more often than not, the offender, and if it means criticising those Aboriginal practices that constrain victims or witnesses from giving evidence and ensure the ability of the offender to keep behaving in exactly that same way then why should there be an Aboriginal cultural practice that sustains that? (ABC, 2006)6 As interviewer Tony Jones summarised for her: “there is a sort of propensity to silence on this these [sic] issues built into the culture.” “Entrenched violence,” they muse, gives place to a culture of “malaise.” Conversely, Rogers would not be silenced, speaking at length about acts of violence and rape, drug abuse, petrol sniffing, and intoxication of offenders and victims, in terms both lurid and sordid. The narrative is graphic and technical, reminiscent of a Marquis de Sade text, and, like Sade’s narrators, Rogers and Jones took time to confer and evaluate, as concerned onlookers. TONY JONES:  It’s

almost incomprehensible. I mean, they were throwing rocks at him, they were yell–​ng at him -​he didn’t stop? NANETTE ROGERS:  No, it was awful, absolutely dreadful. Rogers’s reference to a highly punitive culture of secrecy provided scope for slippage regarding the evidentiary basis for the claim that child sexual abuse was widespread in communities. For instance, when asked if cases of paedophilia were common, Rogers responded: “They are common in an anecdotal sense. They’re not common in terms of us getting prosecution files through the office.” The following evening, in a follow-​up interview, Minister for Aboriginal Affairs Mal Brough made the sensational claim live to air that “everyone in those communities knows who runs the paedophile rings” (Graham, 2008) –​a claim he later retracted. A month later, Jones interviewed a man purporting

En-Gendering Failure Through the Colonial Apparatus  157 to be a youth worker who had lived and worked in the community of Mutitjulu, his narrative corroborating Brough and resonating strongly with Rogers’s interview. To protect his identity and heighten the drama, his face was silhouetted, and voice digitised. He claimed there was a paedophile ring operating in Mutitjulu and surrounding communities, and again shared lurid stories of child abuse. His tearful testimony included accusations locals had attempted to silence him. Subsequently, Australian Labor Party politicians in the NT made inquiries (SMH, 2006), and it was raised in Parliament that this ‘anonymous source’ was Gregory Andrews, Assistant Secretary in the Office of Indigenous Policy Coordination (OIPC) (Hansard, 9 August 2006, p. 81) –​ an advisor to the Minister. Andrews had not worked as a youth worker in Mutitjulu; nor had he lived there.7 The NT government commissioned an inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse following these controversies, and the Little Children Are Sacred Report –​which would later form the Howard government’s justification for the Intervention –​was the outcome of that inquiry. I want for the moment to set aside the veracity or otherwise of the claims by Rogers, Brough, and Andrews, to draw out these testimonies’ connections with rhetorical disparagements of Indigenous cultures from Australia’s eugenic and assimilationist past. Each of these stories resonates with the discourses of Protectors, before the 1967 referendum conferred to the Commonwealth race powers. Particularly, Neville’s late writing (discussed in Chapter 5), which argues the demise of ‘full-​blood’ Aboriginal societies was due to causes inherent to Aboriginal culture rather than the intergenerational impacts of ongoing colonial violence, echoes within these interviews. That discourse had not lain dormant since the mid-​twentieth century, but rather had continued to be nurtured within the pages of Murdoch-​owned daily national newspaper The Australian. Representative of this discourse is Louis Nowra’s long essay “Culture of Denial” (Nowra, 2007a), which publicised his book Bad Dreaming: Aboriginal Men’s Violence against Women and Children (2007b). Nowra claimed Aboriginal men are more likely to perpetrate intimate violence and sexual abuse than non-​Indigenous men, and that this is connected to their “cultural traditions.” As several scholars have pointed out, the authorities to whom Nowra appeals for evidence of this claim are white anthropologists and colonists (Wild and Anderson, 2007; Atkinson and Woods, 2008; Behrendt and Watson, 2008; Konishi, 2008; McGlade, 2012). In a passage that is shocking for its omissions, Nowra writes: After the arrival of the First Fleet explorers and settlers wrote about the violence they saw Aboriginal men inflict on women. They also observed how the men kidnapped women from other tribes, raped them, and forced them to become their wives. By the end of the 19th century, the new discipline of anthropology began to study Aboriginal cultural and society in detail, and with much

158  En-Gendering Failure Through the Colonial Apparatus sympathy and respect. It is in these studies that we gain a clearer picture of the relationship between Aboriginal men and women. … Despite local variations, there is a consistent pattern of traditional Aboriginal men’s treatment of women that could be exceedingly harsh and sexually aggressive (gang rape, for instance). Given its pervasive nature across Australia, we can say that it was ancient and long-​lasting. (Nowra, 2007a) Despite the well-​documented history of massacres of Indigenous groups (Elder, 2003; Ryan et al., 2017–​2022) and rape perpetrated by white men (Conor, 2016; Behrendt, 2016), Nowra attributes all epistemic authority to white ‘observers,’ taking these sources at face value. This overreliance on non-​ Indigenous sources is supplemented heavily by Nowra’s own speculation and intuitions. Much like Neville’s lamentations regarding the failure of other white men to ‘uplift’ Aboriginal people, Nowra frames the wrongs of settler colonisers passively, as “benign neglect and callous indifference” (Nowra, 2007a) –​ rather than actively, as violent abuse and appropriation. This downplaying of colonisation’s influence is counter-​levered by his emphasis on violence within Aboriginal communities, and he refers to intergenerational trauma to underline the effects of ‘Black on Black’ violence rather than the way colonial violence disrupts relationships and wounds Aboriginal people individually and collectively. Another of Nowra’s strategies is to counter criticism of the carceral and judicial systems. Positioning himself against other settler colonisers who, he says, refrain from speaking out against the violence of Aboriginal men for “ideological” reasons, Nowra took aim at political activism regarding Aboriginal deaths in custody, for which there was a Royal Commission (1987–​ 1991): “the number of murdered Aboriginal women exceeds the number of indigenous [sic] men who have died in custody” (Nowra, 2007a). Nowra ignores that Aboriginal women also die in custody (Kerley and Cuneen, 1995; Davis, 2011). In line with the strategies of the Commonwealth government, Nowra lay blame for “undetected and unreported” violence on the permit system, which the Intervention would unravel later that year. And, like Howard, he identifies welfare dependency as a source of the “most insidious and intractable problems” within Indigenous communities. Nowra’s concluding remarks resonate strongly with Neville’s words at the end of “Contributory Causes of Aboriginal Depopulation…” (1948) and anticipate Howard’s ‘To Stabilise and Protect’ speech: … men need to accept that certain aspects of their traditional culture, and customs such as promised marriages, polygamy, violence towards women and male aggression are best forgotten.

En-Gendering Failure Through the Colonial Apparatus  159 Above all, there should be one law for all and a recognition that human rights come before cultural rights. If the men refuse to do anything, they will be responsible for the slow death of aspects of their culture and their communities will continue to be on a nightmarish treadmill to cultural oblivion. (Nowra, 2007a) These resonances invoke Howard’s doctrine that traditional law is incompatible with Australian law and sovereignty and Neville’s that, left alone, Aboriginal culture will determine the demise of the Aboriginal race. Sacrificial Bodies The title of the Report of the Northern Territory Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse –​“Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle: ‘Little Children Are Sacred” –​references a senior Yolngu lawman: “In our Law children are very sacred because they carry the two spring wells of water from our country within them” (Wild and Anderson, 2007). The children must be protected because they themselves protect the wellsprings of life and knowledge. Women are also held sacred. … in pre-​colonisation Aboriginal society, rape outside of marriage was extremely rare as there were strict marriage laws that protected a woman from advances from anyone other than her “husband.” The “contract” between a girl and her intended “husband” was considered sacred. Women were also generally considered sacred: To rape a woman was to take away her sacredness and this was an offence worse than murder and punishable by death with a spear. –​Yolgnu Elder. (Wild and Anderson, 2007, p. 69) It is, then, perplexing that sexual violence towards women and children would be attributed to traditional culture. The “ethno-​pornography” (Atkinson and Woods, 2008, p. 3) of the accounts of Aboriginal communities that galvanised the NTER, the linking of these crimes to traditional culture, and the focus of the Intervention on the protection of women and children can all be understood in terms of Agamben’s concepts of consecration (making sacred) and profanation (making profane). Agamben writes that, according to Roman law, whatever is ‘sacred’ belongs to the gods or the sphere of religion. Sacred objects must be ‘consecrated’ –​ that is, removed from the everyday sphere of human existence and rendered unavailable for ordinary use, and the apparatus of consecration is sacrifice. Whatever is sacred has been sacrificed: separated from life as it is lived and subject to rituals and protections that regulate its separation from the everyday. Profanation, conversely, returns the sacred thing to everyday use.

160  En-Gendering Failure Through the Colonial Apparatus And sacrilegious acts, particularly, violate the “special unavailability” that belongs to sacred objects (2009, p. 18). Transgressive, sacrilegious acts are charged with a greater intensity than the merely profane, because they pollute the sacred. They share with sacrifice a violent force. Little Children Are Sacred comes from Yolngu knowledge, but this phrase also resonates strongly with the status of children in Western modernity –​ which is possibly why it was used as a heading for the report. While Yolngu children carry the life-​giving water of their country, white Australian children are sacred because of their ‘innocence.’ Children’s sanctity and innocence is co-​determined by virtue of their being kept separate from the adult spheres of work, sex, and violence, and their social value depends on this protection being inviolate (Faulkner, 2010). Children who ‘lose’ their innocence –​perhaps they have been subject to abuse –​are a focus of moral concern, but their place in the community is ambiguous. When Howard’s speech referred to childhood innocence, it was only to deny that status to Aboriginal children (“A truly colour-​blind society must recognise that we are dealing in this crisis with a group of young Australians for whom the concept of childhood innocence has never been present” [2007, p. 76]). Nowra addresses the child’s sacredness in terms that further undermine that inference: “The most important commodity in any society is its children. After all, they are the future” (Nowra, 2007a). A commodity is not unique or sacred, but rather is its opposite: it is exchanged and circulates between people, underlining its profanity. His next sentence clarifies the nature of this exchange, which takes place in the CPS: The problem with this is that, despite the high numbers of Aboriginal children being removed from their communities and families (in 1990, indigenous [sic] mental health specialist Ernest Hunter reported that heavy drinking had been so destructive of family life that there were fewer Aboriginal children in Western Australia being reared by their biological parents than in the days of forced assimilation), many other at-​risk children are not being removed. (Nowra, 2007a) Are these children sacred too? Or would they be better understood as sacrifices, burnt offerings to the mantel of innocence? Agamben’s concept of homo sacer elucidates the status of Aboriginal children, represented by politicians and media as deprived of innocence and a form of life. The homo sacer, or ‘sacred man,’ belongs to neither divine nor human law. Abandoned by man and God, the homo sacer cannot be sacrificed, but may be killed with impunity. The homo sacer is an example to others of bare life: human life exposed to the elements, hovering between human and non-​human: human and animal. It is the enfant sauvage, or, as Agamben famously argued, the death camp inhabitant who lost the will to live (Muselmänner) (Agamben, 1998). It is a human life deprived of social, political, and cultural meaning.

En-Gendering Failure Through the Colonial Apparatus  161 Rendered as homo sacer the Aboriginal child cannot be sacrificed. They instead are integrated into settler-​colonial fantasy as an object of sacrilege, defiled and exchanged like one of Sade’s heroines. Supposed to be rescued, but ultimately abandoned and too difficult to rescue, they bear the coloniser’s guilt. Andro/​Gyno-​Machines The Sexualised Girl In the lead-​up to the Intervention, the focus fell upon little girls as victims. Government-​mandated “health checks” were supposed to gather evidence for potential prosecutions. The health check operated euphemistically. What was meant was a genital check: evidence of penetration or venereal disease. After medical practitioners objected and the legal status of that component of the NTER was scrutinised, health checks became voluntary, and subsequent reporting detailed other endemic health concerns for children: eye and ear health and rheumatic heart disease. The image of abused Aboriginal girlhood lingered in the public imagination, however, and borrowed heavily from historical images of the Stolen Generations and colonial times that had sexualised and vilified Indigenous girls. The Inquiry into the Stolen Generations –​and conservatives’ responses to it –​cut the frame through which many Australians would understand the Territory crisis. Five years earlier, conservative intellectual Keith Windschuttle (2003) had launched a missive against the Human Rights Commission, “university-​based historians,” and the film Rabbit-​Proof Fence, arguing the Stolen Generations never existed. Neville had not removed children to “breed out the colour,” he said. Rather, children were taken for their own moral or physical well-​being because of parental neglect. In the case of Rabbit-​Proof Fence, he stated “Molly had attracted authorities’ attention because of reports she was ‘running wild with the whites’ and was being abused by the full-​blood members of her tribe” (Windschuttle, 2003, p. 14). In an article published in the magazine he edited, Quadrant, Windschuttle expanded this argument: The Western Australian Chief Protector, A.O. Neville, did not remove the girls as part of some government plan to “breed out the colour.” Molly, aged 14, and Gracie, aged 11, were removed because they were having sex with the white fence workers who stopped at the Jigalong depot overnight. Fifteen years earlier, Molly’s mother had done the same with a young English fence inspector, who soon moved on. (Windschuttle, 2010) On 9 December 1930, Mrs Chellow of Murra Munda Station near Jigalong wrote to [Neville] about Molly and Gracie’s behaviour. “I think you should see about them as they are running wild with the whites.” It was

162  En-Gendering Failure Through the Colonial Apparatus only after receiving this letter that Neville put in motion the procedures that would eventually see the girls sent to Moore River in July 1931. (Ibid.) Later in this article Windschuttle defended his interpretation of the key phrase: ‘running wild.’ “Running wild,” when applied to girls, was a contemporary euphemism for promiscuity; “running wild with the whites” meant Molly and Gracie were having sex with the whites. Doris Pilkington disputes this. She responded to my interpretation saying her mother told her “running wild” simply meant that the girls were watching musterers catch and brand calves, “cheering them on and all that.” It is understandable that Pilkington would want to defend her mother’s reputation but women of Mrs Chellow’s generation (like my own mother and her friends, who commonly used “running wild” to describe promiscuous teenage girls) knew well what it meant. (Ibid.) In parsing these paragraphs, it’s striking how partially Windschuttle attributes epistemic authority to sources of these competing claims. Mrs Chellow is assumed to be authoritative about who was doing what with whom. Whether the girls were having sex with men, or men were predating on the girls, or the girls were larking about as men mustered cattle, Mrs Chellow’s judgement is taken to be a fundamental truth. Doris is represented as a dupe, and Molly a liar, as historical fact is reduced to a disagreement about semantics. Mrs Chellow’s interest in writing to Neville remains unexamined, and Windschuttle takes for granted the apparent solution –​to remove children to a ‘Native Settlement’ (itself a euphemism) rather than intervene in the men’s activities –​endorsing Mrs Chellow’s assessment that the girls were ‘promiscuous.’ As Conor (2016) has argued, the attribution of promiscuity to Indigenous girls had a long tradition before Windschuttle, or even Mrs Chellow, adjudged Molly and Gracie to be ‘running wild.’ Through an episode of territorian history involving Japanese pearlers, Conor draws out connections between accusations of loose morality, proprietorial claims over access to the bodies of Aboriginal women and girls, and the assertion of Australian sovereignty (Conor, 2016, Kindle loc. 4048–​4629/​8931). Alongside the scandal of the Japanese luggers, Conor traces a secret history of the use of the term black velvet to designate the sexual enjoyment of Aboriginal women by white men exclusively. This enjoyment is occasionally referred to in news copy and literature and operates as an excessive signifier for the place of Aboriginal women in the colonial economy as property neglected, abused, or bartered by Aboriginal men. Settler-​colonial gender norms that linked women to property through marriage figured Indigenous women as “gender deviants,

En-Gendering Failure Through the Colonial Apparatus  163 the embodiment of prehistoric promiscuity and excess” (McClintock, 1995, p. 44; quoted in Conor, 2016, Kindle loc. 2177/​8931). They were represented as “always already fallen” and as property Aboriginal men had neglected to exercise a claim over by “failing to privatise and constrain sexual access within monogamous marriage” (Kindle loc. 4331/​8931). The rape of Aboriginal women –​seen to lack the “delicacy of sentiment” associated with white femininity –​was trivialised by settler lawmen. And Aboriginal men were seen as culpable for the actions of white men, as negligent or abusive, or as prostituting ‘their’ women. Conor notes the conspicuous absence of the term black velvet during the scandal that erupted over sexual liaisons between Aboriginal women and girls (“lubras”) and Japanese pearlers near Darwin and Broome. National newspapers reported Aboriginal men were trading access to women for tobacco and food. In the context of a White Australia that had erected barriers to immigration against Asians, trespass against Aboriginal women’s bodies represented an intolerable breach of the property rights of white Australian men (Conor, 2016, Kindle loc. 4555/​8931). The NT was sedimented in the national imaginary as a frontier of race war between First Peoples, Asians, and white settlers. Aboriginal women were ‘revealed’ to be victims of Japanese and Aboriginal men, to be rescued by whites. Comingled with this imperative to rescue, however, remained the perception of Aboriginal women as promiscuous and girls as “sexually precocious” (ibid., Kindle loc. 4464/​8931). At this frontier 80 years later, the NTER recapitulated the movements of that historical moral panic. Women and girls for whom there had been little concern were now at the centre of a media storm and militarised intervention focussed on the probative value of children’s genitals. The Intervention, as apparatus, asserted sovereignty over this ambiguous site of excess, the Aboriginal girl’s body. The Aboriginal child was thus (re)produced as bare life, separated from culture and history: their form of life. The compulsory health check promised to locate the point of difference between the Aboriginal child and settler-​Australian children: the point at which innocence took its leave, and where the child would become a commodity instead. The Criminalised Boy While boys are no less prone to sexual abuse, normative colonial gender differentiates the quality of lack regarding ‘innocence’ Aboriginal boys and girls embody. While the ‘girl’ figures as sexually abused, the abiding image attached to Aboriginal boys in settler-​colonial imagination is as a potential (or actual) criminal. Media representations of Aboriginal boys tend to make them examples of inevitable degeneration and neglect of Aboriginality. The NT again furnishes a stage for two mediatised emergences of the criminalised Aboriginal boy. Disproportionately represented within the correctional system (at any time in NT the proportion of incarcerated boys who are Aboriginal is ~100%), Aboriginal boys are criminalised –​are made into

164  En-Gendering Failure Through the Colonial Apparatus criminal subjects –​by a regime of representation in which they appear only as incipient criminals. On 25 July 2016, investigative journalism programme Four Corners (ABC, 2016) aired an episode called “Australia’s Shame” which contained footage of abuse at the hands of correctional officers at Don Dale Youth Detention Centre, east of Darwin. Inmates had been subjected to teargas, pressure hoses, extended periods of solitary confinement without clothes, and denial of water and food. A powerful image that has come to represent these incidents showed a 17-​year-​old boy bound to a restraint chair and “spit hood” resembling, it was noted, images of torture at Abu Ghraib (Bogage, 2016; Davidson et al., 2016). The media treated these incidents as a spectacular ‘event’ or ‘scandal,’ with the imperative being to mend the wound it had opened, to bring the situation back to ‘normal.’ Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced a Royal Commission the morning after “Australia’s Shame” aired, which promised to suture the wound. Yet, the Don Dale ‘scandal’ can be seen as consistent with the state’s tendency to take a punitive attitude toward Aboriginal people who cross its path. Even at Don Dale, a history of abuse had already been reported to little public reaction. Guards had forced inmates to fight one another and eat animal faeces for their entertainment (James, 2015). In 2014 inmates were teargassed (Jones, 2014), and in 2000 a 15-​year-​old boy committed suicide, having been jailed for 28 days for stealing pens and pencils (Cruez, 2000). The graphic nature of the Four Corners footage, and its presentation within the hard-​hitting investigative genre of television journalism, conditioned a heightened response. The labelling of Don Dale as “Australia’s Shame” resonated with viewers, who reacted in real time by posting to Twitter. Turnbull’s Royal Commission responded to that anguish, but focused only on the detention of children and young people in the NT. By limiting the Royal Commission’s terms of reference, the Aboriginal problem could also be contained to the NT, just as it was a decade earlier. Just as it set the agenda prior to the Intervention, The Australian shaped elite opinion regarding the source of the crimes the Don Dale images depicted. Its message was that high rates of incarceration of Aboriginal youths are due to dysfunction within Indigenous families. Jeremy Sammut (2016) blamed the Aboriginal Child Placement Principle, which, he claimed, means CPS “practice ‘family preservation’ at almost all costs.” This is the national shame of Australia’s child protection scandal, which could be massively ameliorated if governments had the will to implement the rational alternative approach –​earlier and permanent removal of children, and achieving stability through the use of adoption to give children new and functional families for life. (Sammut, 2016) Later, referencing the apology to the Stolen Generations and foreshadowing Pru Goward’s 2021 commentary, Sammut argued,

En-Gendering Failure Through the Colonial Apparatus  165 we should not allow apologies for past practices to continue to get in the way of saving children –​indigenous or non-​indigenous [sic] –​who are unlucky enough to be born into dysfunctional underclass families. (Ibid.) Other commentators (Laurie, 2016; Albrechtsen, 2016) emphasised the role of personal responsibility for youths, and not only their parents, by foregrounding their criminal convictions –​especially the record of Dylan Voller, who was publicly identified as the youth pictured in the spit hood and restraint chair. Kerryn Pholi’s commentary (2016) was informed by her experience as a social worker and correctional officer, thereby crystallising the complex of sympathy, blame, and scapegoating that characterises ‘white rescue’ discourse: Yes, it’s horrific, but the real horror is that for some of these children [their abuse in detention] may be the closest experience they have had of “parenting.” For some of Australia’s most damaged and neglected children, life inside the juvenile justice system may be their only experience of an adult taking steps to manage their behaviour and to establish a link in the child’s mind between choices, actions and consequences… . (Pholi, 2016) A key manoeuvre here is to radically differentiate Don Dale inmates from “ordinary children” whilst infantilising their parents: When called on to perform in the courtroom, the therapy session or the inter-​agency case conference, they are neither child nor adult but something between. Should the kid’s biological parents make an appearance at these scenes, they often can seem more helpless and childlike than the actual child … for many of these children, love as we understand it is an alien concept. (Ibid.) Pholi finally charges political correctness as the accomplice of Indigenous family dysfunction in the ruination of Aboriginal boys: As social work students, we were taught about “Aboriginal parenting styles,” which were politely described as an approach to parenting that allows children a high degree of autonomy from a young age. Of course, we were also taught that such “parenting” –​which would be regarded as extreme and dangerous neglect in a non-​indigenous [sic] family –​ should be respected and enabled, for fear of engendering another Stolen Generation. Workers in juvenile detention centres preside over the tragic harvest of such exquisite cultural sensitivity, as the custodians of children who have had very little experience of the basic safety, security, routine,

166  En-Gendering Failure Through the Colonial Apparatus hygiene, guidance and consistent discipline that every child is entitled to, regardless of their race, culture or geography. (Ibid.) Conservative commentator Janet Albrechtsen’s argument is even less delicate than Pholi: Yes, we have seen a long line of well-​ meaning, hardworking child advocates, nurses, psychologists, indigenous [sic] leaders and, yes, politicians talk about the boys in Don Dale, explain what has gone wrong in detention, how the system needs to change and how they are working on that. But where were, where are the parents of these broken boys? Where are the fathers and mothers? … Who is protesting about the breakdown of parenting norms and parental responsibility? And at what point do parents say: “I am going to take responsibility for my kids,” rather than try to lay the blame on others? (Albrechtsen, 2016) The day after Albrechtsen’s commentary, The Australian’s star political cartoonist, Bill Leak, published a cartoon summarising the thousands of words already published about the Don Dale boys. The cartoon depicted an Aboriginal policeman holding a boy by the collar and offering him to another Aboriginal man, barefoot and holding a stubby of beer.8 There are two speech bubbles: Policeman –​“You’ll have to sit down and talk to your son about personal responsibility”; Father –​“Yeah righto, what’s his name then?” Following criticism of the cartoon, The Australian’s chief editor and leading commentators backed Leak, doubling down on their position that the scandal of Don Dale was due to ‘family breakdown’ and ‘welfare dependency’ thus disregarding the broader context of colonial violence and structural racism. In response to Leak’s cartoon, First Nations people posted photographs of themselves with loving fathers on Twitter under the hashtag #IndigenousDads (Pearson, 2016). The image was distressing not because –​as commentators in The Australian argued –​it tapped a vein of truth regarding Aboriginal family dysfunction. Rather, the cartoon caused offence because it recapitulated a destructive stereotype of Aboriginal masculinity as incorrigibly criminal. The second case concerns the recent killing of Warlpiri man Kumanjayi Walker in Yuendumu, NT. Kumanjayi was 19 when he was shot three times while resisting arrest by white police officer, Zachary Rolfe. His case is relevant here, however, because The Australian’s campaign against Rolfe’s prosecution focussed on Walker’s “blighted” childhood and the notion that “the odds were stacked against him from the start” (Neill, 2022). This is consistent with the newspaper’s broader narrative about Indigenous issues, as a story of ‘dysfunction,’ ‘welfare dependency,’ and substance abuse. Within this snowdome of bare life, which is constantly shaken and observed by

En-Gendering Failure Through the Colonial Apparatus  167 governments and the media, the ‘effort to civilise’ is seen to fail over and over, as violence of colonialism is projected onto Aboriginality. The failure of the ‘Aboriginal race’ is characterised as inevitable and the child represented as a microcosm of broader social failure of ‘Aboriginality.’ Death at the hands of police is categorised as a natural and inevitable climax of a boyhood lived as Aboriginal. Walker was shot three times on 9 November 2019. The local health clinic was closed so he could not receive medical care. He died from his wounds an hour later and a decision was expedited to charge Zachary Rolfe with murder.9 The Rolfe trial was highly publicised, and parallels were drawn to the death of George Floyd, killed by police officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis in 2020. On 11 March 2022 a jury unanimously found Rolfe not guilty of all charges. News outlets later published text messages by Rolfe, which were withheld from evidence, demonstrating he regarded the NT as like “the wild west,” with “no rules,” and evidence of past incidents in which Rolfe was alleged to have applied unreasonable force and falsify evidence to conceal wrongdoing (Bucci, 2022). Concerns were also raised that the jury included no Indigenous people in a state where over 30% of the population is Aboriginal. The Australian’s coverage defended Rolfe from the beginning, referring to him consistently as a “decorated constable” and “army veteran” (Aikman, 2019a, 2019b; Aikman and Varga, 2019) with a “promising career” (Walker and Aikman, 2019). As the trial progressed, commentators built a picture of Walker as violent and unhinged, and inevitably so due to his upbringing. Kristin Shorten’s long article holds that “it’s impossible to understand [his killing] without knowing Walker’s history” (Shorten, 2019). Shorten’s narrative –​beginning with his parent’s addictions and his potential brain damage (foetal alcohol syndrome), poor school attendance, homelessness, and hooliganism –​attempts to show how a monster was made, generating an impression of fatefulness regarding his violent death. Elyse Popplewell (2022a,2022b) suggests that “Kumanjayi Walker never stood a chance,” again recapitulating his life and death story as an unfolding of inevitability. In the aftermath of the Rolfe trial, the paper felt vindicated in its approach. On 19 March Rosemary Neill wrote: While other media outlets too often have chosen to remain silent about the dysfunction in Indigenous communities for fear of perpetuating negative stereotypes, The Australian has long believed that only by honestly facing up to entrenched problems can solutions be found. The inner-​city deniers and activists see their self-​censorship as racially enlightened. In fact, their silence about the unresolved national emergency playing out in remote communities only exacerbates the “out of sight, out of mind” syndrome, and lets neglectful governments and underperforming white and black agencies off the hook. This, in turn, will mean more children will suffer –​just as Walker did. (Neill, 2022)

168  En-Gendering Failure Through the Colonial Apparatus This vindication itself is inevitable because their reasoning is circular. If news media provide alibis for police, judges, health services, and politicians to abandon Aboriginal people as bare life the moment they are born, there will always be a Kumanjayi Walker whose life is picked over and eviscerated.

Coda Arguably, Kumanjayi and the boys at Don Dale ‘never stood a chance,’ not simply because of their upbringing, but because of the racialised regime of representation that positions them as potential criminals and mediates their interactions with the colonial dispoitifs of health, education, media, and law. The stereotyping of First Peoples as lazy, dysfunctional, drug-​affected, promiscuous, criminal is rooted in the intergenerational trauma so readily cited by commentators, even as they continue to deal in that imagery. The figures of ‘criminalised boy’ and ‘sexualised girl’ are bookends to a broader construction of Aboriginal childhood as wounded, hopeless, broken, and as best lived away from their parents, who, in turn, are represented as products of a blighted upbringing. These representations disconnect intergenerational trauma from the apparatus of colonialism. It is instead assumed to be endogenous, the effect of ‘bad culture’ that cannot compete with white Australian culture. The master signifier anchoring these representations, and to which each returns to replenish its meaning, was given by John Howard as he launched his emergency response: Hobbes’s state of nature. That figure places Indigenous peoples on the other side of a looking glass that reflects an image of the coloniser as ‘civilised,’ ‘rational,’ and ‘good.’ According to that logic, as a site of anomie, the supposed ‘state of nature’ produces an urgency that demands the intervention of law. As a field of war (of all against all), it emboldens law enforcement to act lawlessly, like ‘the wild west.’ As a realm of bare life, it presents itself as a place of abandonment, where life is cheaper because failure is inevitable. As a sphere of experimentation, it becomes a site of controlled trials in humanity, as a “new laboratory for an experiment in Indigenous civility” (Moreton-​Robinson, 2009, p. 68). We have seen how gendered stereotypes produce harm for Aboriginal children, providing settler colonialism one more means to control Indigenous people through their children. Chapter 8 interrogates the meaning of representation of the one supposed to be without speech, reflecting further on the limits and capacity of representations of Aboriginal childhood to speak in different terms, under a different ‘social contract.’

Notes 1 The title of the law that authorised the NT Intervention is the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Act 2007, otherwise known by the acronym NTER. I will use these terms interchangeably.

En-Gendering Failure Through the Colonial Apparatus  169 2 Juvenile boys, transgender and non-​binary people, and people living with disability are vulnerable to rape as well as girls. While perpetrators are usually men, a radical feminist approach is inadequate to theorising rape in these contexts. 3 Rogers was aware of the Bell-​Huggins debate and declared affiliation with Bell in a paper co-​authored with anthropologist Jane Lloyd (Lloyd and Rogers, 1993). 4 The Howard government abolished ATSIC in 2004, tarnishing the reputation of all Indigenous leaders involved in the organisation. 5 As Moreton-​Robinson notes (2009, p. 61), however, while for Agamben the exemplar of this space is the Nazi death camp (Agamben, 1998 and 1999b), and its “public face” today is the practice of extraordinary rendition (Parry, 2005; O’Neill, 2012; D’Arcus, 2014), Guantánamo Bay (Butler, 2004; Agamben, 2005, 4; Hussain, 2007; Aradau, 2007) or the offshore immigration detention centre (Stratton, 2009; Zannettino, 2012), colonial detention on Aboriginal missions, Indian reserves, Native settlements, and factory schools are the historical precursors for these sites of detention and the NTER. 6 Rogers was more careful in separating sexual assault (although not violence) from traditional culture in her earlier paper with Lloyd (1993), where they argue that law courts are too ready to accept at face value what male offenders say is Aboriginal lore. 7 After questions in Parliament, the ABC conducted an internal investigation into the circumstances that led to airing that segment despite knowing the anonymous informant’s identity, clearing themselves of wrongdoing (Graham, 2008). 8 The image can be viewed at https://​miro.med​ium.com/​max/​700/​1*M-​3muvr​r_​EM​ V0LE​r7x_​veQ.png (accessed 4 April 2022). 9 Rolfe was charged in the first instance with murder, and in the alternative, manslaughter, and in the further alternative, engaging in a violent act causing death. These charges related only to the second and third gunshots, considered to have been fatal and unnecessary. Rolfe’s defence argued he acted in defence of his colleagues, as Walker had surgical scissors with which he had wounded Rolfe.

8 Representing Invisibility The Indigenous Child as Subaltern

Chapter 7 examined representations of the Aboriginal child as ‘impasse,’ that is, the child that cannot be saved and so is irretrievable to the colonial project. Children subjected to this category are visible only as a problem, and invisible in their own terms. The question of representing this ‘invisibility’ is fraught, however, depending on who does the representing; and I need to mark it as such and, more specifically, mark my place in the structure of settler colonialism as a coloniser whose thriving is inextricably connected to the dispossession of First Peoples. This chapter thus attempts two tasks: first, to address the limits of my inquiry into representations of Aboriginal childhood –​limits imposed by settler-​colonial modes of representation that produce the ‘Indigene’ as other, and by my position as employee of an institution that continues the work of colonisation through the ordering of bodies and knowledges, and possession of ancestral remains and cultural property. Second, I want to give space to Indigenous challenges to colonial ways of seeing and representing childhood and sovereignty, which re-​present anew the colonial frame as a structure built on the exclusion of Indigenous sovereignty. To these ends, I draw on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s seminal article “Can the Subaltern Speak?” which interrogates the meanings of representation routinely disavowed by intellectuals when they speak about, and in the place of, ‘the subjugated other.’ The demand Spivak places on this effort is to press the equivocation within representation, thus shifting the question from “can the subaltern speak?” to “what is at stake when we insist that the subaltern speaks?” (Spivak, 2010, p. 64). This reframing helps to get at what Spivak meant when, famously, she answered the question “can the subaltern speak?” in the negative. For, the speech act is a reciprocal encounter that implies the place of a ‘listener.’ Speech takes place only when one is included in a circuit of communication. Speech places demands on the listener, drawing them into a structure of responsibility with the one who speaks. To be clear, being drawn into a structure of responsibility is not the same as assuming responsibility –​it cannot be a form of rescue, which has historically served as an alibi for colonialism. ‘Responsibility’ within Spivak’s frame is necessarily relational, reciprocal, respectful, and aims to achieve an equality between participants. It is thus a relation that must be negotiated, engenders openness DOI: 10.4324/9781003099666-8

Representing Invisibility: The Indigenous Child as Subaltern  171 to feedback and reflexivity, and implies holding one’s silence to listen. Should the subaltern speak, this relationship would never be the same for either party. How could the colonised ‘speak’ from within the structure of colonialism, and how could a coloniser unaware of their place at the centre of that structure, listen? Given colonisers’ insistence that all speak their language, does ‘silence’ enact Indigenous sovereignty precisely as a refusal to be interpellated by colonialism? The question of sovereignty is also threaded through Spivak’s work, and is core to Indigenous philosophy and activism, and the meaning of childhood in settler-​colonial Australia. After drawing out the theme of representation in Spivak’s text, I interrogate the concept of the sovereign subject she critiques in relation to Western conceptions of sovereignty over territory, which, as Moreton-​ Robinson amply demonstrates, is intrinsically preoccupied with property (2004, 2009, 2015, 2020, 2021). While, on one hand, I argue Spivak is right to criticise Western intellectuals’ projection of sovereign subjectivity onto the ‘subaltern,’ on the other, a modified concept of sovereignty is fundamental to Indigenous struggles against settler colonialism in Australia and elsewhere. Indigenous scholars and activists stage interventions in the (Western) idea of sovereignty to demonstrate that Aboriginal sovereignty was never ceded, and First Peoples remain sovereign. Understandings of childhood are central to these contretemps over sovereignty for both cultures: not only because inheritance is bestowed upon or denied to the child (as discussed in relation to the piccaninny representation in Chapters 4 and 5), but also, the significances of childhood as a potentiality and future for a people are critical to understanding why First Nations children matter so much to these struggles. With these thoughts in play, Waanyi author Alexis Wright reinhabits and explodes the colonial trope of the ‘wounded Aboriginal child’ through her characterisation of ‘Oblivia’ in The Swan Book (2013). Here Wright explores the equivocation within representation between political proxy and literary production that Spivak identified in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Moreover, in Oblivia she develops the wounded Aboriginal child as an ultimate figure of subalternity that lingers on the threshold between speech and silence. Arguably, Oblivia –​referencing oblivion –​articulates resistance to the doctrine of terra nullius by inhabiting the coloniser’s notion of an empty land excessively and parodically. Wright thus renders visible the mechanism through which settler colonialism excludes positive conceptions of Aboriginal sovereignty, dramatising the machine of representation that both produces and proscribes ways of seeing Aboriginal childhood.

Speaking of/​Through the Subaltern Spivak’s essay addresses many of the themes and problematics that have emerged in this book, and the phrase with which she summarises colonial tactics in India –​“white men are saving brown women from brown men” –​very

172  Representing Invisibility: The Indigenous Child as Subaltern much holds true of rhetorical battles over land in Australia, albeit with the insertion alongside “brown women” of “and children” (2010, p. 48). Spivak likens this phrase to Freud’s “a child is being beaten” because both pick out an ameliorative fantasy.1 She cautions that “our efforts to give the subaltern a voice in history will be doubly open to the dangers run by Freud’s discourse” (ibid.) because, as a middle-​class scholar and member of the Indian diaspora, Spivak is aware she, too, is invested in masculinist-​imperialist ideology –​or as Moreton-​Robinson formulates, the possessive logic of patriarchal white sovereignty. Given the care and self-​ reflexivity of her own questioning, Spivak’s essay is long and complex, defying précis, and often mischaracterised by commentators. In an interview she admits it was not ready for publication when she relinquished it to editors in the hope they would cut sections and bring it under control (Spivak, 1996, p. 288). She has published a number of revised versions and responses to critics since 1985. I refer to the version from 2010, and I approach it through two strategies she takes to answering the question “can the subaltern speak?” the first of which addresses the part of the Western intellectual in representing the ‘subaltern’ –​which refers to those excluded from hierarchies of power2 –​and the textual sleights of hand that enable them to represent subaltern subjects as representing themselves. The second strategy concerns the story of Bhubaneswari Bhaduri, where Spivak attempts to make sense of her suicide in a relation of tension to the prevailing codes through which that act would conventionally have been read –​or misread or elided. The essay responds to a conversation between Foucault and Deleuze (1977), where they discuss the political import of their philosophies, and philosophy itself as a form of struggle. Within this conversation emerges a set of claims with which Spivak finds contention and sees as emblematic of an epistemic blind spot of Western intellectuals. This contention concerns various figures of the oppressed that circulate throughout their conversation as sites of authentic speech: the Chinese Maoist, the prisoner, the worker, the immigrant, women, and children –​all of whom, Foucault and Deleuze agree, can speak for themselves and do not need the intellectual to do so on their behalf. In the meantime, Deleuze and Foucault represent their own theory as practice –​a set of tools –​with a direct and transparent relation to the activism of oppressed peoples. Spivak identifies in this discussion a conflation –​or “sleight of word” (2010, p. 31) between two senses of representation she elaborates via a reading of Marx, Vertretung, referring to the proxy of political representation, and Darstellung, aesthetic representation in literature, art, film, etc. This elision allows the philosophers to deny their part in the latter sense of representation through a refusal to represent the oppressed in the former sense. They produce a representation of the subaltern other they nonetheless insist could represent themselves. For Spivak, into this vacuum of supposed transparency Deleuze and Foucault secrete their own investment in the other: “The

Representing Invisibility: The Indigenous Child as Subaltern  173 produced ‘transparency’ marks the place of ‘interest’; it is maintained by vehement denegation: ‘Now this role of referee, judge and universal witness is one which I absolutely refuse to adopt’ ” (Foucault, 1980, p. 65, quoted in Spivak, 2010, p. 34). Because Foucault and Deleuze disavow (“denegate”) the part of representation (in an undifferentiated sense), they naively reinstate themselves in a position of authority as transparent medium for the subaltern ‘other’ who speaks through them. This denegation gives place to ideology, for Spivak, in the form of an “interested desire to conserve the subject of the West, or the West as Subject” (Spivak, 2010, p. 22). Philosophers from colonised states had already placed under pressure the universal and sovereign subject, with “no geo-​political determinations” (p. 23). French philosophers’ critiques of the sovereign subject then played catch-​up, by, however, reinstating the Subject in the figure of the worker’s undivided and fetishised subjectivity, in whose reflected glory the intellectual bathes. An ideology of Western supremacy continues to operate as their theories are ventriloquised through the oppressed Other, obscuring the intellectual’s part in the global division of labour. For, while it seems the subjugated other would become the self-​knowing, sovereign subject that was otherwise disavowed, the intellectual instead displaces their agency onto this Other, included in the circuit of communication only as a figure for the intellectual’s radicalism. Spivak reintroduces the split subject –​who does not have perfect self-​ knowledge, and whose interests do not coincide with their desire –​through a passage by Marx, from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, which dramatises the gap between the two senses of representation. Here Marx thinks through popular support of Louis Bonaparte in France (Napoleon’s nephew). The peasants, he writes, constitute a class insofar as their economic conditions of existence divide them from other classes, that is, differentially and not at the level of consciousness. Yet insofar as they do not organise and realise an identity of interests, “they do not form a class” (Marx, 1978 [1852], p. 608). Interest and desire diverge, and since “[t]‌hey cannot represent themselves, they must be represented” (ibid). Louis arrives as a “caricature” of Napoleon (p. 597) and as substitute, whom the peasants invest with a power of authority and protection. The representative as replacement is not the same as the representative as aesthetic function, but the two conspire through ideology, so that the second achieves the first. The figures Foucault and Deleuze cite –​the prisoner, the worker, women, children –​are proxies gathering to themselves diverse interests and substituting for a diversity of subjectivities that “fade out,” because “the ground-​ level value codings that write [their] lives elude us” (Spivak, 2010, p. 21). Likewise, those the settler state recognises as representatives of Aboriginality are often so chosen insofar as they serve settler interests. From the spokesperson to the politician, and from the ‘abused Aboriginal child’ to the ‘criminal,’ these figures resemble or complement ‘white’ value codings. They are proxies for a whole people otherwise excluded from lines of mobility within

174  Representing Invisibility: The Indigenous Child as Subaltern the colony and understood as either ‘assimilated’ or a ‘problem.’ Spivak’s contemporary example of such a proxy is the “credit-​baited rural woman” in India –​an “unfortunate marionette” in the shadow of whom “the history of the unheeded subaltern must unfold” (p. 30). The credit-​baited woman represents (Vertretung) Indian peasants as their substitute and represents (Darstellung) the ideology of global capitalist humanitarianism. The proxy ‘represents’ the subaltern within the colonial imaginary according to the colonial order of values, and by not causing disruption, confusion, or ambiguity to the imperial code. A product of colonial imagination, it cannot upset the structure of meaning and power that keeps white settler sovereignty in place –​or cannot do so beyond prescribed limits that give it to own the mantle of ‘subaltern.’ The authority of the Western intellectual is taken for granted where the ‘other’ is signified by a trope, even when this trope is ‘insurgent,’ ‘activist,’ represented by their text even while they disavow that role and their place within a global economy. I have attempted in this book to locate these tropes in Australia as a way of showing a mirror to the broader structures that give those tropes meaning. Co-​opted images of the Aboriginal child indulge the pretext of settler-​colonial sovereignty, performing a hat tip to First People’s sovereignty only by figuring as the conduit of its demise. This book has identified three types of representation that predominate in coloniser depictions of ‘Aboriginal childhood,’ understood as proxies, that is, as sites of mediation or reconciliation; as sites of intervention or rescue; and as sites of impasse or excess. Often a combination of types coexists in the same image. The child-​image that represents reconciliation, for instance, also appeals to a coloniser desire to rescue, manage, and assimilate. They serve an appropriative impulse, whereby ‘care’ for the child authorises the coloniser’s passage to sovereignty. We saw in Chapter 4 how Baz Luhrmann’s co-​productions of Australia and the Tourism Australia advertisement that accompanied it coded the Aboriginal child, Nullah as an object of white rescue, giving place to white enjoyment of Aboriginal land. The advertisement shows Nullah inviting the cashed-​up international visitor to Australia, as an intermediary offering the tourist a provisional sovereignty to legitimise settlers’ sovereign claim. Nullah conforms to the piccaninny type, as cute and consumable commodity. Moreton-​Robinson (2021) writes with respect to that depiction in mid-​century Australian homewares, that these figures, too, substitute and displace those they are supposed merely to represent. These ‘cute’ images place the child in communion with nature, ragged and without adult company or supervision; they are fetishes that give the child to be disconnected from the relationships that engender Indigenous sovereignty. When read in the context of their consumption, during a spike in the state-​ sanctioned removal of Aboriginal children from their families and communities, settler-​coloniser representations of Indigenous children have historically accompanied a mandate to control and ‘care for’ the child. For Moreton-​ Robinson, these kitsch items replace (and displace) those whose value codings

Representing Invisibility: The Indigenous Child as Subaltern  175 elude us. The subaltern is silenced by representations that give voice instead to colonisers’ interest in them. Conversely, in Chapter 5 a vivid instance of ‘subaltern speech’ erupted from the archive in Neville’s book Australia’s Coloured Minority (1947). Here subaltern speech appears in the form of a maternal gesture, in which mothers covered their children with charcoal to blacken their skin. Neville read this as an example of Aboriginal women’s shame regarding their ‘half-​caste’ children. But the alternative and likely more accurate interpretation of these actions places them in the historical context of colonial practices of removal of fair-​ skinned children. Accordingly, covering a child’s body with ash demonstrates maternal love and protection from the enactment of policies Neville himself saw into legislation. Neville could not hear this significance because his attention was trained steadfastly to his own meanings –​particularly the value his mindset attributed to race purity. Likewise, where the child-​image is non-​compliant or jars against the limits of settler-​colonial representation, children are framed as excessive, abject, or shocking; media outlets criminalise, demonise, and dehumanise them, or else sexualise and label them ‘precociously promiscuous.’ Children who are thus misrecognised according to this racialised regime of representation are effectively abandoned. They are excluded in advance from projects of national identity building and instead problematised and hidden within the carceral and child protection systems. This image of the child as a non-​compliant non-​citizen brings us to the second of Spivak’s strategies, that is, the effort to render subaltern speech intelligible. It draws on the Hindi concept of sati (or widow immolation) and the British coloniser penal code that criminalised its practice. Spivak’s account of the suicide in 1926 of Bhubaneswari Bhaduri –​a middle-​class, politically active Indian woman –​could not be narrated coherently within either of those patriarchal codes, nor even by critical discourses such as the Marxism deployed by (male) Indian scholars in the field of subaltern studies. In Australia, instances of subaltern speech are missed regularly. For example, ‘misbehaviour’ by Aboriginal children incarcerated at Don Dale is read as a tragic epitaph to a once-​noble race rather than as a defiant declaration of sovereignty –​the reclamation of sovereignty in the place that they find themselves.3 When Bhubaneswari hanged herself aged just 16 or 17, future generations of women in her family would fail to receive her meaning, interpreting the death instead as a response to unwanted pregnancy. Spivak contends that, rather, Bhubaneswari –​who was “involved in the armed struggle for Indian independence” (p. 63) –​wrote her protest with her body by committing suicide while she was menstruating, and thus excluding illicit love as a reason. Spivak reads the suicide as a deconstructive gesture, or a “rewriting of the social text of sati-​suicide in an interventionist way” (ibid.). The displacing gesture –​waiting for menstruation –​is at first a reversal of the interdict against a menstruating widow’s right to immolate herself:

176  Representing Invisibility: The Indigenous Child as Subaltern the unclean widow must wait, publicly, until the cleansing bath of the fourth day, when she is no longer menstruating, in order to claim her dubious privilege. (Ibid.) For Spivak, Bhubaneswari drew on the systems of meaning available to her through their contravention, to create a new meaning, and a new manifestation of a womanhood whose suicide could not readily be reconciled by those systems. She was neither the jilted/​shamed woman, nor pure enough to enact feminine honour through sati; nor did she conform to the nationalist image of womanhood as the mother who sacrifices all for her sons nor was the middle-​ class Bhubaneswari ‘subaltern’ according to the masculinist discourse of Spivak’s Marxist colleagues. Bhubaneswari, by Spivak’s account, attempted an expression of being-​woman-​as-​activist without relinquishing her embodiment, which necessarily defies the androcentric codes according to which she was bound to be read. “[I]‌t is only in their death that [such women] enter a narrative for us, they become figurable” (pp. 21–​22). But if death makes them visible, it does not necessarily render their meaning, which slips away: they are, rather, “figures of justice as the experience of the impossible” (p. 22). In other words, it is in the very failure to make sense according to the dominant codes that their ‘speech’ belongs to the ‘subaltern.’ Traces of that gesture remain, however, to disturb the fabric of hegemonic sense-​making: traces that might be included within a circuit of communication at a later time, and thanks to their uncanny insistence from within the archive. Bhubaneswari’s suicide, and a note she left for her sister recovered decades after her death, exemplifies such a trace. So does the Aboriginal mother’s attempt to protect her child from removal, which erupts from Neville’s text in the interstices between his misinterpretation of that gesture and his recommendations for solving the Aboriginal problem. Likewise, the resolve of Aboriginal children, both past and present, who refuse to embody Neville’s solution –​who refuse, in other words, to represent the passing of one sovereignty to make way for another. Spivak frames the question of the subaltern’s capacity to speak, and the relation of such speech to sovereignty, in terms of the concept of the ‘sovereign subject,’ the debunking of which is integral to her critique of colonialism. In the settler-​colonial context, however, the question of sovereignty is most associated with a people’s relation to land. Whereas the protagonist of imperialism is ‘sovereign’ in their imagined self-​image as independent and in control of their body, emotions, and surroundings, the ‘subject’ that emerges from Indigenous conceptions of sovereignty is constitutively incomplete, defined rather by its relations to social others, to ancestors and creative spirits, to land and all beings that live with them on that land. First Nations sovereignty is grounded in an integral and timeless relationship between a people and the country to which they belong (Watson, 2015, pp. 145–​164; Araluen, 2019; Kwaymullina, 2020). Furthermore, First Nations sovereignty imposes no

Representing Invisibility: The Indigenous Child as Subaltern  177 burden of enforcement; rather, it calls upon its bearers to attend to responsibilities to land and ancestors. Thus, it is an obligations-​based, ‘narrative’ sovereignty (Kwaymullina, 2020, p. 7), connected to the ability to tell the stories and the lore of one’s homelands, rather than signifying a right to use or dispose of land or a population (Moreton-​Robinson, 2020). Within this worldview, the sovereign self is always already embedded within a structure of responsibility that provides clear guidance regarding one’s conduct, and emphasises interdependency of subjects to one another, and of human and more-than-human beings, rather than the sanctity of individuals. The question of sovereignty is central to Indigenous political movements, but the nature of that sovereignty is often misunderstood, because –​like the s­ ubaltern –​its fundamental value codings elude colonial law. Understanding the specific harm done to Indigenous peoples through colonisers’ targeting of their children depends on holding this difference between sovereignties. Moreover, because the Aboriginal child represents the future of Indigenous cultures, they stand at the border of two sovereignties. Especially the figure of the wounded Aboriginal child is a site of contest, and an impetus for the colonial project of dislocating families, communities, and culture to ‘protect the child.’ The representation of the wounded Aboriginal child in settler-​coloniser imagination stands in the stead of the conflict between rival forms of sovereignty such that, wherever it is posed, the question of First Peoples’ sovereignty is distracted through the performance of concern for abused or neglected children. Like “brown women” of Spivak’s essay, Aboriginal children take the subaltern’s place, speaking only the words and phrases ventriloquised through them by settler colonialism. In The Swan Book, Wright interrogates the significance the wounded Aboriginal child holds for settler Australians, with an irony that undoes its rhetorical force. Western traditions of sovereignty are inextricably connected to violence, whether exercised or threatened. Wright’s representation of Oblivia’s sovereign wound is formed not only by the violence of genocide and military intervention, however. The wound that best articulates the difference between sovereign logics results from spiritual and psychological violence: the interruption of a vital connection to land, ancestors, and animals, and to climate systems whose crisis reflects unmet obligations. Wright allegorises the trauma of being colonised as a virus that has taken over her (the narrator’s) brain, a “nostalgia for foreign things” (Wright, 2013, p. 3) making her vomit “bad histories” (p. 1). Existing both inside and outside white law constitutes the paradox of colonisation this metaphor exemplifies for First Peoples. The wounding blow of colonisation continues to be dealt through every articulation of the state’s regard for First Peoples –​whether elaborated as deaths in custody, NTER legislation, political representation, or child protection. Each time an Indigenous person is brought under the jurisdiction of white sovereignty, ‘Blak’ sovereignty is suspended, held in abeyance, survivance.4 Wright’s question concerns how First Nations peoples can decolonise their minds and activate a sovereignty maintained in reserve, despite the ongoing

178  Representing Invisibility: The Indigenous Child as Subaltern injury to country, climate, and the social structures through which cultural knowledge is transmitted to future generations. The wounded Aboriginal child is the issue between Indigenous and non-​Indigenous sovereign claims because children bear the brunt of colonial techniques of power, through carceral and child protection systems and media representations that precipitate interventions into their communities. Sovereign differences are contested through the meaning of Aboriginal childhood not only because children are targets of colonial power, but moreover, they also signify future expressions of Blak sovereignty. Only when colonisers commit to reading Aboriginal childhood for signs of sovereignty rather than of decline will the decolonisation of Australia’s institutions be possible.

A Tale of Two Sovereignties The Swan Book casts its reader into a world some decades hence, once global warming has intensified and the NTER has been extended to apply to Aboriginal peoples across Australia. Climate refugees also gather in ‘the swamp,’ an exceptional zone supposed to be reserved for Aboriginal communities, and which, in this shambolic post-​apocalyptic time, is like a ‘mission’ that has been abandoned by God and white ‘protection.’ Here, First Nations peoples bear witness to climate devastation integrally related to their incapacity to fulfil obligations to land, given its appropriation under colonial rule. Wright’s elaboration of this world is marked by an unsettling ambivalence. To represent the hybrid predicament into which colonisation forces First Peoples, she draws on literature and colonial discursive figures that demonstrate ‘the virus’s’ hold on her as a storyteller. But she does so self-​consciously, placing these techniques ‘under erasure,’ in Derrida’s sense at once bringing to notice their contingency and acknowledging their hold on Aboriginal life. Living with the Virus The colonisation of the Aboriginal mind is a psycho-​ existential condition that begins with the interpellation of narratives settlers imported, so they would feel at home, and which transform what home had been to First Peoples. Narratives that constitute land as property replace Aboriginal time and ceremony and articulate a social hierarchy that excludes Indigenous peoples. The Swan Book brings forth a haunting perspective on imaginings of cohesive nationhood through its specific iteration of colonial tropes. For instance, Wright characterises ‘Closing the Gap’ –​an intention supported by governments and NGOs to bring Aboriginal people’s life expectancies and health care into line with those of non-​Indigenous Australians (Gardiner-​ Garden, 2013) –​as an assimilative take on Aboriginal advancement, reducing Aboriginality to a form of what Agamben would call “bare life” (Wright, 2013, pp. 49, 82, 116, 295). She cites ‘Closing the Gap’ with wry derision: “kicking

Representing Invisibility: The Indigenous Child as Subaltern  179 Aboriginal people around the head with more and more interventionist policies that were charmingly called, Closing the Gap” (Wright, 2013, p. 49). Likewise, Wright demonstrates the absurdity of ‘Native Title’ as a law that acknowledges Aboriginal sovereignty at the precise moment it is removed: They had no sooner set foot on the place, when they were told that Australians now recognised the law of Native Title after two plus centuries of illegal occupation, but unfortunately, on the day that they had left their land, their Native Title had been lost irredeemably and disappeared from the face of the planet. (Wright, 2013, p. 10) The paradox of Native Title is that the continuity of cultural practice and custodianship the legislation demands as a demonstration of Indigenous sovereignty is broken by colonisation –​and indeed, by the very law that claims the power to bestow or deny sovereignty. Wright thus signals the cunning of contemporary colonialism, which interpellates and implicates the subject in their colonisation through concepts supposed to ameliorate its effects. Wright’s critique recalls Tanganekald/​ Meintangk philosopher Irene Watson’s analysis of settler colonialism as a system of law that dominates by incorporating its other and then denying the existence of whatever it cannot assimilate (thus, what might be called an excluding-​ incorporation). The international legal principle –​or “legal fiction” –​of terra nullius (Watson, 2009b, p. 28; Moreton-​Robinson, 2015, pp. 4, 15, 18) determines colonisers’ understanding of land as originally empty, existing ‘for their invasion and settlement’ (Watson 2002, para. 21). However, as we have seen in previous chapters, terra nullius also operates as a key signifier in the Australian settler-​colonial imaginary, conceptually emptying a land’s laws and existing meanings to then empty it physically of its people and extract its resources through the process of settler colonisation (Watson, 2015, pp. 110–​111; Wolfe 2001, p. 868; Wolfe, 2006). Whereas ‘assimilation’ –​which transforms the ‘outside’ into the ‘inside,’ excluding difference –​once directed Australian government policy explicitly, it now works more insidiously through techniques like Closing the Gap and Native Title, incarceration and child protection. Living as Aboriginal in Australia thus involves ‘living with the virus,’ such that expressing sovereignty means incorporating and neutralising a small component of the virus, developing antibodies: immunity. ‘Tiddalik’ Sovereignty Watson illustrates the logic of excluding incorporation of contemporary Australian colonialism through a story about a thirsty frog that drinks the country’s water until nothing is left (Watson, 1998, p. 29, 2015, p. 16).5 The other animals conspire to make the frog laugh so it will release the water and be brought down to size. Watson compares the frog of her people’s creation

180  Representing Invisibility: The Indigenous Child as Subaltern story to white settler sovereignty, which greedily consumes its surroundings without heeding others, rendering outside and inside indistinct. Settlers first refuse to recognise Indigenous cultivation practices as labour that establishes a land claim, and thus entitle themselves to call their ‘outside’ a ‘state of nature’ (available to incorporate). Howard’s characterisation of Aboriginal communities as existing in a state of nature before initiating the NTER can be understood in this vein (Howard, 2007, p. 69). In declaring a state of nature, land is conceived of as empty: ‘unclaimed’ property in common, ready to be claimed. Second, at the centre of this understanding of sovereignty is a violent exclusion of Indigenous peoples. And, Watson argues, this “foundational violence which established a colonial sovereignty” is internalised (incorporated) by Aboriginal communities in the form of trauma and lateral violence, so that settler sovereignty extends its reach into the bodies and souls of colonised peoples. [T]‌ he violence of the state […] retains its original character against Aboriginal peoples’ laws and cultures. It is a colonial violence which re-​ enacts itself to support its claim to legitimate foundation, and the Howard government emergency measures [NTER] are such a re-​enactment. (Watson, 2009a, p. 48) Settler sovereignty is ontologically violent, repudiating First Peoples’ very existence. This violence is exerted both internally and externally: rippling through First Peoples’ relations to one another and through the state’s capacity to apply and withdraw from Indigenous peoples and their land in the everyday exercise of law. In Homo Sacer, Agamben frames the question of political power and violence in terms of a more ‘fundamental’ ontological question, which helps theorise the violence of settler colonialism and centrality of the child to conceptualising sovereignty. The question concerns the relationship between what is ‘actual’ and what is ‘potential.’ All uses of state force to maintain order, administer, punish, and limit citizens (‘constituted power’) appeal for their legitimacy to ‘constituting power,’ that is, violence through which the state originated. In terms of modal ontology, constituted power is an actual use of power –​through which police make arrests, courts adjudicate, and citizens obey. Constituting power, conversely, forms the state’s potentiality. It is the ‘big bang’ from which emanates the logic of colonial sovereignty. Constituting power makes possible all so-​called ‘legitimate’ uses of force –​yet, to do so it must exist autonomously from individual acts of state coercion, that is, it does not need to be exercised to exist. In this way, for Agamben, potentiality is also an impotentiality, that is, it comprises the capacities to-​do and not-​to-​do. Indeed, to withhold from action is more essential to a potentiality than doing that to which its power refers because this ability ‘not-​to’ is what distinguishes potentiality from actuality (Agamben, 1998, pp. 29–​33).

Representing Invisibility: The Indigenous Child as Subaltern  181 Just so, for Agamben, the citizen’s relation to the sovereign is formed more essentially through a withdrawal of protection rather than, as the social contract myth would have it, the sovereign’s grant of protection. Sovereign power itself originates as a ban or banishment, thus conserves itself as an impotentiality, or refusal to act or respond. The state of nature is preserved within the polis as the sovereign, who may invoke a state of exception, beyond the rule of law, at any time, thereby restating or recapitulating its originary violence. Sovereign abandonment through which subjects are set apart and exposed takes the form, for instance, of state closure of homeland communities through denial of water and electricity (Solonec, 2014), or amendment of the Migration Act (1958) to excise mainland Australia from the “migration zone,” thus excluding boat arrivals from claiming asylum and detaining them on Nauru (Phillips, 2013). The modern European logic of sovereignty is thus organised through a series of equivocations between inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion, applied through prohibition and denial. Wright’s account of colonisation as a virus shows that the power of settler sovereignty over Indigenous peoples is not only its capacity to kill them, although this form of violence enforces white sovereignty. The more ubiquitous operation of white sovereign power ‘includes’ Aboriginal peoples within its jurisdiction the better to expunge their specific form of life or ontological difference. Inclusion by white law makes ‘disappear’ the fundamental value codings of Indigenous sovereignty. As Watson writes of the Australian High Court Case Mabo v. Queensland (1992), recognising Native Title: In the genocide game we may perhaps have only the choice of how we take it. We may enter the native title process and become a consenting party to the genocide, where one is stamped native or extinguished, but whatever the stamp, once in the process you are open to a determination of extinguishment at a time determined by the state. (Watson, 2002, para. 34) Far from overturning terra nullius, Native Title enacts the logic of elimination within the register of law, hailing the ‘Natives’’ consent to their own extinguishment through authenticity tests determined by the coloniser. The colonial code thereby refuses Indigenous speech and elaborations of sovereignty. Moreover, this formal exclusion –​or right of extinguishment –​the settler state claims for itself confuses the outside and inside, thus permitting an ambiguity between violence and law (constituting and constituted power) that continuously reprises the act of colonial conquest and imposition of colonial sovereignty. Terra nullius in this sense forms a reserve –​in Agamben’s terms, an impotentiality; in Spivak’s, the subaltern’s silence –​upon which white settler sovereignty continues to draw to maintain itself. Yet, if terra nullius establishes settler sovereignty by withholding recognition of another law it had banished and placed in abeyance, it may also be said to form a potentiality available to Blak sovereignty in a time to come, in the

182  Representing Invisibility: The Indigenous Child as Subaltern exercise of obligations to land rather than the violent conquest of territories and their peoples. Unrecognised and set aside by colonisers’ assertions of sovereignty, Blak sovereignty was never ceded –​although white law reserves the right to extinguish it at any moment. Inhering in the relationality between peoples and ecosystems, Blak sovereignty is ontologically distinct from white sovereignty: it is not founded in an act of violent exclusion and does not alienate and claim land as property; rather First Peoples belong to the land and being sovereign means being embedded in relationships with ancestors, community, and country. Blak sovereignty is so alien to the logic of white sovereignty that its laws and practices have resisted inclusion, to be attended unnoticed. As Ambēyaŋ man Callum Clayton-​Dixon writes, Our sovereignty has endured since the first sunrise –​it cannot be handed to us or taken from us.6 Aboriginal sovereignty can only be expressed or suppressed ... We ran this country once, and our sovereignty as Aboriginal people is the authority we hold to run our country again. (Clayton-​Dixon, 2015, p. 10) Watson goes further to imagine a position that escapes settler-​colonial law as the “place we have always been,” and which is indexed to the ancestors: Those in the process [of claiming Native Title] may be fed a small price until their ultimate extinguishment. Those remaining outside the process resisting absorption into native title rules, go untitled, non-​consenting and perhaps it is only here that we have the possibility of freedom, and like the ancestors “myall blackfellers” we live to die outside the boundaries of the muldarbi7 claimed sovereign territory. To be in a place we have always been, a creation of Nunga laws. (Watson, 2002, para. 34. Emphasis added) Settler sovereignty is imposed without regard for the laws of the land, asserting sovereignty through the erasure of prior claims and peoples. Through the very activities that are supposed to establish that right –​building, planting, clearing the land –​settlers compromise Aboriginal peoples’ capacity to nourish their sovereign being. Yet this capacity remains in reserve, as an impotentiality: to be activated through the drawing together of peoples and knowledges on country; and through the quiet refusal to engage with the terms of settler sovereignty: to resist absorption; to enact a silence that is strategic rather than only a failure to be heard. Wright’s mise en scène for The Swan Book illustrates the predicament of First Peoples who live the displacement of this capacity and bear witness to its catastrophic consequences (the running dry of vast river systems and mass extinction of animals, etc.). In so witnessing, however, an impotentiality is kept in reserve. In remembering colonial difference and resisting assimilation, a “place we have always been” is kept in potential for the exercise of obligations to land, and Blak sovereignty remains possible.

Representing Invisibility: The Indigenous Child as Subaltern  183 As I elaborate in the next section, Wright’s protagonist, ‘Oblivia,’ finds within herself this reservoir: a place of witnessing that defies incorporation by colonial law, an excess through which she may elaborate a poetics of subalternity –​and thus bring into sharper relief the incapacity of expression engendered by excluding inclusion. She does so through a series of strategic resistances to the role settler-​colonial imagination and law assigns to Aboriginal childhood, as a site of another kind of impotentiality, that is, the disappearance or withdrawal of Aboriginality. The equivocal girl-​child of The Swan Book articulates a turning point through which First Nations sovereignty is recuperated rather than extinguished: through back-​talk to the white Australian use of ‘the wounded Aboriginal child.’

Swan Girl In terms of both state violence and the violence that constitutes the state, settler-​ colonial nations are more violent than most. This is because, to claim sovereignty over territory, land must first be cleared, and its original inhabitants forgotten or disavowed to produce terra nullius and represent a narcissistic fantasy of peaceful settlement (Veracini, 2010, p. 77). As discussed in earlier chapters, discourses and practices regarding childhood in settler-​ colonial settings often sanitise this violence, and articulate ideas about rights to ownership –​or inheritance –​of land (Conor, 2012; Moreton-​Robinson, 2021). Racialised images of Aboriginal childhood articulate the extinguishment of sovereignty through disinheritance and demise of lineage and of a race. The Swan Book dramatises how this contention between rival sovereignties is elaborated through the bodies and minds of First Nations children. As Honni van Rijswijk argues, also in connection with Spivak, Wright’s representation of the novel’s adolescent protagonist “evokes” and “intervenes in the archive” of the figure of the abused Aboriginal child of the NTER. In this novel as well as Carpentaria (Wright, 2006), Wright sets up a “counter-​ imaginary” with which to reappropriate this figure and challenge coloniser representations of Aboriginality (van Rijswijk, 2014, p. 126). Wright’s writing galvanises the critical imagination with which we might re-​read “the entire archive in which the figure is embedded: to offer a counter-​archive to those archives of state and state law, to recover that which has been ‘lost in an institutional textuality at the archaic origin’ ” (ibid., p. 131). The name ‘Oblivion Ethylene’ references both the stereotype of petrol-​ sniffing and the burden of settler Australians’ forgetting of Aboriginal history and existence. Depicted as a perennial child, she is the homo sacer of an Aboriginality already deprived of its form-​of-​life: infantilised, dehumanised, and rendered unprotectable by apparatuses of colonialism (Rollo, 2018a, 2018b). Having been gang-​raped by (Aboriginal) youths in her community, Oblivia hides in a tree, where she sleeps for ten years. During this internment, she silently and unconsciously absorbs the lore of her country –​“old ghost language” whispered to her by the “ancient river gum” in which she took refuge

184  Representing Invisibility: The Indigenous Child as Subaltern (Wright, 2013, p. 8). The shame of her rape, her confinement in the tree, and her subsequent cohabitation with white rescuer ‘Bella Donna,’ all separate her from the community and invest her with significances that historically furnished an alibi for colonisers to intervene in Aboriginal life. Oblivia’s abuse, seclusion, and manner of acquiring knowledge (through an unmediated relationship to nature rather than social transmission) alienate her. Otherworldly and ambiguously sacred, she is at once polluting and impossibly pure. All children in living memory of the lake people’s history, and regardless of the Army intervening in their parenthood, were deeply loved by their families, until this girl came along who was so different to any child ever born in their world, it made everyone think about why Oblivia had been born at all after this dumb girl was dragged out of the eucalyptus tree by old Bella Donna after years –​a decade of being missing –​and who disowned her people by acting as though she had by-​passed human history, by being directly descended from their ancestral tree. (p. 11) Wright reflects here on the part of representation in colonial dispossession, in its dual senses as proxy and depiction. As a pastiche of settler-​colonial stereotypes of Aboriginal childhood, Oblivia’s community regards her with suspicion: she is sent there fully formed as an Aboriginal childhood weaponised against Aboriginal people, in the guise both as victim and as the most authentic ‘Aborigine’ regarding which counter-​narratives are silenced. Whereas they have always loved their children, along comes Oblivia, unloved and unlovable: the colonial trope of ‘wounded Aboriginal girlhood’ made flesh. The representation that Oblivia embodies infiltrates people’s understandings of themselves –​like the virus, it gets under their skin and into their brains; makes them hate themselves. Oblivia’s journey, however, sees her critique these rusted on representations by navigating her way through them. In the first place, Oblivia assiduously and critically curates the stories that pass into her consciousness, finding sustenance from them where she can and resisting their attempts to circumscribe her. The image of the virus with which Wright allegorises colonialism characterises Oblivia’s journey. Subjected to the delirium of endless chatter, she eclectically incorporates these discourses to bolster her immunity. She undergoes colonisers’ projections upon her qua ‘Indigenous girl-​child’ –​as abandoned, neglected, abused, petrol-​sniffing delinquent –​each of which would render her available to discrete modes of state intervention. Yet Oblivia also takes refuge in the impenetrability that allows her to be a screen for others’ projections, others’ stories about her. She bides her time in a play of madness, to find her own place –​her own subaltern sovereignty. Oblivia’s taciturn refusal to accede to others’ expectations cultivates within her a “possibility of freedom,” a place (“we have always been”) of safekeeping against extinguishment (Watson, 2002, para. 34).

Representing Invisibility: The Indigenous Child as Subaltern  185 Oblivia’s muteness thus represents the double-​sided nature of subaltern silence: as an incapacity to make sense in one’s own terms when forced to speak in the colonisers’ language, and as a form of resistance –​of Bartleby-​ an refusal (“I prefer not to”) –​that presses against colonial power and grows in relation to it. Oblivia first cannot talk back to the settler-​colonial representations that enclose her. She introjects others’ stories about her: the loquacious Bella Donna’s rescue discourse; community members’ insults; and, when she is confined to a tower block as First Lady to Warren Finch (the first Aboriginal President of Australia), publicity discourses that make her into a model Aborigine. In her capacity as listener and object of others’ discourse, however, Oblivia actively bears witness to colonisation and is not just afflicted by it. Her silence invests her with a power of knowing and eventually a power to act. This incapacity becomes impotentiality –​a reserve of sovereignty –​ as she silently nurtures the trauma invested in her by the colonial situation and amplified by her prolonged sleep in the tree as an Aboriginal “Rip Van Winkle” (p. 7). Her slumber marks both a contestation against the passage of time (“the tide of history,” as colonial law says when it formally extinguishes native title), and an intensive gathering of the ancient and sacred knowledge of country that safeguards Blak sovereignty. Oblivia thus claims the part of subaltern by choosing whether-​or-​not to speak and exempting herself from the genocide of her people by living inside a tree. Significant to this development of a reserve in/​capacity is the place Oblivia makes within herself for a swan. The black swan arrives at the swamp with her bevy after drought had driven her from her country. The swan has a signal role in Oblivia’s growth, guiding her to maintain her distance from those who would use her along her journey. Wright heralds this role obliquely, referencing the red dust storm on which the bevy came: “Oblivia remembered thinking that dust had a way of displacing destiny the first time she saw a swan” (Wright, 2013, p. 13). There is a double displacement here, as Wright asks the reader to imagine her protagonist in a future already past, looking back to this moment once destiny has taken its course. This unusual construction refers us to the dual temporality of colonised Australia’s present: its pretension to be ‘post’ colonial together with the coexistence of rival temporalities and sovereignties. It also signals to the divergent paths that might be taken by First Peoples. As Watson writes in response to the suggestion that First Peoples should “get over” colonialism, “assimilation is the death of the native”: [I]‌f there is another way, we cannot accept this as our destination. Death cannot be our resolution, for it goes against our law ways, and as such we have an obligation to resist it. We have an obligation to throw over the discourse of death and our progress towards death, and open a new transformative space to return us to our ancient cycles of renewal, of new beginnings and of bringing the old into the new. (Watson, 2015, p. 147)

186  Representing Invisibility: The Indigenous Child as Subaltern Similarly, the ‘displacement of destiny’ of Wright’s text suggests a possibility of freedom emergent of resistance. For Oblivia, the swan’s arrival produces an opening to another future. In this fateful moment, Oblivia is finally seen in her uniqueness. The swan marks her with its feather, and thus, singles her out as a fellow exile: It was through this narrow prism of viewing something strange and unfamiliar, that the girl decided the swan wasn’t an ordinary swan and had not been waylaid from its determined path. She knew as a fact that the swan had been banished from wherever it should be singing its stories and was searching for its soul in her. (Wright, 2013, p. 15) The swan thus also becomes her interlocutor, establishing a line of flight or mobility and a structure of responsibility through which to transform her subaltern status. Knowledge transmitted between swan and girl in mutual recognition binds them in obligation to one another. As exiles, both are positioned as witnesses: survivors who have come back from something terrible with a story they do not have the words to tell. This moment readies Oblivia for the task of telling her story and emboldens her resistance against others’ narratives about her. For, while her voicelessness prepares her as a surface to be inscribed by the sundry representations of Indigenous childhood delivered by Australian media, her silence also resonates the reverse side of these images –​the sentient, receptive, subjective side that exceeds and thwarts these representations, bearing the promise of a resurgent Indigenous sovereignty. The Limbo of Childhood: Subaltern Sovereignty During her confinement to the city apartment of new husband President Warren Finch, Oblivia is shown to the dual potentialities her life holds upon noticing herself on the television dutifully playing the part of the First Lady, but with no memory of having done so. This double-​self is a self-​for-​others to enhance Finch’s reputation. He married the most damaged Aboriginal girl to garner authenticity and makes her over as his personal Pygmalion. In this regard, returning to Spivak, Oblivia’s muteness fundamentally represents others’ inability to listen, and to enter a structure of responsibility with her. Save for her imaginary interlocutors, Oblivia is not included in conversation on her own terms, but instead is continuously exchanged by others in political commerce, co-​opted as a proxy to symbolise their projects. Illustrating this experience of alienation from her own image, Oblivia watches the television in amazement as the alternate version of herself accompanies the Aboriginal President as his First Lady –​a mirage cobbled together from fancy women she has seen on TV:

Representing Invisibility: The Indigenous Child as Subaltern  187 She quickly noticed the really small things that were totally opposed to how she thought about herself. Where were the downcast eyes for instance? Why the lack of self-​consciousness? Where was the shame? How could she have agreed to allow people to stare at her like that? She had to adapt to the television picture of herself with fingernails painted red or pale pink, speaking through lipstick, looking from eyeliner and orderly designed hair, and how she moved with an air of confidence dressed in Marlene Dietrich clothes. (Wright, 2013, p. 255) The novel can thus be read in Spivakian terms as a study of the difference within representation, the split subject, the part of story and ideology in shaping experience and possibility, and the measuring of silences in the colonial archive. Subjectivity emerges within these fissures; but, drawing on colonial tropes for Aboriginal respectability and victimhood, Wright shows how the proxies of ‘President,’ ‘First Lady,’ and ‘wounded Aboriginal girl’ alienate by disciplining Indigenous identity to the coloniser’s regime of representation. Spivak might thus characterise this ‘First Lady’ Oblivia as an ‘unfortunate marionette’ –​the image of the subaltern that accommodates capitalist colonialism by demonstrating the benefits it bestows upon ‘the uncivilised.’ Conversely, the Oblivia that haplessly watches her ‘self’ on the television, incredulous that she ever was so well-​turned-​out, represents the ‘subaltern’ in her split being, as always already fractured between discourses, and searching for the integration of silence with speech, vulnerability with agency. This Oblivia is not the hero of Foucault or Deleuze’s writings; she does not express her sovereign being by ventriloquising their theories, but nor is she simply a passive victim. Rather, as Spivak puts it, “the ground-​level value codings that write her life elude us” (Spivak, 2010, p. 21). During her banishment to Warren Finch’s apartment, when she is most segregated from lines of mobility or communication and when her agency appears most limited, Oblivia realises her obligation as custodian of swans. Vowing to rescue every last one, she escapes her penthouse prison, filling (and defiling) it with the birds. She becomes a “shepherd” to the lost children who wander the streets to repurpose significant buildings fallen into disuse. Swan-​ rescuing becomes a “street-​kid game,” as Oblivia recruits the children to build upon her reserves of sovereignty (Wright, 2013, pp. 250, 252). Through this community of swans and street kids, Oblivia finds in herself a uniqueness that eludes expression or comparison –​what Agamben would call “whatever being” (Agamben, 1993a, pp. 1–​2). This scene is reminiscent of two images Agamben invokes concerning the potentiality of children. First, we are reminded of his discussion of children’s socially allotted power as “humanity’s little scrap dealers” (Agamben, 1993b; Faulkner, 2016b). At a time of cultural crisis, when objects and customary ways of life lose their meaning and force, they become available for children

188  Representing Invisibility: The Indigenous Child as Subaltern to rework through play. Play can thus be seen as a form of sacrifice that deactivates and purifies these things of their previous toxicity, making way for new forms. We may interpret Oblivia and her street kids in this vein as cultural transformers or high priests, investing new significance in disused spaces and the institutions they previously housed. Where old ways are found no longer to be adaptive, children appear on the horizon as uniquely equipped to overhaul ways of life. As Oblivia and her street children occupy churches, cathedrals, and arcades, Wright also reinvests institutions of assimilation and reconciliation with another meaning, speaking back to colonial power by resonating its silences. Second, this scene recalls the Catholic concept of Limbo, where unbaptised children dwell, having died before knowing God, and so whom it would be immoral to punish. This space-​between (good and evil; salvation and damnation) is usually seen as a place of abandonment to interminable boredom or meaninglessness. It reflects the place of Indigenous peoples who have been removed from land and kin, separated from language and culture, whose sovereignty is unrecognised and unfulfilled, and who are rendered as “bare life.” Agamben’s gloss of Limbo connects to impotentiality: it becomes a space for thinking about possibility in its purest (inactive, deactivated) form in situations of banishment. It becomes a place of natality, where “whatever singularities” are born (Agamben, 1993a, p. 5). It is a place where what picks one out and makes one intelligible –​the ‘whatness’ of a self –​is determined: Oblivia’s singularity as identified by her swan on that fateful day of its arrival, for instance. Children are the inhabitants of Limbo, but the infantilisation to which Indigenous peoples are subject (through colonial modes of governance and the space of the mission) also lends itself to thinking of First Nations sovereignty through this figure. The suspension of a way of life under the ‘benevolent’ rule of another creates a Limbo state: a stasis in abandonment. But could this also be perceived as a place of (im)potentiality, where Blak sovereignty is maintained? If we consider spaces like juvenile detention centres (where Aboriginal children are abandoned and tortured) and the child protection system (which frequently deprives children of their Aboriginality), Limbo appears as an increasingly apt descriptor for these spaces –​except for the key difference that at least the former is a punitive space of abandonment. Unlike the notional children whom the NTER was supposed to protect, incarcerated Aboriginal children are represented as bad seeds, ‘no angels,’ beyond rescue. However, once the legitimacy of this punishment is questioned, we might find capacity in this Limbo. In the 4 Corners “Australia’s Shame” episode considered in Chapter 7, children, both captured and abandoned by the state, were seen in security video fighting against the system that had erased them. We might even see in this footage a resistance against erasure that the struggle for sovereignty necessitates. As these images entered a circuit of communication, after being televised, the children were no longer anonymous and forgotten. They are seen, and, through contemplation of the injustice of their experience,

Representing Invisibility: The Indigenous Child as Subaltern  189 ‘Australia,’ however briefly, saw itself. Singled out in their isolation, where they are not supposed to exist, a capacity is preserved and even nurtured. Once brought into the light through a reciprocal act of witnessing, this Limbo space resonates the notes of unclaimed history. And in that void, a sovereignty, never ceded, presses itself into intelligibility. Old Lady Drought Oblivia realises this capacity reserved as terra nullius –​sovereignty preserved in its withholding –​within the constraint of obligation to her swan and within what appears as the barest relation to survival. Late in the novel, having escaped into the desert and when she is at her weakest, Old Lady Drought implores Oblivia not to give up on her last dying swan: … The drought woman told her of all people, You have to carry the swan. Oblivia thought she was being put upon by some proper big dependency that was now far too much for her, and she snapped at the swan, That was the big problem about being a survivor swan –​outliving your life span, getting too fond of gobbling up the muck in the sewage ponds of life, and not laying down and dying like the others. (Wright, 2013, pp. 331–​332. Emphasis in original) In reluctantly accepting the burdens and obligations that constitute her sovereignty –​which waits in abeyance having endured terra nullius –​Oblivia also refuses to lay down and die, to accept the fate allotted her as an Aboriginal person. As Watson argues, a future for First Nations lies in challenging narratives about loss, damage, and decimation. Indigenous ways persist, and lands and animals continue to call upon them and confer authority: Survival is no longer exclusively a question for we Nungas; it is a question for all humanity, of how human beings will co-​exist with each other and within the natural world. Global colonialism has damaged our relationships with the natural world; many First Nations Peoples have no land base and live within cities, suburbs and country towns. However, while many First Nations are without physical control over our territories we still hold the law, the stories and the songs for country. And while some of our territories have been damaged, the law continues to live in those places because of the “Dreaming that will never be taken away.” (Watson, 2015, pp. 145–​146)

Conclusion: Swan Country At the novel’s end, we are left in Swan Country, Oblivia’s abandoned homeland: a space of discomfiting ambiguity. Myna birds continue to speak in traditional language, “little linguists with yellow beaks [singing] song about

190  Representing Invisibility: The Indigenous Child as Subaltern salvaging and saving things … .” But they do so mechanically, meaninglessly “rearranging sound in a jibber-​jabbering loudness” (Wright, 2013, p. 329) –​ like Agamben’s scrap-​dealing children. Oblivia holds the last swan to her, which, after losing its flock, had “found being alone unbearable” (p. 332). But she is left in a difficult relation of resentful identification with the lost swan. Her own survival is tenuous and marginal, as she wanders the dried-​up swamp lonely as a spectre and fixed in adolescence. She remains marked by colonial violence, shunned by her people, and continues silently to tell herself “stories of extinction” (p. 333). Wright resists the resolved and happy ending, insisting throughout on a complicated depiction of identity, agency, and speech: there is no position of purity in her text, and ultimately there is also no salvation. Oblivia’s last swan dies, and she is left wandering her desiccated homelands like a lost spirit, a will-​o’-​the-​wisp, sent to distract the lonely wanderer (Wright, 2013, pp. 1, 7). Wright uses the Latin Ignis Fatuus, translating it as “foolish fire” (p. 7), but it is related to the English folkloric entity the will-​o’-​the-​wisp –​a mischievous, sometimes malevolent spirit that misleads night travellers by mimicking the flicker of firelight. A will-​o’-​the-​ wisp is also colloquially used to refer to a false hope. Throughout her tour of self-​discovery, Oblivia is repeatedly displaced and then appropriated by others who find in her a useful conch shell through which to amplify their own speech. By referring to her as “Ignis Fatuus =​Foolish Fire” (ibid.), Wright hints that Oblivia is also a site for the investment of false hope, to distract the weary explorer into thinking she might represent reconciliation or redemption, as a proxy for settler colonialism. By the novel’s end Oblivia’s use as a lure for colonial ideas such as reconciliation, ‘the NT Intervention,’ and ‘Closing the Gap’ has been exhausted and these notions abandoned. Instead, she is caught in conversation with herself, with no prospect of dialogue or reciprocation. As with Spivak’s understanding of the subaltern (following Ranajit Guha) as one who is “cut off from lines of mobility in a colonized country” (Spivak, 1996, p. 288), and whose efforts to speak could not be received without upsetting the social order, Wright’s novel enacts a poetics of failed speech, of subalternity. Implied by Wright’s emphasis on storytelling as an apprehension of sovereignty, however, is the potential existence of interlocuters; allies and partners in dialogue who may not presently be available but are called into existence by her address, like the street children of her story. Likewise, The Swan Book’s power is held in reserve, as a potential exchange between sovereignties and acknowledgement of their coexistence. The imaginary world Wright weaves for Oblivia’s quest borrows from European folklore, reworking the significances of its key figures to trick the virus that has infected her into thinking she wants what it wants. Being sick with the virus gives her a second sight: a vision from below or double consciousness. She hides within the shadows cast by ‘foreign things’ to impersonate being colonised, and thereby, keep something of herself in reserve. This dissimulation is a strategy “to regain sovereignty over [her] own brain” (Wright, 2013,

Representing Invisibility: The Indigenous Child as Subaltern  191 p. 4). It also expresses an agency that subverts the premise of white sovereignty: terra nullius, the assertion that nothing exists outside its jurisdiction. Oblivia is named for the sovereignty-​founding ‘oblivion’ that marks her as subject to colonial violence. Like the many Aboriginal children she represents –​ children whose Aboriginal identity is obscured and disappeared within the systems that capture them –​Oblivia supposedly marks a forgetting that Aboriginal peoples were ever on this continent. In this capacity, she cannot petition the government to recognise her presence under Native Title. In any case, she would refuse to subject herself to the authenticity tests demanded by the settler-​colonial system –​a system that measures Aboriginality in parts of blood or tone of skin and demands of ‘real Aborigines’ that in effect they should never have been colonised (Watson, 2009a, pp. 48–​50). This connects her to the ancestors Watson identifies as keepers of the reserve of a sovereignty that cannot be incorporated by settler-​colonial law. As non-​consenting pariah, Oblivia occupies the space that, Watson writes, ‘we have always been’ –​a place of a possible freedom that cannot be imagined through assimilative notions such as reconciliation or ‘Close the Gap.’ Through Oblivia’s story, Wright imagines, and so makes possible, a space outside colonisation –​ the ‘impotential’ space of a relational, obligations-​based First Nations sovereignty, held in reserve as what is excluded by white sovereign power. The “place we have always been” cannot be swept away by the tide of history. Like Oblivia, it slumbers in trees, soil, rivers ready to be awakened. The concluding chapter develops further this representation of the Aboriginal child as a reserve of Indigenous sovereignty that exceeds the settler insistence on terra nullius, by exploring further interventions by First Nations writers and filmmakers in the representation of Aboriginal children and childhoods as sites of impasse for colonialism, or as means without ends.

Notes 1 While Freud interprets the fantasy of “a child is being beaten” in connection with a woman’s unresolved sibling rivalry over the father, white Australia’s fascination and enjoyment of the figure of ‘the abused Aboriginal child’ also indicates an unresolved conflict. More specifically, it is a collective fantasy of the settler-​colonial community that addresses conflict over land, expressing a supposed incommensurability of sovereign claims. 2 Borrowing from Antonia Gramsci, Indian post-​colonial theorists used the term ‘subaltern’ to describe the socio-​economic status of colonised peoples who are geographically, politically, socially, and culturally excluded from the circuits of power in colonial and global economies. 3 There is a potential reading that would compare Bhubaneswari’s suicide to the suicides of Aboriginal people that make up just over a third of all deaths in custody in Australia (Willis et al, 2016). 4 ‘Survivance’ is a term first used in the context of Indigenous studies by Anishinaabe man Gerald Vizenor to refer to the survival of Indigenous peoples in resistance against colonisation.

192  Representing Invisibility: The Indigenous Child as Subaltern 5 The story of the thirsty frog is popularly known as ‘Tiddalik’ to non-​Indigenous audiences, for whom it has been repackaged as an illustrated children’s story. This name belongs to the Gunai/​Kurnai People of what is now known as South Gippsland, Victoria, but appears in multiple nations across the continent under other names (Morton, 2006). 6 While the claim that Blak sovereignty exists since the first sunrise is seen as strategic or purely political (just as are all sovereign claims to an extent), it is important to recognise that this grounding of sovereignty in belonging to the land is integral to a way of being and a lifeworld of epistemologies and practices that exists without reference to European political ontology. In that context, the grounding of Blak sovereignty in terms of a lineage stretching all the way back to the creative spirits should be accepted at face value if it is to own its requisite force. Equally, this is not equivalent to a race-​based ‘blood and soil’ claim; it refers to a way of relating to human and more-than-human others through time and the obligations these relationships generate. 7 ‘Muldarbi’ is the name for a demon spirit, which Watson attributes throughout her work to the coloniser (Watson 1998, 2002, 2015).

9 Conclusion Impasse or Emergence? The Unrepresentability of the Aboriginal Child

The greatest punishment –​the lack of the vision of God –​thus turns into a natural joy: Irredeemably lost, they persist without pain in divine abandon. God has not forgotten them, but rather they have always already forgotten God; and in the face of their forgetfulness, God’s forgetting is impotent. Like letters with no addressee, these uprisen beings remain without a destination. Neither blessed like the elected, nor hopeless like the damned, they are infused with a joy with no outlet. (Agamben, 1993a, pp. 5–​6)

In this concluding chapter, I want to bring the Aboriginal child home, so to speak, by exploring further the zone of impotentiality that shelters Indigenous sovereignty, touched upon at the end of Chapter 8, and to which Agamben alludes in the previous quote. This exploration makes its way through the work of First Nations cinema that holds this space open as a habitus where children dwell and develop their sovereignty through relationships with family, culture, and place. Such intimate portraits of Aboriginal childhood lend themselves to a Spivakian reading, measuring so many silences within the public archive. Agamben’s depiction of Limbo furnishes an image to approach these representations from the direction of Western ontology, but this image makes sense of Indigenous lives and objects only in its resonances with Watson’s formulation of sovereignty as “a place we have always been” (Watson, 2002, para. 34): as a register of being Aboriginal that survives and resists colonisation, whether or not this space is recognised by, or even visible to, colonisers. Unlike the figurative white child who loses her way once over the boundary line, Aboriginal children are at home right where they are standing. Their sovereignty resides in their relationships to the human and more-​than-​human beings in their midst, and in the consciousness of their being as articulated through those relationships. Writers and filmmakers such as Tony Birch, Nardi Simpson, Warwick Thornton, Beck Cole, and Ivan Sen depict in diverse ways Aboriginal childhoods lived in the shadows: childhoods that negotiate, with a quiet intelligence, a sovereignty that is immanent to their being –​in “a place [they] have always been.” DOI: 10.4324/9781003099666-9

194  Conclusion: Impasse or Emergence? Watson’s articulation of Indigenous sovereignty (amplified through Agamben) returns the Aboriginal child home –​to the place they have always been –​by negating, or neutralising, the displacement forced upon them by settler-​colonial laws and imaginaries. As I have argued throughout this book, these imaginaries –​elaborated through literature, film, news media, bureaucratic discourse, and institutions –​tell a story of white belonging as the displacement and attempted elimination of First Peoples, whom Aboriginal children are taken to represent as both proxy and metonym. In Chapters 2 and 3 we saw this theme developed in children’s fiction from the late nineteenth century to adult literature in the twenty-​first century, where Aboriginality is depicted in absentia –​as invisible or on the margins, bequeathed to white children lost and found in the Australian bush. Chapters 4 and 5 saw the Aboriginal child charged with being the vessel of transmission of sovereignty to colonisers through the mixing of blood (Nullah) or through sacrifice (Jedda), each of which represents the passing of Indigeneity, whether in the era of assimilation or reconciliation. Chapters 6 and 7 then connected these imaginaries elaborated in works of fiction to the treatment of Aboriginal children in the CPS and carceral systems. Through Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book, we saw in Chapter 8 how these imaginaries are internalised, and a resistance to/​against them cultivated by First Peoples decolonising their minds and reclaiming sovereignty, through creative intervention in the representation of the Aboriginal child. This final chapter showcases recent portrayals by First Nations creators that situate Aboriginal children and adolescents in their sovereignty –​which takes account of colonisation in the way it is lived but cannot be erased by the ‘tide of history.’ The space of ‘infancy’ carved out by these works is fragile. Its movement is subtle and complex, as child and adolescent protagonists negotiate the limits of their agency according to multiple constraints: in relation to colonial systems as well as family and community obligation, recognition, pain, joy, and their own vulnerabilities. The difference between these texts and others analysed from Chapters 2–​6 is not only that their creators are Indigenous, but so, too, are their imagined audiences. That is not to say non-​Indigenous Australians do not consume them –​nor even that most of their audience is Aboriginal. If that were so they could not be as critically and commercially successful as they have been. Rather, these works centre First Nations experiences in context, without didactic explanation. They assume knowledges and experiences that are otherwise marginalised, refusing to accommodate non-​Indigenous audiences’ ignorance. Instead, the onus is on the viewer to do the exhausting work of code translation, to catch up to the world that the text evinces. As Marcia Langton puts this, “it is a process of incorporating the non-​ Aboriginal world into the Aboriginal worldview or cosmology, to lessen the pressure for Aboriginal people to become incorporated or assimilated into the global worldview” (Langton, 2003, pp. 81–​82). In turn, by drawing from a repertoire of images and norms that are not addressed to the mainstream

Conclusion: Impasse or Emergence?  195 settler-​colonial frame, these texts increase the pressure on coloniser viewers and readers, placing greater demands on their attention and situating them as outsiders and intruders. As a settler coloniser, the phenomenology of receiving these texts is unsettling –​and I use this term advisedly. Because this gesture of centring Indigenous experience and First Peoples as receivers of a message intrinsically asserts Blak sovereignty. Interacting with these texts as a settler coloniser forces a recognition of that sovereignty. Like Charlie Bucktin, I feel like I am trespassing somewhere I’m not supposed to be, welcomed conditionally into a relationship that makes demands upon me –​a structure of responsibility. Unlike Charlie, however, I take the maintenance of this feeling of ‘unbelonging’ to be necessary to the cultivation of subjectivity appropriate to the work of decolonisation by settler colonisers. It is a valuable attitude that reminds me of my obligations to the land on which I live and work (Gadigal, Wangal, and Dharug) and the peoples who belong to it. If I’m attending to it correctly, this discomfort will not resolve into a space of comfort or rest, like Charlie’s assumption of Jasper’s glade. It should always remind me of the limits of my own possibility as a researcher, who is nurtured and has thrived on stolen land. The trajectory of thought this book represents will come to a provisional rest, however, on two filmmakers whose studies of Aboriginal childhood have provoked discomfort in me qua settler coloniser, because they stage the almost impossible demands placed on those children by the settler-​colonial state and in some cases their own communities. Each of these productions is marked by its ability to imagine the space of Aboriginal childhood as a place of enormous possibility precisely because it is forgotten, unsupervised: “Limbo.”

Beneath Clouds (2001) and Toomelah (2012) Gamilaroi man Ivan Sen’s first feature film, Beneath Clouds, was released shortly after Rabbit Proof Fence. Although critically acclaimed, it did not achieve the box office success of Noyce’s film. A more modest road movie, it draws together two adolescents –​both Aboriginal, but with different degrees of identification with Indigeneity. Lena leaves behind her hometown, which she calls a ‘hole,’ in search of her Irish father, with whom she identifies strongly despite his absence during her childhood. She carries with her a postcard with a picture of the Sydney Opera House, one of the few mementos she has of him. Her brother has come to the attention of local police, and her best friend is pregnant by one of the town boys. Lena sees no future for herself there and is eager to leave her Aboriginal mother and stepfather, both of whom she views with contempt. While hitchhiking, she runs into Vaughn, who has escaped from a detention centre to reunite with his dying mother. He also bears resentments towards his family but is strong in his political consciousness and cultural identity and detests white people. The connection between them is unstable: Lena is running from what Vaughn represents to her, but he continues to stand by her,

196  Conclusion: Impasse or Emergence? even rescuing her from abduction by a pair of white hoodlums. Although she ‘passes’ as white, and does not disclose to Vaughn that she is Aboriginal, an old woman she sits beside in the back of a car recognises her as Aboriginal, asking “who are your people?” Like Oblivia’s swan of Wright’s novel, this Aunty picks her out and reminds her obligations to her. The film concludes ambiguously: Vaughn arrives too late for his mother’s passing and breaks down with grief, angrily sending Lena away. At the end of the final scene, train doors close, separating them. Lena continues the journey to find her father –​a journey surely bound for disappointment. The moment of hesitation before the doors close provides a temporal break or caesura: an opening of possibility in which Lena might release her hope of becoming white through her absent father, and in which Vaughn’s incipient and likely violent arrest might be aborted. Hope for the two tarries in that temporal space in which the future is stripped of inevitability, and, in that moment, the journey they have shared together redeems whatever disappointments are to come. Sen’s third feature film, Toomelah, takes ten-​year-​old Daniel as the site of struggle in the unfolding of a particular yet still-​open future, and as the situation of a delicate agency that must negotiate its own life path relative to the various adults in his orbit. Daniel dwells in an ambiguous space between childhood and adulthood, belonging and expropriation, and between the culture of his ancestors and ‘Western’ culture. The town itself is the site of intermixing of two peoples who were supposed to remain separate: the Gamilaroi and Bigambal, who were forced together there in the 1930s. The passage to adulthood is no longer marked by ceremony, and there are few men to act as models to Daniel. His father is a drunk, notoriously hopeless. His male teacher is barely there, occupying, rather, a regulative, spectral presence. The only non-​Indigenous people in the film apart from ‘teacher’ are police, viewed always at a distance, so that whiteness itself is present only as detached, controlling, and ineffectual. The men with most influence over Daniel are members of Linden’s gang, who deal drugs to the mission residents, including Daniel’s mother. Suspended from school for stabbing a boy with a pencil, Daniel hangs out with the gang in an atmosphere defined by Grand Theft Auto and the rituals of packaging marijuana. These men seem unworthy of Daniel’s admiration, yet they present an alternative future from that modelled by his father: they have power, income, and a project. He is a harmless presence to them, quietly observing how they operate, learning from how they negotiate their own vulnerability and leverage it into strength. They confide in him about their families and problems as he learns how to become one of them. They also mock him by asking whether he’s a “virgin in the bum,” finding fun in the comedy of his not yet knowing how to answer them, and not being able to admit his ignorance. Yet precisely through this equivocation regarding what Daniel does and doesn’t know, he finds himself of use to them. When the more-​worldly “Bruce”

Conclusion: Impasse or Emergence?  197 returns to the mission after a long stint of jail time, he lures away Linden’s customers by offering them better deals. Linden and the boys spend a leisurely day tailing Bruce, watching him steal each of their clients. They hatch a plan to tip off the police about his drug stash, and Daniel grasps his moment by volunteering to conduct the dangerous work of breaking into Bruce’s house to locate it so that the police will know where to look, wordlessly reassuring them he understands what is required. He finds the stash under a bed as he hears Bruce and a woman raucously return to the house. Undetected, he sees Bruce and the woman having sex as he makes his escape. We later learn that the woman was Daniel’s mother and wonder at his knowledge of this as well. The plot next takes an unexpected turn when Linden’s gang attacks Bruce with baseball bats, killing him in plain sight of mission residents. The gang is arrested, and Daniel contemplates suicide, throwing a rope over a tree branch before breaking down in sobs. Toomelah’s closing scene returns to the film’s opening, when Daniel was detained in the school library, and absorbed in his anger, could make no sense of the maps of his homeland and photographs of his people’s history. Daniel has now undergone a transformation, following the course of one of his potential futures and finding it no longer available to him. When he returns to school, we are left again to speculate about what he understands. Yet, the possibility is suggested, he may now find a different destiny, by accepting and negotiating the gamut of what it means to be Aboriginal in contemporary Australia. We watch him drawing fresh connections between the mission’s colonial past and present in photos on the community history wall. His white teacher is conspicuously absent, but the teacher’s aide –​an Aunty –​instructs the class in language. Daniel’s appropriation of his identity is possible only when he has exhausted other avenues: once he has been allowed to make his own choices and draw his own conclusions. The film shows that Daniel’s agency is situated in relation to those events and people who are meaningful to him, to whom he belongs, and who accept him as a part of their world. The film situates the settler-​coloniser viewer in relation to the impulse to white rescue, which must be suspended for Daniel to reach his destination and apprehend his sovereignty. The authorities could not have ‘rescued’ him without continuing the cycle of colonial violence and destroying Daniel’s part in determining his own future.

Samson and Delilah (2009) Kaytetye man Warwick Thornton has said of his film Samson and Delilah that it is a story of “true love” between two 14-​year-​old Aboriginal children that sees them through hardships and the trauma of loss, as well as substance use (petrol sniffing) administered to counter boredom and emotional pain. Like Sen’s films, with Samson and Delilah, Warwick intervenes in the news media representations of Aboriginal children in terms only of deficit and

198  Conclusion: Impasse or Emergence? undifferentiated suffering, to give them specific names, thoughts, and feelings. As Felicity Collins writes, By reframing “bare lives” as vulnerable and grievable lives, the film provokes an ethical response that has been numbed by the hyperbolic flow of media images, government reports and expert debate. (Collins, 2010, p. 74) Warwick’s children live in ‘Hidden Valley,’ a township near the town and tourist destination of Alice Springs, in the NT: Samson with his brother, whose band plays on the front stoop, the same monotonous song relentlessly; Delilah with her nan, with whom she speaks in language and helps produce traditional paintings for sale to tourists through a white art dealer. Samson is at a loose end: he hangs around his brother’s band, occasionally trying to join in, but is violently rejected. He wanders the township, sometimes dancing, sometimes running amok. He starts his day by sniffing petrol and begins hanging around Delilah, gradually ingratiating himself into her life. Delilah is more purposeful. She has an easy and amiable relationship with her nan, for whom she cares, making sure she takes her medication and taking her from place to place in a wheelchair that is poorly adapted to navigate the desert sands. Nana teases Delilah about Samson, as he perches on a fence waiting to be invited into their sanctum. Nana calls him Delilah’s “husband.” Eventually Samson invites himself in, gathering his foam mattress and bedclothes, which Delilah tries to eject. It is a kids’ game of tag, as Samson throws his bedding over the fence and Delilah picks it up and throws it back again. These interactions are for the most part performed wordlessly. After Nana dies in her sleep, Delilah is distraught. She cuts her hair short with a knife, in a gesture of mourning that also references the biblical story of Samson that connects strength to uncut hair. Delilah is, indeed, incapacitated by her grief and separated from a strong sense of belonging after her grandmother’s death. Women elders blame her, saying she did not take Nana to the clinic when she needed to go, and they beat her as punishment. Samson has a violent argument with his brother, and police are called to deal with his rage. He hides in the foothills and then steals a truck. Bundling Delilah up, he drives her to Alice Springs. Their situation deteriorates further from this point: they are hungry and steal food; Delilah’s effort to sell art to a gallery, and then to tourists in the street, fails (she had seen one of her Nana’s paintings, which she helped to paint, priced at $22,000). Delilah is then abducted, beaten, and presumably also raped, by two white men, who grab her into a car behind Samson’s back.1 Samson increases his petrol sniffing, and Delilah also begins to sniff petrol, to ease the pain of her trauma. The film reaches its nadir when Delilah is hit by a car, again unnoticed by Samson. Assuming she has died, he, too, cuts his hair, and descends into intoxicated stupor. This low point is followed by hope, however –​and this part of the film departs starkly from settler-​ colonial representations of the plight of

Conclusion: Impasse or Emergence?  199 Aboriginal children. On crutches, Delilah returns with Samson’s brother, scooping him up and returning him to Hidden Valley. She appears to him as an angel: backlit and wearing a white hoodie, she looks like the Aboriginal Virgin Mary seen earlier in an Alice Springs church. Delilah claims a disused outstation and nurtures Samson back to health there. A particularly poignant scene, loaded with religious sensibility, shows Delilah carefully bathing Samson in a water trough. We learn that Samson’s father has been in prison, with “only six months to go” of his sentence, when a radio DJ announces he has dedicated a song to Samson; Samson laughs raucously, and the film closes with better times on their horizon. The most striking feature of Samson and Delilah is silence, or at least the absence of speech. Thornton was keen to avoid cinematic clichés of “Hannah Montana”-​like children, aware of their emotions and able to articulate them at length (Thornton, 2009). Rather, feeling is exchanged through facial expression, glance, and gesture. Their courtship begins when Samson throws a stone at Delilah’s back. He writes “S+​D 4 eva” on a shop wall, and as their relationship grows, we see them perform small acts of consideration for one another. Dialogue is spare, so that any word spoken juts out from the film, breaking its spell: the berating of elders, the “have a nice day” of a white checkout girl, and the garrulous camaraderie of ‘Gonzo,’ a drunk with whom they briefly share the shelter of a bridge. Gonzo, played by Thornton’s brother, brings a lightness to the film through his Chaplin-​esque bearing;2 but the care he shows the teenagers –​who remain non-​verbal, responding only by taking the food he offers –​provides them a ballast in an unfamiliar place. Gonzo recognises in them a trauma akin to his own, responding to Samson’s petrol sniffing: “you outa cut that shit out, it’ll fuck up ya brain.” He then takes a swig of his cask wine, and the pain of past generations reverberates through each of them. Their poison is also their panacea, and trauma becomes manifest through a drift of its signifiers: wine and petrol. One of the film’s most tender scenes takes place under that bridge at the town boundary, akin to the scene in Malouf’s Remembering Babylon (discussed in Chapter 3), when on the boundary between the bush and colonial homestead, Gemmy declares to the settler children that he is a “B-​b-​ british object.” Desperate finally to break through the children’s days-​long silence, Gonzo finally quips, “if you’re gonna live in my home you’re gonna have to talk to me.” He asks for their names, and Samson stutters his own with great difficulty, as if using an apparatus rusted and broken from disuse. Samson’s speech feels like an enormous gesture of trust: a gift that Gonzo graciously accepts. In their shared home and mutual homelessness, Samson is heard. These interactions between generations, in the abandoned space under a highway, cultivate sovereignty. Silence is punctuated by these rare exclamations, as well as music. The film begins and ends with Charlie Pride, who has a strong following in rural communities –​first singing Sunshiny Day on Samson’s radio, as he awakens and draws his first inhalation of petrol. The band’s jagged reggae song serves as a

200  Conclusion: Impasse or Emergence? soundtrack to life in the township, played sparsely: drums, bass, and guitar. Delilah sometimes retreats to a derelict car to listen to South American music with Spanish libretto. In one scene she watches from the car as Samson dances, his lithe, writhing torso bared and reflecting the glow of the porch light. His heavy rock music is overlaid by her more sensual Latin jazz, to which he appears to be dancing. For the first time she lets her eyes linger on him and sees him as desirable. The film closes with All I have to offer you is me, sung again by Charlie Pride, which portends the strength each will derive from their relationship, grounded in mutual care. The film is also riven with religious iconography: the cutting of hair after loss; Delilah’s shadow as she drags a tree branch references Jesus’s ordeal carrying his own cross; her bathing of Samson contains shades of baptism, as well as Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. Thornton notes in an interview the strong Christian belief of many Aboriginal people in the NT, in part because they grew up on missions, in part because “Jesus works perfectly with the Dreaming” (Thornton, 2009). This dimension of the film transfigures these children, seen by news media only as unfortunate, into figures of hope for the future. Like Oblivia, together they find their sovereignty where they find themselves, by honouring obligations to one another.

Coda: The ‘Limbo’ of Unrepresentability This elaboration of the redemption of Aboriginal childhood through Christian motifs in Samson and Delilah lends itself to a reading in terms of Agamben’s depiction of Limbo. The original colonisers certainly harboured the notion that Native peoples did not know God, so that they would be sent to Limbo: a place where children are abandoned by a God they had never known, so that “in the face of their forgetfulness, God’s forgetting is impotent” (Agamben, 1993a, pp. 5–​6). “Irredeemably lost” –​in this instance because of colonial displacement –​Vaughn and Lena, Daniel, Samson and Delilah –​find themselves, and find their sovereignty, where they are. They are indifferent to colonisers’ sanction or recognition. Like letters with no addressee, these uprisen beings remain without a destination. Neither blessed like the elected, nor hopeless like the damned, they are infused with a joy with no outlet. (Agamben, 1993a, p. 6) As I write, a newly elected Labor government is promising to deliver a referendum on the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which would enshrine an Indigenous voice to Parliament –​a proposition the previous Coalition government had refused to contemplate.3 The Statement from the Heart was formulated in 2017 by the National Constitution Convention –​a national congress of First Nations leaders, headed by Professor Megan Davis (who also led the Family Is Culture review, discussed in Chapter 6). It sets out a

Conclusion: Impasse or Emergence?  201 vision for the formal recognition of coexisting sovereignties and a process of truth-​telling (Makarrata) that promises to bring Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples onto a more equal footing with settler colonisers. The Uluru Statement is widely seen as a touchstone for reconciliation by prominent Aboriginal leaders and progressive settler colonisers, but it is also important to understand that a significant contingent of Aboriginal people and elders do not agree that the Statement would serve First Nations interests. A group of staunch delegates walked out of the convention, warning that a referendum would be as fraught with danger as native title –​presenting yet another means for colonisers to displace Indigenous sovereignty. The key contention with which they disagreed (and continue to disagree) was the requirement for a referendum, which predicates Indigenous sovereignty on the coloniser’s recognition. They walked out because they also saw the convention process itself as flawed: its conclusions set in advance of the congress, and its framing in colonisers’ terms non-​negotiable. In the words of Wiradjuri elder Jenny Munro, “It’s not a dialogue, it’s a one-​way conversation. Every time we try and raise an issue our voices are silenced” (Blanco, 2017). This breakaway group is routinely dismissed as ‘too radical,’ and their message written off as belligerent and separatist. I think of them in terms of Spivak’s story of the suicide that could not be interpreted because all frames of reference with which it was read were patriarchal. Their speech is minor, but for that reason all the more important, because they speak from a place that is uncolonised: a holdout position that demands the suspension of coloniser codes if it is to be heard. “Like letters with no addressee,” these delegates speak for a sovereignty that refuses recognition. A subaltern poesis is at work here, which does not depend on being heard, but instead resonates in the failure of recognition a space of belonging in one’s own terms and indifferent to the coloniser. It’s a position that commands admiration but does not require it to exist. It is not a politically expedient position, and in a settler colony is destined to remain minor. I want to amplify those voices that risk being lost because they struggle against the threatened obscurity of entire peoples, whose sovereignty is not contingent on others’ recognition. Contemplation of this minoritarian voice returns us to the figure of impasse –​of the child who refuses colonialism, or in which the process of colonisation is blocked, and which is registered by colonial media only as a negative space or lost cause, to disappear in institutions of incarceration. I want to conclude with a study of this figure of impasse, whose apparent ‘silence’ (to the coloniser) shelters their sovereign being, through a short story by Aboriginal writer Tony Birch. The story, from his collection Common People (2017), is called “Colours,” and is told from the first-​person perspective of a boy. It tells of his relationship with his grandfather, who minds him and then later becomes his sole carer, after his mother’s death from rheumatic heart disease. ‘Pop’ shares practical knowledge about evading police: “You see the Gunjis coming, you run like hell.” The police and “the Welfare” are ever-​present threats on the periphery

202  Conclusion: Impasse or Emergence? of their lives. He also imparts sacred astronomical knowledge about his constellation: “One night he whispered a special story to me, slow and sweet, while tracing the location of each star on the back on my hand. It was a story I could tell no one, he said. My own story” (Birch, 2017, p. 199. Emphasis in original). One day, when leaving his grandfather’s aged care home, pockets stuffed with coloured paper the old men had used to make flags, the boy is picked up for no reason by police intent on beating him for their own entertainment. Alone in a jail cell, awaiting a beating, he takes the coloured papers from his pockets and rolls them into balls. Spitting on them, he sticks them to the wall in the shape of the constellation he shares with his grandfather. He then presses his body to the cell wall. When the police come to get him, they grow confused and furiously tear the room apart, searching. He is invisible to them. This story can be interpreted several ways. We may read his special knowledge, which connects him to kin and culture, as a reserve of sovereignty untouchable by the state violence that enforces white sovereignty. It would then be an allegory for the part of children in continuing knowledge and culture, nurturing First Nations sovereignty. His sovereignty is what saves him, placing him as sovereign beyond the reach of a settler sovereignty instituted by violence, even if that violence were physically to kill him. Another way of reading this story, however, is as representing the unrepresentability of Aboriginal childhood as sovereign, within a system of meaning that codifies Aboriginal childhood as a passage to white sovereignty. The Aboriginal boy, enacting his sovereignty, becomes invisible to the settler-​colonial state. This space of unrepresentability sits adjacent to settler-​ colonial representations of Aboriginal childhood, as the impotentiality that remains after them –​or the potentiality that those representations cannot exhaust and so remains in reserve for another use. This ‘unrepresentability’ is a zone of being about which settler-​colonial codes have nothing to say and so can only be silent. It is, moreover, the silence within colonisers’ speech: ‘infancy,’ in Agamben’s sense (1993b), which exploits the original meaning of ‘infans’ as muteness. As the muteness within colonisers’ speech, Aboriginal childhood exceeding the settler-​colonial imaginary is heard only as a ‘stutter’ –​an obstacle to speech, a parapraxis, or a symptom. Likewise, in the scopic field of cinema, this unrepresentability erupts forth as an anamorphic disruption to the line of vision. Unintelligible from the normative (settler) position, the anamorphic image can be seen clearly only from a painting’s margins. By centring the perspective that settler coloniality excludes, the works explored in this concluding chapter discomfit a settler-​ coloniser audience accustomed to occupying a ‘benevolent invisibility’ at the centre of the colonial structure. The white viewer’s gaze is marginalised, finding no easy place to settle or identify. And, insofar as settlers are represented at all, it is at a distance –​as intrusive, ineffective, and superfluous; signified by police vehicles, or as ‘extras.’ Once colonisers apprehend their own being as intruders rather than rescuers, and once the Aboriginal child is placed out

Conclusion: Impasse or Emergence?  203 of the reach of colonisers, no longer available as an object of settler-​colonial concern, only then will listening be possible. Only then will the Aboriginal child be freed from the apparatuses of settler colonialism.

Notes 1 This scene is reminiscent of a scene of Sen’s Beneath Clouds, except that Samson does not save her as Vaughn had. He is too lost in intoxication to even notice. I am not aware whether Thornton was referencing Sen’s film here, or if, rather, these common elements of plot are explained by the frequency of this kind of attack in NT. 2 The likeness of Gonzo to Chaplin is particularly notable given that he is the only one who speaks in what is otherwise a ‘silent’ film. The importance of gesture as a mode of communication can also be understood in this context. 3 The Statement from the Heart can be accessed in text, audio, and video formats at https://​ulu​rust​atem​ent.org/​the-​statem​ent/​ (accessed 28 June 2022).

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Index

9 Network 137–​138 ABC 156–​157, 164, 169n7 abduction 64n2; Fraser, Eliza 51; Manganinnie 48, 58, 64; Nest 41 abjection 54–​55, 142 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) 117, 122, 169n4 Aboriginal Child, Family and Community Care State Secretariat (AbSec) 137 Aboriginal Child Placement Principle (ACPP) 133, 135, 137, 140–​141n10, 164 Aboriginal Legal Services (ALS) 115, 122 Aboriginal Reconciliation Convention 116 Aboriginal Tent Embassy 12 Adelaide Observer, The 44n2 Adopt Change 137 adoption 137–​138, 164 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain) 129 Adventures of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, The (May Gibbs) 21, 37–​39, 42, 44 advertising: fetish 78–​80; Tourism Australia 75–​76, 83, 84, 174 After the Apology (2017) 135–​136 Agamben, Giorgio: anthropological machine 18, 153, 155; apparatus 154; bare life 148, 154–​155, 178; consecration and profanation 153, 159–​160; homo sacer 160; Indigenous sovereignty 193, 194; infancy 202; Limbo 18, 188, 200; political power 180–​181; state of nature 149; whatever being 18, 187, 190

Ahmed, Sara 107 Aitken, Stuart C. 46n23 Akerman, Piers 140n7 Albrechtsen, Janet 166 Alcott, Louisa May, Little Women 28, 31–​32 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll) 23, 28, 33 Amglo see Anco (Narcisse Pelletier) ancient world 5–​6, 12 Anco (Narcisse Pelletier) 49–​54, 65n4 Anderson, Benedict 9–​10 Anderson, Pat 151–​152 Anderson, Stephanie 51–​52, 65nn4–​6 Andrews, Gregory 157 anthropological/​gynaecological machine 143, 155 apparatus 155, 159, 163, 168 Araluen, Evelyn 21, 24, 38–​39; Dropbear 83 Aristotle 5, 11, 88 Armytage, Samantha 136, 137 Arthur, Governor 58 assimilationism 17, 93, 114–​115, 136; Bringing Them Home 143; Closing the Gap 178, 191; Jedda 89, 91–​92, 107–​110, 114; Native Title 179; Neville’s thinking 99, 105, 107, 121; Northern Territory Intervention 152–​153, 157; Nowra on 160; Rabbit-​ Proof Fence 126, 127; reconciliation 191; The Swan Book 188; Watson on 185; see also Stolen Generations atavism 21, 103–​104, 107; Jedda 87, 89 Augustine 5–​6 Australia (2008) 15, 17, 66–​77, 80, 82–​85, 108–​109, 125, 128, 174 Australia Day 2, 9, 11, 84 Australian, The 157, 164–​167

Index  223 Australian Aborigines Ameliorative Association 102 Australian Film Commission 46n23 Australian Financial Review 138–​139 Australian Greens Party 45n5 Australian War Memorial (AWM) 10, 19n5 Australia’s Coloured Minority (A.O. Neville) 15, 17, 87–​88, 96–​101, 103–​106, 121, 175 ‘Australia’s Shame’ 164, 188 ‘bad colonisers’ 14–​16; Australia 67–​70; Manganinnie 60–​61, 63–​64; Rabbit-​ Proof Fence 126 Bad Dreaming (Louis Nowra) 157 Barnett, Chelsea 81, 109, 113n17 Barthes, Roland 13 Bashford, Alison 94 Bates, Daisy 107–​108, 113n16 Beazley, Kim 116, 122 Behrendt, Larissa 6, 8, 49–​51, 135, 152; Finding Eliza 49–​51, 107, 142 Bell, Diane, ‘Speaking about Rape Is Everyone’s Business’ 143–​147, 149, 169n3 Beneath Clouds (2001) 195–​196, 203n1 Benjamin, Walter 46n20 ‘Bertie and the Bullfrogs’ (John Clarke) 44n2 Bhaduri, Bhubaneswari 172, 175–​176, 201 Birch, Tony 127, 136, 193; ‘Colours’ 201–​202; Common People 201–​202 Black Line/​‘black drive’ (1830) 58, 61, 63 ‘black velvet’ term 15, 162–​163 Blackwell, James 135 Blainey, Geoffrey 71 Blak sovereignty 19n7; atavism 104; future expressions of 178; ‘half-​caste’ 15, 104; piccaninny 78; as possible 182; recognition of 195; suspension 177; The Swan Book 185, 188; terra nullius 181–​182 Bleakley, J.W. 111n4 Blumenberg, Hans 14 Bolt, Andrew 140n7 Bonner, Neville 86n11 Bradford, Clare 60 Bringing Them Home (1997) 17, 19n1, 114, 143, 150; After the Apology 135; Australia 70; brutality 51, 137; child protection 124, 131–​133;

Family Is Culture 132; homelessness of Aboriginal childhood 122–​124; Rabbit-​Proof Fence 125, 127; tabling in Parliament 115–​116, 118–​119, 121–​122 Brittan, Alice 65n12 Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre 31–​32 Brough, Mal 152, 156, 157 Bryson, Ian 92 Buckmaster, Luke 91 Bulletin, The 23 Burney, Linda 135 Burns, Margaret 92 Burrows, Victoria 57 Byrnes, Paul 111n2 Canada, child protection 140n10 Canberra Conference (1937) 87, 96, 102, 111n4 ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak) 170–​177, 181, 183, 186–​187, 190, 201 Capote, Truman 129 captivity 48–​51 Carpentaria (Alexis Wright) 183 Carroll, Lewis, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 23, 28, 33 Carter, Renée 137–​138 Castaway (Robert Macklin) 53–​54, 65n5 castaways 26–​27 castration anxiety 72–​75 Caucasian hypothesis 102–​104 Channel Seven 136–​137 Chanouga, Narcisse books 51 Chauvel, Charles 17, 70, 88, 90–​91 Chauvel, Elsa 88, 90–​91, 110 Chauvin, Derek 167 Child Protective Services (CPS) 1, 115, 140n9, 160, 175; After the Apology 135; Bringing Them Home 124; criminalised boys 164; Family Is Culture 132–​134; Grandmothers Against Removals 135; Limbo 188; statistics 138; Sunrise panels 136, 137 Children and Young Persons (Care and Protection) Amendment Bill 2018 138 children’s literature 20–​24, 28–​41, 124 child sexual abuse 146, 163; see also Northern Territory Intervention Cinema’s Missing Children (Emma Wilson) 45n6 Clarke, John, “Bertie and the Bullfrogs” 44n2

224 Index Clayton-​Dixon, Callum 182 Cleland, J.B. 111n4 Closing the Gap 112n7, 178–​179, 190 Cole, Beck 92, 193 Collins, Felicity 85n5, 198 ‘Colours’ (Tony Birch) 201–​202 Common People (Tony Birch) 201–​202 Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) 117 Conor, Liz 67–​69, 80–​82; Skin Deep 142, 162–​163 consecration 159 constituted v. constituting power 180–​181 constitutional referendum (1967) 17, 41, 119–​122, 133, 150, 157 ‘Contributory Causes of Aboriginal Depopulation in Western Australia’ (A.O. Neville) 87, 96–​97, 158–​159 convicts 65n12 Cook, Cecil 85n2, 93–​94, 107, 143 Cook, James 10, 86n7 Cook, Kenneth, Wake in Fright 42, 67 Credlin, Peta 141n14 Creed, Barbara 107 criminalised boys 18, 143, 163–​168 Crosby, Clara 45n7 ‘Culture of Denial’ (Louis Nowra) 157–​159, 160 Darstellung 172, 174 Davis, Ben 136 Davis, Megan 200; Family Is Culture 17, 132–​134, 139, 200 Deacon, Destiny 12 Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe 24, 26, 40, 51 Deleuze, Gilles 172–​173, 187 Department of Communities and Justice (DCJ) 140n9 Department of Community Services (DoCS) 140n9; see also Family and Community Services Derrida, Jacques 178; ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ 104 Dickens, Charles; Great Expectations 31, 45n12; Oliver Twist 28–​29, 31 distribution of the sensible 11–​12, 48, 72; Australia 84; Manganinnie 59; national apology 135; Remembering Babylon 56 Dix-​Sept Ans Chez Les Sauvages (Constant Merland) 51–​53 Dodson, Mick 116

Donald, Ella 85n6 Donald, Stephanie Hemelryk 85n3, 140n8 Don Dale Youth Detention Centre 117, 164–​166, 168, 175 Dot and the Kangaroo (Ethel C. Pedley) 15, 21, 32–​37, 39–​40, 42, 44 Downer, Alexander 117 Downing, Brownie 80–​82 Drew, Anne 81 Dropbear (Evelyn Araluen) 83 drop bears 83–​84 Duff children 27–​28, 42 Duggan, Laurie 38 Durack, Elizabeth 81 Duvall, J. Michael 103 eco-​nationalism 21, 24–​26 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The (Karl Marx) 173 Elkin, A.P. 107, 108, 112n13 enfant sauvage 49, 65n6, 155, 160 England 20; children’s literature 21–​23; eco-​nationalism 25; Seven Little Australians 28, 30–​31 ethno-​nationalism 23, 68, 93 eugenics 93–​94, 111–​112n5, 136; Australia 69; Australia’s Coloured Minority 15; Cook, Cecil 85n2; Goward 138; Jedda 87; Neville’s thinking 93, 97, 100–​101, 106, 111n5, 112n10, 138; Northern Territory Intervention 157; Rabbit-​Proof Fence 126; Stolen Generations 64 Family and Community Services (FACS) 132, 134–​137; see also Child Protective Services (CPS) Family Is Culture (Megan Davis) 17, 132–​134, 139, 200 Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders 119–​121 fetish: advertising 78–​80; Australia 74; eugenics 93; image politics 14; Jedda 92; Manganinnie 63–​64; native-​child nexus 7; in Neville’s thinking 101, 105–​106; origins of concept 75; piccaninny 67, 76–​78, 80–​83, 174; and reconciliation 76, 83–​85; scopophilia 67, 73–​74; workers 173 figure of excess 15, 93 fillius nullius 8, 82

Index  225 Finding Eliza (Larissa Behrendt) 49–​51, 107, 142 Floyd, George 167 Fogarty, William 153 Foley, Fiona 12 Foley, Gary 12 Follow the Rabbit-​Proof Fence (Doris Pilkington Garimara) 125 forced removal of children see Stolen Generations Foucault, Michel 153–​154, 172–​173, 187 found white child 16, 47–​48, 54; historical 48–​54; Manganinnie 48, 57–​64; Pelletier, Narcisse (Anco) 49–​54, 65n4; Remembering Babylon 54 Four Corners 164, 188 France, and Pelletier 49, 51–​52 Frank, Jane 42 Franklin, Adrian 25 Fraser, Eliza 48–​51, 107 ‘Freedom Rides’ (1965) 130 Freud, Sigmund 73, 75, 81, 172 frontier wars 10, 19n5, 53 Galton, Francis 138 Geelong Gazette, The 27 Gelder, Ken 32 gender 142–​143 genocide 13; Manganinnie 58, 64; The Swan Book 177, 185; Watson on 181 Gibbs, May 56; The Adventures of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie 21, 37–​39, 42, 44 Goddard, Henry H. 94–​95 ‘good colonisers’ 14–​16; Australia 67–​68, 70, 74–​75, 84; Manganinnie 48, 57, 60–​64; Rabbit-​Proof Fence 126–​127; ‘Speaking about Rape Is Everyone’s Business’ 143; state of nature 168 Gough, Julie 12 Goward, Pru 137–​139, 141n14, 143, 164 Graham, John 50 Grahame, Kenneth 138 Gramsci, Antonio 191n2 Grandmothers Against Removals (GMAR) 135 Great Expectations (Charles Dickens) 31, 45n12 Greece, ancient 5, 12 Guha, Ranajit 190 ‘half-​caste’ 66; Australia 66–​71, 84; civilisation process 87; as figure of

excess 15, 93; good and bad coloniser 15; government institutions 127; Jedda 87, 89–​90, 92, 109, 111; and the moron 94–​97; Neville’s thinking 93, 95–​101, 104–​107, 139, 175–​176; objectification by female anthropologists 146; as problem 98–​101; as solution 104–​107; vilification 113n16; see also Stolen Generations Hall, Stuart 4–​5, 7, 28, 87 Haskins, Victoria K. 65n4 Hasluck, Paul 93, 107, 111n4 Hauser, Kaspar 49, 65n6 Havnen, Olga 137 Hell on Wheels (2011–​2016) 64n2 Herbert, Xavier 56, 85n2, 108–​109; Poor Fellow My Country 68–​69 Herron, John 124 hierarchy of needs 121 history wars 71 Hitchcock, Alfred 30 Hobbes, George 168 Hobbes, Thomas 149, 154 homelessness representations 17, 124; After the Apology 135; Jasper Jones 129–​130; Rabbit-​Proof Fence 127–​129 homo sacer 148, 160–​161, 183 Honey, John 57, 62–​64, 67 Hossain, Samia 93 Howard, John: ATSIC abolition 169n4; Bringing Them Home 119, 121–​122, 127, 143, 150; history wars 71; Northern Territory Intervention 117, 148–​152, 157, 168, 180; and Pearson, Noel 140n3; ‘To Stabilise and Protect’ speech 148–​151, 154, 158–​160, 180; Wik Decision 118, 121, 152 Huggins, Jackie 144–​145, 169n3 Hughes-​D’aeth, Tony 127 Human Rights Commission 161 Hunter, Ernest 160 Hutcheon, Linda 85n6 hygiene 94 Idriess, Ion L., Nemarluk 90 Immigration Restriction Act 1901 10, 44n3 Imperial Leather (Anne McClintock) 67, 78–​81, 84, 86n7, 163 incarcerated child 1, 117, 175, 201; ‘Colours’ (Tony Birch) 202; criminalised boys 163; Don Dale

226 Index Youth Detention Centre 117, 164–​166, 168, 175; Limbo 188–​189 infantilisation 3; of criminalised boys’ parents 165; native-​child nexus 6–​7; piccaninny 81; The Swan Book 188 Ingram, Penelope 56 Initial Conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities see Canberra Conference intergenerational trauma 114; artefacts 137; Child Protection Services 133; ‘Culture of Denial’ 157–​158; piccaninny 84; Samson and Delilah 199; and stereotypes 168 Invasion Day 2, 9, 11, 84 Ivory, Bill 90 Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë) 31–​32 Jasper Jones: film (2017) 129–​130; novel (Craig Silvey) 15, 129–​132, 195 Jedda (1955) 15, 17, 67, 70, 78, 80, 87–​92, 107–​111, 114–​115, 125 Johnson, Colin 92, 111n3 Jonas, Hans 14 Jones, Tony 156 juvenile detention centres see incarcerated child Kant, Immanuel 6, 102 Keane, Jan 29–​30, 45n11 Kelada, Odette 69, 70 Kennerley, Kerri-​Anne 2, 9 Kernot, Cheryl 123–​124 King, Governor 20 kitsch 38, 46n20; The Adventures of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie 37, 38; Australia 67, 80; piccaninny 67, 76–​78, 80–​83, 174 Koche, David 137 Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror 54–​55 Kunoth, Rosalie 91 Lacan, Jacques 45n14 Langton, Marcia 71, 74, 92, 194 Lateline 146–​147, 156–​157 Lavarch, Michael 115 Lawson, Henry 23, 88 Laycock, Rebecca 128 Leak, Bill 166 Lee, Harper, To Kill a Mockingbird 129 Letourneau, Charles 49 Limbo 188–​189, 193, 195, 200

Lindsay, Joan, Picnic at Hanging Rock 42 Lindsay, Norman 23 Lingiari, Vincent 86n9 Link-​Up 19n1, 115 Linnaeus, Carl 155 Little Big Man (1970) 64n2 Little Children Are Sacred (2007) 122, 151–​153, 157, 159–​160 Little Women (Louisa May Alcott) 28, 31–​32 Lloyd, Jane 169n6 Locke, John 149 Lorde, Audre 144 Lost (Frederick McCubbin) 26 lost child 16, 23, 26–​28; The Adventures of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie 37; Dot and the Kangaroo 33–​34, 37; and found child 47; Nest 41–​42; Rabbit-​ Proof Fence 129; Remembering Babylon 55–​56; Seven Little Australians 30; Where the Trees Were 43 Luhrmann, Baz 17, 66–​69, 71, 84, 125, 128, 174 Maademan 49, 52 Mabo v. Queensland (1992) 10, 43, 118–​119, 151, 181 MacGuffins 30, 45n14, 68 Macklin, Robert, Castaway 53–​54, 65n5 MacSween, Prue 136–​137 Malouf, David, Remembering Babylon 54–​57, 199 Malty, Peg 81 Manganinnie: film (1980) 48, 57–​58, 62–​64, 67–​68; novel (Beth Roberts) 15, 48, 57–​64, 68, 70 Mankind 96 Martin, Susan K. 45–​46n15 Marx, Karl 75, 172; The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 173 Maslow, Abraham 121 Maynard, J. 65n4 Maza, Bob 12 McClintock, Anne, Imperial Leather 67, 78–​81, 84, 86n7, 163 McClure, Patrick 118, 140n3 McCubbin, Frederick, Lost 26 McGregor, Russell 102 McLaren, John 24 McQuire, Amy 137

Index  227 Members of the Yorta Yorta Aboriginal Community v The State of Victoria (1998) 119 Menzies, Robert 111n4 Merland, Constant, Dix-​Sept Ans Chez Les Sauvages 51–​53 migration acts 10, 181 Millais, John Everett, ‘A Child’s World’/​ ‘Bubbles’ 79 Miller, Benjamin 111n1 Mills, Jane 109 mimetic theory of the image 13 minstrel shows 78, 111n1 mixed race see ‘half-​caste’ Moffatt, Tracey 12 Moreton-​Robinson, Aileen: Bell’s ‘Speaking about Rape Is Everyone’s Business’ 146–​148; land, Indigenous people’s connection to 119; Northern Territory Intervention 150, 152–​153, 168; pathologisation of Indigenous people 18; piccaninny 67, 80, 82, 174; terra nullius 10; white possession 69, 76, 80, 171–​172 moron 94–​97 Morrill, James (‘Gemmy’) 53 Morrison, Scott 135 Mullins, Ian 62 Mulvey, Laura 67, 72–​75 Munro, Jenny 201 Murdoch, Rupert 157 nation 9–​10 national apology to Stolen Generations 15–​16, 70, 114, 116, 122, 125, 131, 135, 164–​165 National Archive 116 National Black Theatre 12 National Constitution Convention 200–​201 national identity 21–​23; eco-​nationalism 24–​25; excluded children 175; ‘half-​ caste’ 93; Seven Little Australians 28 National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families 115–​116; see also Bringing Them Home native-​child nexus 4–​9 Native Title 129; danger 201; extinguishing 185; Howard’s ‘To Stabilise and Protect’ speech 149, 151; Howard’s ‘Wik 10-​point plan’ 121–​122; Mabo Decision 10, 43,

118–​119, 151, 181; Members of the Yorta Yorta Aboriginal Community v The State of Victoria 119; Native Title Amendment Bill 1997 (Cth) 118; The Swan Book 179, 191; Watson on 181–​182; Where the Trees Were 43; Wik Decision 118, 121–​122, 151 nativised white child 22, 39, 47; The Adventures of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie 37; Dot and the Kangaroo 33; Manganinnie 48; Remembering Babylon 56 nature writing 41–​44 naughty child 20–​21, 28–​30 Neill, Rosemary 167 Nelson, Topsy Napurrula 144 Nemarluk 89–​90 Nemarluk (Ion L. Idriess) 90 Nerad, Julie Cary 103 Nest (Inga Simpson) 41–​42, 44 Network Ten 2 Neville, A.O. 111n4, 143, 157–​158; atavism 103, 104; Australia’s Coloured Minority 15, 17, 87–​88, 96–​101, 103–​106, 121, 175; Canberra Conference 96, 102, 121; Caucasian hypothesis 102–​103, 104; ‘Contributory Causes of Aboriginal Depopulation in Western Australia’ 87, 96–​97, 158–​159; eugenics 93, 97, 100–​101, 106, 111n5, 112n10, 138; ‘half-​caste’ 93, 95–​101, 104–​107, 139, 175–​176; Jedda 89, 109; Rabbit-​Proof Fence 125, 128; Stolen Generations 15, 87, 92, 100, 102, 106, 161–​162, 175–​176 ‘Nevilles’ 86n11 Nimon, Maureen 23, 33, 44n2 Nine Network 137–​138 noble savage 6–​7, 8 Northern Territory Intervention 18, 117, 122–​123, 143, 146–​148, 151–​155, 159, 188; criminalised boys 164; Howard’s ‘To Stabilise and Protect’ speech 148–​151; sexualised girls 161, 163; The Swan Book 178, 183, 190; Watson on 180 Northern Territory National Emergency Response Act 2007 see Northern Territory Intervention Nowra, Louis: Bad Dreaming 157; ‘Culture of Denial’ 157–​159, 160 Noyce, Phillip 85n3, 125–​128, 195

228 Index Oatman, Olive 64n2 objet petit a 45n14, 54, 68 Oliver Twist (Charles Dickens) 28–​29, 31 Olsen, Christine 125, 127 original sin and original innocence 5–​6 origins of Australian childhood 22–​24 Orwell, George 138 ‘Our Gang’ (1922–​1944) 78 out-​of-​home care (OOHC) 140n9; and adoption 137–​138; Family Is Culture 132–​134; privatisation 141n15 Papson, Stephen 67, 85n6 parody 67–​68, 85n6 passing as white 106–​107 pastiche 67, 184 paternalism: fetish 75; Howard government 121, 123; Little Children Are Sacred 152; missionary 13; native-​ child nexus 8 Paterson, A.B. 23, 88 patriarchy: Bhaduri’s suicide 175, 201; Northern Territory Intervention 150; white sovereignty 172 patriotism: The Adventures of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie 37; eco-​nationalism 25; political imaginaries 9–​10 Pearson, Noel 118, 140n3 Pedley, Ethel C., Dot and the Kangaroo 15, 21, 32–​37, 39–​40, 42, 44 Pelletier, Narcisse (Anco) 49–​54, 65n4 Perkins, Charles 130 Perkins, Rachel 130 Phaedrus (Plato) 104, 106 pharmakon 104, 106 Pholi, Kerryn 165–​166 piccaninny 84–​85, 171; Australia 67, 174; Jedda 89; kitsch 67, 76–​78, 80–​83, 174; stereotype 76, 84, 111n1 Picnic at Hanging Rock (Joan Lindsay) 42 Pierce, Peter 26–​27 Pietz, William 75, 79, 81 Pilgrim, David 77 Pilkington Garimara, Doris, Follow the Rabbit-​Proof Fence 125 Plato 5, 11–​13; Phaedrus 104, 106 ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ (Jacques Derrida) 104 political correctness 165 political imaginaries 9–​11 Poor Fellow My Country (Xavier Herbert) 68–​69

Popplewell, Elyse 167 Powers of Horror (Julia Kristeva) 54–​55 Probyn-​Rapsey, Fiona 68, 85n2 profanation 159–​160 Protection Acts 119, 125, 129, 133 Quadrant 71, 161 Rabbit-​Proof Fence (2001) 15, 69, 85n3, 125–​129, 136, 161–​162, 195 race riots 10 Racial Discrimination Act 1975 118, 143, 149 racial typology 102 racism 1, 136; accusations 2; After the Apology 135; Australia 68; captivity narrative 48; ‘civilising’ the ‘savage’ 87; fetish 75; ‘Freedom Rides’ 130; ‘half-​ caste’ 99; Howard’s ‘To Stabilise and Protect’ speech 149–​150; Jasper Jones 130; scientific 23, 49, 79; ‘Speaking about Rape Is Everyone’s Business’ 143–​144; Sunrise panel 136 ‘raise the age’ campaign 117 Rancière, Jacques 11–​12, 47–​48, 56, 59, 62, 72–​73, 84, 88, 135 rape: ‘Culture of Denial’ 157–​158; Kennerly’s claims 2; Little Children Are Sacred 159; Samson and Delilah 198; ‘Speaking about Rape Is Everyone’s Business’ 143–​147, 149, 169n3; The Swan Book 183–​184; trivialisation 163; see also child sexual abuse Read, Peter 140n6 reconciliation 16–​17; assimilationism 191; Australia 66, 71, 74, 84, 108; Bringing Them Home 115, 123–​124; and fetish 76, 83–​85; and government 121–​123; Howard’s ‘To Stabilise and Protect’ speech 151; ‘practical’ 121–​123; Rabbit-​Proof Fence 125; Stolen Generations 115, 123–​124, 131; The Swan Book 190; Uluru Statement from the Heart 201 regulatory ritualism 133 Remembering Babylon (David Malouf) 54–​57, 199 removed child 124; After the Apology 135; Bringing Them Home 132; Family Is Culture 132–​135; gender 142; Rabbit-​Proof Fence 125–​129; see also out-​of-​home care; Stolen Generations

Index  229 Reynolds, Henry 19n1 Roberts, Beth, Manganinnie 15, 48, 57–​64, 68, 70 Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe) 24, 26, 40, 51 Rogers, Nanette 146–​147, 150, 156, 157 Rolfe, Zachary 166–​167 Rollo, Toby 5, 8 Rome, ancient 5–​6 Ross, Alison 13–​14 Rossiter, Richard 29 Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques 6, 98, 149 Rowley, C.D. 98 Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse 147 Rudd, Kevin 70, 114, 116, 125 sacrificial bodies 159–​161 Safran, Henri 39 Said, Edward 7, 22, 64n1 Sammut, Jeremy 164–​165 Samson and Delilah (2009) 197–​200 Scherger, Deanna Gross 103 scopophilia 67, 73–​74 Searchers, The (1956) 64n2 Secretariat of the National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care (SNAICC) 115, 122 Seitler, Dana 113n15 Sen, Ivan 18, 193, 195–​197, 203n1 sensible, distribution of the see distribution of the sensible Seven Little Australians (Ethel Turner) 20–​22, 28–​33, 39–​40, 68 sexual abuse 146, 163; see also Northern Territory Intervention; rape sexualised girls 18, 143, 161–​163, 168 Shorten, Kristin 167 Silvey, Craig, Jasper Jones 129–​132 Simpson, Inga 41, 44n4; Nest 41–​42, 44; Where the Trees Were 42–​44 Simpson, Nardi 193 Skin Deep (Liz Conor) 142, 162–​163 Sky News 141n14 slavery 13; atavism 104; Bringing Them Home 51; captive white woman 50; Jedda 92; Kant’s anthropology 102; piccaninny 76; sexual 142 Smith, Nicholas 24 soap advertising 78–​80, 84 Social Security Legislation Amendment [Work for the Dole] Bill 1997 117 Socrates 104

‘Speaking about Rape Is Everyone’s Business’ (Diane Bell) 143–​147, 149, 169n3 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 18, 193; ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ 170–​177, 181, 183, 186–​187, 190, 201 Statement from the Heart 200–​201 state of nature 149, 168, 180–​181 stereotypes 7; The Adventures of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie 39; After the Apology 135; captive white woman 50; children’s literature 24; Dix-​Sept Ans Chez Les Sauvages 51; Dot and the Kangaroo 35; fear of perpetuating negative 167; gender 142; and intergenerational trauma 168; Lateline appearance by Nanette Rogers 146; piccaninny 76, 84, 111n1; Storm Boy (1976) 46n23; The Swan Book 183, 184 sterilisation 93–​94, 97, 112nn6, 9, 143 Stolen Generations 1, 115–​116, 143; After the Apology 135; Australia 66–​70, 74, 84, 125; constitutional referendum (1967) 122; criminalised boys 164–​165; darkening of children’s skin 100, 175–​176; Dot and the Kangaroo 36; eugenics 64, 111–​112n5; Family Is Culture 133; Goward on 138, 141n14; Jasper Jones 131; Jedda 88, 107, 111, 125; national apology to 15–​16, 70, 114, 116, 122, 125, 131, 135, 164–​165; Neville’s role 15, 87, 92, 100, 102, 106, 161–​162, 175–​176; origins of term 140n6; Rabbit-​Proof Fence 125–​129; settler-​coloniser representations 174; sexualised girls 161; Sunrise panel 136; see also Bringing Them Home; removed child Storm Boy: film (1976) 39, 46n23; novella (Colin Thiele) 39–​41 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom’s Cabin 77–​78, 111n1 ‘Stronger Futures’ legislation 122 Studio 10 2, 9 Stynes, Yumi 2 subaltern 18, 175, 201; ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ 170–​177, 181, 183, 186–​187, 190, 201; The Swan Book (Alexis Wright) 171, 183–​187, 190 Sunrise 136–​137 survivance 177, 191n4 Sustainable Australia Party 45n5

230 Index Swan Book, The (Alexis Wright) 18, 171, 177–​179, 181–​191, 196, 200 Taylor, Affrica 36 Temple, Shirley 78 terraformers 27 terra nullius 1, 179; atavism 104; Australia 67; Blak sovereignty 181–​182; ‘half-​caste’ 15, 106; Jedda 114; Mabo v. Queensland 43, 118; Manganinnie 58, 62, 64; native-​child nexus 7; Native Title 181; Northern Territory Intervention 148; piccaninny 78, 82; political imaginaries 10–​11, 19n5; reassertion 119; Seven Little Australians 32; The Swan Book 171, 189, 191; and violence 183; the visible and invisible 12 Thiele, Colin, Storm Boy 39–​41 Thoreau, Henry David 41 Thornton, Warwick 18, 193, 197–​200, 203n1 ‘Tiddalik’ (Irene Watson) 179–​180, 192n5 Tilley, Elspeth 56, 60 Tindale, N.B. 111n4 Today Show, The 137–​138 To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee) 129 tomb of the unknown soldier 9–​10 Toomelah (2012) 196–​197 Torney, Kim 27 ‘To Stabilise and Protect’ speech (John Howard) 148–​151, 154, 158, 160 Tourism Australia 75–​76, 83–​84, 174 transitional objects 30, 45n14 Tune report 141n15 Turnbull, Malcolm 164 Turner, Ethel 56; Seven Little Australians 20–​22, 28–​33, 39–​40, 68 Turner, Patricia 137 Twain, Mark, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 129 Uluru: Jedda 90; Statement from the Heart 200–​201 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe) 77–​78, 111n1 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) 117

United States of America: atavism 104, 113n15; child protection 140n10; Floyd’s killing 167; Rabbit-​ Proof Fence 128; settler-​colonial whiteness 65n13; Tourism Australia advertisement 75–​76 unrepresentability of Aboriginal childhood 18, 202 van Rijswijk, Honni 183 Vertretung 172, 174 Vizenor, Gerald 191n4 Voller, Dylan 165 Wake in Fright: film (1971) 67; novel (Kenneth Cook) 42 Walker, Kumanjayi 166–​168 Wallace, Alfred Russel 102 Wallace, Jo-​Anne 4 Ward, James 137 Watkins, Tony 24 Watson, Irene 18, 179–​182, 185, 189, 191, 193–​194; ‘Tiddalik’ 179–​180, 192n5 Weaver, Rachael 32 We of the Never Never (1982) 67 Where the Trees Were (Inga Simpson) 42–​44 white Australia policy 23, 44n3 white saviour 142–​143, 145 Whitlam, Gough 86n9 Wik Decision 118–​119, 151–​152 Wild, Rex 151–​152 Willmot, Jo 144 Wilson, Emma, Cinema’s Missing Children 45n6 Wilson, Sir Ronald 116 Windschuttle, Keith 140n7, 161–​161 Winnicott, Donald 30 Winton, Tim 41 Wizard of Oz, The (1939) 69, 85n3, 128 Women’s Studies International Forum 145 Wordsworth, William 41 Wray, Matt 112n12 Wright, Alexis: Carpentaria 183; The Swan Book 18, 171, 177–​179, 181–​191, 196, 200 Žižek, Slavoj 45n14 Zonn, Leo E. 46n23