’A lovely land . . . by shadows dark untainted’?: whiteness and early Queensland women’s writing

11. ’A lovely land . . . byshadows dark

untainted’?: whiteness and earlyQueensland women’s writing

Belinda McKay

White women’s participation in the literary culture of Queensland has

been marked from the beginning by a preoccupation with the colonial

experience, and particularly with the racial dimension of that experi—ence. This chapter looks back at the formative but largely forgottenyears of white women’s writing, from the establishment of the colonyof Queensland in 1859 until 1937, the year in which the assimilation

policy was adopted across Australia. It examines whiteness in this bodyof literature as a discourse that both draws upon, and helps to shape, the

experience of women writers and readers as members of a recentlyestablished white colony. An ideology of whiteness underpins this

work, but its formulation is neither monolithic nor static: from the

beginning there are divergent tendencies, and significant new trends

emerge in the 19205 as the assimilation project begins to take hold of

the literary imagination. This literature tells us very little about the

racial Others with which it is so preoccupied, but a great deal about the

lived experience iof whiteness by women in early Queensland, as well

as the ways in which literary culture articulated whiteness as the cen—

trally cohesive factor in constructing a new white nation in the

Antipodes.Overall, two broad tendencies can be observed in this body of liter—

ature: on the one hand, a celebration of whiteness in the context of ide-

alisation of the developing state and nation, and, on the other, an

attempt to understand what it means to be an author and an agent of

colonialism.1 In terms of genre, celebration is characteristic of poetry,while a somewhat more complex and ambivalent response to race and

colonisation is explored in fiction. Since World War II, the tension

between these two approaches has been developed and transformed

creatively by white women such as Judith Wright, Thea Astley and

Janette Turner Hospital, along with Indigenous writers such as

Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Melissa Lucashenko.'

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’A lovely land . . . by shadows dark untainted’?

Early colonial writing by women

The distinctiveness of Queensland’s colonial history is reflected in the

literature of white women. While the dispossession of Indigenouspeople in Queensland to a large extent follows the familiar pattern of

colonisation throughout Australia, there are some significant differ—ences. Queensland was not extensively settled until much later than the

more populous states of New South Wales and Victoria, so that when

literature by Queensland women began to be published in the late

nineteenth century, the frontier wars were already largely over in the

southern states, but still continuing in Queensland and northern

Australia generally. New South Wales andVictoria had settled into more

genteel forms of colonial life, centred on the urban cultures of Sydneyand Melbourne, which were much more dominant in their states than

was Brisbane in relation to the highly decentralised state of

Queensland.The sustained intensity of the frontier wars in Queensland,the extreme harshness of the environment, and a system of land tenure

based on leases and small selections rather than large tracts of freehold

land, combined to intensify those anxieties about origins, legitimacyand belonging which characterise Colonial cultures. Moreover,

Queensland women writers often lived for substantial periods of time

in non-metropolitan areas, where such anxieties are most strongly felt.

The earliest forms of expressive writing in colonial Queensland —

letters and diaries — played an important role in paving the way for

more public forms of literature by describing the conditions of life in

a strange environment, and exploring ways of integrating new experi-ences into familiar cultural forms. Rachel Henning’s Queenslandletters, written between 1862 and 1865 and first published in the

Bulletin in the 19505, are full of episodes and scenes which soon appear

in women’s fiction about Queensland: battles against the harsh ele—

ments, frightening encounters with ‘wild blacks’ and scenes of comic

relief involving ‘station blacks’. After her first encounter with

Queensland ‘blacks’, Henning wrote to her sister in England that ‘[t]heyare the queerest-lookingmortals certainly, with their long lean legs and

arms without an atom of flesh on them, more like spiders than anythinghuman’.The loyal ‘station blacks’ — whom she regards with a mixture

of condescension, mirth and affection —— are contrasted starkly with

treacherous ‘wild blacks’ or ‘myalls’beyond the station boundaries. This

was a period in which the colonial government had little effectivecontrol over substantial tracts of its gazetted territory, and Henning can

imagine the unsubdued' north of the colony only through what she has

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read of the American frontier: ‘The “far north” here is like the far west

in America, and strange wild stories are brought down about it’

(Henning 1969:92, 161).Henning’s letters described everyday conditions of life in the bush for

her English relatives, but the difficultyof finding a voice in a land that

was perceived to have ‘no old tradition’s magic’preoccupied early colo—nial women poets (O’Doherty 1909:92). Mrs Hope Connolly and

Mary Eva O’Doherty, under the pen names ‘Thomasine’ and ‘Eva’, had

both written for the Irish nationalist periodical, the Nation, before

migrating to Queensland in 1860 and 1862, respectively.Their poetryfor the Nation elaborates a female version of prophetic nationalism,often using the voice of the patriot mother or lover, and the poetry

they wrote in Queensland continued to draw predominantly on this

context. In poems such as ‘Mater Dolorosa’, Mrs Hope Connollyheralds the Irish diaspora as Ireland’s salvation: ‘Like dragon’steeth is

our banished seed’ (Connolly [1883]:111).The ironies generated-by transferring prophetic nationalism to the

Australian context, however, are epitomised in Mary Eva O’Doherty’spoem, ‘Queensland’,which depicts that colony as ‘a lovely land . . . byshadows dark untainted’ but at the same time ‘cold and soulless’. Here

Queensland. is a cultural term nullius: ‘barren’, ‘blank’, ‘lifeless’, and

apparently unpopulated, it awaits ‘that touch informing’of a nationalist

literary movement (O’Doherty 1909:92—3).Thispoem renders invisi-

ble the history of colonisation: O’Doherty fails to acknowledge that

Queensland too has an oppressed people and a foreign overlord, but

that here she is a member of the oppressor race. Patrick Buckridge has

identified in Connolly and O’Doherty a ‘cultural maladjustment’,attributing their scanty production in Queensland to the ‘lack of the

particular forms of cultural organisation and participation’ that would

have enabled them to continue to play the ‘semi—publicpoetic role’characteristic of their earlier careers (1991:22). It is also significant that,in Queensland, Connolly and O’Doherty were active participants in a

British colonial project: it was surely their inability to draw analogiesbetween the colonisation of Ireland and of Australia that deprived them

of the possibility of finding inspiration for political protest in their new

environment.,

By contrast, Rosa Praed, who was born and educated in Queenslandbut lived most of her adult life in England, was both prolific and explicitin representing and reflectingupon the ways in which white women in

nineteenth—centuryQueensland engaged with the colonial enterprise.

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The daughter of an early Queensland colonist who became a politi—cian, she set many of her novels in the colony of ‘Leichardt’s [sic]Land’— a ‘transparentmask’ for Queensland —— and initiated a number

of key literary themes which endure to the present, including a preoc—

cupation with the state’s violent origins (1881:iv).The main plots of Praed’s Queensland novels centre on love and mar-

riage, but the sub—plotsof these novels often explore relationshipsbetween colonising whites and dispossessed blacks, drawing on her own

experiences of the frontier wars and early colonial life, which are

recounted -—-— with some licence -—— in the autobiographical MyAustralian Girlhood (1902az54—62)and Australian Life (188550—65). As

a child, Praed lived on the property next to the Frasers, who were killed

by Aborigines at Hornet Bank in 1857, and her father Thomas LodgeMurray-Prior led the subsequent ferocious retaliations.2 Perhaps not

surprisingly, Praed’s depiction of relations between the colonisers and

the dispossessed is ambiguous and inconsistent. In much of her earlier

work she inserts episodes from the standard colonial repertoire of

‘Aboriginal’ stories, such as the elopement of a married woman with

a lover: in Outlaw and Lawmaker (1987bz214—15)and The Luck of the

Leura (1907:195—6), Praed facetiously recounts a ‘Blacks’ Iliad’, in

which Helen leaves Menelaus for Paris and causes inter—tribal warfare.3

Gradually, however, Praed begins to subject colonialism to critical

scrutiny, not —— it must be emphasised ——-— as an advocate for Aboriginalrights, but rather to seek moral redemption for the white race.

In Mrs. Tregasleiss,a novel primarily concerned with the dilemma of a

woman trapped in a loveless marriage, Praed’s sub—plotadumbrates a

Vision of a future that will fuse European and Aboriginal cultures in a

descendant of white colonisers. But the embodiment of the fantasy —

the child Ning, ‘a queer, elf—like creature’ who speaks a mixture of

‘blacks’ language’and English, sings Aboriginal songs and is fascinated

by stories about ‘debil—debil’ — wanders off into the bush, where she is

devoured by Wild animals (1897:4PS, 12, 138). Equally slippery poten—tialities are explored in Fugitive Anne (1902b), where. Praed deploys

fantasy to broach alternatives to the existing social order: escape from

the constrictions of patriarchal marriage bonds, female power, and

sexual attraction across racial and cultural boundaries. After escapingfrom her husband into the wilds of Cape York Peninsula,Anne is hailed

as a goddess by Aboriginal ‘cannibals’, then as high priestess by a lost

Mayan tribe. Sexual attraction between Anne and Kombo is suggestedin several ways. ‘Comboism’ was a nineteenth—centuryeuphemism for

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sexual relations between white men and black women (Loos 1982:170)and Anne feels Kombo’s ‘wealed chest’ while she is ‘drawn along in his

arms’ as he rescues her from the Mayans (Praed 1902b:425).The sexual

attraction, however, is quickly suppressed.Anne inherits a title, marries

the white Eric, and collaborates with him on an anthropological work,while Kombo is reduced to the role of a; sideshow on their Englishlecture tour. In Praed’s novels, the liberation of the oppressed white

heroines often comes at the expense of the Aboriginal characters.

Not until Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land (first published in

1915) did Praed explicitly accuse the colonial regime of theft of

Aboriginal land.When Colin McKeith, who scores his gun barrel with

a notch for every black—fellow he kills, describes his shooting of KingMograbar, Lady Bridget retorts: ‘How cruelly unjust. It was his country

you were stealing.’She continues: ‘I don’t admire your glorious British

record, I think it’s nothing but a record of robbery, murder and cruelty,beginning with Ireland and ending with South Africa’. Lady Bridgethere places herself outside the oppressor group by speaking as a

member of the colonised Irish race, but soon colludes with the ‘invader’

and ‘aggressor’ by accepting McKeith’s proposal of marriage and

accepting her future husband’s violent past: ‘The black—fellows he has

slain —— the one jarring note between us ——- are never to be resuscitated’

(Praed 1987az47, 62, 80). Bridget leaves her husband after his brutal

punishment of the fugitive black lovers,Wombo and Oola, but the vio-

lence of Colin McKeith serves primarily to establish his need for moral

redemption as an individual.The insight into colonialism which beginsthe novel is not developed, and the suffering of the Aboriginal charac—ters merely provides the basis for the rehabilitation of the white

woman’s marriage. However limited her analysis may be, Praed’s wOrk

initiates a preoccupation with the intertwining of race and genderissues in Queensland women’s writing. Her literary descendants, in this

sense, include Mabel Forrest, Dorothy Cottrell, Kay Glasson Taylor,Janette Turner HoSpitaland Thea Astley.

The poet Mary Hannay Foott dealt with colonisation very. differentlyfrom Praed. After the death of her husband in 1884, the Scottish—born

and Melbourne—educated Foott moved from south—westQueenslandto Brisbane, where she edited the Women’s page of the Queenslander for

about a decade from 1887. In 1885 she published a volume of poetry,Where the Pelican Builds and Other Poems, which in 1890 was reissued in

London with new poems as Morna Lee and Other Poems. Foott’s work

attempts to make European culture ‘at home’ in Australia, moving

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seamlessly between themes drawn from Queensland life, on the one

hand, and European high culture, on the other: translations of Heine_

and Hugo appear alongside poems about colonial hardships such as

drought (‘Where the Pelican Builds’ and ‘In Time of Drought’) or the

attacks of the ‘savagehorde’ (‘Up North’). In ‘The Future of Australia’,

she acknowledges nostalgia for ‘the legends of olden days’— that is,

for European culture — but urges instead the creation of an Australian

literary nationalism:

Sing us the Isle of the Southern Sea, —

The land we have called our own;

Tell us what harvest there shall be

From the seed that we have sown. (1885:13)

The use of the pioneering analogy of sowing and harvesting (theactivities often used to justify taking Aboriginal land) is one of the

empowering strategies adopted by Foott to construct an identity as a

white colonial writer. A further empowering strategy is her denial that

the colony was founded on violence and dispossession: she declaims

confidently of Australia that ‘slaves, —— she has not one!’ and ‘no theft

her soul shall soil’ (1885:14). Foott’s celebration of the colonial past

contrasts markedly with Praed’s attempt, tentative and ambivalent

though it may be, to understand what it means to be an author and

agent of colonialism. The tension between these two approachesinforms writing by Queensland women to the present day. It also marks

a difference between the literary genres of prose and poetry.

’Australia’s national hymn of progress’: poetry and the

celebration of whiteness‘

In the years leading up to Federation, and immediately afterwards, one

of the most public ways in which white women in Queensland partici—

pated in the process of creating a nation was through writing patriotic

poetry for competitions and periodicals. In their work, nationalism is

closely bound up with celebration of whiteness.

Carina Thorne, for instance, in Leaves from the Australian Bush, lauds

the ‘pioneers’and their forging of a superior Anglo—Saxontype. In ‘To

Australian Girls’, she writes: ‘The fresher life, ’neath brighter skies, shall,

to your Anglo—Saxonblood,/ A grand development insure, for you are

free and fair and good’. Britain, on the other hand, is shown as weak—

ened by her betrayal of the racial superiority of Anglo—Saxonblood. In

‘The Symptoms’, a poem ridiculing Britain’s finding of schools in

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.China, a. ‘senile’ Mother Britannia asks: ‘What if my children growstunted and weak and are dying of hunger now;/ What are the rights of

the British born, compared to the rights of the Chow?’ (191223, 6, 10).Thorne’s work demonstrates the extent to which a sense of Australian

identity at this time was founded on an explicitly articulated ideologyof whiteness.

Ernestine Hemmings (later Ernestine Hill, author of The Great

Australian Loneliness) was a schoolgirl at All Hallows’ Convent in

Brisbane when her earliest poems were published in the children’s pageof the Catholic Advocate, and subsequently in Peter Pan Land and Other

Poems. Meaghan Morris has pointed to the self—consciouslyIrish and

Catholic modernism of the young poet’sBrisbane milieu, but Catholic

.modernism could look surprisingly like familiar Queensland racism

overlaid with evangelising Catholicism. In ‘For the Chinese Babies’,

Hemmings urges her readers to donate to Chinese Catholic missions

which buy and educate girl babies ‘[s]o that horrid old John Chinaman

can’t throw them in the sea’ (1916:17).The superiority of the Anglo-Saxon also underlies the work of Mabel

Forrest. Alpha Centauri draws much of its inspiration from nationalist

fervour. Fear of invasion from the north is the inspiration for ‘Australia

Undefended’, which calls Australians to take up arms to defend theirland from an unspecified (but clearly racial) threat:

Arm the empty North that drowses by its tide—washed sandy slopes;There is iron in the ranges, there is silver in the stopes,There is wealth undreamed —

your birthright ——- in the country’sscattered parts,There is grit and honest courage in your people’sloyal hearts.

Oh! the fair—maid country calls you, as she crouches in the sun,

That you keep her honour stainless with the power of your gun!(1909:20—1)

Forrest needs the familiar trope of terra nallius —— the land is ‘empty’ -—

in order to claim that the immense mineral wealth is the ‘birthright’ofthe colonisers.Their qualities of ‘grit and honest courage’further justifythe claim.

The Queensland poems of US—born Lydia O’Neil, Dinkum Aussieand Other Poems, explicitly attribute the qualities of Queenslanders -—

endurance and cheerfulness in the face of adversity —- to their racial

origins. ‘Kintail’s Children’, for example, celebrates the Celtic origins ofwhite colonisers:

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Ay,Kintail’s children have wandered far —

Farther they yet may roam;

But the heart of one is the heart of all,And the blood of the clan runs clean and free. (1924276)

In this poem, O’Neil makes racial links between the two settler dispos—sessory nations of her experience: the United States and Australia. Most

other women poets, however, focus exclusively on Australia’s connec-

tion with Britain.

The prolific and popular Emily Coungeau migrated from Britain in

1887 at the age of 17 and lived much of her life on Bribie Island. In

high—flown,sentimental verse, Coungeau addresses an eclectic range of

subject matter, including world events, war and peace, womanhood,children, mythology, and poetic fantasies. One of her main preoccupa—

tions, however, was contributing to ‘Australia’s national hymn of

progress’,as she put it in her poem ‘Queensland Pioneers’. Her agendais explicitly racialeustralia, the ‘younger child’ of the ‘EmpireMother’,is populated by the ‘lineal sons of Norsemen’ and the need to ‘fill

Australia with our kin’ is Set against the danger that ‘through portalswide the alien hordes may pour’ (1916bz7, 32—3,61—3).

In expounding this racial agenda, Coungeau is generally reticent on

the question of Indigenous Australians. In ‘Australia: Enchantress’, she

suggests that with, their ‘skins of amber bronze and blue-black hair’

(1927:87) they may be descended from ancient Egyptians, but they are

‘savages’overawed by a superior civilisation in ‘Discovery of the

Brisbane River’ (1927210).4‘Austral’s heroes’ are ‘pioneers who delved

the virgin soil/ In this new land with patient endless toil’; they are

likened to the ancient Greek heroes in that ‘theyfought, and would not

yield’ (1916bz38—9).Coungeau makes no reference, however, to the

resistance of Aboriginal peoples in the frontier wars, let alone their

prior claim to the land.

Australia’s involvement in World War I prompted a number of writers

to develop a new public poetic role by merging several strands identi-

fiable in earlier poetry, including the intertwining of patriotism with

racial purity. Coungeau already considered herself a public poet, havingwritten regularly on colonial inaugurations or anniversaries, and not

surprisingly she found fertile subject matter in World War I. Princess

Mona is a fantastical contribution to the Anzac legend, again emphasis—

ing the Viking ancestry and heroism of Australian soldiers. A beautiful

girl, Princess Mona, is the sole possessor and ruler of the natives of the

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Island of Dreams, which Coungeauidentifies as Felix Australis. Her

origins are obscure, but she is not a native: as a baby, she was found

floating near a coral atoll and rescued by the earth sprite, Gnomus.

Growing up, she survives the raids of Indonesian marauders and marries

an explorer, Prince Boris. MOna bears five sons, three of whom (‘readyfor the foemen/ For of Viking stock are we’) depart for the ‘seat of war’

in the ‘Boreal Seas’,where they are killed. The capital city of the realm

is named ‘Anzac’ in their honour, and Mona — now Queen Auster —-—-

appears at the ceremony wearing a gift from her dead sons, a ‘coronet

of magnificent scintillating diamonds’ fOrming the letters ‘ANZAC’

(Coungeau [1916a]:[51], 52, 61).This bizarre fantasy might have been

expected to sink without trace, but its message— that the superiority

of the Nordic races justifies the possession of a population of inferior

natiVes —— clearly struck a chord among Australian artists of the era.

Alfred Hill used Coungeau’s text as the libretto for an opera entitled

Auster, which was praised by Thorold Waters as ‘more promising for the

deve10pment of a real Australian opera than anything that has yet been

done’! (193514).Similar articulations of patriotism in terms of whiteness are common

across the political spectrum. In O’Neil’s ‘Anzac Day at Wynnum,1921’, the ‘heroic band’ at Anzac Cove asked just one privilege of

England, the right to die for her: they ‘provedtheir British blood that

day’(1924:53—4).Lala Fisher, on the other hand, was a vehement oppo—

nent of the war and of conscription, but her anti-war sentiment is

matched by an equally vehement racism. In ‘Violation’ (1919), origi—nally published in the Australian I/Vorleer,she attacks the Allies for seekingthe support of non—white races in their struggle. Fisher’s racism was partof an agenda — coherent for that era — which included nationalism,support for workers’ rights and a concern for sexual purity. It was not

until afterWorldWar II, when Judith Wright and Oodgeroo Noonuccal

developed a political position which linked a sense of place to the

history of dispossession and colonisation, that poetry by Queensland,women moved to any significant extent beyond the celebration of

whiteness.'

’Nearly white’: the exploration of assimilation in fiction

For many years, Rosa Praed Was Queensland’sonly published woman

novelist, but from the 1890s, a number of Queensland women ——

including Laura Palmer-Archer, Ethel Mills and Lala Fisher — were

prolific writers of short stories, which were often set in western or

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northern Queensland, with stories of contact between white women

and Aboriginals (especially, but not exclusively,Aboriginal women ser-

vants) featuring prominently. Non—fiction emerging from Queenslandwas more explicitly focused on Aboriginality. Katie Langloh Parker,author of Australian Legendaryfiles (1896), collected Aboriginal stories

while living on stations in Queensland and northern New South Wales.

Alice Monkton Duncan—Kemppublished recollections of her child—

hood, and reflections on Aboriginal people and culture, in Our Sandhill

Country (1933). _

In 1899, Lala Fisher responded to the English taste for exotic stories

of bush life by editing By Creek and Gully, a collection of work byAustralian writers living in London. One of her own contributions to

this volume, ‘The Sleeping Sickness of Lui the Kanaka’, evokes the

horrors of slave labour on a Queensland plantation: the narrator,‘

Wilton, who is ‘paid to watch over the interests of the sugar industry’,decides that a series of mysterious deaths are the result of ‘the Kanakas’

well-known habit of “caving in”’.When Lui, the ‘native doctor of the

herd’, becomes ill Wilton decides to effect his own cure: ‘Round and

round that bullock-yard I lashed him — lashed his Crimean shirt to

ribbons -—-- lashed great weals upon his chest and shoulders and across

his arms, until at length my arm refused further service, and fell help-less at my side’ (1899:259).While Fisher has the boss expose his own

callousness and brutality, the story also depicts the Kanaka labourers asI

unsuitable for employment and feeds into the racist campaign for the

expatriation of Pacific Islander indentured labourers.

Although By Creek and Gully purports to be about bush life, Fisher’s

story in fact marks the beginning of a shift, which became more pro—

nounced in twentieth—centuryQueensland writing, from interest in the

outback to interest in coastal and north Queensland. Where outbacknovels feature arid landscapes and conflict between pastoralists and dis-

placed Indigenous people, coastal novels explore the gothic possibilitiesof wet and fecund environments,and their multi—ethnic communities.

Harriet Patchett Martin’s ‘Cross Currents’, in the same collection, is

also set in the coastal north. Englishwoman Alma Belmont is shocked

on her arrival in Queensland by the omnipresence of Aboriginal

people, most of whom she finds ‘objects of horror’. She faints during a

corroboree performed in the grounds of a Custom House by ‘grinning

demons, with countenances distorted by every Vile passion’ (Fisher1899:21, 33).

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Whiteness & Nation - McKay

Zora Cross’s first novel, Daughtersof the Seven Mile, is a three—genera-tional colonial saga located in and around the Queensland goldminingtown of Hillborough (based on Gympie). The saga’s foundational

moment is a fight for possession of Mary (the saga’sfuture matriarch),in which the white Bill Wilson (the future patriarch) kills the ‘half—

caste’ Madrack: “‘Australia doesn’t mix her blood with yellow nor

black, Madrack. There’re a whole lot of things like you that want

quietly pushing off the earth.”’Twentyyears later, Aboriginal people are

omnipresent on the fringes of Hillborough, but are nonetheless seen as

a disappearing race: even ‘poor doomed Sally Snake’, although a

midwife to whom ‘many a good Australian owed her life’, is reduced to

a ‘remnant of a race dying so quickly on the advancing wave of another’

([1924]:16, 128).Through its focus on women and marriage, the plotvoices some of the central anxieties of white women: obscure parent—

age, forinstance, raises the shameful spectre of a convict past or the

horror of miscegenation.‘

Cross’s second novel, The Lute-Girl qf Rainyvale, is set in north

.Queensland, which Marie Bjelke—Petersenwas later to describe in her

only Queensland novel, jungle Night, as a place of paradoxes: ‘The land

of fine deeds and black, terrible ones! The country of contradictions, a

conglomerate of good and evil!’ (1937:26). Cross’s novel takes placelargely in Rainyvale at the home of the Li Kee family -— a thinly dis-

guised allusion to Innisfail and the influential See Poy family.The inter—

secting plot lines interweave ‘love, mystery and 'adventure’ against the

background of a racially and ethnically diverse society Which initiallystrikes fear into the southern heroine Melise Hargreaves.Gradually she

warms to Chinese culture through the agency of her friend Lily Li Kee,but nonetheless champions the duplicitous Dora against Mr Li Kee out

of a need to defend her race against the Other: ‘whatever Dora had

done . . . Dora was white and her friends were yellow. Dora was West;

they were East’ (Cross [1925]:194). The novel’s parallel love story,however, involves the crossing of racial boundaries: Harry Li Kee elopeswith an Islander trapeze artist, Sina, against the wishes of his parents and

her guardian.The white heroine, by contrast, can only cross boundaries

at Li Kee’s fancy dress ball, where she dresses — and experiences a

Vision —

as the Princess of the Blue Bamboo. Melise’s engagement to

Dale Acton at the end of the novel restores normality as whiteness.

Mabel Forrest, already a well—known poet, achieved great popularsuccess with her second novel, The Wild Moth, which was filmed by

'Charles Chauvel in 1926 as The Moth qf Moonbi. Forrest’s novel is the

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’A lovely land . . . by shadows dark untainted'?

parallel tale of two women: the white Dell and an unnamed ‘half—caste’

who plies her trade as a prostitute in a Queensland country town. In

the violent opening scene, Dell is threatened with physical and sexual

violence by Black Ferris, the drunken brute whom she believes to be

her father, and he is shot dead by Tom Resoult. The message of this

novel is the necessity of pure breeding: in the ‘back blocks’, everyone is

‘[t]abulated,marked of. Black or white. Neutral tints are not allowed’.

Dell’s dark colouring, however, hints at the possibility of racial impu—

rity, and the mystery of her ancestry has to be resolved before she can

marry the impeccably white Resoult. The discovery that Dell is the

product of her mother’s illicit liaison with an Irish artist is sufficient to

reinstate her to all the privileges of whiteness, while in the sub—plotthe

‘half—caste’ is rejected by whites and blacks alike. Most men simply use

and abuse the ‘half—caste’,but Tom, whom she desires passionately,rejects her advances, while a ‘flaccid’ bank clerk is in love with her. Both

of these men are drawn sympathetically to differing degrees: Tom is

shown to be a worthy hero because he keeps his sexuality racially pure,

while the bank clerk’s unrequited love makes him almost heroic. No-

future, however, can be imagined by Forrest for the ‘half—caste’: she

drowns in a flooded river, dragged down by her fine European clothes

as she tries to escape her ‘hated black blood’ (Forrest 1924:13—14, 177,

199).5In White Witches, Forrest again alludes to liaisons between white men

and black women. Irish Maeve is on her way to marry Armand, the

‘Merino King’,when he telegrams to intercept her with the announce-

ment that a ‘dark woman’ has greater right, though not in law, to his

home. Later in the novel, there is a casual reference to the mixed race

children of such liaisons, and a repetition of a trope, common amongwomen writers of this period, that such children believed themselves to

be superior to ‘full—bloods’: ‘Dirra the half—caste had a kindly contempt

for Algernon, who was a full—blood aboriginal, Dirra having an

Englishman for a father -— some said a titled gentleman — in any case,

probably an efficient rotter’ ([1929]:60—1).In the realm of fantasy,however, Forrest suggested that relationships which transgress racial

boundaries might be possible: in the short story‘The Little Black Man’,

a black gaelic goblin ‘who does not like talk about the White Australia

policy’ has his love for a pink waterlily sanctioned by her kiss!

(1915220).Like Forrest, most of Queensland’swomen novelists of the 1920s and

19305 engaged with Australian debates on the so-called Aboriginal

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problem. In this era, it was becoming clear to white Australians that

Aborigines were not simply and conveniently disappearing, and assim—

ilation (formally adopted as a policy by all the states in 1937) was

emerging as a new way of thinking about the future of the dispossessedby the dispossessors. Dorothy Cottrell’s work exemplifies this shift in

thinking. Her first novel, The Singing Gold, is a Bildungsromanin which

.Joan, the narrator, recounts her experiences as a woman defying genderstereotypes. Although the action is set in the 19205, Queensland’s colo—nial past frequently breaks through the surface of the text.joan grows

up on the Darling Downs, but her father’s stories about the beauty of

‘the “Myall”country of the blacks’ to the north lead her, at the end of

the novel, to visit the Channel Country. In a land now empty of

‘Myalls’,she finds spiritual replenishment in the landscape of the Plains

of the Singing Gold ([1928]:23, 271).By contrast, Cottrell’s second novel, Earth Battle, explores the survival

of Aboriginal people and the land’s resistance to colonisation. Set in

western Queensland during the first thirty years of the twentieth

century, the novel chronicles the ‘splendid’yet ‘hopeless’quest of Old

HB, ‘one o’ the worst men in Queensland’,to ‘own and master’ a pieceof property called Tharlane ([1930a]:17, 39). As in The Singing Gold,Cottrell suggests in Earth Battle that Aboriginal people have been wipedout. Old HB, who, in ‘the early days of Queensland settlement’, had

seen many such skeletons ‘lying where “justice”had been dealt’, is

moved when he comes across the skeleton of a very old man:

He had been trained in fierce contempt for the black man, and yet—

and yet—— it seemed to him rather rough that . . . there was left of the

Dark People only the stains of smoke and the shadows of traced hands

on the cave—walls . . . and picked bones on a rock! . . .And he saw the

White tide of the new people trampling, driving,cheating, hewing out

a new world wherein there was no room for the soft—eyedDark Folk,a new swift world in which they could not learn to live, and he saw

.them forced northward and westward ever to the desert and the fringesof the Gulf ——- beyond which was the seal ([1930a]:196—7)

Despite Old HB’s articulation of the ‘dyingrace’ theory, Earth Battle is,ironically, full of evidence of the survival of the ‘Dark Folk’.The ‘half—

caste’ Baada, the survivor of a massacre of Aboriginal people by troop—ers ([1930a]:132), is the mother of fourteen living children by a white

man, Old Backs. She inhabits a fluid racial space:

As years passed, she had grown fat and very ugly, while her skin dark—ened until she might have been taken for a ‘full black,’ and men called

160


her Mother Backs, and she called herself ‘the first white woman on the

Black Ant Creek,’ and was very hospitable. ([1930a]:24)6

White men also flock around Baada’s daughter, Georgina, who

becomes pregnant to one of them, and marries another:

Georgina was a little quarter-caste girl, and when such a one is beau—

tiful, it is with the beauty that one can believe in unless he sees it: a

beauty of crimson and black and dusky gold that takes away the breath— and that you can’t believe you have really seen afterwards.

([1930a]:20)

The fact that Baada and Georgina are fecund mothers of healthy chil—dren ambiguously undercuts the vanishing—racetheme that is stronglypresent in other parts of the novel: cave paintings and skeletons, despitewhat the white characters believe, are not all that is left of the ‘Dark

Folk’ whom they dispossessed. By contrast, the white women in the

novel are either childless, the mothers of sickly or retarded children, or

die in childbirth. The scantiness of white fertility reinforces Cottrell’s

theme of the precariousness of the colonisation of Queensland, which

is contrasted with the ‘stronglysettled lands of New South Wales’ where

men stare ‘strangely’at the unaccustomed sight of black Baada and her

children ([1930a]:22).Cottrell’s sequel to Earth Battle, a short fictional work entitled The

Night Flowers, takes one of the story lines forward a generation. White

Chum is in love with two sons of ‘quarter—caste’Georgina: the ‘dark,

passionate and beautiful’ Donnie, and the ‘fair and blue-eyed and

steady’Martin. Dark Donnie, who is constantly in trouble with the

police, shoots Chum dead, wrongly believing that she has betrayed him.

The story concludes with Donnie announcing his intention to kill

himself by riding over a cliff, along with the ‘half-breed prostitutedancer’ Josie whom he has kidnapped, in order to rid the world of

‘cruel and bad things’ ([1930b]:3, 4, 14).Assimi1ation can work, Cottrell

suggests, only if the taint of ‘colOur’ is bred out.

Kay Glasson Taylor’snovels also engage with contemporary debates

on assimilation. Like other novels of the period, Pick and the Dufirs dis-

rupts the binary of white versus black by the presence of a number of

characters of mixed ancestry, but sends out conflicting messages.

Although raised and educated to assimilate, the ‘nearlywhite’ Bella lives

with the Coomera tribe —— ‘the bush and my blood called me back’ ———-

while her brother, Dickon Dixon, is a book—keeperand tutor who

passes as white. Warde Maynard, the illegitimate son of Dixon and a

161


station—owner’s daughter, is adopted by his white grandfather and is

killed before his ‘one horror’ — ‘that he should learn he had coloured

blood’ — is realised. When 11—year-oldPick reassures Warde that he is

not ‘yellow’,he says ‘you’rethe whitest man I know’. Neil Warren uses

the same language to Dickon when he discovers the truth about his

ancestry: ‘You’re a real white man. I don’t give a hang for anything else’

(193029, 234, 266, 272). Neil’s words equate full humanity with white-

ness, and endorse assimilation, but Bella’s rejection of whiteness under—

mines a simple assimilationist reading of the novel, as does Pick’s

defence of the rights of his black friend, Gordon:

‘Fancy not letting a tiny, little blackfeller like Gordon come for a bit of

a ride with me among the ranges we took from his own people last

century anyhow. That’s what you might call tyranny o’ gover’ment,’nd

it’s about made a Sosherlist 0’ me for one.’ (1930:255)

Despite Pick’s facetious claim, however, Sugar Heaven by Communist

Party member Jean Devanny was the first novel by a Queenslandwoman to offer a radical political analysis of race. The main thrust of

the work is the political re—education of the female protagonist, Dulcie

Lee, who initially refuses to believe that ‘our early settlers used to hunt

the abos as they now hunt kangaroos and wallabies’ (1936:159).Devanny’s novel exposes the ongoing detrimental effects of the ‘psy—

chology of superiority in the Britishers’, but at the same time depicts a

cross—racial love affair between the Anglo—AustralianEileen Lee and the

Italian Tony Pirani as doomed to failure.

The novels of Cross, Cottrell, Forrest, Taylor and Devanny unsettle

dominant ideologies, but ultimately fail to generate Viable imaginativemodels of racial interaction. They disclose an unresolved tension

between the notion that Aborigines were a vanishing race, and the

emerging belief that they could be assimilated into white Australia.

Conclusion

The work of early white women writers in Queensland reveals an

intense and ongoing preoccupation with race, whether expressed as

glorification of the writers’ own northern European racial origins or as

a focus on racial Others who raise anxieties about miscegenation and

colonisation. In this body of work, the underpinning (and often expli-citly articulated) ideology of whiteness works to reflect upon and guidethe experience of women writers and readers as participants in the

project of creating a white nation. White women writers position

162


themselves as leaders of public opinion, articulating responses to Chang-sing preoccupations and social debates.

The differences between genres are striking. Celebration of whitenessand expressions of virulent racial hatred tend to characterise the poetry,while the fiction generates a more complex exploration of what it

means to be an author and agent of colonisation.The fictional tradition—- initiated by Rosa Praed in the late nineteenth century and contin—

ued by Zora. Cross, Mabel Forrest, Dorothy Cottrell and Kay Glasson

Taylor in the 19205 and 19305 —-- is of particular interest because it

explores, from the point of View of women who had lived in the

contact zone,‘dying race’ and assimilation debates in the lead—upto the

formal adoption of assimilation in 1937. Unease with the experience of

racial interaction and, more generally, with women’s participation in

colonisationsporadicallyripples the surface of fictional narratives, but

such eruptions ultimately fail to unsettle the ideology of whiteness.

163

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Essays in social and cultural criticism

WhiteningRaceEdited by Aileen Moreten-Robinson

.

\*

AboriginalStudies

First published in 2004 by Aboriginal Studies Press

for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres

Strait Islander Studies, GPO Box 553, Canberra ACT

2601

The views expressed in this publication are those of

the authors and not necessarily those of the Australian

Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander

Studies.

© In the collection: Aileen Moreton—Robinson, 2004

© In each chapter: the contributor, 2004

Front cover image © Alan Crosthwaite, 2002

'

Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of privatestudy, research and criticism or review, as permittedunder the CopyrightAct 1968, no part of this publica—tion may be reproduced by any process whatsoever

without the written permission of the publisher.

National Library Cataloguing—in—Publicationdata

Whitening race : essays in social and cultural criti—

cism.

Bibliography.ISBN 0 85575 465 6.

1. Whites —- Race identity —— Australia. 2. Whites— Australia —— Attitudes. 3. Race awareness —-—

Australia. 4. Race discrimination ~—— Australia.

5. Racism —— Australia. I. Moreton—Robinson,Aileen.

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’A lovely land . . . by shadows dark untainted’?: whiteness and early Queensland women’s writing