Dreams and nightmares of a 'White Australia' : the discourse of assimilation in selected works of fiction from the 1950s and 1960s

This thesis is an analysis of the production of assimilation discourse, in terms of Aboriginal people’s and white people’s social relations, in a small selection of popular fiction texts from the 1950s and 1960s. I situate these novels in the broader context of assimilation by also undertaking a reading of three official texts from a slightly earlier period. These texts together produce the ambivalent white Australian story of assimilation. They illuminate some of the key sites of anxiety in assimilation discourses: inter-racial sexual relationships, the white family, and children and young adults of mixed heritage and land ownership. The crux of my argument is that in the 1950s and early 1960s the dominant cultural imagining of Australia was as a white nation. In white discourses of assimilation to fulfil the dream of whiteness, the Aboriginal people – the not-white – had to be included in or eliminated from this imagined white community. Fictional stories of assimilation were a key site for the representation of this process, that is, they produced discourses of ‘assimilation colonization’. The focus for this process were Aboriginal people of mixed ancestry, who came to be represented as ‘the half-caste’ in assimilation discourse. The novels I analyse work as ‘conduct books’. They aim to shape white reactions to the inclusion of Aboriginal people, in particular the half-caste, into ‘white Australia’. This inclusion, assimilation, was an ambivalent project – both pleasurable and unsettling – pleasurable because it worked to legitimate white colonization (Aboriginal presence as erased) and unsettling because it challenged the idea of a pure ‘white Australia’

Imagining Borders / Policing Borders : Australia, Asylum Seekers and the Oceans of the Asia Pacific

特集 : 「移民国家のつくられ方―アメリカ、オーストラリア、スペインの比較」Special Topic : Immigrant Nations : America, Australia, and Spai

The Proposition: Imagining Race, Family and Violence on the Nineteenth-Century Australian Frontier

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2016v69n2p165This article analyses John Hillcoat’s 2005 film The Proposition in relation to a spate of Australian films about violence and the (post)colonial encounter released in the early twenty-first century. Extending on  Felicity Collins and Therese Davis argument that these films can be read in terms of the ways they capture or refract aspects of contemporary race relations in Australia in a post-Mabo, this article analyses how The Proposition reconstructs the trauma of the Australian frontier; how from the perspective of the twenty-first century it worries over the meaning of violence on the Australian frontier. It also explores what has become speakable (and remains unspeakable) in the public sphere about the history of the frontier encounter, especially in terms of family and race.  The article argues that The Proposition and other early twenty-first century race relations films can be understood as post-reconciliation films, emerging in a period when Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians were rethinking ideas of belonging through a prism of post-enmity and forgiveness. Drawing on the theme of violence and intimate relations in the film, this article argues that the challenges to the everyday formulation of Australian history proffered in The Proposition reveal painful and powerful differences amongst Australian citizens’ understanding of who belongs and how they came to belong to the nation. I suggest that by focusing on violence in terms of intimacy, relationships, family and kin, it is possible to see this film presented an opportunity to begin to refigure ideas of belonging. http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2016v69n2p165This article analyses John Hillcoat’s 2005 film The Proposition in relation to a spate of Australian films about violence and the (post)colonial encounter released in the early twenty-first century. Extending on  Felicity Collins and Therese Davis argument that these films can be read in terms of the ways they capture or refract aspects of contemporary race relations in Australia in a post-Mabo, this article analyses how The Proposition reconstructs the trauma of the Australian frontier; how from the perspective of the twenty-first century it worries over the meaning of violence on the Australian frontier. It also explores what has become speakable (and remains unspeakable) in the public sphere about the history of the frontier encounter, especially in terms of family and race.  The article argues that The Proposition and other early twenty-first century race relations films can be understood as post-reconciliation films, emerging in a period when Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians were rethinking ideas of belonging through a prism of post-enmity and forgiveness. Drawing on the theme of violence and intimate relations in the film, this article argues that the challenges to the everyday formulation of Australian history proffered in The Proposition reveal painful and powerful differences amongst Australian citizens’ understanding of who belongs and how they came to belong to the nation. I suggest that by focusing on violence in terms of intimacy, relationships, family and kin, it is possible to see this film presented an opportunity to begin to refigure ideas of belonging.

New voices, New visions: Challenging Australian Identities and Legacies

New Voices, New Visions brings together a collection of papers that engage with the ideas of nation, identity and place. The title New Voices, New Visions harks back to earlier scholarship that endeavoured to explore these issues. It therefore makes links between old and new stories of Australian identity, tracing the continuities, shifts and changes in how Australia is imagined. The collection is deliberately interdisciplinary, gathering work by historians, literary and film scholars, communication and cultural theorists, political scientists and sociologists. This mixed perspectives enables the reader to trace ideas, concepts and theories across a range of disciplines and understand the distinctive ways in which different disciplines engage with ideas of nation, space and Australian identity. The book is written in an engaging and accessible manner, making it an excellent text for undergraduate and postgraduate students in the fields of Australian Studies. It will be especially useful for the growing number of students living outside Australia who engage with Australian literature and culture. The book provides a range of topics that introduces students to key issues and concepts. It also situates these ideas in historical context. New Voices, New Visions engages with key contemporary issues in everyday Australian life: environment and climate change, immigration, consumerism, travel and cities. It explores these various topics by considering case studies, both contemporary and historical. For example the issue of attitudes to Asia are analysed through art; the topic of national symbols through the case of the crocodile; approaches to immigration via a popular reality television programme