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’.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/216790 |
| Date | January 1999 |
| Creators | Elder, Catriona, catriona.elder@arts.usyd.edu.au |
| Publisher | The Australian National University. Faculty of Arts |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://www.anu.edu.au/legal/copyrit.html), Copyright Catriona Elder |
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