"Into Outside Country": the Influence of Violence on Discourses Of
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“INTO OUTSIDE COUNTRY”: THE INFLUENCE OF VIOLENCE ON DISCOURSES OF HOMELAND IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AUSTRALIAN YOUNG ADULT NOVELS Trudy Clutterbok (BA, MPC) A thesis submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Faculty of Education and Arts National School of Arts (Melbourne) Australian Catholic University Graduate Research Office Level 5, 250 Victoria Parade East Melbourne VIC 3000 11th February 2019 Copyright by Trudy Clutterbok 2019 All rights reserved STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP AND SOURCES This thesis contains no material published elsewhere or extracted in whole or in part from a thesis by which I have qualified for or been awarded another degree or diploma. No parts of this thesis have been submitted towards the award of any other degree or diploma in any other tertiary institution. No other person’s work has been used without due acknowledgment in the main text of the thesis. All research procedures reported in the thesis received the approval of the relevant Ethics/Safety Committees (where required). Signed: Date: 11 / 02 / 2019 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks to the Australian Catholic University for granting me the scholarship to work on the Nolan Historical Children’s Book Collection, which helped support me through this project. I would like to thank John and Grace Nolan for their generous donation of the Nolan Special Collection of Children’s books to the Australian Catholic University and for the discussions, ideas and warmth they have offered me over the past few years. Thanks to my supervisors, Professor Margot Hillel OAM and Dr. Carolyn Masel for their knowledge, patience, assistance and for many interesting discussions. Thanks to the inimitable Denise Howard and to librarians at the Australian Catholic University and the State Library of Victoria, particularly Daryl Bailey and Helena Lozanouski. Thanks to my family, friends and colleagues, especially Primo Clutterbok, Cath Davies, Fay Howgate, the late Lucille Osborne, Dr. Jeff Stewart and Fiona Trigg. I would like to acknowledge and pay my respects to the traditional owners of the lands on which I work and write: the Dja Dja Wurrung and the Wadawurrung people. iv TABLE OF CONTENT Statement of Authorship and Sources ......................................................................... iii Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................... iv Table of Content ............................................................................................................ v List of Illustrations ....................................................................................................... vi A note on the Text ....................................................................................................... vii Abstract ...................................................................................................................... viii INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER ONE – Transplanting Britain: Cumulative Violence and the Australian Home ............................................................................................................................ 28 CHAPTER TWO: Turning Murnong Into Yam: A Home for Sheep and Cattle .... 60 CHAPTER THREE – “To Stone A Helpless Chinaman”: Australia for the Chinese ...................................................................................................................................... 96 CHAPTER FOUR – Riots, Pearls and Rape: The Japanese in the Australian Homeland ................................................................................................................... 134 • Part One, The Japanese in Broome: The Broome Race Riots and Asian Invasion .......................................................................................................... 137 • Part Two: The Japanese as Yellow Skinned ................................................. 166 • Part Three: The Japanese as a Sexual Threat .............................................. 175 CHAPTER FIVE – The Fatherland and the Dachshund: Signs of Germany ......... 190 CHAPTER SIX – Depicting Aborignal People, Languages and Country: Practices of Erasure, Containment and Degradation .................................................................. 220 • Part One, Settler Spaces ................................................................................ 221 • Part Two, Wild Places ................................................................................... 238 • Part Three, Assimilation ................................................................................ 253 • Part Four, Aboriginal Women ...................................................................... 258 • Part Five, Language ....................................................................................... 264 CONCLUSION .......................................................................................................... 270 APPENDIX ................................................................................................................ 284 WORKS CITED LIST .............................................................................................. 292 v LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1. Saw a Terrible Thing; May Gibbs, The Complete Adventures of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie (Angus & Robertson Ltd., 1947), p. 57. 2. Cover and spine illustrations; D.C.E., The Yellow Raiders (The Children’s Press, 1940), p. 118 3. The Yellow Peril: Nations of Europe Defend Your Holiest Possessions, c.1895; H. Knackfuss, (Michael Keevak, Becoming Yellow, 2011), p. 174. vi A NOTE ON THE TEXT Throughout this thesis I have followed the MLA style (eighth edition) apart from when it interferes with British and Australian orthography. In the appendix and in the list of works cited I have included the city of publication for the Young Adult novels, if available, as these details are important for historical reasons. vii ABSTRACT Representations of home and homeland in twentieth-century Australian Young Adult novels are regularly associated with violence towards people and place. I have worked with the Nolan Historical Children’s Literature Research Collection to undertake close readings of seventy-eight Australian novels published between 1896 and 1968. In the method articulated by Literary Discourse Theory, I have examined paraliterature such as Australian literature, films, Acts of Parliament, and environmental texts to contextualise and elaborate the notions of home, homeland and violence which appear in these novels. The novels represent the Australian home as a place that is populated almost exclusively by British people, as a place in which eating together is highly valued and which is surrounded with English-style gardens. The novels actively devalue landscape features that pre-date white settlement and they portray sheep and cattle as the primary, critical inhabitants of the Australian homeland, ignoring the impact that these animals have on the environment. Australian young women in particular are personified as under threat by Chinese, Japanese and German peoples, who are construed in a variety of derogatory ways. Aboriginal characters are presented in one of two ways: as station workers, trackers or native police who “help” settlers, or as “wild” and threatening. Aboriginal women are described in extremely offensive terms and are sexualised. The novels do not generally recognise Aboriginal languages. I examine the depictions of people and place in the context of discourses of colonial settlement and Lorenzo Veracini’s model of the tripartite social structure of settler colonial societies. I find that this model is reproduced in the novels, as settlers, immigrants and Aboriginal peoples are segregated. Drawing on theories of violence developed by Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben and others enables an analysis that differs from previous studies of viii Young Adult novels that have examined themes of racism, the environment or colonialism as individual subjects, which presume the presence of violence but which do not examine it. Several types of violence are identified by this study: written violence on the page; the book as a vehicle of violence; depictions of fictional or historic violence; hate-speech; structural violence of binary classificatory systems implicit in the novels; the ‘violences’ of various moral, environmental, scientific, political, racial, social and anthropological discourses, in which some of the novels participate and citational violence, in which the novels refer to historical discourses. I find that Walter Benjamin’s theory of mythic violence and its connection with law provides a productive framework with which to theorise the function of violence in the novels. Each of the different types of violence that appears in these novels is related to written or unwritten laws about the home and homeland and serves to promote or maintain those laws, as Benjamin theorised. ix INTRODUCTION This thesis is about the expression of violence. It is also about depictions of home and homeland. These two themes are examined in a selection of twentieth-century Australian Young Adult novels. Children’s and Young Adult literature can often tell us more about a culture, its values and ethics than many other literary genres because it functions both as a medium that transmits ideas to the next generation and as