In the Shadow of the Australian Legend

In the Shadow of the Australian Legend: Re-reading Australian Literature Elisa Bracalente Laurea in Lingue e Letterature Straniere (summa cum laude) University of Rome ‗Tor Vergata‘ This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of Murdoch University 2011 Declaration I declare that this thesis is my own account of my research and contains as its main content work which has not previously been submitted for a degree at any tertiary education institution. .................................... Elisa Bracalente ii Abstract The Australian legend worked as a romantic myth of survival, a foundational grand narrative that legitimised white Australian belonging to the land. The construction of an identity based on the bush ethos and on those values and characteristics recognised as quintessentially Australian helped in the creation of an imagined community. This myth carried a racist underpinning which limited the typical Australian to the category ‗white‘. Drawing on Foucault‘s discourse analysis I argue that the legend is a discourse, grounded in an untheorised whiteness which defines Australianness. The national identity was modelled on the exclusion of the ‗other‘ from any sense of belonging because Australianness was simply a substitute for whiteness. This exclusion worked on two levels; while it ensured cohesion among whites against a common enemy, it also provided a sense of belonging that could not be questioned because the ‗real‘ Australians, the indigenous people as the common enemy, were left out of a definition of Australianness. Over time this discourse evolved slightly, altering its characteristics, but maintaining its power position and ensuring that its core whiteness remained unaltered. Despite the current claim of a multicultural nation, in fact, the legend is still central to Australian identity and still constitutes the defining characteristic of Australianness. Thus even in a multicultural context where ‗white‘ Australians claim to be just one category among others, they are the ones who define the ‗rules‘ that govern who belongs and who may be granted iii recognition. In this thesis the evolution of the Australian legend is analysed through readings of key literary texts. While before Federation literature was the major instrument for the construction of the legend and a sense of national identity through an uncritical celebration of the foundational myth, later writing engaged in a critique of the legend and the discourses constructed around it. Contemporary white authors have exposed the discourses of terra nullius and the violence at the foundation of the nation, thus deconstructing the legend. However, their critique is still influenced by their privileged white perspective so that even in their dismantling of the legend there is an implicit celebration of it. It is only when indigenous authors challenge the legend that we find a more radical challenge to the legend and the discourse of whiteness which underpin it. Even then, as argued in this thesis, the legend permeates Australian life and continues to play a role in one‘s understanding of ‗Australianness‘. iv Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor Professor Vijay Mishra for his invaluable professional guidance and mentorship throughout the writing of this thesis. I thank him for the discussions and reading suggestions, and for his patience in reading, editing and providing detailed and constructive feedback and guidance on my countless drafts. I would also like to thank Camilla Brokking, Julia Hobson and Andrew Fisher for their fabulous editing skills. I am also grateful to Murdoch University academic and non-academic staff for their support and to Murdoch University and the Australian Government for awarding the scholarship that made this project possible. And finally, my thanks to my family and friends for their constant encouragement, support and patience. v Contents Abstract _______________________________________________________ iii Acknowledgements ______________________________________________ v Contents _______________________________________________________ vi Introduction _____________________________________________________ 1 Chapter One The Cultural and Literary Antecedents of the Australian Legend ___________ 18 Chapter Two Questioning the Legend: Xavier Herbert ____________________________ 107 Chapter Three Critiquing the Legend: Patrick White and the Metaphysical Encounter with the Legend ______________________________________________________ 167 Chapter Four After Mabo: Rethinking the Australian Legend: Andrew McGahan and Kate Grenville _____________________________________________________ 237 Chapter Five The Legend Dismantled: Aboriginal Counter Narratives ________________ 328 Conclusion Hierarchical Pluralism ___________________________________________ 397 References ___________________________________________________ 403 vi Introduction The Australian legend has been a very powerful discourse of whiteness in Australian history. Drawing on Foucault‘s discourse analysis I re-examine this discourse with a view to deconstructing it and to show that it is grounded in a white colonial history of Australia. Australia was settled as a white outpost of the British Empire. Its ‗Europeanness‘ and ‗whiteness‘ were constructed as forms grounded in ‗civilised‘ values in opposition to the indigenous population and the alien land.1 In the years before Federation the colonies became conscious of themselves as entities separate from the mother country and needed to differentiate themselves from the British. The defining moment for Australianness was, in fact, not the Federation of the colonies, since Australians did not have to fight a war of independence, but the creation of a foundational myth. This myth, which was really the myth of the ‗pioneers‘—the ‗bushmen‘ who settled the hostile land—gave the nation a ‗heroic‘ past and, in a sense, enabled them to differentiate themselves from the British. As a discursive construction, the myth had a double function: while it provided Australians with a grand narrative about the foundation of the Australian nation, it also contributed to the erasure of any trace of the ‗other‘ and of previous ownership of the land, thus 1 Australians originated from different parts of the British Empire, many of them from Scotland and Ireland, which had only recently been included in the category ‗white‘. See Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (1995). 1 allowing Australians to claim uncontested belonging. The ‗battle‘ fought by these brave ‗fathers‘ of the nation was in fact not against the indigenous people, whose stories of resistance and whose very presence were erased from the grand narrative and from the land, which was presented as terra nullius, but against the land itself, the hostile wilderness that needed to be tamed, civilised and put to productive use by white settlers. Thus, the foundational myth is a celebration of whiteness and of white people‘s achievements, presenting a nation that was ‗born‘ into civilisation through the enterprises of the (white) pioneers, who challenged and confronted the unknown land. The Federation of the colonies in 1901 and the promulgation of the ‗White Australia Policy‘ emphasised the intent of maintaining the core white values of the nation. Whiteness was stressed as a distinctive characteristic that defined Australianness. The racial discourse of white superiority was used to justify the exclusion from Australianness of those immigrants—especially Asians—believed to threaten those values of civilisation that white people of European descent exemplified. This racial discourse was employed both for the exclusion of non-white immigration and for the exclusion from any role in the nation of its Aboriginal people who were labelled as uncivilised and ‗inferior‘ in order to justify their dispossession. Discourses of whiteness were used in Australia to guarantee white power through the production of knowledge about the land and the other. Non-white people were excluded from the legend because they did not belong to the whiteness implicit in it. Whiteness 2 became so central to the essence of Australianness that the two could be used interchangeably. In contrast to its later usage, in this early stage whiteness was a racial category. In this thesis I examine how the Australian legend, as the foundation of Australian identity, is a discourse of whiteness employed to maintain white power in Australia. I argue that the Australian legend is an untheorised whiteness, as the whiteness of the national ‗type‘ is implicit in the legend. The need for a myth of origin, a common shared idea of the nation with which Australians could identify, led to the all-encompassing power of the legend. The Australian legend incorporated in the myth those discourses used to claim the land. The diversity of the landscape, its fauna and the distance of Australia from the mother country contributed to the constant uneasiness felt by its settlers, who perceived the alienness of the place as threatening. Thus, Australians had to reimagine their surroundings and their place in them into a familiar pattern. In order to exert their power over the land, Australians had to define anything ‗native‘ as inferior and beyond evolution. This categorisation was intended to include the indigenous inhabitants along with the flora and fauna. Once they had been categorised as ‗uncivilised‘ the process of ‗taming‘ could be extended from the land to its people through ‗education‘ and ‗control‘.

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