Critical Race and Whiteness Studies www.acrawsa.org.au/ejournal Volume 7, Number 2, 2011 SPECIAL ISSUE: FUTURE STORIES/INTIMATE HISTORIES In Relation to a White Father Barbara Baird Women’s Studies, School of Social and Policy Studies, Flinders University This paper sets out to explore the meaning for the author, a white woman in contemporary Australia, of having a white father. It both follows and deviates from other work by white daughters about their white fathers – not seeking to defend the father, nor needing in particular to resolve grief, but like the other work, acknowledging pride, admiration and above all a major personal and cultural debt to the father. Notwithstanding this debt it sets out to clear a space where a white daughter’s relationship to Indigenous sovereignty is not mediated or protected by a relationship with the white father. The paper moves between history, theory, family archives, memory, stories, and reflection; it is fragmented. It is both personal and particular but also I hope of wider relevance to the project of moving Australia and white Australians, including myself, towards a post-colonial future. The paper risks all the pitfalls that Sara Ahmed outlines in her article on the non-performativity of anti- racism but pins it hopes on her call to those in whiteness studies to ‘turn away from themselves and towards others’ (2004:59). Inheritance A couple of years ago I wrote an article about the cultural politics of the resignation in 2003 of Peter Hollingworth as Governor-General of Australia (Baird 2009). I located Hollingworth as the White Father of the nation, and following Fiona Probyn’s (2003) argument about the white nation’s need to disassociate from ‘bad white fathers’ in relation to the Stolen Generations, I made a lot of the nation’s need to remove Hollingworth from the centre stage. His presence there raised questions about national virtue that, from the white nation’s point of view, were best dealt with by his departure. It took a while to sink in that ‘the white father’ was not just a conceptual construct that I could identify in national politics: I was/am a white daughter of a white ISSN 1838-8310 © Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association 2011 Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 7.2 2011 father. That moment of recognition brought home to me a passage in the introduction to Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s book Talking Up to the White Woman. After discussing the work of some white feminists who have pioneered the area of whiteness studies, Moreton-Robinson qualifies: The work of these feminists recognises that white race privilege makes a difference to women’s life chances. Yet these authors fail to appreciate that their position as situated knowers within white race privilege is inextricably connected to the systemic racism they criticise but do not experience. (2000: xx) This article continues thinking about my white father, as a material presence and provider and as a symbolic figure, about what it means for me to be his white daughter, and the relevance of these things to my position as an academic writer. In a response to an early version of this article a friend wrote: [A]s someone who grew up without a white father (or any father) being present - I have always been aware of the provision and protection that the white father provides - something that was very much absent from my life and left our family very vulnerable. (Kurtzer 2008) I take it as an obligation to reflect on what my white father has provided for me – and to reposition myself in relation to these provisions. This is the way here that I locate myself in the contradictory time and place of white Australia, now, where, as Alison Ravenscroft has described it, there is both fear and desire in moving ‘towards another future’ (Ravenscroft 2003: 239). To do this the paper moves between history, theory, family archives, memory, stories, and reflection; it is fragmented. It is both personal and particular but also I hope of wider relevance to the project of moving Australia and white Australians, including myself, towards a post-colonial future. It needs to be acknowledged here that having a white father is no guarantee that one inherits his legacy of white privilege. For the many members of the Stolen Generations who were the children of Indigenous mothers and white fathers it was indeed this paternity that lead to their removal from family, community and culture, all too often into situations of abuse and deprivation (National Inquiry 1997). Even for white daughters whiteness alone does not convey material security, although it usually helps. And plenty of white fathers do more emotional damage than they convey self-worth and a sense of entitlement. But that’s not my story. In my case having a white father has created more than a fair share of economic security and subjective self- possession. Having said all that let me introduce my father, Ross Baird, because it is in relation to him that this article takes shape. He was born in 1913 in Melbourne. By my reckoning he was fourth or fifth generation Australian, descended on his maternal side from migrants who came to Victoria from 2 Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 7.2 2011 England in the first twenty years of the colony, and on the paternal side from migrants who arrived in Melbourne from Scotland in 1854. After his father left them, when my dad was six or seven years of age, he was raised by his mother, with support from her family, in particular her sister. His mother supported the two of them by working as a tailoress. They lived in ‘rooms’. My father was academically gifted and I can only assume that his mother sacrificed her own comforts so that he could continue his education well beyond his years of compulsory schooling. After qualifying from Footscray Technical College with a diploma in civil engineering in 1931 he gained employment in the newly developing kiln seasoning department in the Division of Forest Products at the CSIRO in Melbourne, and began a lifetime working in the timber industry. In 1934 he went to Adelaide to work in the kiln drying department at the Holden car factory. It was in Adelaide that he met my mother, Jean Taylor, whose people had come to South Australia from Wales and England in the 1880s and where they married in the Unitarian Church in 1936. My father’s work took the two of them and a growing family to Tasmania, back to South Australia and then to Victoria, and round again, through many small and medium sized rural timber-milling towns as well as Launceston and a short period back in Melbourne. My father did not go to war, his Unitarian faith leading him to conscientious objection (although he was in any case exempted from service because of his involvement in an essential industry). In 1950 he became manager of Glen Maggie Timber Limited, located in Heyfield in Gippsland, Victoria, a position he occupied for nine years and which developed into wider responsibilities for the company’s timber operations across Gippsland. While in Heyfield, then a town growing to well over two thousand people, my father served on the Management Committee of the Bush Nursing Hospital, for four years as Chairman, was a Justice of the Peace and a member of the Heyfield Masonic Lodge. The 1950s were the hey-day of Heyfield, and the period included the building of the Glen Maggie Weir about ten miles north of Heyfield. The weir was built with a significant migrant workforce and newly arrived migrants also worked in the timber industry. I’ll pause in this brief account here, because it was at the end of this period in Heyfield that I was born. In 1958 I arrived, after five boys, as my father’s first and only daughter. This brief sketch of my father’s first forty-five years gestures towards many familiar aspects of Australian social history but does not, however, offer an account of the subjective dimensions of this history. And neither is an account of colonialism in twentieth century Australia apparent at face value. These are the issues that are at the heart of this article. But the point here is not only the social context of my father’s life, nor how he was able make sense of his circumstances. The issue is as much my inheritance from him, material and cultural, including my investment in a certain idea of my father, one for which he cannot be held entirely responsible. My mother’s repeated appreciative statement that my father had never been out of work for a single day in the whole time of their marriage is an example of how others’ views of my father became part of my view of him –good worker, good husband, good father. It is also a testament to the economic privilege of whiteness. Further, 3 Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 7.2 2011 daughters’ ideas about (white) fathers are bigger than can be embodied in any one single white man. This is one point to be drawn from Katrina Schlunke’s story of feeling guilty after the distant sight of her father interrupts the skinny dipping in a river pool on her family’s property at her tenth birthday party. She goes on to write that ‘it took me a long time to realise that my parents found it funny. Only I thought of possible immorality’ (2005:26). When I first presented the conference paper from which this article has developed, I finished my presentation with a photo of me, my father and my dog, taken by my girlfriend about six months before my father died.