MADE TO MATTER White Fathers, Stolen Generations Fiona Probyn-Rapsey Made to Matter White Fathers, Stolen Generations Fiona Probyn-Rapsey First published in 2013 by Sydney University Press © Fiona Probyn-Rapsey 2013 © Sydney University Press 2013 Reproduction and Communication for other purposes Except as permitted under the Act, no part of this edition may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or communicated in any form or by any means without prior written permission. All requests for reproduction or communication should be made to Sydney University Press at the address below: Sydney University Press Fisher Library F03 University of Sydney NSW 2006 AUSTRALIA Email: [email protected] sydney.edu.au/sup National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication Data entry Author: Probyn-Rapsey, Fiona, author. Title: Made to matter : white fathers. stolen generations / Fiona Probyn-Rapsey. 9781920899974 (pbk.) ISBN: 9781920899981 (ebook : epub) 9781743325667 (ebook : PDF) 9781743323687 (ebook : kindle) Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index. Stolen generations (Australia). Race discrimination--Australia--History. Aboriginal Australians--Mixed descent—History. Subjects: Racially mixed people--Australia--History. Whites--Race identity--Australia--History. Fathers--Australia. Dewey Number: 179.3 Cover image by Brian Rapsey Cover design by Dushan Mrva-Montoya This book was made Open Access in 2017 through Knowledge Unlatched. Contents Acknowledgments v Guess who’s not coming to dinner vii Husbands 1 Breeders 24 The combo 45 Black sheep 82 Jim Crows 108 Conclusion: embracive reconciliation 138 Works cited 149 Index 171 iii Acknowledgments In writing this book over the last decade or so, I’ve come to understand that books are not so much finished as stopped. The time comes when you have to hand it in, stop fiddling with it, adding things and taking things out (no one warned me how long all that could take!). For putting up with me in the process of writing (and stopping) this book I have many, many people to thank. All my colleagues (past and present) in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, particularly the extraordinary Vicki Grieves, Linnell Sec- omb, Kane Race and Elspeth Probyn and also Sara Ahmed and Sarah Franklin who shared an underground bunker/office near me in the early days of this project, and whose intellectual generosity continues to be an inspiration. I was very lucky to be able to sit and talk with Stephen Kinnane about Shadow Lines, the book and the concept, and also talk with Kim Scott, Henry Reynolds and Pauline Mullett. Big thanks also to Gillian Cowlishaw for reading through some very early drafts of chap- ters. And to Vicki Grieves (again!), Alison Holland, Anne Brewster and Ann Curthoys for their advice and comments on earlier drafts of the introductory chapter, and Clive Probyn, who read through the whole manuscript. I also owe a big debt of gratitude to the research assistance provided by one time postgraduate students, and now fabulous scholars in their own right; Esther Berry, Ann Deslandes, Adam Gall, Jodi Fraw- ley and Nikki Savvides. I also gratefully acknowledge the support of the Australian Research Council Discovery Scheme (DP0557139) between 2004 and 2011, and the Editors of the following journals where ear- lier versions of chapters have appeared: Journal of Australian Studies, v Made to Matter Australian Literary Studies, JASAL: Journal for the Study of Australian Literature, Antipodes, Postcolonial Studies, Australian Cultural History and Australian Humanities Review. Thanks also to the anonymous peer reviewers whose comments on previous incarnations of a few of these chapters have helped to shape the work that is here today. Thanks to Sydney University Press for their incredibly skilful copy-editing and their professionalism. It’s been a real pleasure to work with the editors, particularly Agata Mrva-Montoya. Thanks also to friends and family here and far, human and more than human: Peter Donaldson, Meg Probyn, Clive Probyn, Netty Noble and Lucy Nias, and of course, last but never least, Brian, Sunday, Olive, Billy and Alice. Now I’ll stop. vi Guess who’s not coming to dinner In Guess who’s coming to dinner (Kramer 1967), wealthy white Amer- ican parents meet their prospective African-American son-in-law for the first time. The new family comes to the table, an act that signals fra- ternity, equality and, from 1965, the legality of mixed-race marriages across most, but not all, states of America. Australia, by contrast, does not have an equivalent textual or cinematic moment (however fraught and mythic it is) to mark the beginning of a new era for race relations. Bran nue dae (Chi 1991; Perkins 2010) comes close with its acknowl- edegment of already mixed families, with its 1960s reconciliation theme revolving around the acknowledgment of suppressed family connec- tions. But whoever comes to dinner in Australian cultural texts is likely to enter the scene from the closet, rather than the front door. This is because Australian racial history is distinct1 due to the embedded na- ture of two seemingly opposed colonial policies regarding Aboriginal people: segregation on the one hand and biological assimilation on the other. While segregation separates and denies, biological assimilation seeks a radical embrace and swallowing up of Aboriginality. Segrega- tion might be challenged head-on at the dinner table, but biological assimilation confounds it, seemingly more at home in the closet, as it 1 Margaret D Jacobs makes the point that both the US and Australia ‘proposed to “assimilate” American Indians and “absorb” Aborigines in the majority population’ but that the US reformers and government officials ‘believed Indians could be whitened through cultural assimilation; in Australia many authorities focused in- stead on the biological assimilation of Aboriginal people’ (Jacob 2009, 66). vii Made to Matter were. This is especially the case for white fathers of Aboriginal children during the early to mid-20th century, the focus of this book. In 20th-century Australia, white paternity of Aboriginal children was positioned as key to the biological assimilation of Aboriginal peo- ple. For different and, I insist, still often unknown reasons, these white men would often not come to dinner, figuratively speaking, nor invite their unacknowledged children or lovers, nor tell their friends and relatives, nor allow Aboriginal people access to the dinner table, that ‘kinship object’ par excellence (Carsten qtd in Ahmed 2006, 80). White fathers who did recognise their Aboriginal children are also a part of this story of public secrecy; the bushmen who rejected the dinner table and all its white pretensions. I discuss these white men as critics of white culture, whose acknowledgment of their Aboriginal children and partner was often circumscribed by the threat of removal, of prosecu- tion (for cohabitation), and whose positions lend textual flesh to the tensions played out in the broad scheme of settler colonialism and its desire to ‘replace’ indigenous people (Wolfe 2006, 389). Australian settler colonialism is, as Wolfe points out, marked by a ‘logic of elimi- nation’ (1994) that includes conflicting aims: to eliminate but also to be the indigene. Wolfe argues that this desire to eliminate but be the indi- gene foregrounds settler colonialism’s ‘contradictory reappropriation of a foundationally disavowed Aboriginality’ (2006 389). These contradic- tions are evident in the lives of, and discussions surrounding the white fathers, from autobiography to parliamentary debates, dinner tables to family trees. All are subject to the ‘jangling nerves’ (Byrne 2003) of Aus- tralian settler colonialism ‘simultaneously predicated on incorporation and distancing’ (Stoler 2002, 83). Such tensions manifest in intimate re- lations, and within individuals but also across broader cultural sites: the domestic, familial and national. Those ‘jangling nerves’ (Byrne 2003) can be felt in Prime Minister John Howard’s ‘Motion for Reconciliation’ (1999) presented to Aus- tralia’s federal parliament in response to Bringing them home (1997), a report written by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commis- sion (HREOC) about the devastations wreaked upon Aboriginal people by the removal of children from their families under the policies of bi- ological (and cultural) assimilation. John Howard rejected the call to apologise to the Stolen Generations on the basis that ‘present gener- ations cannot be held accountable … for the errors and misdeeds of viii Guess who’s not coming to dinner earlier generations’ because ‘for the overwhelming majority of the cur- rent generations of Australians, there was no personal involvement of them or their parents’. Many have commented on the absurd nature of his short view of history and accountability (Manne 2001; Schaffer 2001; Rose 2004; see also Thompson 2002). Mick Dodson’s ‘Corroboree speech’ (2000) asks: Where or who is this generation of Australians Mr Howard blames for the removals and the assimilation policies. Are my sisters part of this generation? Are not John [Howard] and John [Herron] part of this generation? Indeed, am I not part of this generation? … Who was it that tried to take me from my kin in 1960? What generation do we look to if Mr Howard says it wasn’t this generation? Where is this mythical group of Australians who made these laws, adopted these policies put them into practice. Who took the kids? Moreover, how is it that the white father’s ‘personal involvement’ is not known to current generations? They were one half of the biological as- similation policy that underwrote child removal and are frequently (if briefly) mentioned in Bringing them home and numerous Aboriginal life histories: Especially during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, rela- tionships between European men and Aboriginal women were often abusive and exploitative. Many children were the products of rape. The European biological fathers denied their responsibility and the authorities regarded the children with embarrassment and shame.