The Fantasy of Whiteness: Blackness and Aboriginality in American and Australian Culture

Home , Andrew Bolt, Bob Catley, Cookie table, Greenhide, Jada Pinkett Smith, James Unaipon

Benjamin Miller

A thesis submitted to the School of English, Media and Performing Arts at the University of New South Wales in fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy

2009

THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES Thesis/Dissertation Sheet Surname: MILLER First name: BENJAMIN Other name/s: IAN Degree: PhD School: ENGLISH, MEDIA AND PERFORMING ARTS Faculty: ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES Title: MR

ABSTRACT

This dissertation argues that a fantasy of white authority was articulated and disseminated through the representations of blackness and Aboriginality in nineteenth-century American and Australian theatre, and that this fantasy influenced the representation of Aboriginality in twentieth- century Australian culture. The fantasy of whiteness refers to the habitually enacted and environmentally entrenched assumption that white people can and should superintend the cultural representation of Otherness. This argument is presented in three parts. Part One examines the complex ways in which white anxieties and concerns were expressed through discourses of blackness in nineteenth-century American blackface entertainment. Part Two examines the various transnational discursive connections enabled by American and Australian blackface entertainments in Australia during the nineteenth century. Part Three examines the legacy of nineteenth-century blackface entertainment in twentieth-century Australian culture. Overall, this dissertation investigates some of the fragmentary histories and stories about Otherness that coalesce within Australian culture. This examination suggests that representations of Aboriginality in Australian culture are influenced and manipulated by whiteness in ways that seek to entrench and protect white cultural authority. Even today, a phantasmal whiteness is often present within cultural representations of Aboriginality.

Declaration relating to disposition of project thesis/dissertation I hereby grant to the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or in part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all property rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation. I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstracts International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only).

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ORIGINALITY STATEMENT

‘I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project's design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.’

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which I live and on which this dissertation was written, the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. Their sovereignty has never been ceded. This dissertation has benefited greatly from the support of colleagues, friends and family. I’m eternally grateful for the patience, wisdom and careful guidance of my supervisor, Anne Brewster, who has allowed this project to mature in ways that neither of us imagined. I’m a better researcher and writer for having worked with Anne, and I am fortunate for every moment she spent helping me express and clarify my ideas. My various co-supervisors—Bill Ashcroft, Shalmalee Palekar and Sue Kossew—each provided comments that improved the overall thesis. My ideas also grew thanks to my teaching experiences with Brigid Rooney at the University of Sydney. Many thanks also go to Wesley Enoch and Bindi Cole, who generously discussed their work, and Uncle Chika Dixon for sharing his knowledge about Australian history and politics. I’d like to thank fellow postgraduates Blanca Tovias, Heather Moritz and David Fonteyn, who have provided wise sounding boards and proven to be inspirational as they each finished their PhDs. I am unreservedly grateful to my family. My mother believes in the great rewards of deep thinking. My father listens while we disagree and has always let me make mistakes. My brother knows that knowledge doesn’t stop. My sister’s selfless charity is the epitome of care, and her beautiful daughters give me a reason to leave my books (and return to them again). My family give me values that I hold dear and attempt to honour in my work. Last, and most importantly, my love goes to Hallie, who put a lot of hard work into keeping me sane, and slightly less work, I hope, into reading every word of my dissertation.

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RESEARCH SUPPORT AND PUBLICATIONS

My research was enabled by an Australian Postgraduate Award administered by the University of New South Wales. The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at UNSW also provided a Top-up Scholarship from 2005-08, as well as a grant to support my research trip in 2007 to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre at the University of Texas, Austin. In 2006 I also received a postgraduate support grant to present my research on Charles Chauvel at ASAL’s annual conference in Perth, Western Australia.

Selections from Chapters 3, 4, 6 and 7 of this thesis have appeared in the below publications. The article “Australians in a Vacuum” is not contained in this dissertation, but is on the theme of whiteness and Aboriginality. I thank the editors and referees who have influenced and improved my research and writing through their engagement with the below articles.

Miller, Benjamin. “Aboriginal Short Stories: A Case Study of David Unaipon”. Reading Down Under: Australian Literary Studies Reader. Ed. Amit Sarwal and Reema Sarwal. New Delhi: SSS Publications, 2009. 205-15. ---. “Australians in a Vacuum: The ‘Socio-political Stuff’ in Rachel Perkins’ Radiance”. Studies in Australasian Cinema 2.1 (2008): 61-71. ---. “Confusing Epistemologies: Assimilation, Mimicry and Whiteness in David Unaipon’s ‘Confusion of Tongue’”. Altitude 6 (2005). ---.“David Unaipon’s Style of Subversion: Performativity and Becoming in ‘Gool Lun Naga’”. Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (JASAL) Special Issue: The Colonial Present (2008): 77-93. ---. “The Mirror of Whiteness: Blackface in Charles Chauvel’s Jedda”. JASAL Special Issue: Spectres, Screens, Shadows, Mirrors (2007): 140-156. ---. “Unaipon, David”. The Literary Encyclopedia. Encyclopaedia Entry. 2005.

ABSTRACT

This argument is presented in three parts. Part One examines the complex ways in which white anxieties and concerns were expressed through discourses of blackness in nineteenth-century American blackface entertainment. Part Two examines the various transnational discursive connections enabled by American and Australian blackface entertainments in Australia during the nineteenth century. Part Three examines the legacy of nineteenth-century blackface entertainment in twentieth-century Australian culture.

Overall, this dissertation investigates some of the fragmentary histories and stories about Otherness that coalesce within Australian culture. This examination suggests that representations of Aboriginality in Australian culture are influenced and manipulated by whiteness in ways that seek to entrench and protect white cultural authority. Even today, a phantasmal whiteness is often present within cultural representations of Aboriginality.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION The Fantasy of Whiteness: Nationalism, Blackface and 2 Whiteness Studies

PART ONE NINETEENTH-CENTURY BLACKFACE 33 ENTERTAINMENT IN AMERICA

Chapter One Making Blackness in Early American Blackface 34 Entertainment, 1825-43

Chapter Two Making Whiteness in American Blackface Minstrelsy, 60 1843-75

PART TWO NINETEENTH –CENTURY BLACKFACE 91 ENTERTAINMENT IN AUSTRALIA

Chapter Three Transnational Blackface: Aboriginality and Blackness 92 in Early Australian Theatre

Chapter Four Strengthened Connectivities: The Influence of 127 Blackface Minstrelsy in Australia

Chapter Five Blackfaced Aboriginality: Charles Never and No Mercy 142 (1882)

PART THREE TWENTIETH-CENTURY INTERCULTURAL 167 DIALOGUES IN AUSTRALIA

Chapter Six Recognising Aboriginal Agency: The Performative 168 Dandyism of David Unaipon

Chapter Seven Blackfaced Landscapes: Intercultural Dialogues in 199 Charles Chauvel’s Cinema

CONCLUSION Whiteness, Blackface and Aboriginal Agency 237

APPENDIX Select Bibliography of American Blackface Songs 244

WORKS CITED 248

LIST OF FIGURES

INTRODUCTION Fig. i: Bindi Cole, “Wathaurung Mob” (2008) 3

PART ONE NINETEENTH-CENTURY BLACKFACE ENTERTAINMENT IN AMERICA

Chapter One Fig. 1.1: “My Long Tail Blue” (Atwill’s, c.1827) 43

Fig. 1.2: “My Long Tail Blue” (Firth, c.1827) 43

Fig. 1.3: Detail from “Coal Black Rose” (Hewitt, 48 c.1827)

Fig. 1.4: “Jim Crow” (Edgar, c.1832) 56

Fig. 1.5: “Zip Coon” (Hewitt, c.1834) 56

PART TWO NINETEENTH-CENTURY BLACKFACE ENTERTAINMENT IN AUSTRALIA

Chapter Three Fig. 3.1: “Jim Brown” (Endicott, c.1836) 123

Fig 3.2: “Jim Brown” (Hewitt, 1835) 123

Chapter Five Fig. 5.1: S.T. Gill, “Native Dignity” (1866) 148

Fig. 5.2: W. Strutt, “Charles Never [a]” (1850) 160

Fig. 5.3: W. Strutt, “Charles Never [b]” (1850) 160

PART THREE TWENTIETH-CENTURY INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUES IN AUSTRALIA

Chapter Seven Fig. 7.1: Still from Moth of Moonbi (1925) 204

Fig. 7.2: Location Shot, Jedda (1955) 219

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INTRODUCTION

The Fantasy of Whiteness: Nationalism, Blackface and Whiteness Studies

Australia has a “new black race—the political Aborigine” declared journalist Andrew Bolt in April 2009 (“So Hip” 22). Bolt mounted a vitriolic attack against people he claims are “white Aborigines” who choose to be Aboriginal because it is “the one identity open to [them] that has political and career clout” (“So Hip” 22). Bolt named many respected Aboriginal artists, academics, authors and politicians, including Larissa Behrendt, Tara June Winch, Anita Heiss, Kim Scott, Pat Eatock and Mick Dodson. Further, according to Bolt, the “new black race” is epitomised by an emerging Aboriginal photographer, Bindi Cole. Bolt claims that Cole is the “white face of the new black race” (“So Hip” 22). Ironically, the exhibition of Cole’s which brought her to Bolt’s attention was satirically entitled “Not Really Aboriginal” and was intended to criticise white people who attempt to define and authenticate Aboriginality.

Cole’s exhibition, which opened in May 2008, contained the image “Wathaurung Mob”. Controversially perhaps, “Wathaurung Mob” depicts Cole’s family gathered in a lounge room in casual attire, staring into the camera with their faces painted black, and red headbands across their foreheads (See Fig. i). For Cole, blackface was an appropriate metaphor for a history of racial thinking that tempers both how Aboriginal artists can express themselves, and how they are understood by white audiences. Arguably, such histories have led to provocateurs like Bolt believing it is their right to superintend Aboriginality. The ideation of white dominance over Aboriginality (and Otherness more generally) has been historically entrenched in Australian culture and has also been supported by transnational racial ideologies such as those that circulate through and within nineteenth-century blackface entertainment. This dissertation investigates the history of blackface in Australian and American culture, arguing that beneath cultural representations of Otherness lurks a spurious notion of white authority.

Fig. i: Bindi Cole, “Wathaurung Mob” from “Not Really Aboriginal” (2008). Reproduced with permission from Bindi Cole.

This examination of the transnational underpinnings of the representation of Aboriginality in Australian culture is an interdisciplinary project. It analyses cultural theory and a range of visual, literary, film and media texts from both Australia and America. In many ways, this dissertation contributes to a new direction in Australian literary studies recently suggested by David Carter (2007): To be involved in literary studies might now mean […] engaging with a messier, worldly politics that demands a new cross-disciplinary approach that we’ve only just begun to invent. (“After” 117) Nineteenth-century theatre, media, manuscripts, and visual ephemera, as well as more recent photography, cinema, art and literature, constitute the messy and worldly field of culture that I investigate with the aid of cultural theory and textual analysis. Further, this dissertation adds depth to Carter’s observation that recent Australian studies are more closely attentive […] to Australia’s long history of interdependence in imperial and global networks […] and to the circulation of cultures beneath and beyond the level of nation. (“After” 119)

While this dissertation is explicitly engaged with identifying the role played by (blackfaced) representations of Aboriginality in Australia’s national imaginary, these representations are shown to have facilitated, initially at least, an exchange of “colonial ideologies” between America and Australia.1 This dissertation, then, operates in two directions, often simultaneously: it investigates the influence of nineteenth-century American blackface entertainment on representations of Aboriginality, and it analyses the ongoing influence of that transnational connection. These themes are intertwined in my overall thesis: circulating beneath representations of Otherness in America and Australia is a phantasmal whiteness which creates and manipulates imaginings of Otherness in an attempt to normalise the role and right of white people to govern and position Others within the nation space. I read dominant cultural productions in the entertainment industry as protecting and securing “white privilege”2 in America and Australia during the nineteenth century. Arguably, whiteness’ assumption of control is still a largely invisible presence underpinning representations of Otherness in Australian culture today.

This introductory chapter will now establish the critical and cultural context for the following dissertation. While this dissertation draws predominantly on whiteness

1 Ania Loomba, in Colonialism/Postcolonialism (2005), states that “colonial ideologies” are flexible, and develop in unique ways in different contexts (98). For example, “racial ideologies” and “stereotypes provided an ideological justification for different kinds of exploitation” in various locations (98-9). Gillian Whitlock, in “A ‘White-Souled’ State” (1996), states that “Post-colonial analysis must resist [… making] transhistorical and transcultural” assumptions about colonial ideology by examining “the discursive production, reproduction and power of colonial ideology” in a range of texts (71). This dissertation responds to Whitlock’s warning by defining “transnational connections” as incomplete, fragmentary and flexible, and using textual analysis to uncover similar, though not perfectly congruent, colonial ideologies operating in America and Australia. At times these ideologies were manifested in different ways in different locations to similar effect, and at other times they were manifested in similar ways in different locations with different effects. This dissertation, then, maps the “flexibility of colonial ideologies” that Loomba mentions (98). 2 The phrase “white privilege” is commonly used in whiteness studies. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, in Critical Race Theory: an Introduction (2001), state that “‘[w]hite privilege’ refers to the myriad of social advantages, benefits, and courtesies that come with being a member of the dominant race” (78). It is, thus, a highly contextual phrase which refers to the benefits that accrue to white people as a result of dominant racial ideologies. The exact nature of such benefits—psychological and material— will be discussed in more detail throughout the dissertation.

studies for theoretical impetus, whiteness studies itself has emerged from a range of critical fields, including feminism and gender studies, postcolonial studies, critical race studies and creative writing. The first section of this chapter will use the work of Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra (1991) to situate my thesis in relation to the field of postcolonial studies. This section of the Introduction will also draw on Ghassan Hage’s (1998) critique of white nationalism, which combines a postcolonial investigation of racial discourse within the nation space with a whiteness studies approach that positions white people within such racial discourses. Hage’s articulation of the “White nation fantasy” has been influential in my thinking about the relationship between whiteness, nation and Aboriginality.3 I will then elaborate on the controversy surrounding Bindi Cole’s blackface images and compare her work with a film by Spike Lee, an African American filmmaker, to establish the relevance and timeliness of a transnational examination of blackface in Australian culture.

The second section of this introductory chapter provides an extensive review of whiteness studies in order to establish the key themes and ideas for the following dissertation. Whiteness studies is particularly apt as a theoretical nucleus for this dissertation because it has developed, like blackface entertainment, transnationally in Australia. Australian critics have engaged closely with American whiteness theorists, but have refocused whiteness studies in a local context, bringing many questions and concerns from postcolonial studies, for example, into whiteness studies.

Postcolonialism, Nationalism and Blackface I envision this dissertation not to be distinct from postcolonial studies, but to build upon investigations into race and transnational imperialisms that have been conducted under

3 Hage, in White Nation (1998), chooses to use an upper-case “W” when referring to “White” as an identity category. The upper-case “W” implies that White is an identity group and that people identifying and recognised as White do not necessarily require white skin colour (57). I have chosen to use a lower- case “w” when referring to “white Australia/n” in order to imply that skin colour has been central to— even if it is not the only factor in—racism and social identity in Australia. In this I am following scholars such as Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2000), who states “I use the term ‘white’ […] because skin colour is the marker for objectifying difference in the social construction of ‘race’” (Talkin’ Up xvi). Further, whiteness is formed and maintained through individual and institutional practices where skin colour influences how a person is positioned within social power matrices, how, that is, a person is racialised.

the rubric of postcolonialism. Postcolonialism emerged as a field of study in the late 1980s, and debates over its scope and method have continued since.4 In one of the first texts to establish a methodology for post-colonialism, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (1989) state: “We use the term ‘post-colonial’ […] to cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day” (EWB 2). Post-colonial cultures have been created, Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin continue, out of the experience of colonization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial power, and by emphasizing their differences from the assumptions of the imperial centre. It is this which makes them distinctively post-colonial. (EWB 2) For Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin, the role of critical post-colonialism involves identifying and critiquing the emerging post-colonial cultures and their challenges to imperialism, as well as comparing different national post-colonial literatures.

Early criticisms of the methodology defined by Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin were concerned that critics might erase post-colonial agency. For example, in an important criticism of Empire Writes Back (henceforth referred to as EWB), Hodge and Mishra (1991) state: By seeming to transform the post-colonial into an object of knowledge that might be critiqued through a postmodern/ novelistic critical discourse, what EWB has done is to remove the post-colonial as a radical political act of self-legitimation and self-respect locked into practices which antedate the arrival of the coloniser, and bracket it with postmodern practices generally. (“What is?” 38) That is, post-colonialism, as a critical practice, risks removing the agency of indigenous and marginalised authors, artists and critics (“the post-colonial”) by placing them within a western critical discourse that identifies and defines their merit. Early literary post- colonialists, then, often implicitly privileged western epistemologies in granting critical valency to the post-colonial and declaring the post-colonial culturally legitimate. This legitimation, according to Hodge and Mishra, assumes that the post-colonial emerges out of modernity, and also that the post-colonial is distinct from pre-modern, pre-

4 In the following paragraphs I am discussing “post-colonialism” (with the hyphen) as a brand of early literary postcolonialism practised by critics such as Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin (1989), and “postcolonialism” (without the hyphen) as a broader field of cultural studies and interdisciplinary criticism that distinguishes itself from early literary post-colonialism.

colonial culture and philosophy. The critical paternalist tendencies of some postcolonial work is in danger of ignoring both the role of colonisers in creating, legitimating and controlling post-colonial culture and the autonomy of indigenous and marginalised people who make their pre-colonial, pre-modern cultural practices modern as they alter, inspire and subvert imperial culture.5 Hodge and Mishra, then, perceive a type of “race-blindness” in some early post-colonialism.6 In many ways, the criticism identified by Hodge and Mishra performs the exact solipsism that this dissertation seeks to investigate: a representation of Otherness as an object to be studied, known, defined and positioned in relation to the unspoken norm of whiteness as knower, knowledge- giver and cultural legitimator. In effect, such post-colonialist work risks presuming to (culturally) authenticate representations of Otherness within western epistemology and culture.7 Western epistemology and culture appear to remain unchanged in such imaginings about the post-colonial, which sometimes refuse to acknowledge that postcolonialism is actually a field that has developed as a response to the political and

5 An example of critical work that acknowledges the autonomy of Aboriginal people is Jennifer Deger’s analysis of the creative cultural adaptations evident in Yolngu filmmaking. In Shimmering Screens (2006) Deger states that “the genius of the Yolngu imagination lies in its ability to recognize the Ancestral in new contexts and to envisage a place within modernity that does not imply a break with the past” (210). Deger is open to accusations of critical paternalism, given she assigns Yolngu films a value based on their achievement of a place within modernity. Stephen Muecke’s theorisation in Ancient and Modern (2004), that there is an “indigenous modernity” that is “distinct from European modernisation processes since it developed its own forms”, is more sensitive in attempting to avoid what he calls the “search-and-destroy mission” of critical relativism that assumes Western (theoretical, conceptual) ascendancy (5). 6 Alfred J. Lopez, in his “Introduction” in the collection Postcolonial Whiteness (2005), states that there is a “race-blindness” evident in postcolonial studies (3). For Lopez, even though he admits that the blindness may be because whiteness is often viewed as synonymous with colonial power, “postcolonial studies has to date produced relatively little scholarship exploring the relations […] between whiteness and the consolidation and maintenance of colonial power” (3). 7 The phrase “representations of Otherness” may seem tautological following Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism (1978), which defines the Other as a “theoretical illustration” of “European identity as […] superior” (7). In this sense all Otherness is constructed, discursive and represented. While Said’s thesis is clearly central to my argument, I use the term Other to refer to actual subjects who are objectified and marginalised by dominant discourses. Otherness refers to the culturally constructed signs and symbols that are said to refer to the Other. The phrase “representations of Otherness” (and similar other phrases) emphasises that these signs are discursively assembled according to various political agendas and/or cultural norms; often, as Said argues, the cultural assembly of Otherness occurs to create the illusion of European superiority.

cultural agency of the Other. Nevertheless, the work of both postcolonial and whiteness studies critics have more recently attempted to open Western epistemology and culture to the distinct and different epistemologies of the Other. Such work can be self-reflexive or focused on the epistemologies of Others, addressing the epistemological relationship between coloniser and colonised in an attempt to perform something akin to a decolonising critical practice.

Hodge and Mishra’s “What is Post-colonialism?” (1991) was published in the same year as their full-length work Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind (henceforth referred to as Dream). In Dream Hodge and Mishra argue that postcolonial Australian culture is permeated with a repressed colonial mindset that prevents the decolonisation of Australia. For critics such as Curthoys and Muecke (1993), Australia will never be “truly post-colonial”, or decolonised, until “Aboriginal peoples achieve recognition, compensation and political autonomy” (180). Dream examines how the Other can be stripped of their agency not only as they are ignored, but even as they become the centre of attention.8 Hodge and Mishra attempt counter-readings of dominant stories of Aboriginality in order to expose the dark side of the Australian cultural history: It is in that side—the forbidden, suppressed and “unspeakable”—that another cultural history is played out. In this book we have read, symptomatically, texts which take us to the shifting meanings of a dream which has always been the Other of Australian culture. An unacknowledged secret that recurs throughout this “dream”, we have argued, is Australia’s colonial history and the relations of domination formed within that history. (Dream 204) This dissertation follows the methodology of Dream, examining a history of colonialism (though I investigate Australian colonialism primarily as it was connected with American imperialism) and asking how that history endures and is exemplified in more recent examples from Australian culture. However, instead of reading the way

8 Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana (2007) have recently argued, along similar lines, that such representational systems can be thought of as “epistemologies of ignorance”, where, for example, “white ignorance includes both false belief and the absence of true belief about people of color, supporting a delusion of white racial superiority” (“Introduction” 3). False belief can occur through an intense focus on Otherness, and an absence of true belief can occur through an ignorance of Otherness. In both cases, Hodge and Mishra would suggest, the Other’s agency and humanity is ignored, and the underlying presumption of white superiority remains unchanged.

Aboriginality is imagined as a dark side of a dream, I read white representations of Aboriginality as national fantasies.

Following Ghassan Hage’s (1998) Lacanian use of the term, I read fantasy as a space that is inhabited (White Nation 70). It is both a way of thinking, and the material effects stemming from ways of thinking. Thus, the term “fantasy” can more usefully exemplify the discursive relation between imaginings of Otherness and actual lived experiences.9 Australians do not live in a dream-state, they act according to their fantasies of how their world appears (or what they want it to become). Further, Hage’s work on national fantasies allows for a clearer articulation of whiteness and race. David Carter has stated that postcolonialism provides an insufficient lens for discussions of race in Australian culture: “The closer we approach the issue of race, and the more the focus shifts from the colonial to the Indigenous subject, the less postcolonialism as a discrete theoretical discourse has seemed adequate” (“After” 116). Arguably, this is the moment that whiteness studies separates from postcolonialism, to refocus critical attention on the colonising subject. As the next section of the Introduction will demonstrate, this refocusing is not without its own problems. In this dissertation, Hage’s work on fantasies and whiteness (despite being centred on multiculturalism and not Aboriginal politics) resonates with my own work on whiteness and Aboriginality which analyses the “colonial” (and colonising) subject as the main beneficiary of dominant cultural imaginings about Otherness. This refocusing is vital to an understanding of whiteness and Aboriginality in postcolonial Australia.10 My reading of Australian culture suggests

9 I use “discourse” and “discursive” in the Foucauldian sense. In The History of Sexuality, Volume One (1978), for example, Foucault states: “we must not imagine a world of discourse divided between accepted discourse and excluded discourse, or between the dominant discourse and the dominated one; but as a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies […] discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy” (100-1). This dissertation investigates discourses of whiteness (those ideas and cultural imaginings that entrench, enact and justify white authority and privilege), as well as discourses of blackness, Aboriginality and Otherness (symbolic fields where representation is negotiated to align with, resist, or attempt to overturn dominant cultural power geographies). 10 My definition of postcolonial Australia acknowledges both “oppositional” and “complicit” postcolonialisms in Australia, following critics such as Hodge and Mishra (“What is” 39). I use whiteness studies to interrogate the nature of complicit postcolonialism (white authors, for example, who write

that whiteness desires to exert its control over the nation space and those within it and exhibits this aspiration through cultural representations of Otherness.11 Implicit in this thesis is the recognition that Otherness is not—not completely at least—determined and controlled by whiteness. Instead, Otherness and whiteness are mutually responsive within culturally imagined environments and continually negotiated in relation to each other.

Central to this dissertation is a reading of Aboriginality as a vital component to dominant cultural visions of the nation as a space controlled and governed by white people. In examining the white cultural construction of Aboriginality I am examining white nationalist practices that often impinge upon the expression and reception of Aboriginal and nonwhite ethnic voices in Australia. Hage’s White Nation and Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s Talkin’ Up to the White Woman (2000) are two key texts that analyse the tensions between the dominant white Australian national will, and the counter-wills of Others within Australia.12 Critical studies of race in Australia have been concerned with various discursive networks within the triad of whiteness, Aboriginality and multiculturalism.13 Hage argues:

against colonial or imperial centres and against indigenous populations). However, my reading of whiteness studies also acknowledges how oppositional postcolonialisms critique complicit postcolonialisms (how, for example, Aboriginal people critique white Australian culture to goad political change). 11 This argument could be rephrased as an examination of the “spatial politics” of culture. Heather Goodall (1996) defines spatial politics as “conflict [that] occurs over who controls and has access to the various places in which public and domestic life are conducted” (Invasion to Embassy 269). Ghassan Hage argues that nationalist practices (such as tolerance) are practises of “spatial power” (White Nation 91). Hostility about rights to occupy, inhabit and control space has become, for Hage and others, a central aspect of aggressive nationalism. Ien Ang (2003), for example, has argued that “the culture of space” and the “space for culture” is an increasingly important issue in debates over the “Australian way of life” (“From White Australia to Fortress Australia” 65). Following these critics, I examine culture itself as a space of complex power negotiations. 12 The field of whiteness studies will be discussed more extensively in the next section of the Introduction; in this section I will focus on Hage’s discussion of fantasies and nationalism. 13 Erez Cohen, in “Non-Anglo” (2006), states “I think it is important to challenge […] the ways by which multiculturalism and Aboriginality are divided into two separate discourses” (68). The division between Aboriginality and multiculturalism has also been questioned by Ann Curthoys in “An Uneasy Conversation” (2000). It should be noted that the separate discourses of Aboriginality and

White racists and White multiculturalists share in a conception of themselves as nationalists and of the nation as a space structured around a White culture, where Aboriginal people and non-White “ethnics” are merely national objects to be moved or removed according to the White national will. This White belief in one’s mastery over the nation, whether in the form of a White multiculturalism or in the form of a White racism, is what I have called the “White nation” fantasy. It is a fantasy of a nation governed by white people, a fantasy of White supremacy. (emphasis added, White Nation 18) Although it is tempting to argue that whiteness simply dominates and controls Aboriginality, Hage’s work makes the vital distinction that absolute white control and domination is illusory—a “conception” and “belief”—and overlooks the complex negotiations and (counter)struggles occurring between whiteness and Others within the national space.

Hage describes two important elements to the white nation fantasy that are relevant to this dissertation. Firstly, dominant ideations of the nation reveal “the very way nationalists inhabit, experience and conceive of their nation and themselves as nationalists” (White Nation 71). For Hage, the white nation fantasy gives meaning to the lives of nationalists, who feel they must contribute to creating their ideal nation. Secondly, white national fantasies require Otherness to exist as a threat to the model nation. For Hage: the other is what allows nationalists to believe in the possibility of [… an ideal] space eventuating. It helps them avoid having to face the impossible nature of what they are pursuing, the traumatic kernel of the real, by constructing the other as that which stands in the way of its attainment. It is in this sense that the other is necessary for the construction and maintenance of the fantasy. (emphasis in original, White Nation 74) Crucially for this dissertation, the Other is read as a “constructed” presence within a white representation of national space. That is, within their own “cultural praxis”, white nationalists fabricate, create and represent Otherness in ways that energise and justify their own role as masters of the national space.14 This prevents white nationalists from

multiculturalism are usually positioned in relation to whiteness and not each other. A notable exception to this is Peta Stephenson’s The Outsiders Within (2007), which examines the relationship between Aboriginality and multiculturalism. It has been the role of whiteness studies to investigate the third (hidden) discourse that is normalised in relation to the other two—whiteness. 14 Johan Fornas, in Cultural Theory and Late Modernity (1995), states that “[c]ultural praxis is always also social praxis: the joint production of meaning is not clearly separated from the co-operation of

engaging with the fact that they can never gain absolute control of the nation or Others within it. Thus, non-indigenous representations of Aboriginality in Australian culture are often only “dominant mythologies” that repress exactly what they pretend to represent, 15 and do so in order to inspire nationalists to inhabit and work towards the goal of white control over Otherness. Even if the ambition to create an ideal nation is never fulfilled, the desire is pervasive enough to impact upon the everyday lives of Australians.

Theories of national fantasies allow for an examination of the whiteness beneath representations of Aboriginality. However, as this dissertation follows a current critical trend to move beyond nationalist conceits, I examine the discourse of Aboriginality as part of a global history, connected to, for example, transnational imperial networks of racial ideologies.16 The trend I follow is identified by David Carter, who argues that “we’re in a moment that is in some manner after postcolonialism” (“After” 114). Carter states that postcolonialism has failed “to recognise or explore the productive nature of

individuals or the normative rules regulating that interaction” (57). Fornas is referring to the slippage between cultural productions and social actions. 15 Gilbert and Tompkins (1996) state that non-indigenous nationalist plays that overlook Aboriginal histories “often participate (albeit unwittingly) in the dominant [read imperialist] mythologies of a society even while they attempt to articulate suppressed [read white nationalist] versions of the past” (114). I am broadening this observation to state that cultural stories presenting errant conceptions of Aboriginality or Aboriginal history also contribute to the dominant mythologies of whiteness. 16 It is prudent here to distinguish ideology from discourse. My use of the term ideology follows critics like Louis Althusser and Catherine Belsey, emphasising the racial or historical context in which ideas and practices are situated. For example, Belsey (2002), in her second edition of Critical Practice (1st edition 1980), follows Althusser to define ideology: “Ideology […] works in conjunction with political practice and economic practice to constitute the social formation […] Rather than a separate element which exists independently in some free-floating realm of ‘ideas’ and is subsequently embodied in words, ideology is a way of thinking, speaking, experiencing” (emphasis in original 5). Thus, “ideology” is defined in this thesis in a similar way to “discourse”, only that ideologies tend to be institutionally entrenched and politically biased. I suggest that an ideology refers to a particular deployment of discourse towards a political or cultural end. Thus, a white nationalist might manipulate the discourse of Aboriginality to create a racial ideology. In this sense, ideology is more narrowly defined than discourse. The political and cultural bias I am referring to in the phrase “imperial networks of racial ideologies”, for example, is a transnational belief that whiteness is culturally ordained within a global racial hierarchy. This argument develops throughout the dissertation.

imperial networks as vectors of modernity” (“After” 117). Carter then theorises the themes and content of work that is “‘after’ postcolonialism”: perhaps it would include a list of themes something like this: Australian modernity or cosmopolitanism, transnational cultures, critical race and whiteness studies, Asian-Australian identities and diasporas, material print cultures, and, following Stephen Muecke’s latest book, studies of Indigenous modernity. When I consider that list, it does seem to begin to add up to something rather new, something that both expands and collapses the logics of literary postcolonialism. (119) For Carter, critical studies after postcolonialism both benefit from and contribute to the earlier work of postcolonialism. In this sense, my dissertation is situated after postcolonialism. It uses whiteness studies to investigate the role of nineteenth-century blackface entertainment as a site where doctrines of whiteness circulated transnationally between America and Australia. Specifically, nineteenth-century blackface entertainment enabled a connection between racial ideologies in America and Australia. American and Australian discourses of race shared not simply their style of representing Otherness, but the ideology of whiteness that circulated beneath the blackface mask to firmly entrench a transnational “will to govern” Otherness.17

The controversy surrounding the work of Bindi Cole—an Aboriginal photographer based in Melbourne—brought blackface into the spotlight. Members of Cole’s family wear blackface in several of the works she displayed in the exhibition “Not Really Aboriginal”. In “Warre Beal Yallock”, for example, her father stands outdoors proudly; his bare chest and grey beard are a clear contrast to the black face paint he wears. During the opening of her exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne, Cole surveyed the people viewing her works. There were Indigenous and non-Indigenous viewers in the gallery. Cole later stated, with a laugh: I slightly underestimated the impact that these images would have. I knew that they’d be a little controversial. I didn’t realise quite how much, and also how much I would tap into what so many people within the [Aboriginal] community had been feeling for a long time, because it’s kind of a taboo subject. (Interview) “Not Really Aboriginal” addressed several taboos. For example, the blackface mask on fair-skinned Aboriginal people raises questions about the relationship between skin colour and race. In this way Cole was raising an important subject for Aboriginal

17 The terminology here has been taken from Said, who described Orientalism as “a kind of Western projection onto and will to govern over the Orient” (95).

communities that are often pressured (by governments and cultural critics, for example) to define Aboriginality.18 Cole also raises the spectre of blackface entertainment. Blackface entertainment was popular in America, Britain and Australia during the nineteenth century, and remained popular for some audiences until the 1980s.19 In addition to the historical subject of blackface entertainment, “Not Really Aboriginal” implies that modes of racist thinking similar to those that underpinned nineteenth- century blackface entertainment persist in Australia today. Despite the popularity and pervasiveness of blackface entertainment in the past, there now remains a critical and cultural silence surrounding the history and ongoing influence of blackface entertainment in Australia.

As mentioned already, Andrew Bolt (2009) launched a scathing personal attack on Cole (“So Hip”).20 His engagements with Cole and her work can be read as displaying the lingering presence of blackface mentalities in Australian culture. In addition to his acerbic article “So Hip”, Bolt had blogged about “Not Really Aboriginal” prior to the actual exhibition. He included “Wathaurung Mob” (Fig. i) on his website and stated “I don’t think insisting on racial differences no one can even detect is a sensible use of brain-space” (“‘White Aboriginal’ Wants You to See Black” 12 May 2008). The

18 It is my opinion that it is not the role of academic studies such as this one to establish the nature of Aboriginality for Aboriginal communities. Instead, academic studies can productively investigate why there has been and still is a cultural and political impulse for white people to intervene in the politics of Aboriginal identity. That is, white people should examine the role of whiteness within a discourse of Aboriginality rather than seeking to define Aboriginal identity and culture. 19 Unless otherwise noted the term “popular” is used throughout this thesis to refer to culture that is enjoyed by a great number of people. Nevertheless, blackface entertainment can be thought of as “popular culture” as opposed to high culture (though a tangential argument in Chapter Two suggests that later blackface entertainment blurs this distinction). Blackface entertainment can also be thought of as “popular culture” as defined by Tony Bennett (1980): “an area of exchange […] a network of relations” (“Popular Culture” 25). Given that this dissertation reads culture more generally as a transnational network and a site of intersubjective exchange, I feel that the term “popular” is redundant when referring to culture. 20 A response to “So Hip” in the online news service Crikey exposed errors in Bolt’s short “biographies” of those he attacked. In “Memo to Bolt: Race Runs Deeper than Skin Colour” (2009), Chris Graham points out factual errors, specifically regarding Bolt’s descriptions of Larissa Behrendt and Anita Heiss, and states that Bolt’s article “is a carbon copy of his many previous attempts to attack Aboriginal welfare, and define Aboriginality” (n.p). Bolt claims that those who identify as Aboriginal receive unearned political, cultural and social advantages over non-Indigenous Australians.

comments attached to the blog revealed something of Bolt’s target audience: readers recalled memories of Al Jolson in blackface, The Black and White Minstrel Show (a BBC television show that screened in Australia throughout the 1960s and 1970s) and quoted old blackface minstrel skits; many readers foreshadowed Bolt’s theme in the later article “So Hip” (that claiming Aboriginality attracts undeserved cultural/political/social capital); some readers claimed that Sam Newman (who had, in 1999, used blackface to impersonate Aboriginal AFL player Nicky Winmar) should be vindicated and they lamented the onset of “PC” (political correctness); some comments went so far as to state that Cole’s work is only art if controversial photographs of Australian police in blackface make-up can also be considered art.21 These comments suggest that blackface imagery is still very much in the memory of some Australians and still shapes Australian culture, even if it is not often discussed. Some of the comments also suggest that, even if there is no familiarity with the history of blackface entertainment in Australia, a blackface mentality is still evident, particularly in the way some Australians feel that they have the right to manage and adjudicate Aboriginality. In my interview with Cole, she stated that the blog and associated comments—based on a media release and written prior to her exhibition—are evidence that “there is still so much racism alive and well here in Australia” (Interview). Further, Cole saw Bolt’s blog as validating the reasons she was critiquing current-day racisms: “These stereotypes need to be broken down” (Interview). In this sense, “Not Really Aboriginal” provides the strongest criticism of Bolt’s ongoing patronising and mis- informed comments about Aboriginality.

No doubt, the harsh criticism that Cole encountered prior to the exhibition caused her concern about how viewers would respond when her exhibition opened. Of the viewers in the gallery on opening night, Cole stated:

21 In March 1992 ABC TV’s Four Corners screened a home-made video showing two non-Indigenous police officers from Bourke in blackface make-up with nooses around their necks, mocking the recent attention given to Aboriginal deaths in custody via a Royal Commission on the topic (“Bourke Police Blackface Video”). It also emerged that there were photos of Bourke police in blackface taken two months prior to the making of the video (See New South Wales, “Police Service Racism Allegations” [1994]—a transcript of a debate in the Legislative Assembly of NSW published in Hansard; and New South Wales, Final Report [2007]—the findings of a Royal Commission into the NSW Police Service).

I saw some Indigenous people looking at the images and having a physical reaction like a punch in the face, or a punch in the stomach. That was scary to see. I’d stand there and think: “God, they’re gonna turn around and tell me off.” However, when they finally did turn around from taking in what they’d seen, they’d just look at me with this deeper understanding of what I was trying to say. They just got it. (Interview) Her Indigenous viewers understood that Cole was using blackface to open a discussion on stereotypical views of Aboriginality. The physicality of her viewers’ response indicates how deeply blackface is connected to histories of actual and symbolic racial violence. Cole describes herself as fair-skinned, with Aboriginal heritage, but “uncomfortable about expressing that heritage because the response that I always got was that ‘you’re not really Aboriginal’” (Interview). The comment “you’re not really Aboriginal” is an example of how non-Indigenous people live through the repercussions of white fantasies about Otherness. In such mindsets the role of Aboriginal authenticator is absolutely naturalised for many non-Indigenous people. Blackface in Cole’s images can be read in many ways. Without doubt, though, they make obvious the mask that Aboriginal people are expected to inhabit to conform to white nation fantasies.

Interrogating blackface can elucidate the nature of both past and present racisms. For Cole, investigations of blackface can have transformative effects on current and past experiences of racism. Cole states: I just knew that [blackface] was right at the time, that this was the way I needed to express what I felt. The use of blackface expressed an inherent racism in society, and it expressed my uncomfortability and also broke down the stereotypes that I had been coming up against. (Interview) Strangely, perhaps, blackface for Cole simultaneously represents a history of uncomfortable racism and disturbs that history. The blackfaces in Cole’s images are double-edged: an abstraction of the ideology of white control over Aboriginality (and the racism it has entrenched in society), as well as an expression of Aboriginal pride. The affect of Aboriginal pride was surprising, even to Cole: [Blackface] was a representation of everything that was wrong about the assumptions that were made about Indigenous people. Yet, on some level, it represented the pride that I have. (Interview) The expression of pride in these blackface images testifies to the empowering effect of a declaration of agency in the face of white bigotry. Cole uses blackface as both an abstraction of racism and as an abstraction of Aboriginality. The red headbands on her subjects in “Not Really Aboriginal” can be read as powerful reclamations of a cultural

stereotype. The red headbands suggest a pre-modern, pre-colonial element to Aboriginality, but combined with the modern settings they also suggest the inappropriateness of labels such as pre-modern, pre-colonial, post-colonial and modern.22 Cole’s work suggests that Aboriginality can transcend these categories even as it is intricately grounded within them. Her use of blackface signals a timely investigation into the way racism has become entrenched in Australian society and culture. The power of Cole’s work is in exposing racial fictions (“assumptions”) such as the relationship between “race” and skin colour, or between Aboriginality and welfarism. The red headbands can also be read as signalling the white stereotypical idea that Aboriginal people are pre-modern (which relates to the claim that Aboriginal welfarism proves that Aboriginal people cannot or have not joined modernity).23

Racial fictions about Aboriginal people were being developed and disseminated by Europeans ever since the earliest colonial encounters. Kay Anderson argues, in Race and the Crisis of Humanism (2007), that, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Aboriginal people were seen as outside modernity and as closer to nature than humanity. As such, Aboriginal people were believed to represent proof of biologically essential differences between races (or “innatism”), and proof that Western European races were the most “human” (read civilised and modern) of races (Kay Anderson 2). Investigating blackface entertainment can remind us that blackness was (and is) largely

22 Bain Attwood (2005) has noted that red headbands have been used by Aboriginal people in more recent times as “a symbol of mourning and protest among Aboriginal people […] regarding the dispossession and destruction of Aboriginal people and culture” (Telling the Truth About Aboriginal History 33). Maria Nugent (2005) has also described Aboriginal protestors in 1970 wearing “red headbands, symbolising [the Aboriginal] blood spilt” in the previous 200 years since Captain Cook’s landing at Kurnell (Botany Bay 177). Arguably, in addition to Attwood’s and Nugent’s reading of them, the red headbands are also powerful symbols of protest because of their use prior to and since colonisation. 23 This argument risks implying that modernity is something to which people should aspire. Ziauddin Sardar, in Postmodernism and the Other (1998), has described how this is an assumption central to colonialism: “Modernity presented itself as a universal aspiration and sought the absorption of the Other into the west as a natural process of accretion, the inevitable outcome of the Other seeking their own betterment. Here hierarchical control came in terms of history” (31). On the contrary, I am suggesting that the strength of Cole’s work is to undermine (Western) modernity as an aspiration for Aboriginal people or artists. Cole’s work suggests that Western modernity can only comprehend a biased and incomplete Aboriginality, as Sardar states: “Modernity sought nothing less then to replace the ways of knowing, being and doing of non-western cultures” (33).

imagined, and that it was (and is) imagined within (transnational) discourses of imputed white authority, colonialism and imperialism. Blackface, for Cole and for this dissertation, is a symbol of the history of blackness as it has been shaped by the desires of whiteness; the cultural history of blackface provides just one possible history of whiteness.

Blackface was recently interrogated by black American filmmaker Spike Lee. Lee’s 2000 film Bamboozled restaged nineteenth-century blackface shows to satirise the relationship between whiteness and blackness at the beginning of the new millennium. Bamboozled is the story of Pierre Delacroix, an African American television producer who is struggling to have a sitcom about black, middle-class lives approved and filmed. Angry at his white boss’s continual rejection of such ideas, Delacroix pitches a show to expose the racism of the people and the network for whom he works. The following conversation between Delacroix and Sloane (his assistant, played by Jada Pinkett- Smith) elaborates on this plan: DEL: Dunwitty wants a cool show, so that’s what I intend to give him. The show will be so negative, so offensive and racist; hence, I will prove my point. SLO: Which is what? DEL: The point being that him—the network—does not want to see negroes on television unless they are buffoons. (DVD Ch. 5) Delacroix’s slippage between “him” and “the network” reveals that white nation fantasies are individually reproduced and institutionally entrenched. “Cool” is an abstraction that literally becomes blackface entertainment in the film, and signifies how whiteness’ stereotypical view of blackness shapes Delacroix’s expression. Delacroix originally intends his “New Millennium Minstrel Show”—apparently acceptable because it has black people performing in blackface—to expose the racism of at least his boss, and possibly the racism of the television network. For Delacroix and Lee, blackface represents American culture’s restrictions on expressions of black identity. Blackness must fit the accepted stereotypes in order to be palatable to mainstream audiences and thereby culturally legitimated. In Bamboozled, much to Delacroix’s horror (and financial profit), the “New Millennium Minstrel Show” becomes a sensational success.

Bamboozled provides a trenchant critique of the institutionalisation of white representations of Otherness. In Bamboozled, the institutionalised pressure to conform to prefigured illusions about blackness is personified by the white network boss, Dunwitty, who claims to love black culture; he even claims that he is “blacker” than Delacroix (DVD Ch. 3). Blackness becomes an abstract quality, though it is a quality that is shaped in specific ways. Through the (un)surprising success of the minstrel show and the profits it makes for its black producers, Lee implies that black people can share in the material profits that are derived from the dominant culture’s fiction of blackness. Delacroix, in aligning himself with the racist expectations of the institution, shares in the privileges of that system. Importantly, Delacroix’s submission to the institutional pressures of whiteness is seen as a metaphoric imposition of blackface upon him. In later scenes, including his execution scene, Delacroix literally wears a blackface mask, visualising the metaphoric significance of blackface. Overall, the discursive effect of the conceit of whiteness (where blackness exists without black agency) involves violent consequences for the black characters. The minstrel show’s lead actor is kidnapped by a militaristic black rights organisation and murdered on live television, black members of the militant group are killed by police, and Delacroix is executed by his assistant in revenge for the murder of the minstrel show’s lead actor. Thus, racism and violence are energised by the representations of blackness that whiteness disseminates.

Both Cole and Lee use blackface to focus their critiques of the white nation. These critiques align when blackface is read within an American-Australian transnational history. Cole was forced to confront the transnational nature of blackface as she conducted research for “Not Really Aboriginal”. One of her early ideas was to use a computer program (Adobe Photoshop) to blacken the faces of her subjects after she had photographed them. She stated that this was “too subtle” (Interview). Cole recalled that after a friend showed her a tin of black make-up, the project “just clicked into place” (Interview). Cole described her trip to a costume shop in Victoria to buy black face- paint: They still called it “Minstrel Black” and “Negro Brown”! I was shocked and traumatised. I didn’t expect that when I went out to buy make-up they would be the names used for those colours. I wondered whether people would understand the history that was attached with that, but I think most people would just gloss over it and not even question it, and that surprised me. It drove me and gave me more ammunition really. (Interview)

Cole’s trauma here can be read as a response that is triggered by the symbolic return of repressed histories: the return of histories of race that are often imagined to be distinct and distant from present-day experiences. Painful images that have come to stand for a history of white hatred and racism—blackface minstrels and their archetypal characters—surface in Cole’s search to understand her relationship to blackness. Shock is the result for Cole as the gap is closed between an apparently distant, historical period of racist entertainment and her own experiences of racism. That is, contemporary bigotry—which motivates someone to believe they can define Aboriginality and tell Cole “you’re not really Aboriginal”—and nineteenth-century discourses of blackness coalesce and intertwine with traumatic effect. For both Lee and Cole, a confrontation with a historic technology of racism—such as blackface—becomes the impetus for their challenges to current-day racisms. The names of the make-up that Cole eventually used hark back to the same history of blackface entertainment and blackface minstrelsy that Spike Lee used to represent modern-day racism in America.

Blackface entertainment came to Australia from America and Britain in the 1820s and was popular for over 150 years. While blackface entertainment was being criticised as racist in the early twentieth century, it was still seen on Australian television in the 1970s. Lee’s and Cole’s uses of blackface in arguments about current racisms in their respective societies suggest that, while the actual blackface might have disappeared from popular culture, the underlying ideologies of whiteness that energised blackface entertainment during the nineteenth century still continue, albeit in more insidious ways. More so, these recent uses of blackface suggest that there is a shared—transnational— connection between the histories of racial representation and modes of oppression in America and Australia. The American whiteness critic Vron Ware (1992) insists that “whiteness needs to be understood as an interconnected global system, having different inflections and implications depending on where and when it has been produced” (85). This dissertation suggests that a discourse of whiteness is present within the cultural representation of both blackness in America and Aboriginality in Australia. The chapters that follow will uncover how American and Australian discourses of whiteness were connected, and chart the various inflections of those discourses. First, however, it is prudent to review the development and critical endeavours of critical whiteness studies.

Transnational Fantasies of Whiteness As well as artists such as Lee and Cole, academics in America and Australia have attempted to expose and destabilise whiteness through critical theory. This section of the Introduction adds depth to the notion of a fantasy of whiteness through a reading of some of the core works in American and Australian whiteness studies. Many of these core works and critics have been influenced by earlier work in postcolonialism, feminism, Marxism, and critical race theory. However, they focus, for various reasons, on how white racial privilege is normalised, not only within their subject material, but within their critical fields. Whiteness studies, then, is not so much an original critical field, as a new orientation that utilises existing critical frameworks within active critical debates.

As a named field of critical study, “whiteness studies” emerged in America during the 1990s. Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark (1992) is widely held to be one of the inaugural works of whiteness studies. Morrison’s work impels critics to read the presence of blackness in literary texts by white authors as “an extraordinary meditation on the [white] self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the [white] writerly self” (13). But, more than this, whiteness is institutionalised; as Morrison states, texts can be read “to discover through a close look at literary ‘blackness’, the nature—even the cause—of literary ‘whiteness’” (9). This reading strategy was articulated in other fields around the same time as Morrison’s work, notably in the work of labour historian David Roediger. Roediger’s chapter on nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy in Wages of Whiteness (1991) argues that, through blackface minstrelsy, “a new sense of whiteness” was created through “a new sense of blackness” (115). This dissertation follows such reading strategies, reading representations of blackness and Aboriginality not only as representations of the author’s fears, anxieties and desires, but also as representations of the broader institutional and social pressures that validate and popularise such representations.

Whiteness is often (contentiously) defined as invisible. Richard Dyer, in White (1997), argues that whiteness becomes invisible at the very moment it is normalised (5-10). Thus, whiteness is not invisible per se, but operates as a social norm. Many critics, such as bell hooks (1992), have criticised the wording of this aspect of whiteness, forcing the recognition that whiteness is often only invisible to white people:

Although there has never been any official body of black people in the United States who have gathered as anthropologists and/or ethnographers to study whiteness, black folks have, from slavery on, shared in conversations with one another “special” knowledge of whiteness gleaned from close scrutiny of white people. (Black Looks 165) Works such as Morrison’s and Roediger’s are, therefore, not the first articulations of whiteness, but are among the first discussions of whiteness studies as a critical project.24 An important project in whiteness studies, nevertheless, is to expose whiteness when it is operating insidiously to marginalise nonwhite people. For example, Shirley Anne Tate (2005) has argued that “monologic discourses on Blackness” imply “whiteness as the norm” (163). Tate’s methodology in Black Skins, Black Masks involves an interrogation of how whiteness is enveloped within definitions of blackness; that is, Tate uncovers how white privilege is protected whenever blackness is discussed and defined in ways that conform to dominant cultural imaginings. Any discourse that reserves “race” for nonwhite people re-enacts the normalisation of whiteness. Recognising the (implicit) normalisation of whiteness is of paramount importance to whiteness studies, given that socio-cultural norms have historically functioned as the (natural) foundation from which white privilege stems.

Whiteness is evident in the policies, unspoken prejudices, and organisation of social institutions, as well as being a property and possession that grants white individuals privilege within social institutions. Cheryl Harris’s “Whiteness as Property” (1993) and George Lipsitz’s Possessive Investment in Whiteness (1998) provide lucid accounts of whiteness as a property and possession. Harris, examining legal definitions of whiteness in the American legal system from an American critical race theory perspective, draws incisive connections between the legal categories of property and whiteness. The American legal system changed in response to the gradual abolition of slavery during the nineteenth century, which meant whiteness was no longer a synonym for “free” or an antonym for “slave”. Harris argues that, within American law and society, an “aspect of identity” was converted into “an external object of property” (1725). It can be inferred through Part One of this dissertation that the same movement occurred in

24 Many whiteness studies critics are influenced by nineteenth-century and twentieth-century writers such as Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and other nonwhite writers who analysed whiteness. For examples, see David Roediger’s edited collection Black on White: Black Writers on What it Means to be White (1999).

American culture with the aid of blackface entertainment. Whiteness, during the nineteenth century, morphed from a “privileged identity [in]to a vested interest” (1725). However, the relationship between identity and institutionally-protected investment is complex. Harris states: The law’s construction of whiteness defined and affirmed critical aspects of identity (who is white); of privilege (what benefits accrue to that status); and, of property (what legal entitlements arise from that status). Whiteness at various times signifies and is deployed as identity, status, and property, sometimes singularly, sometimes in tandem. (1725) Whenever whiteness is signified and deployed as an identity, it always implicitly derives power from its historical connection with status and power. Similarly, when property rights are claimed due to status (the sixth-generation Australian who claims a historical connection to the land, for example), it is often implicitly connected to whiteness as a raced and historically positioned identity.

Lipsitz’s analysis of whiteness is also concerned with the ways whiteness exists as an institutional privilege, even if it is not obviously connected to whiteness as an identity. Throughout his work, Lipsitz analyses how white people are privileged by financial lenders, real estate agents, school teachers, legal systems, governments, and so on. Often the foundation for privilege is a mythology about Others as essentially different; a mythology that has been culturally disseminated, scientifically justified, and socially influential. Lipsitz powerfully articulates not only how white people have benefited materially and psychologically from histories of racism, but also how white Americans are encouraged to invest in whiteness, to remain true to an identity that provides them with resources, power, and opportunity. This whiteness is, of course, a delusion, a scientific and cultural fiction that like all racial identities has no valid foundation in biology or anthropology. Whiteness is, however, a social fact, an identity created and continued with all-too-real consequences for the distribution of wealth, prestige, and opportunity. (emphasis added, vii) In Bamboozled, Lee’s investigation into black alignments with whiteness suggests that there are material and institutional benefits that also pressure nonwhite people to invest in whiteness (though Lee shows the extreme psychological damage and physical violence to black people that such an alignment produces). Taken altogether, these arguments reveal how white privilege can be protected without acknowledging, or being conscious of, whiteness. For Lipsitz, white people can defend their “possessive investment in whiteness”—consciously or not—from a range of subject-positions:

progressive, liberal, anti-racist, racist, conservative, patriot, and so on. For each of these subject-positions, whiteness might be imagined—a “creation”, “delusion” or “fiction” with “no valid foundation”—but it is enacted as a social fact.

Even though whiteness is a social fact, it is difficult to identify precisely because it is so malleable. That is, whiteness is always being made and unmade. This phrase gestures towards an important collection of whiteness studies essays entitled The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness (2001). In their introduction, the editors of that collection, Brander-Rasmussen, Klinenberg, Nexica and Wray, state that it is “daunting […] to consider ‘unmaking whiteness’” (17). This statement implies that the dismantling of whiteness is the critical goal of whiteness studies. Such a line of argument follows the “abolitionists” of whiteness.25 Critical theory alone would struggle to dismantle the long history that has led to the institutionalisation of whiteness. That is, I doubt whether whiteness can be abolished without dismantling entire legal systems, systems of government, as well as capitalism itself. Whiteness is so insidiously embedded in social institutions and habits of everyday life that it can never be entirely identified, let alone identified and altogether unmade. Further, I doubt whether whiteness is static enough to be unmade. Whiteness continually adapts to incorporate new social ideas and identities. What whiteness studies can do, instead, is work towards an in-depth understanding of the way that whiteness operates as a process that continually remakes itself, often in indirect and unobvious ways.

One of the most influential practitioners of whiteness studies, Ruth Frankenberg, provides a nuanced reading of how whiteness is made and unmade. In her Introduction to the collection of essays Displacing Whiteness (1997) Frankenberg states: it is only when the processes of constructing dominance are complete that whiteness enters the realm of the apparently natural, of doxa. Moreover, […] the status of whiteness in doxa is unstable, to say the least. Rather, I would argue that whiteness is always constructed, always in the process of being made and unmade. (emphasis added 16)

25 The academic journal Race Traitor provides a forum for whiteness critics to voice white-abolitionist arguments. The editors include Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, and the published academics include the editors, as well as David Roediger, Vron Ware and Les Back (the latter two authors co-authored the abolitionist text Out of Whiteness [2002]).

That is, whiteness exists as a social fact (doxa) under conditions of white dominance. However, both the conditions of white dominance, as well as the nature of the social fact of whiteness, are frequently changing, always incomplete and continually in process. Frankenberg insists that whiteness is a fantasy—“apparently” natural, “constructed,” “made and unmade”. While the two are undoubtedly connected, the difference between a fantasy of whiteness and a white nation fantasy is that the latter refers strictly to the imagined social relationships that inspire and energise nationalists. The fantasy of whiteness refers to an often unspoken connection between embedded, institutionalised socio-cultural fictions and the racialised positioning of, and power- relations between, individuals that racial fictions justify and support. The strength of this fantasy is that, as it is interrupted and disturbed, often-unconscious habits remake it through social, legal, governmental and cultural apparatus. This dissertation suggests that the remaking of whiteness occurs through the remaking of Otherness. That is, Otherness is imagined to exist without effective cultural or political autonomy so that the threat to whiteness is neutralised.26 Of course, this is a fantasy in two senses: it is untrue, which is why whiteness must continually remake itself (the Other will soon force change again); and it is discursive—despite its untruth it is inhabited by white people (and occasionally nonwhite people) so that it has real effects upon everyday lives.

The hegemony of whiteness is imagined, constantly in flux and highly contextual. The editors of The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness correctly observe that “whiteness […] will always be dynamic and context-specific” (7). Moreover, whiteness is a transnational product as well. Certain ideas and technologies travel across the globe—in

26 Concepts of autonomy and agency have been developed in critical theory. For example, in Border Crossings (2005), Henry A. Giroux draws on Adorno to theorise “political agency”: “agency requires being able to engage democratic values, principles, and practices as a force for resistance and hope in order to challenge unquestioned modes of authority” (246). In this dissertation, I refer to agency as a cultural, social or political expression of the individual’s will. That will may take the form of challenging power, demanding recognition, or attempting to engage in intercultural dialogues. Autonomy refers to the ability to formulate, express and act without social, cultural or political restrictions. In this sense, autonomy is an aporia. For Giroux, as for Adorno, agency is a “crucial element of autonomy” (246). I would suggest that agency is crucial for resisting the various restrictions on complete autonomy. Whiteness stifles the Other’s progress towards autonomy (self-determination, for example) by ignoring or manipulating the Other’s agency.

books, performances, and images—and are adapted from place to place.27 Whiteness circulates the globe, aligning with and being adapted into scientific, cultural and social narratives in various locations. Australia was intricately involved in this transnational circulation of a discourse about whiteness. Whiteness was adapted to local contexts in Australia and exported to other nations. In analysing whiteness in Australia, it is necessary not only to consider how whiteness studies developed in the United States, but also how it has been adapted to an Australian context.

Whiteness studies in America has been largely concerned with interrogating race- relations between white Americans and African American people or immigrants. Studies there, certainly until recent years, tended to overlook the postcolonial relationships between Native Americans and white Americans, African American people or immigrants. In Australia, whiteness studies has been predominantly focused on race-relations between white Australians and Aboriginal people or people who have migrated to Australia since the second world-war.28 The leading critic in regards to whiteness and multiculturalism has been Hage, while the leading critic in regards to Aboriginal people and whiteness has been Aileen Moreton-Robinson. Robinson’s monograph Talkin’ Up is the definitive early work in the field of whiteness and Aboriginal studies. Moreton-Robinson argues that whiteness acts discursively, and her work has analysed the material effects of the racial ideas expressed or implied in, for example, white women’s feminism, postcolonialism, literary criticism, media reports, legal judgements, and popular song lyrics. In a later article, “Whiteness, Epistemology and Indigenous Representation” (2004), Moreton-Robinson states:

27 Marilyn Lake’s “White Man’s Country: The Trans-national History of a National Project” (2003) provides an exemplary account of the exchange of ideas about white race superiority between Britain, America, Australia and South Africa. Her latest book with Henry Reynolds—Drawing the Global Colour Line (2008)—continues this work. 28 I recognise that the term “white Australian” is a particularly elusive one that fails to account for the ways certain ethnicities have “become white”. The works of Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (1996), and Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folk (1999), highlight the slipperiness of whiteness as a racial category. Nevertheless, I will use the term “white Australian” to refer to Australians who are privileged and/or assume a position of nationalist authority most easily justified by skin colour, but also because, in various combinations of the following, they are individually, socially, culturally, and/or legally identified as white.

To recognise that whiteness has shaped knowledge production means academia would have to accept that the dominant regime of knowledge is culturally and racially biased, socially situated and partial. Such recognition would not only challenge the universal humanist claim to possess impartial knowledge of the Indigenous other, it would also facilitate recognition of the subjects of other humanisms to whom whiteness has never been invisible or unknown. (88) Moreton-Robinson, here, destabilises whiteness by reading white epistemology as biased, situated and partial. Whiteness, she claims, has allowed for ideas about Aboriginal people to become “truths”. The blackface mask can be read in light of this argument as a metaphor for the situated and fictional creation of knowledge about Aboriginal people. The types of “truths” that become social fact are invariably those that continue to mask whiteness and entrench white privilege.

Moreton-Robinson argues that the foundation of white privilege in Australia is myths about Otherness that justify the land as a white possession. She asserts that a “possessive logic” operates in Australia—acknowledging Lipsitz’s theory of “possessive investment”—to “naturalise the nation as a white possession” (“Possessive Logic” [2004] par. 5). Even so, Indigenous sovereignty, Moreton-Robinson affirms, is never extinguished and continues to exist despite legal rulings and cultural assumptions that Australia is governed (legally and culturally) under “white sovereignty”.29 Moreton-Robinson, along with other critics such as Fiona Nicoll (“Reconciliation”),

29 Larissa Behrendt suggests, in Achieving Social Justice (2003), that “confusion […] surrounds the use of the word ‘sovereignty’” (94). “White sovereignty”, for example, has set meanings within international law, but is also interpreted discursively by Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2007). Moreton-Robinson states the “white sovereignty operates ideologically, materially and discursively to reproduce and maintain its investment in the nation as a white possession” (“Writing Off” 88). For Moreton-Robinson, discourses of white sovereignty preclude the existence of Aboriginal sovereignty in order to secure white privilege within the nation. For Larissa Behrendt, this is an unfounded fear. “Aboriginal sovereignty”, for Behrendt, “is not a threat to the sovereignty of the Australian state but it does question the legitimacy of that authority, accuses it of historically excluding Indigenous people and of continuing that exclusion today. It seeks a fundamentally different relationship, one that will change through a range of initiatives that, in totality, can be characterised as self-determination” (103). The phrase “Aboriginal sovereignty”, then, can be used colloquially as a claim to Aboriginal land rights, compensation, and autonomy, and it can also be used in legal debates about pre-existing and/or ongoing systems of Aboriginal legal, spiritual, agricultural and cultural custodianship of land. Further, for Behrendt, Aboriginal claims to sovereignty provide “an expression of distinct identity and a starting point for the exercise of self-determination as a way of achieving empowerment, autonomy and equality” (115).

Damien Riggs (Taking Up the Challenge), and Irene Watson (“Aboriginal Sovereignties”), have vocally figured sovereignty matters as the most pressing issue in Australian critical whiteness studies. This dissertation, in undermining the discourses about Aboriginality that implicitly support white sovereignty, contributes to this discussion.

Whiteness in Australia has always abrogated to itself the right to govern and position Otherness. Hage’s White Nation, for example, argues that: “Whiteness” is an everchanging, composite cultural historical construct. It has its roots in the history of European colonisation which universalised a cultural form of White identity as a position of cultural power at the same time as the colonised were in the process of being racialised. (58) Whiteness, then, operates to secure domination through the cultural discourses that racialise colonised peoples. These discourses shift and change but, according to White Nation, imagined characterisations of Otherness that emphasise “White Australians” as the agents of national change are central to whiteness. Hage defines “White Australians” as those who “aspire to occupy [whiteness] and to assume a governmental position within it, and consequently within the nation” (57). Thus, to occupy a position of whiteness in Australia is to occupy a “governmental position”; not literally to hold a position in government, but to assume the right to—officially or otherwise—govern the nation-space and those within it (or wishing to enter it). This theme has been further investigated by scholars such as Suvendrini Perera (“Our Patch”), Jon Stratton (“Dying to Come Here”), Toula Nicolacopoulos and George Vassilacopoulos (“Racism”), Alia Imtoual (“Australian Whiteness”), and Goldie Osuri (“Australian Orientalisms”). These works testify to the fact that attempts to delimit and defuse the Other’s agency are central to the discourse of whiteness in Australia.

There are some problems with whiteness studies that must be addressed. Chief among them is the fear that whiteness studies could re-centre whiteness and ignore the voices of socially marginalised people. Fine, Weis, Powell and Wong, editors of the American collection Off White (1997), expressed this concern: we worry that in our desire to create spaces to speak, intellectually or empirically, about whiteness, we may have reified whiteness as a fixed category of experience; that we have allowed it to be treated as a monolith, in the singular, as an “essential something”. (xi)

Many critics have voiced this concern since.30 In Australia, Sara Ahmed (2004) and Fiona Probyn (2004) provide criticisms of whiteness studies, arguing that it can problematically alleviate responsibility for white racisms, appropriate Aboriginal agency, and even entrench new forms of (benevolent) white racism. Ahmed also suggests how a whiteness studies methodology might overcome this: whiteness studies should involve at least a double turn: to turn towards whiteness is to turn towards and away from those bodies who have been afforded agency and mobility by such privilege. (par. 59) Ahmed argues that the first “turn” of whiteness studies is to problematically refocus whiteness as the centre of knowledge production; whereas a “double turn” would involve reflection on the role of whiteness (including the white critic’s own whiteness) and the use of critical privilege to reformulate and practise critical methodologies that encourage nonwhite agency without impinging upon or defining what is involved in the Other’s progress towards autonomy.

This double-turn, too, is problematic. It risks restricting the agency of the Other, a problem that is almost impossible to resolve. Probyn (2004) describes how the challenge to relinquish power, question power, and unlearn privilege can take the form of a weirdly white ressentiment which has the effect of appropriating the moral and political authority of the disempowered—the very critical strength of the Other. (par. 1) Nevertheless, for Probyn, whiteness studies can become a field of criticism for any critic who “wants to give up privilege but who also recognises the irreducible problem” of ressentiment (par. 42). Formulating the methodology for whiteness studies can, in some ways, only come after postcolonialism: both after postcolonialism has emphasised the importance and significance of Indigenous epistemologies and the ambiguous position of white settlers in colonial spaces, and after postcolonialism has failed to rearticulate the settler-colonial subject as an anti-racist decoloniser. A whiteness studies

30 Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, in Post-colonial Studies: the Key Concepts (2000), appear to have taken notice of the criticism levelled at their foundational text (EWB) and state that colonial mentalities might always inhere in post-colonial studies. For Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin, this problem cannot be resolved, even by alternative critical practices that have emerged from postcolonial studies, such as whiteness studies: “whiteness studies faces a problem similar to that which haunts many contemporary academic fields, including post-colonial studies itself, that is that its existence as a field of study preserves the very concept (colonialism) it seeks to dismantle” (222).

methodology must, like whiteness itself, be always in process. Fiona Nicoll (2004) emphasises this: “it’s important to resist a tendency to try to ‘resolve’ our discomfort […] the aim of critical whiteness theory should be to unsettle white subjectivity rather than create opportunities for individual confession, catharsis and redemption” (“Are You” par. 30). Similarly, Irene Watson (2007) calls for unsettledness and discomfort when she asks “can we move from places where whitefellers feel comfortable, to what I call ‘into a meditation on discomfort’?” (48-49). The critical impetus to unsettle whiteness follows the work of Ruth Frankenberg (2001), who reminds critics of race and whiteness that “the critical examination of race, racism, and whiteness requires a particular kind of vigilance” (“Mirage” 73). Following these critics, the ethics of critical whiteness studies should incorporate an ongoing and uncomfortable (re)making of whiteness.

This dissertation interrogates fantasies of whiteness in order to move beyond them. It does this in a number of ways: it exposes the nature of whiteness in America and Australia during the nineteenth century; it practises creative readings to uncover resistances to whiteness as well as the limits of critical writing about Otherness; and it theorises on the styles of Aboriginal resistance within modernity. The intention of this dissertation is to identify histories of white racism in the way Otherness has been culturally imagined. Whiteness studies is used in a way that turns twice: to identify white privilege and to avoid controlling and determining Aboriginality; to practise whiteness studies so that Aboriginal moves towards self-determination (whether it be artistic, social, legal or political) might occur in negotiation with a culture of whiteness that recognises that the imperative of whiteness in Australia, ideally, would be to continually and vigilantly remake itself to better fit within a process of Aboriginal self- determination. The latter of these double turns describes a process of white self- determination that is simultaneously focused on (but does not intervene in) Aboriginal self-determination.

Conclusion In his discussion of a peculiarly Australian civilisation, Richard Nile (1994) observes that the genealogies of Australian society and culture are diverse and multiple. He states:

We have come together out of fragments, out of bits and pieces from here and there, out of crosses and double-crosses, out of colonialism and modernity. (21) Within this capacious reading of Australian history and culture, Otherness is particularly relevant. Nile argues that, as Europeans made contact with indigenous peoples around the world, a new theoretical “dialectic” emerged— “civilisation/savagery”—which “was required to provide the semantic and philosophical manoeuvrability to renegotiate civilisation in its new space” (Nile “Introduction” 8). Ways of adapting the discourse of civilisation to colonial spaces were tried and tested on the frontiers of America and throughout the colonies of Britain. Whenever the Other was discussed, it was within the binary of civilisation/savagery, and whiteness was sufficiently manoeuvrable as to always emerge (at least in its own eyes) as more civilised.

It is the argument of this thesis that representations of Otherness in Australia and America provide a site for the transnational circulation of a cultural dialectic that privileges whiteness. In Science, Sexuality, and Race in the United States and Australia (2008), Gregory D. Smithers has recently argued along similar lines: In the nineteenth-century settler colonies of the Unites States and Australia, the power of whiteness, and race more generally, was its malleability. In the hands of the politically, economically, and socially powerful this malleability meant an ability to define and re-define the racial “other”, and at the same time to broaden the definition of whiteness. (5) This dissertation follows Smithers in examining the malleability of whiteness, and the ways in which it remakes itself through an engagement with Otherness. Smithers primarily investigates scientific discourses, while I investigate cultural discourses. Nevertheless, the similarity in our arguments suggests that science and culture leak into each other and variously manifest the manoeuvrable dialectic of civilisation/savagery. Further, particularly in the final chapters of this thesis, I nuance this argument by examining how the Other goads whiteness into a process of reformulation. That is, whiteness does not simply remake itself to secure more power, but, often, relationships of alterity are reconfigured through complex intercultural engagements occurring within the nation space.

Overall, this dissertation points to a definition of Australian culture as a heterogeneous space where whiteness and Aboriginality are constantly renegotiated. The dissertation is

divided into three parts. Part One focuses on the development of a discourse of blackness through American blackface entertainment from 1825 to 1875. Part Two is broadly concerned with the relationship between American discourses of blackness and discourses of Aboriginality in nineteenth-century Australian culture. Part Three examines the cultural representation of Aboriginal agency and the ongoing influence of American blackface entertainment on intercultural dialogues between Aboriginality and whiteness in twentieth-century Australian culture. The analyses of representations of blackness and Aboriginality considered in this dissertation suggest that there is a transnational ideology that attempts to justify whiteness’ habitual inhabitation, performance and management of Otherness. This fantasy is continually disrupted and remade, and continues to influence how Australians relate both to each other and their diverse culture.

32 PART ONE

Making Blackness, Making Whiteness: Nineteenth-century Blackface Entertainment in America

CHAPTER ONE

Making Blackness: Early American Blackface Entertainment, 1825-43

Part One of this dissertation contains two chapters on nineteenth-century American blackface entertainment. It is, perhaps surprisingly, an apt place to begin an analysis of Aboriginality and whiteness in Australian culture; these categories have been shaped by the transnational circulation of ideas, texts and entertainments. This chapter and the following chapter serve two crucial purposes in my overall argument. Firstly, in undertaking textual and cultural analysis concerning the invented nature of blackness in nineteenth-century American culture, I provide evidence for the discursive nature of race generally. That race is discursively produced is central to this dissertation. Only when race is considered to be discursive can I assert (as I do in Part Three of this dissertation) that culture is a space where whiteness and Otherness engage each other to negotiate and renegotiate identity; moreover, I claim that cultural institutions are shaped by whiteness and that in the mutual cultural negotiations between whiteness and Otherness whiteness is privileged. Secondly, in reading blackface entertainment as representative of the fantasies of whiteness that attempt to create and shape blackness in nineteenth-century American culture, I establish the reasons for the popularity of American blackface entertainment in Australia. That is, in Part Two of this dissertation I state that it was not blackness that enabled American blackface entertainment to be successfully performed in Australia, but the ideology of whiteness that was inherent in blackface entertainment (and which was more relevant for colonial Australian audiences). To enable the progression of this dissertation, then, the two chapters of Part One establish the nature of nineteenth-century American blackface entertainment and argue that popular images of blackness in America between 1825 and 1875 were manipulated by white performers to express and ease white anxieties and desires. Chapter One analyses early American blackface entertainment (1825-43) to argue that race is overdetermined and discursive, while Chapter Two analyses American blackface minstrelsy (1843-75) to argue that a fantasy of whiteness was central to cultural representations of blackness in the nineteenth century.

Throughout Part One blackface entertainment is analysed as a major site for cultural determinations of alterity in nineteenth-century America. A comprehensive analysis of the many different types and origins of blackface entertainment in the nineteenth century is beyond the scope of this dissertation. There are, thus, two limits in this study. Firstly, I am only interested in American performances; that is, performances of African American characters such as the slave Jim Crow, or the dandy Zip Coon by white performers in blackface. It is possible to trace the influences on American blackface characters further back into English theatre traditions (including, most famously, the character of Othello) or other European traditions (including opera, commedia del arte, mumming plays, traditions such as Carnivale or John Canoe inversion rituals).31 Secondly, there are chronological limits. The period of early blackface (1825-43)—the focus of Chapter One—begins with the popular emergence of the characters Long Tail Blue and Jim Crow, and ends with the group performances of the Virginia Minstrels in 1843. The second period, blackface minstrelsy proper (1843-75), is the focus of Chapter Two and begins with a significant change in the style of blackface entertainment (from one or two performers to group performances) and ends with the decline of blackface minstrelsy’s popularity in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.32 The fifty years covered by these two periods is a sufficient period in which to map the main themes and ideologies behind the white representation of blackness in America during the nineteenth century. Overall, these two chapters argue that the discourse of blackness that was disseminated by white performances of blackness in America between 1825 and 1875 normalised and obscured desires for white American domination. Blackness,

31 For an excellent summary of these influences see Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder (1997). 32 The period of blackface minstrelsy includes the American Civil War. It is outside the scope of this dissertation to discuss the impact of the Civil War on blackface entertainment. However, I would tentatively suggest that, given that the Civil War has become symbolic of the period’s intense scientific, philosophical and religious debates about race and slavery, the Civil War might be seen as an important event signalling a major decline in the explicit and popular racism that had energised early blackface entertainment and early blackface minstrelsy. A shift in theme and content has been noted by Paul S. Boyer et. al., who state in The Enduring Vision (1990) that “themes of lost love and loneliness dominated song lyrics” during the Civil War (951). While there were many reasons for the Civil War besides race, its symbolic importance within a history of race coincides with a period when the racism of blackface entertainment became less explicit and was instead coded within and beneath national sentimentalism and nostalgia. This argument will be advanced in Chapter Two.

throughout this study, is revealed to be a discursive medium through which whiteness confronts and dispels its own anxieties and fears.

Blackface entertainment was a cultural site where audiences engaged with a predominantly white-authored discourse of blackness. In analysing a “discourse” of blackness, I am following Foucault and the many scholars influenced by his work. Gail Bederman (1996), for example, defines discourse as “a set of ideas and practices which, taken together, organize both the way society defines certain truths about itself and the way it deploys social power” (24). Part One interrogates blackness as a discourse in order to reveal some habitual epistemological and ontological practices of whiteness (such as the assumed right to determine, intervene in, and govern black people’s identities and lives). In What White Looks Like (2004) George Yancy describes a “white socio-ontological cartography”, where whiteness fails to acknowledge the bias inherent in the “imperial epistemological and ontological base from which it sees what it wants (or has been shaped historically) to see” (12-13). This dissertation examines blackface entertainment as disseminating a way of knowing Otherness that influenced actual ways in which white people treated black people. Yancy defines whiteness as a multitude of individual, collective, intentional, unintentional, isolated, systemic actions that synergistically work to sustain and constantly regenerate relationships of unequal power between whites and nonwhites. (14-15) Yancy argues that the epistemological and ontological practices of whiteness are not always conscious, but that whiteness refers to individual, communal and institutional practices that define, disseminate and enact racism. For Yancy, whiteness is both conscious and habitual. The myths, caricatures and images of blackness disseminated through blackface entertainment, and their effects, are precisely what I am labelling the discourse of blackness. The fantasy of whiteness operates consciously and habitually as an emphatic force within the discourse of blackness.

Recent studies of race often emphasise the discursive nature of race. Algernon Austin (2006), for example, provides a useful definition of race and racial essentialism: what makes a group a racial group is the belief that they are essentially different from another group. Racial essentialism means that groups are seen as possessing an essence—a natural, supernatural, or mystical characteristic—that makes them share a fundamental similarity with all members of the group and a fundamental difference from non-members. (emphasis in original, 12-13)

Austin emphasises the imagined nature of race: race is a belief (not an embodied fact), an essential characteristic that is assumed (observed rather than possessed). Race is constructed from outside the body and fabricated by artifices and ideologies that implicate the nonwhite subject. Shirley Anne Tate (2005) describes blackness as “a discourse of containment” (163). For Tate, blackness operates discursively as a set of ideas about racial difference that restrict the freedom and opportunity of black people. Ideas about race are read onto bodies, usually using skin colour as evidence of essential difference. This is a source of frustration for Frantz Fanon (1968), who, in examining his own blackness, states: “I am given no chance. I am overdetermined from without. I am the slave not [of] the ‘idea’ that others have of me but of my own appearance” (82). For Fanon, blackness is overdetermined: the product of an array of social, cultural and political theories and ideas. White nineteenth-century blackface performers manipulated existing theories, ideas and representative styles to express and ease their own social, national and racial anxieties and desires. In this sense, nineteenth-century American blackface entertainment can be read as a one-sided site of contestation, where white performers and audiences largely controlled, for their own benefit, the type of blackness that was disseminated through American culture.33 The various contexts for discursive contests over blackness determine not only how blackness is represented, but also the material consequences of that representation.

This chapter will undertake a number of close readings and analyses of performers, characters and texts from the period of early American blackface entertainment (1825-

33 In this dissertation, especially in later chapters, I follow Herman Gray’s reading of television as a site of intersubjective contest and apply it to blackface entertainment to suggest that culture, generally, is a site of intercultural, intersubjective contest and negotiation. In Watching Race (2004) Gray states: “television and the representations of black people that circulate there [act] as a discursive site where contests of the meaning(s) of blackness are waged” (xiii-xiv). E. Patrick Johnson, in Appropriating Blackness (2003), also reads blackness as an intersubjective discourse. Further, Johnson observes that anyone (white or black) can participate in negotiations of blackness: “‘blackness’ does not belong to any one individual or group. Rather, individuals or groups appropriate this complex and nuanced racial signifier in order to circumscribe its boundaries or to exclude other individuals or groups” (2-3). Though Johnson does not use the term “contest”, the seriousness of the discursive “negotiation” is emphasised when he states that blackness is manipulated for “cultural capital” (3) and “the consequences of its signification vary materially, politically, socially, and culturally” depending on the way blackness is represented in various contexts (218).

43). It will examine how, during this period, white performers exerted their control over the representation of blackness in American culture. This chapter will argue that the manner in which early blackface entertainers represented alterity erased black agency in order to voice and ease white racial and social concerns. Performers and audiences found the cover of blackness to be a safe haven for their rebellious ideas about the state and future of the American nation. The way performers and audiences inhabited and identified with black characters in this period was always dangerously close to disrupting the belief that whiteness is the human and civilised antithesis to blackness. Crude and demeaning stereotypes emerged that enabled audiences and performers to move into blackface and palliate their cultural and social anxieties, just as they moved out of blackface to distance themselves from blackness and reassert the primacy of whiteness in a racial hierarchy.

“Long Tail Blue” and “Coal Black Rose” Blackness was, at times, an unsettling presence on the American stage during the nineteenth century. Black characters brought white audiences face-to-face with many perceived socio-political “problems”: the harsh institution of slavery; fears about miscegenation; anxieties about industrialisation, urbanisation and migration; questions about national identity and culture; and concerns about the racial constitution of the working class. Such implications would have been very uncomfortable for the predominantly white, male audiences. However, early blackface entertainment also had other potential (counter-)effects: to challenge the bourgeoisie and class hierarchies; to satirise affluent high-brow culture; and also to confirm the strength, virility and power of white masculinity. This kind of blackness must have delighted the predominantly white, male audiences. The popularity of early blackface entertainment depended entirely on what combination of these various threats and delights were evoked by the theatrical signification of blackness.

The blackface mask was a cultural technology that could be used in two ways: as a counter-political mask under which popular views of the nation could be expressed and as a tool to manipulate the discourse of blackness so that specifically racial concerns could be expressed and normalised. The first of these uses (blackface as a socio-political critique) led to the overdetermination of blackness. Used in this way, blackface was not explicitly racially motivated; it was, instead, simply a mask under which rebellious

commentaries on apparently non-racial social and cultural issues could be made. The second of these uses (blackface as a socio-racial commentary) describes the explicitly racial imaginings that were developed through blackface performance. This chapter argues that these two uses of the blackface mask were intricately linked and cannot be separated. However, the distinction is useful in order to isolate the various tensions, anxieties and effects of blackface performance. Regarding the socio-racial effects of blackface, for example, Ralph Ellison (1964) has stated that the mask was the most important “thing” in blackface entertainment: The racial identity of the performer was unimportant, the mask was the thing (the “thing” in more ways than one) and its function was to veil the humanity of Negroes thus reduced to a sign, and to repress the white audience’s awareness of its moral identification with its own acts and with the human ambiguities pushed behind the mask. (49) According to Ellison, white anxieties about race in the nineteenth century were eased as blackface entertainment reduced blackness to a dehumanised sign; thus, for example, it allowed for an exculpation of white people for the inhumane treatment of black people under slavery. My analysis of early blackface entertainment seeks to uncover how such racial tensions were expressed through blackface, but also to show how the two uses of blackface (socio-political critique and socio-racial commentary) were inseparable. That is, the use of the blackface mask to voice counter-cultural debates actually enabled and reproduced aberrant racial essentialisms.

This chapter will now turn to the careers of two of the most popular early American blackface performers to show some of the overdetermining (socio-political) factors that led to the monstrous characterisation of blackness in this period. From 1825 to 1843, blackface emerged as a popular form of entertainment largely due to the performances of George Washington Dixon and Thomas Dartmouth Rice. I will argue that somewhere between the characters performed by these two entertainers (the dandy and the slave) a balance was struck between the unsettling and the twisted aspects of dramatised blackness. This balance was affected by an array of social, cultural and political factors. The following sections of this chapter provide original, close readings and analyses of early blackface texts, including the popular songs of Dixon and Rice and the characters their songs popularised. Firstly, Dixon’s performances of “Long Tail Blue” (1827) and “Coal Black Rose” (1827) will be read as epitomising the ambivalences and ambiguities of early blackface. Secondly, Rice’s “Jim Crow” (1830)—the most popular song of the

period—will be seen to articulate the shifting uses of blackness. Thirdly, Dixon’s most famous song, “Zip Coon” (1834), will be read in two ways: as a response to the popular criticisms levelled at black dandyism (by songs like “Jim Crow”) and as a lucid representation of the uses of blackness in the mid-1830s. By the end of the period of early blackface, blackness had been stripped of much of its challenging content, especially regarding race relations; blackface had also become a discursive tool for the use of the white working class in their claims to be the most fundamental element of American society.34 As well, during this period, blackness became an execrable sign that worked to justify, among other things, the ongoing violence against black people.

By 1825 blackface entertainment was a growing enterprise. In a newspaper article from 1889 Charles White—a famous blackface performer and amateur blackface historian— wrote of the origins of blackface performances of African American characters. He listed a performance by “‘Mr. Graupner’ of ‘The Negro Boy’ in 1799; [and] another performance by ‘Pot-Pie Herbert’, who in 1814 sung the ‘Battle of Plattsburg’ [in blackface]” (“Negro Minstrelsy” Newspaper Clipping). White states that, as early as 1823, Edwin Forrest (later a famous tragedian) “assumed the character of a negro dandy” before joining a circus (“Negro Minstrelsy” Newspaper Clipping). White goes on to mention that there were a growing number of blackface performers during the 1820s. Many of the earliest worked in circuses providing short clown skits, or in theatres providing comic relief during scene, set or play changes.35 Given the increasing popularity of blackface entertainment, the stage was set for the emergence of a star.

34 Labour historians’ studies of blackface entertainment have often concluded that blackface entertainment developed a discourse of blackness that was perfectly suited to a white, working-class audience. Early blackface may not have begun in such a way, but it certainly developed into a discourse that satirised the upper classes and ridiculed the lower classes (read black people) in order to declare the superiority of a white working class. This is the argument of, for example: David Roediger, Wages of Whiteness (1991); Eric Lott, Love and Theft (1993); and Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder (1997). 35 In Black Like You (2007), John Strausberg states that early blackface (which he calls blackface theatre), blackface street performances and blackface clowning were the precursors to blackface minstrelsy (which will be discussed in the next chapter). Referring to the early blackface character Jim Crow, Strausberg discusses the influence of clowning traditions on blackface representation: “In many traditions the clown would show some physical deformity, like a hunchback, dwarfism—or like Jim Crow, lameness. And because he was different, an Other, the clown was allowed to say and do things no one else could” (68-9).

George W. Dixon was born to a poor family in Richmond, Virginia, probably in 1801. Nothing is known of his education. We know only that a circus manager noticed his potential as a vocalist at the age of 15, when he was apprenticed to West’s travelling circus as an errand boy. Most likely, he first used blackface as a clown in the circus (Cockrell 96). Having developed a voice of some repute, Dixon was on the brink of stardom as a blackface performer in the late 1820s. He was known for his performances of the blackface song “Long Tail Blue” as early as 1827, and may even have performed “Coal Black Rose” that early (Lewis 257). Of Dixon’s “Long Tail Blue”, the S. Foster Damon songbook—Series of Old American Songs (1936)—states: “though not so successful as ‘Coal Black Rose,’ it remained for half a century one of the standard burnt-cork songs” (quoted in Lewis 257). I do not agree that “Long Tail Blue” was a standard song for fifty years; in my research into the song-sheets used by performers I have never seen the song published later than the 1830s. However, what “Long Tail Blue” did do is popularly introduce the character of the black dandy, which certainly proved to be an enduring presence, though altered, in blackface entertainment for the rest of the century. Arguably though, it was “Coal Black Rose” that led to popular success for Dixon. According to Cockrell (1997), in 1829, during a three-day, late-July span, he [Dixon] appeared at the Bowery Theatre, the Chatham Garden Theatre, and the Park Theatre and at all three sang in blackface “Coal Black Rose”, performing for “crowded galleries and scantily filled boxes”, a solid indication of the heart of his audience. (96) Ticket prices ensured that, generally, the gallery was populated by working-class crowds, the boxes by upper-class audiences. Cockrell implies that Dixon’s blackface routines were disliked by upper-class people, but delivered him success through the approval of working-class, gallery audiences. It would not be unreasonable to suggest that “Coal Black Rose” and “Long Tail Blue”, when performed together, led to Dixon’s popularity. What was it about these songs that working classes enjoyed?

“Long Tail Blue” is about a black dandy who courts women and flouts authority.36 As one of the first blackface character songs, “Long Tail Blue” cemented the place of the

36 The American blackface song sheets which I draw on in this dissertation rarely list details about the authorship of the songs, the dates of publication, dates of performance, and rarely have page numbers. For ease of reading, I refrain from using in-text citations for the song sheets. Instead, I have compiled an Appendix with a select bibliography of blackface songs, including a section specifically detailing the songs sheets from which I quote here and in later chapters.

black dandy in nineteenth-century popular culture. The narrator of the song tells the story of his blue jacket with long tails. The dandy—named Blue—wears his blue jacket on Sundays, while (religiously) pursuing women. He sees Jim Crow, another black man, courting a white girl named Sue and attempts to intrude. As Blue calls to Sue he is arrested and his jacket is torn. Blue has his jacket mended upon his release, and finishes the song by advising the audience to go and buy a jacket so they too can be like him and win the ladies’ hearts.

In her excellent article “Daddy Blue: The Evolution of the Dark Dandy” (1996), Barbara Lewis reads Blue as a dignified character (unlike the more loathsome characters that would dominate the following decades). Further, Lewis states that Blue represented the condition of some black Americans in reality: Blue’s handsome, dignified image, the epitome of rationality and reserve, reflected the situation for a sizable and growing segment of [upwardly mobile] African Americans […] Blue emblematically expressed the assurance and achievement of this group. (259-60) Lewis bases this reading on the lyrics, but also on a lithograph of Blue which was printed on the front page of a song sheet. Lewis reads the lithograph incorrectly, I believe, as showing a dignified and respectable man of property who is ready to put his equal citizenship with white men to the test by taking his place in a “teeming metropolis” (258-59). Lewis misses some revealing details in the lithographs of Blue.37 It is true, as Lewis states, that Blue appears to be dignified and wealthy; however, he is also demonised. In one lithograph Blue’s hat brim curls upwards at either end, simulating devil’s horns (Fig. 1.1). In another lithograph Blue’s moustache provides the devil’s curls, while the tail of his jacket flows away from his body into sharp points, mimicking something snake-ish or devilish (Fig. 1.2). In both lithographs Blue’s eyes are squinted and shifty; they bring his character further under suspicion. Arguably, the fact that Lewis misses these details allows her to idolise the character—perhaps in an effort to find an accurate cultural representation of the real black dandies of the period, who were bravely challenging social boundaries and confronting the often violent treatment of dignified black people. My reading of the lithographs suggests that Blue is not an accurate representation of real black dandies, but a representation of the

37 I am fairly certain that Lewis is referring to the lithograph in Fig. 1.1 (published by Atwill’s). Nevertheless, I include two lithographs which would be, I believe, indicative of any other lithographs produced.

ambivalence white society felt toward real black dandies. Blue is fascinating, but ambiguous, and must be treated with caution.

Fig. 1.1: “My Long Tail Blue” (Atwill’s, Fig. 1.2: “My Long Tail Blue” (Firth, c.1827). c.1827).

Blue’s blackness serves at least two dramatic ends. Firstly, Blue is demonised because of the scepticism and animosity many whites felt towards the class of real black dandies populating the urban centres of America. On this point, Lewis describes events in Philadelphia during 1828 when “white ruffians” (whose “mobocratic tactics” were endorsed by local papers) physically assaulted and verbally insulted the elegant and well-dressed black people who attended balls and dances (264). Secondly, Blue’s blackness serves as a synonym for social transgression. Blue does not obey rules; for this he is a character that many in the predominantly white audience—with desires to escape social regulations and rules—would have admired. However, white audiences also needed to be differentiated from Blue so that they might feel socially and culturally secure. The critic Nathan Huggins (1973) elucidates this ambivalence, stating that the characters performed in blackface represent

the self that white men might become—would become—except for those civilizing restraints of character and order that kept the tension real. How much better it was to have that other self in a mask, on stage, objectified as it were. How that tautness of fear and self-doubt could be released in explosions of laughter once one saw that the fool—the animal, the corruption one feared most—was nothing more than a prancing darky on a stage. (254) The lyrics of “Long Tail Blue” suggest that Blue is free from social rules and boundaries: he is upwardly mobile; has money and property seemingly without effort; he pursues women openly and aggressively, even women in conversation with other men; and he breaks the law without serious consequence. Blue’s blackness (representing social rebellion and disorder) allows white audiences to escape into his “freedoms”, as tense as this identification with a socially transgressive black dandy might be, at the same time as his blackness (representing racial difference) allows white audiences to feel socially superior, civilised and “normal”. Huggins explains this dual identification further, arguing that identifications with blackness in blackface entertainment objectified and therefore created a distance between white men’s normative selves (what they had to be) and their natural selves (what they feared but were fascinated by). With such a creation, one could almost at will move in or out of the blackface character. (257) Being able to move in and out of blackness in this way became a significant white privilege during the nineteenth century.38 The ambivalence of early American blackface eased social tensions (which may seem to have nothing to do with race), but also created racial essentialisms (so that white audiences could distance themselves from the site of their anxious release). The success that Dixon found with “Long Tail Blue”, and later “Coal Black Rose”, was due to the balance he had found between fear and fascination. I agree with Lewis—especially in light of the characters that would follow—that Blue was one of the most transgressive black characters on the nineteenth- century American stage; he, no doubt, would have caused “pandemonic fascination and consternation” (Lewis 258). An actual emerging class of wealthy black people would have certainly created more tension for both middle-class and working-class people. Blue—typically played by a lower-class white actor wearing black make-up and a dandy’s costume—embodied white tensions about blackness, class, and (normative)

38 The following chapter argues that the movement was naturalised during the period of blackface minstrelsy. The theme is also taken up in Part Two and Part Three in relation to white representations of Aboriginality in Australian culture.

white identity. Despite the fact that Blue’s blackness is shifty and demonic, for white audiences it was still appealing, and thereby threatening—calling normative white identity into question. The possible effects of “Long Tail Blue” were neutralised, however, through its pairing with other, more obviously demeaning representations of blackness.

“Coal Black Rose” was the most popular—and possibly the most racist—song of the late 1820s. Dixon was the man to popularise it. It was so successful for him that he later starred in a play entitled Love in a Cloud, based on the narrative of “Coal Black Rose”. The first half of “Coal Black Rose” tells the story of Sambo arriving at a kitchen door to serenade his love, Rose. The final stanzas tell of Sambo finding another suitor hiding in the kitchen and the two men fighting as they run away. The song was probably read as a comedic inversion of popular romance literature and, more immediately, popular romance songs that were not sung in blackface. The romantic dysfunction and debased portrayal of the characters provides a stark contrast to the heroine and hero of romantic tradition. However, this satirical intent energised a racial discourse as well. Each of the beginning seven stanzas ends with a slight variation of the three-line phrase: Oh, Rose, de coal black Rose, I wish I may be burnt if I don’t love Rose, Oh, Rose, de coal black Rose. (stanza 1-6) Where blackness was an implicit, albeit obvious, part of “Long Tail Blue” (it was never directly named in the lyrics), here blackness is explicitly referenced. The logic of the song rests on the linking of coal, blackness and the possibility of getting burnt. Coal is an adjective, but also an essence; it foreshadows Rose’s infidelity that will “burn”—that is, emotionally injure—Sambo. Almost certainly, the song’s logic implies, Rose will burn her suitor because she is black. The second half of the song reveals Rose’s essentially unfaithful nature; immediately the catch-phrase of the song changes: Oh, Rose, take care Rose! I wish I may be burnt if I don’t hate Rose, Oh, Rose, you blacka snake Rose! (stanza 7-10) The “comic” turning point of the song is the loss of potential romance. By the time blackface minstrelsy was popularised, as is discussed in the next chapter, a cultural stereotype had emerged that represented an aversion to representations of “loving blackness”; functional relationships between black characters were virtually absent from the nineteenth-century stage. Perhaps, this stereotype was first formulated through the

romantic satire by songs like “Coal Black Rose”. The satire, however, entrenched racial essentialism. The loss of romance in “Coal Black Rose” was linked to the deceptive nature of blackness. The song’s logic linked the turn, from love to hate, to the change from the image of warming black coal to an image of a dangerous black snake. “Coal Black Rose”—in painting a picture of dysfunctional relationships—essentialises blackness to suggest that (romantic) dysfunction is due, in essence, to racial inferiority.

“Coal Black Rose” provides a case study in racial essentialism. The characters are linked to their blackness: Rose is linked, as mentioned, to black coal and a black snake; Cuffee (the rival suitor) is linked to “de white ob his eye” (stanza 8), his swollen “two lips” (stanza 9), and “de wool” of his head (stanza 10)—all features exaggerated by the blackface mask and common woollen wig worn during blackface performances; and Sambo is linked to his banjo (which was almost exclusively an African American instrument at this time), and his love of “hoe cake” (stanza 5), “possum fat and hominey, and sometimes rice, / cow heel and sugar cane” (stanza 6)—foods that would have been synonymous with the diet of African-American slaves at the time.39 Further, it is likely that the individual blackface performers would have added other characteristics.

39 While slavery was not legal in all states at this time, many Americans would have come face-to-face with slavery, or remember when their state was a slave state, or have heard first-hand accounts from slave-owners or traders. The topic was hotly debated throughout the United States. The actual abolition of slavery in the Northern states of the U.S. occurred in a slow and piecemeal fashion. In 1827 there were eight free states in the U.S.; several of these states had been founded as free states in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. New York, which had abolished slavery in 1827, had free states immediately to its north, and slave states immediately to its south. By 1850, when Philadelphia—the major state on the southern side of New York—abolished slavery, the free states in the U.S. numbered sixteen (including California), and this number increased by two over the next decade. Leading up to the Civil War, in 1860 there were thirteen slave states in the south (six of which had over 40% of their population as slaves), while the bulk of the mid and western plains of America was considered “unorganised territory”. One of the major issues that often prevented unorganised territories forming states was whether or not the area was to become a free or slave state. This issue was largely resolved when slavery was abolished across all states in the U.S. in 1865 following the Civil War. Share-cropping after 1865, however, ensured that many white plantation owners still derived an income from their former slaves. A more detailed elaboration of this information can be found in “Slavery in America” (n.d.).

The lithograph accompanying the sheet music for the song displays Sambo with an enlarged posterior, holding his “instrument” (lute-like, though the lyrics refer to it as a banjo) in a suggestively phallic manner. Rose gazes, even slightly raises her apron, at Sambo’s overt sexuality (See Fig. 1.3). The lithograph also suggests that Rose was likely to have been portrayed as a “wench” character: a female character performed by a man. Rose’s physical appearance is muscular and brutish (masculine to say the least). It is likely that such sexually overt images would have been censored in nineteenth- century society if the characters were not black.40 Purely for this reason, the lithograph would have fascinated audiences. The lithograph suggests that blackness is hyper- sexual, and that black gender relationships are the inverse of western norms: given that the relationship in “Coal Black Rose” is technically between two “black” men, black femininity is masculinised and black masculinity is feminised. In each case, the “uncivilised” nature of the gender relationships represented in “Coal Black Rose” works to essentialise myths about blackness that confirm the superiority of (normative) white gender roles. Thus, narrative and costume create an essential blackness. Characters are presented as cheating, fighting, and acting foolishly and in an uncivilised manner because of their blackness. That is, early blackface entertainment fostered a belief in racial essentialism, not simply through using “facts”—such as banjo-playing, diet, or skin pigmentation—but in making these “facts” signify an “essence—a natural, supernatural, or mystical characteristic” (Austin 13). The exaggeration of actual aspects of black identity emphasised that blackness was the sign, and the characteristics of stupidity, deception, dysfunction, hyper-sexualisation, “abnormal” gender roles, and violence were the essences that early blackface entertainment attached to the sign of blackness.

40 Seymour Stark states, in Men in Blackface (2000), that “[p]rimitivism (comparing the white European with black African) […] on stage permitted minstrels to break the puritan taboo against sexuality” (26). I would argue that the taboo was gradually broken by the early blackface performances of songs like “Coal Black Rose”, not just by the minstrels (post-1843).

Fig. 1.3: Detail from “Coal Black Rose” (Hewitt, c.1827).

“Coal Black Rose” is far more explicit than “Long Tail Blue” in its degradation of blackness, but still would have been unsettling for contemporary audiences. Eric Lott (1993) reads “Coal Black Rose” as a challenging song because it forced contemporary audiences to confront slavery. This confrontation, according to Lott, would have been uncomfortable for audiences either because it forced them to confront the inhumanity of using black bodies for personal economic gains or because, in free states for example, it forced audiences to recognise that their economic system still legitimated slavery in other states (118). Both “Long Tail Blue” and “Coal Black Rose”, then, can be read as representing a blackness that is threatening: “Long Tail Blue” for Blue’s defiance of social norms, and “Coal Black Rose” for raising the spectre of slavery. However, both use racial essentialism to contain these threats. Thus, Eric Lott describes “Coal Black Rose”—though his comments are also true for “Long Tail Blue”—as invoking the black male body as a powerful cultural sign of sexuality as well as a sign of the dangerous, guilt-inducing physical reality of slavery but relying on the derided category of race to finally dismiss both. (118) Even from the earliest blackface performances, racial essentialisms were being crafted to ease the tensions that black characters onstage would raise, as well as to satirise non- blackface popular culture. Racial essentialism works to ensure that white audiences

could forget about the horrible treatment of black people in everyday American life. Further, to add to Lott’s point, the racial essentialism fostered by early blackface entertainment ensured that white audience members could continue to participate in the horrific treatment of black people from day to day—both directly through actual engagements with black people, and indirectly as beneficiaries of black oppression and exploitation (consumers of the end product of slavery, for example). What might have begun as a joke on romance quickly became a racial discourse. Other popular songs of the period—such as “Jim Crow” and “Zip Coon”—continued (even perfected) this trend toward alleviating socio-political tensions through the circulation of racial stereotypes.

“Jim Crow” and “Zip Coon” Jim Crow was a character in “Long Tail Blue”. Blue interrupted Jim Crow’s courting of Sue, which landed him in trouble with the law. Most likely, Jim Crow was a figure in African American folk-lore long before he became the most popular stage character of the 1830s.41 While Dixon was having success with “Long Tail Blue” and “Coal Black Rose”, Thomas Dartmouth Rice began composing a song and dance routine about Jim Crow. “Jim Crow” proved to be a success, arguably due to its attack on black dandyism.42 The character of Jim Crow revolutionised the discourse of blackness, and Dixon’s later hit song—“Zip Coon”—readjusted the portrayal of black dandyism to follow suit.

Rice was born around 1808 and grew up “in New York’s most ethnically mixed neighbourhood—the Seventh Ward—along the East River docks” (Lhamon Jump Jim Crow 1). He began working as a carpenter’s apprentice but was drawn to the stage. In the mid-1820s Rice was appearing in “supernumerary roles” in plays and by 1828 he was on the road full-time with a performance troupe, still performing bit-parts in various plays (Cockrell 62).Lhamon (2003) suggests that Rice—a tall jester of a man— had stolen the show in his minor roles at the Park theatre in New York during 1828

41 For an extrapolation of this theory, see Lhamon’s Raising Cain (1998), and “Introduction: An Extravagant and Wheeling Stranger” in Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture (2003). 42 I will use the title “Jim Crow” to refer to performances of the character Jim Crow. There were many titles for such performances (two examples which I draw on are listed in the Appendix), but “Jim Crow” is used to prevent confusion.

(Jump Jim Crow 32). His comic ability had even drawn the criticism of senior actors who did not enjoy the distraction from their shows, and by late 1828 Rice was on playbills for comic songs during interludes (Jump Jim Crow 33). The next eighteen months were to be formative for Rice. In mid-1829 Rice was touring with a company in which the company director’s son was having between ten and twenty dollars (a significant amount of money in those times) thrown onstage during his performances of “Coal Black Rose” (Cockrell 63). Because of the virtual absence of intellectual copyright legislation, as well as there being no technology to record “hit” songs, many performers in the nineteenth century covered the same song at the same time. The success of the company director’s son for his cover of Dixon’s “hit” song suggests that Dixon was even more successful and that there was clearly a market for such songs. During this time Rice began composing “Jim Crow” (Cockrell 64).

In 1830 Rice developed a routine involving a catchy song and a quirky dance that would define his career. By 22 September 1830, he was listed on a playbill for his performance of “Jim Crow” (Cockrell 64). Cockrell claims that the song was not likely to have been instantly popular (64). Nevertheless, two years later Rice was headlining with “Jim Crow” in New York. Between 1836 and 1841 Rice performed the song to acclaim in England, Ireland, Scotland and France, returning several times to the United States, each time more popular than before (Cockrell 65-66). Rice’s popularity should not be underestimated: he is mentioned, incorrectly, as the first blackface performer in many accounts of blackface performance; Jim Crow is the most well-known character from the period; and various versions of “Jim Crow” remained in the repertoire of blackface performers and folk bands for over a century.

There are a number of versions of “Jim Crow”. Lhamon, in his collection of songs and plays performed by Rice, reproduces a version of “The Original Jim Crow” published in New York in 1832 (hereafter referred to as version A). The version has no less than forty-four short, four-line verses, each followed by the chorus: “Weel about and turn about and do jis so, / eb’ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow” (Jump Jim Crow 96). Another version, published in Philadelphia in the same year, contains nineteen verses (hereafter referred to as version B), only some the same as version A. Version B is subtitled “A Comic Song sung by Mr. Rice at the Chestnut Theatre”. In both versions the chorus is the same, yet there remains no definitive version of the verses. Early

blackface songs were highly improvised and adapted to current affairs and the place of performance. There were, however, some constants in the song, including the chorus, followed by a lengthy musical “turn around” in which the famous hopping and spinning dance-step would be performed.

The wheeling and spinning nature of Jim Crow suggests that the song is playing with themes of inversion. The chorus—which could constitute half the performance—is an obvious example. Jumping Jim Crow is clearly about turning about, inverting. The most obvious inversion in Jim Crow is, of course, a racial inversion. Version A contains several verses where Jim Crow pities white people because they are not black: Kase it dar misfortune, And dey’d spend ebery dollar, If dey only could be Gentlemen ob colour.

It almost break my heart, To see dem envy me, An from my soul I wish dem, Full as black as we. (99) Perhaps audiences found the phrase “Gentlemen ob colour” amusing, both because they would have found the phrase oxymoronic (the thought of a “savage” crossing the divide), and because they would have found it outrageous to think of themselves as black (inhabiting the apparently oxymoronic persona of a civilised savage, as it were). The narrator of version A continually slips between referring to the audience as white people (“I’m glad dat I’m a niggar, / An don’t you wish you was too”; 98), and as black people (“Now my brodder niggars”, and, above, “as black as we”; 98).43 Version B— recalling Blue’s invitation to follow suit—invites the (white) audience to become (black) Jim Crows:

43 It is important here to make a note about the language of the sources I am quoting. I quote many hateful words from American and Australian texts in this dissertation. For example, “nigger”, “coon”, “piccaninny”, and “gin” are quoted even though they are no longer used without contention. In choosing to include these words I am following the argument of Jabari Asim in The N Word (2007): “the word ‘nigger’ serves […] as a linguistic extension of white supremacy, the most potent part of a language of oppression that has changed over time from overt to coded” (4). For Asim, the “N word” and other derogatory words are hurtful, but analyses of such language can begin to undo the deep ideologies that surface in overtly racist language.

Den go ahed wite fokes Don’t be slow, Hop ober dubble trubble Jump Jim Crow. (stanza 18) While these wheeling audience affiliations could be indicative of both black and white audience members, it is also an indication of how audiences were actually invited to slip in and out of the blackface mask or, to recall Nathan Huggins: “one could almost at will move in or out of the blackface character” (257). This suggests that early blackface entertainment was not simply about inversion, but about the ability to simultaneously associate and disassociate with blackness.

There is some critical debate about whether blackface was only motivated by socio- racial concerns, or whether it was intended to specifically address white class and cultural tensions. Lhamon, for example, argues that blackface performers such as Rice “were not so much racist as something like its opposite, or something besides” (Jump Jim Crow 187). Lhamon privileges the class struggle common to blackface performance over the racial signification of blackface entertainment. William J. Mahar (1999), similarly, states: “Mask or no mask, the true object of [blackface’s] subversive texts was the overthrow or replacement of the dominant culture” (350). It seems that Mahar, like contemporary audiences, slips in and out of the mask, while consciously ignoring the racial discourse operating through blackface performance. Mahar goes further in dismissing the socio-racial discourse of blackface: Worrying about the effectiveness of the disguise or the authenticity of the portrayals of African Americans misses the implications of social mobility and status inversion as principles in blackface comedy. The inversion theory played out in the skits and sketches explains why a good portion of American society seems to have delighted in and identified with the spectacle of powerless blackface characters outsmarting or commanding the powerful. (350) Mahar argues for an “inversion theory” to explain blackface as a technology that enabled lower-class (white) Americans to criticise the upper classes. Arguably, taking either side of the debate (socio-racial or socio-political) fails to identify whiteness as a race, thereby implying that whiteness is the norm against which race is defined. Other critics have attempted to avoid this binaristic view of blackface entertainment.

Dale Cockrell (1997), in another major work about this period, provides a more complex, though not unproblematic, reading of the “inversion theory” relied upon by

Mahar. Cockrell states that “[t]oo often critics have seen blackface […] as only a case of inversion ritual” (160). He goes on to argue that white working-class people were struggling to understand their “industrialized New world” (169): “Caught in the middle, between class and race, white common people had to devise both upward and downward processes and rituals” (161). For Cockrell, blackface performance—derived from an array of cultural sources—is the resultant ritual. Cockrell states that blackface entertainment, in mediating between the “premodern Old World” and the “industrialized New world”, attacked urbanisation and industrialisation and did so using a technique that shows up in the cultural expressions of nearly all enslaved or colonized societies: seeming accommodation to the tropes and values of the powerful, but with underlying subversion of them and affirmation of traditional modes of understanding. (169) Cockrell goes on to state that “[t]he ‘seeming accommodation’ I mention is, of course, with racism” (169). Cockrell equates blackface performers (who usually had working- class backgrounds) with enslaved or colonised people. No doubt, they were all oppressed, albeit in differing ways. Cockrell is right to suggest that using the tropes and values of oppressors, with subtle subversions, is a common form of cultural resistance. However, it must be said that blackface performers’ enactment of middle-class racism is not simply the result of a faulty resistance strategy, but of the (white) privilege shared by middle-class audiences and white, working-class performers.

Rice’s representation of black dandyism is typical of a cultural resistance strategy that also defends white privilege. “Jim Crow” is among the earliest cultural texts that are openly hostile to black dandies (a characteristic central to Jim Crow’s character). Previously, “Long Tail Blue” had been ambivalent about black dandyism, but Rice would take any suspicions about black dandies to another level. In version A of “Jim Crow”, three verses relate Jim Crow’s encounter with a black dandy: I met a Philadelphia niggar Dress’d up quite nice and clean […] So I knocked down dis Sambo And shut up his light, […] Says I go away you niggar Or I’ll skin you like an eel. (98) The acclamation of such violence rests uneasily against the actual violence that was being directed against well-dressed black people at the time. Nevertheless, the jokes

continued as Rice’s rocketing popularity led to his own star-vehicle play Oh! Hush! Or, the Virginny Cupids. Oh! Hush! was loosely based on the narrative of Dixon’s own star- vehicle, Love in a Cloud, which in turn was based on the narrative of the song “Coal Black Rose”. Rice’s version had the role of the suitor Sambo Johnstone performed as a black dandy, while Rice played the role of the rival suitor Gumbo Cuffee (hidden in the kitchen). Cuff, played by Rice, was a veritable Jim Crow: an upstart, dandy-hating, field-working, anti-authoritarian man. No script of the original performance remains, though Lhamon has edited a later adaptation by Charles White. For the purposes of this discussion, the following joke from Oh! Hush! is certainly in the spirit of “Jim Crow”: Cuff: Excuse my interrupting you for I see you am busy readin’ de paper. Would you be so kind as to enlighten us upon de principal topicks ob de day? Johnson: Well, Mr. Cuff, I hab no objection ‘kase I see dat you common unsophisticated gemmen hab not got edgemcation yourself, and you am ‘bliged to come to me who has. So spread around, you unintellumgent bracks, hear de news ob de day discoursed in de most fluid manner. [He reads out some local items.] Dar has been a great storm at sea and de ships hab been turned upside down. Cuff [looks at paper]: Why, Mr. Johnson, you’ve got the paper upside down! [All laugh heartily] (Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow 150) The joke is clearly on the pretentious, unintelligent, black dandy, and Cuff (a.k.a Jim Crow) is his foil. Sambo Johnstone’s essence—his stupidity and his hatred of blackness (that is, he desires to be white: educated and sophisticated)—is linked to his blackness. This creates a demeaning and dehumanising representation of race that operates discursively—“in de most fluid manner”—in depicting violence against black people. Far from the ambivalent figure of Blue, Rice had manipulated the character of a black dandy into a malformed caricature of black dandies.

There seems to have been some protest about the representation of black dandyism by Rice in the contemporary media (though more to do, simply, with the verisimilitude of the representation of blackness, rather than with its racism). Lhamon quotes Rice in a defence of Rice’s representation of blackness: “Grotesquerie of blacks is his vehicle, not his target, as he shows when he hopes black dandyism will ‘discourage its original in the whites’” (Jump Jim Crow 23). Mahar also reads the black dandy character as a parody of white dandies: The dandy gentleman, who was already a subject of disdain by the lower classes, dropped another prestige level when fitted out with blackface makeup and mismatched attire. The whole caricature struck at the American distaste for pretentiousness […] (227)

Such readings of the figure of the black dandy are based—in addition to Rice’s own defence—on the actual lyrics of “Jim Crow”. Jim Crow sings: An I caution all white dandies, Not to come in my way, For if dey insult me, Dey’ll in de gutter lay. (Version A, 102) It is important to note that blackface performances of degraded black dandyism may have been motivated by a desire to ridicule the upper classes generally (or those aspiring to join their ranks). Such representations no doubt worked to confirm the superiority of the working-class whites’ own style of masculinity (nationalistic, anti-authoritarian, rowdy, rebellious, hard-working and physically strong). However, the use of blackface to insult white dandyism implies that an effective way to insult white dandies is to position them in proximity to blackness (that is, blackness is seen as an insult). It is important to note that the socio-political (white nationalist and working-class) influences on the representation of black dandyism were linked to socio-racial concerns. Black dandyism in early blackface entertainment also performed a (white) hostility towards upwardly-mobile black people. This hostility may have been obscured by other factors, like working-class anti-authoritarianism, but never ceased to exist under the blackface mask. To recall Fanon, blackness is “overdetermined from without” (82). There were many factors energising the essentialisation of blackness—not all of them immediately to do with race.

Rice’s refiguring of the black dandy in early blackface entertainment proved popular. Dixon’s next hit song was testament to Rice’s success. Whether Rice’s extreme popularity forced a change in Dixon’s portrayal of the black dandy, or Dixon was a keen judge of social attitudes toward blackness (I would suggest it was both), Dixon’s next song stripped the dignity of the Blue even further and portrayed a loathsome black dandy. In 1834, Dixon first performed the song “on which his renown finally came to rest” (Cockrell 99). It is debatable whether Dixon wrote the song, or whether it had been performed by various little-known singers for many years before, but, undoubtedly, it was Dixon who made “Zip Coon” the only song of the 1830s to compare in popularity with “Jim Crow”.

“Zip Coon” is a monstrous song that mimics certain elements of “Jim Crow”. The lyrics are often nonsensical, with the chorus consisting of “Oh, zip a duden duden duden, zip a

duden day” repeated four times (“Zip Coon” Chorus). The opening verse leads to the chorus with the line: “Den over dubble trubble, Zip coon will jump” (stanza 1). This line echoes Jim Crow’s insistence that white people “hop ober dubble trubble / Jump Jim Crow”, just as other lines in the song appropriate other elements of “Jim Crow”. Both songs, for example, reference the 1814 battle of New Orleans, where the working- class hero of the late 1820s and early 1830s, President Andrew Jackson, had previously defeated the British forces led by Major General Edward Packenham. In the lithographs for the two songs, too, Zip mimics Crow (See Fig. 1.4 and Fig. 1.5). Zip’s bent knee and arms are almost exact copies of Crow’s, and despite the obvious costume differences, Zip’s costume, like Crow’s, is exuberant and disorderly, superfluous and mis-matched. Zip, the lithograph and various appropriations within the text suggest, is Blue with a twist of Crow. Zip mimicked Crow’s invocation of popular, working-class nationalism. Perhaps Zip, as he jumped “over dubble trubble”, even incorporated a spinning leap similar to the one that Rice had made famous. However, it is not the audience who “hop ober” in “Zip Coon”, but Zip himself who takes up Jim Crow’s offer to jump over, double-trouble. Like “Jim Crow”, “Zip Coon” encourages inversion. But, like “Jim Crow”, it is a complex inversion.

Fig. 1.4: “Jim Crow” (Edgar, c.1832). Fig. 1.5: “Zip Coon” (Hewitt, c.1834).

“Zip Coon” is just as ambiguous as “Jim Crow”. The narrative voice in “Zip Coon” slips from the first to the third person. Sometimes it is a narrator talking about meeting Zip Coon, or describing him; sometimes it is Zip himself talking about politics, his mother or a girl who loves him. This is reminiscent of Jim Crow’s slippage between referring to white and black audience members, though here it is the narrator who moves in and out of the blackface character. Similarly, however, this slippage allows audiences to associate with Zip Coon when he is courting women or invoking working- class/nationalistic political narratives, and to despise him when he is nonsensical, or acting in an uncultured manner. While “Long Tail Blue” would have been an ambivalent song for many audience members, “Zip Coon” contained many of the white socio-political themes, but nothing of black dignity and pride.

The changes in representation of the dandy from “Long Tail Blue”, through “Jim Crow”, to “Zip Coon” indicated a much broader shift in the representation of blackness. The distortion of the characterisation of blackness stripped the dandy of his subversive potential and had a significant impact in real life for some early nineteenth-century Americans. Barbara Lewis (1996) reads firstly Jim Crow and then Zip Coon as figures growing out of white working-class hostility towards dignified black people who were slowly accumulating wealth: If Crow served as the antithesis to Blue, Coon mixed their individual elements into a scoundrel composite, the gangling servant dressed in the master’s clothes. Coon combined the original and its reverse into a mockery of the former. (259) Lewis effectively maps the evolution of the dandy figure as it related to attitudes towards blackness in Jacksonian America. In this chapter I have tested Lewis’ argument to show that Crow was not the “reverse” of Blue, but a heightened form of the animosity towards black people that was actually inherent in Blue, and evidenced in the racial essentialism of the contemporary of “Long Tail Blue”, “Coal Black Rose”. I agree wholeheartedly, however, with Lewis’ implication that these racist characters mirrored (perhaps even provoked) real violence that was occurring against black people at the time (be it through direct physical intimidation or the institution of slavery).

As evidence such as that provided by Lewis mounts, it is harder and harder to justify blackface performance as revolutionary and radical despite (or besides) its racism. As Dale Cockrell eloquently states, in regards to “Zip Coon” (though the same may be said

of Jim Crow’s treatment of black dandies): “The genius of the song, from the perspective of the white working-class audience, was its ability to ridicule both up and down the social ladder simultaneously” (94). That is, blackface never laughs up at white dandies without laughing down at blackness. The broader shift occurring in society, seen clearly in the shift from Blue to Zip, is amplified in the iconography of grotesque racism that permeates the popular imagination of working-class Americans. This is the central argument of Eric Lott’s Love and Theft (1993): energies directed against the state apparatus might too easily join those focused on black people […] Class straits may energize interracial cooperation, but they are also often likely to close down the possibility of interracial embrace. (237) A lot of criticism has been devoted to the importance of class struggles in blackface entertainment. However, in analysing other aspects too, this chapter has argued that race is an overdetermined concept. It is possible to chart shifts in the discourse, and hypothesise about the social, political and artistic reasons for these shifts, but the simple truth is that the origins and broad cultural networks of a discourse of blackness, for example, can never be definitely accounted for. What can be generally stated, following an examination of the blackfaced dandy, is that early American blackface entertainment attempted to create “a discourse of containment” through its representation of blackness (Tate 163). That is, whiteness proved very effective in shaping blackness. The cultural representation of black dandyism effectively dominated the public sphere, thereby denying black people the means to express and represent themselves.

Conclusion Overwhelmingly, white performers significantly corrupted representations of blackness during the period of early blackface entertainment. Elements of the songs I have discussed may possibly have come from black culture to be interwoven with elements from white culture. Possibly, the elements of black culture were entirely fabricated, or at least misunderstood, by the white performers who appropriated them. In any case, the examples I have analysed are representative of the broader biopolitics that infuse cultural negotiations. “Coal Black Rose”, “Long Tail Blue”, “Jim Crow”, and “Zip Coon” all represent the power politics inherent within the discourse of blackness during the period of early blackface entertainment: blackface provides a counter-cultural space for Dixon and Rice to challenge what they don’t like about society, yet, all the while, the immense profits (material and cultural) do not go to black people. Rice’s and

Dixon’s performances may have been revolutionary in some aspects, but they also reproduced cruel, dehumanising racial essentialisms that were not incidental, but worked to denigrate black people and maintain white privilege.

In this chapter I have charted how early blackface entertainment reduced blackness to a sign in order to ease socio-racial and socio-political anxieties. The next chapter will examine how white performers and audiences continued to inhabit a fantasy of whiteness, moving into and out of blackness, and imagining, through culture, a nation without black agency. During the period of blackface minstrelsy, the (sometimes literal and sometimes metaphorical) movement into and out of blackface became so natural for white performers and audiences that the purchase of whiteness upon the discourse of blackness appeared absolute. Whiteness was not, however, completely dominant within American culture at this time. Through counter-readings of the themes of blackface minstrelsy and the manuscript of an actual blackface minstrel, in the next chapter I will suggest that the fantasy of whiteness was less imperious than it imagined itself to be and, instead, whiteness is constantly being destabilised and remade in reaction to the threat of the Other. Nevertheless, the next chapter will argue that the discourse of blackness remained an important site through which whiteness imagined social hierarchies which white people could command.

CHAPTER TWO

Making Whiteness: American Blackface Minstrelsy, 1843-75

The simple physical disguise—and elaborate cultural disguise—of blacking up served to emphasize that […] whiteness really mattered. (David Roediger, Wages of Whiteness 117)

T.D. Rice and G.W. Dixon were figureheads of a growing popularity of blackface entertainment. The widespread cultural dissemination of blackface entrenched the fantasy of whiteness within the discourse of blackness. This chapter argues that the second period of blackface entertainment—blackface minstrelsy proper—both enhanced the influence of, while simultaneously obscuring, the role of whiteness in creating and shaping representations of Otherness. Blackface minstrelsy proved to be more popular than Rice or Dixon could have ever imagined. The enormous popularity of blackface minstrelsy, in fact, could be likened to the hysteria that accompanied “The New Millennium Minstrel Show” in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000). Like the popularity of “The New Millennium Minstrel Show”, the wide-spread social endorsement of minstrelsy enabled blackface entertainment to become an industry in its own right. With the professionalisation of blackface entertainment as blackface minstrelsy, whiteness was institutionalised. To inhabit the fantasy of blackface minstrelsy—to perform or enjoy the performance—was to move through alterity into the subject-position of whiteness, with its related privileges of ontological mobility, the freedom to govern and define Otherness, and the security of feeling completely and easily centred within society (given that all of your social concerns, raised as you move into blackness, dissipated as you separated yourself from—moved out of—blackness).

In 1843 there was a shift in the style of blackface entertainment. Until then, “Jim Crow” and “Zip Coon” had remained very popular. They had been supplemented by other songs, such as “Clare de Kitchen” (with a similar story to “Coal Black Rose”—dandies fighting in a kitchen over a woman), “Jim Brown” (the marching-band dandy), “Sitting on a Rail; or, the Racoon Hunt” (about a banjo-playing slave who laments the death of

his poisoned master), and “Long Time Ago” (about a banjo-playing slave who shoots a runaway slave to please his master). Nevertheless, the themes and the style of early blackface performance had remained the same. Songs still presented potentially radical themes about the deaths of plantation owners or black dandies aspiring to the presidency, but the potential was always nullified by a malformed and distorted racial essentialism. Performances had remained solo performances, or sometimes duets; and they never filled an entire evening’s program. That is, until 1843, when four blackface entertainers performed together as the Virginia Minstrels.

The period of blackface minstrelsy (1843-75) saw the reproduction of blackness become a profitable industry. It was no longer a one-off novelty performance during other entertainments, with performers (with the exception of Rice and Dixon) earning between ten and twenty dollars per week; it became an industry where many performers could earn over seventy dollars per week, and where, by the 1850s, some performers had savings in excess of $100 000 (“The Minstrel Business” [1868] n.p.). Blackface minstrelsy became a profitable profession. During the period of blackface minstrelsy, the professionalisation of blackface entertainment normalised the inhabitation of blackness with the effect that black agency was obfuscated and the white inhabitation of blackness was normalised.

Overall, this chapter argues that because the movement into and out of blackness became so natural for white performers during the period of blackface minstrelsy, blackness became a major site for the making and remaking of whiteness. This argument builds through two sections. In the first section I will analyse the themes of blackface minstrelsy. When the jokes and songs are read by themselves they reveal blackness to be a tool with which performers addressed white concerns. While this was certainly the case, a creative reading of a number of blackface minstrel songs, in which multiple themes and storylines are woven together, reveals the inescapable presence of racial discourses within blackface minstrelsy. My critical reading of jokes from performances of the period and my creative reading of the blackface minstrel songs argue that the underlying impulse of blackface minstrelsy was to imagine a site of blackness where the will and agency of black people are transformed into whatever whiteness desires. In the second section of this chapter, the memoirs of Samuel Sanford—one of blackface minstrelsy’s most successful performer-managers—will be

examined to reveal how the imagined absence of black agency enabled white performers and audiences to easily inhabit and transform blackness. Several stories in Sanford’s “Reminiscences” (1875) can be read as broadly representative of the institution of blackface minstrelsy, he convenes an audience of people who move into and out of blackness with him, exploiting and dehumanising black people, overlooking their resistances, and normalising the delusion that blackness is a cultural product for the use and abuse of whiteness. In doing this, blackface minstrelsy normalised many assumed white privileges, including the right to determine blackness, the right to intervene in and manipulate black lives, and the right to accrue cultural and material profits from the commodification of blackness. To draw on David Roediger (1991), quoted as the epigraph to this chapter, the simple blackface mask belies the elaborate transformation of whiteness that took place through the discourse of blackness.

The Narrative of Blackface Minstrelsy Many reports of the development of blackface entertainment during 1843 and 1844 describe how blackface minstrel performers and audiences exhibited an unbridled appetite and fervour for blackface minstrelsy. Robert Toll’s (1977) description of blackface minstrelsy incorrectly assumes that the energy of blackface minstrelsy had been previously unseen; Rice and Dixon were, no doubt, energetic and exciting performers. But Toll usefully describes the impact of a group of blackface performers: They burst on stage with makeup which gave the impression of huge eyes and gaping mouths. […] Once on stage, they could not stay still for an instant. Even while sitting, they contorted their bodies, cocked their heads, rolled their eyes, and twisted their outstretched legs. When the music began, they exploded in a frenzy of grotesque and eccentric movements. Whether singing, dancing, or joking, whether in a featured role, accompanying a comrade, or just listening, their wild hollering and their bobbing, seemingly compulsive movements charged their entire performance with excitement. (36) I argued in the previous chapter that white performers had manipulated the sign of blackness into an aberrant and monstrous racial essentialism. Toll’s description, where twisted features are linked to specifically (black) bodily movements, makes it clear that the linking of racial essences to bodies continued into blackface minstrelsy. Toll, in the passage above, is describing the excitement that accompanied the performance of the first blackface minstrel troupe: the Virginia Minstrels in 1843. Sanford (1875)—one of the first blackface minstrels—states in his memoirs that determining the next blackface minstrel group after the Virginia Minstrels was

a matter of impossibility. They sprung up like mushrooms […] No show was complete without its Virginia Minstrels and during the Summer of 1843, they were manufactured to order. (12) The mixed metaphors in this statement reveal something of the professionalisation of blackface minstrelsy: the blackface minstrel troupes appear natural (“like mushrooms”), but are constructed (“manufactured to order”). This paradox is central to blackface minstrelsy and is indicative of the commodification and essentialisation of race that is at its core: the “knowledge” about blackness that the performances espoused is fictional (manufactured), but the performances fostered a belief in the fiction’s relationship to reality (to nature). Racial essentialism, then, was central to blackface minstrelsy, which proved to be even more popular than early blackface entertainment. Carl Wittke (1968), an early historian of blackface minstrelsy, states: The rage for minstrelsy was so great that minstrel companies were forced to give morning concerts and “three-a-day” shows in order to satisfy the theatre-going public. (58) The increased demand meant greater monetary profits for the performers; and profit led to further professionalism.

Perhaps the biggest effect of the increased demand for blackface entertainment was that blackface minstrelsy quickly became an entire evening’s worth of entertainment. No longer bit-parts or comic relief from the main event, blackface minstrel troupes advertised entire concerts, and they quickly became highly structured. Typically, the blackface minstrel show was performed in three “parts”. As the curtain rose on the first part, audiences could expect several performers—respectably dressed, except for their blackened faces—standing in a semi-circle before their seats. One performer would be a banjoist and there might also be a violinist; there was almost always a performer on one “end” who held a tambourine and a performer on the other “end” who played the bones. The Endmen were also typically comedians and would sing the more vulgar comic songs, while the Middlemen would be responsible for sentimental ballads that would often appear to have almost nothing to do with race. During the first part, a Middleman would introduce, among some comic banter by the Endmen, the various songs. After a concert of between six and eight songs, the curtain would drop. In front of the curtain the members of the troupe would perform the second part, which would have included skits, banter, comic speeches/lectures (often called stump speeches), or dances, depending on the various performers’ talents. The curtain would then rise to reveal the

set for the third part, a satire or burlesque on an opera or high-cultured play, or a play such as Rice’s Oh! Hush!. This became the formula for the minstrel show. Some, though, would perform a two part show, consisting of two concerts: one with the performers dressed as slaves (Jim Crows) on a plantation set, and the second with the performers dressed as dandies (Zip Coons), and banter, skits and stump speeches dispersed throughout. Some talented musicians (or especially large troupes with a lot of musicians) might perform a single extended concert. In any case, the three-part structure became the norm from which certain shows varied, and is referenced in many “how to” guides from the latter decades of the nineteenth century.44 The enduring element of the blackface minstrel show, since the performance of the Virginia Minstrels, was the semicircle of performers, with songs, music, dances, and comic banter.

The humour of blackface minstrelsy was undoubtedly one of its central appeals. Joke- telling was performed in various ways: as banter between songs, an introduction to a song, part of a skit in the second part or part of a scene in the third part. Punning and conundrums were central to blackface minstrelsy’s humour. Apparently, the more puns the better, as in this excerpt from Frank Dumont’s (1899) “how-to” guide: END – Girls love a fireman, don’t they? MID – I dare say they do, for their bravery. END – Yes, indeed, they can spark almost any girl! Do you remember Mollie Cinders? MID – Yes. END – She’s an old flame of mine. MID – You don’t say so. END – Yes, but her father smoked me out. He actually turned the hose on me. He made it very hot for me. (emphasis in original, 45) Such joking was known as cross-fire. “END” stands for Endman, usually the buffoonish character who gets the better of the pretentious Middleman (“MID”). The Middleman might also ask a performer to explain where he learnt to sing, receiving a joke for an answer: The first time I ever sang a sad ballad, was this afternoon. I didn’t know how it would go, so I asked the stage-manager to stand in the wings and tell me if it would do. So he did. He said: “That’ll do”. It was an awful sad song. It was so sad that a man in the audience tried to commit suicide while I was singing it. He

44 See, for example: Dumont, The Witmark Amateur Minstrel Guide (1899); Campbell, Fox’s Ethiopian Comicalities (n.d.); White, Charley White’s New Book of Black Wit; Burnt Cork Joker (n.d.); Nigger Jokes and Stump Speeches (n.d.); Taylor, New Jokes by Old Jokers (1901).

shot at himself twice, but he missed himself and the bullets came right by my head. (Taylor 7) Obviously, the humour here relies on the speaker’s misreading of the manager’s criticism, as well as his misreading of someone’s assassination attempt (due, presumably, to the terrible performance of the song). However, this joke was probably followed by a popular song, and, thus, ultimately the joke is on the critics who would label blackface minstrelsy as low culture. And so, another factor energising the demeaning racial essentialism of blackness was the debate between high and low culture—the paranoid tensions (or cultural cringe) of a newly-forming national culture—that blackface minstrelsy staged (and eased) with comedy.

Another common form of humour was the stump speech, often performed in the second part. The stump speech relied for its humour on conundrums (as cross-fire often did). In the stump speech “Man: An Analysis of Natural History” (n.d.), the address opens: White population ob dis ere Chapel: You are called togeder dis ebenin’ for many reasons; but among dem all, de most important, am a consideration ob de question—What am Man? (Burnt Cork Joker: 9) While the speaker might wave a book, referred to as the “good book”, he would go on to discuss varieties of “man”, such as: Man-date, which always am s’pozin hisself so wise an’ consequential-like, an’ yet am good for nofin’, ‘case he hasn’t got no sense—but has only a squatter sitiwation in de booktionary ob Babel. (9) The humour here revolves around the “booktionary”: a dictionary confused for a Bible. Thus, the sermon on “Man” is a reading of dictionary definitions beginning with “man-” (“mandate”, “manifest”, and “manicure” are all referred to). The very language of the (religious) stump speech is babble, and thus the reference to the religious story of Babel is apt—evidence of minstrelsy’s heightened punning. Both the dictionary (the source of definite meaning) and the Bible (the source of spiritual meaning) are undermined.

Similarly, in one of Charles White’s stump speeches on phrenology, the joke revolves around the babbling performer. The Grand Burlesque Lecture on Phrenology (c. 1850- 70) was performed with the blackfaced actor examining another blackfaced actor’s head: Colored frens, dar’s one bump dat ought to be on toder side ob de head. (pointing to the nose.) Now, sir, if you keep yourself perfectly docile, I will felt

ob your semi-intellectual organs ob your organic, galvanic, elifantic, horse- marine, mud-puddle, flounder-flatten, sculpology. Your eventually am so constructed, dat your brain bumps am congealed an you’re liable to hab fits, dat is, as Mr. Shakespeare expresses himself in his medigolical work, on “Who’s dat knocking at de door”. (White 2) Again there is a babbling criticism of scientific discourses, that spirals out of context to also criticise Shakespeare (equating his work with the blackface minstrelsy song, “Who’s dat Knocking at de Door?”).45 White’s speech, however, is paradoxical in that it criticises biological essentialism at the same time as it practices a racial essentialism of its own. In the above two stump speeches an array of social forces that are seemingly outside of race—such a popular scepticism about science, cultural cringes, religion, and so on—mobilise a discourse of race that effects actual (race) relations. That is, the humour of blackface minstrelsy allowed actors and audiences to make and view significant socio-cultural criticisms only because the criticisms can be forgotten (or, at least, escaped) by laughing at the buffoonery of the black character who voices the socio-political criticisms. This movement into and out of blackness is encouraged by the performers. In the above examples the performers variously refer to the audience as a “white population” (in the first example) and “coloured friends” (in the second example). In other words, the rebellious (white) socio-political criticism is enabled through a socio-racial essentialism of blackness. These two elements of blackface minstrelsy cannot be separated.

It would be erroneous to separate the songs of blackface minstrelsy out under racial and non-racial themes, even though the type of songs that were performed in blackface minstrelsy concerts varied tremendously. Base, comic character songs continued (with the famous examples of “Old Dan Tucker”, “The Fine Old Colored Gentleman”, “Miss Lucy Neal”, “Rosa Lee”, and “Dinah Crow”). There were also sentimental songs about lost love, such as “Lucy Long”, “The New Mary Blane”, “Flora May”, and “Minnie May”. These two groups are not always distinct; either the narrators who are lamenting

45 John G. Blair (1997) suggests that a defining aspect of blackface minstrelsy, as opposed to early blackface entertainment, was a style of humour built on puns and malapropisms. Blair states: “Malapropisms carry an implicit condemnation of social and educational self-promotion which […] continued the social-satirical play on blackface as a preposterous expression of laughably inferior creatures” (61). For Blair, the style of humour reflects the paradoxical nature of blackface minstrelsy; blackface minstrelsy was instrumental in disseminating harsh racial mythologies even as it balked at being read as a site of legitimate knowledge.

their lost love or the lost loves themselves are often vulgar caricatures. The theme of lost love is by far the most common during the 1840s and 1850s. There was also another group of songs that became increasingly popular: the nostalgic plantation song, such as “Darkey’s Lament”, “Oh Boys Carry Me ‘Long”, “Old Folks at Home”, “Happy are We Darkies So Gay”, “Carr Me Back to Old Viginia”, “My Old Kentucky Home”, “Old Folks at Home”, “Row, Row Your Boat; or, The Old Log Hut”, and “Oh! Susannah”. In the spirit of nostalgia, many of the “classics” from the period of early blackface were also performed, such as “Zip Coon” and “Coal Black Rose”.

The music of blackface minstrelsy was undoubtedly about the concerns of white Americans. Nostalgia was the predominant theme of the late 1850s’ and early 1860s’ performances. Toll (1977) explains that the reverie of an ideal past represented the frustrations of audiences and performers with the “decay of their world” (186). For Toll, blackface minstrels lashed out at the effects of urbanization and industrialism, but they had only moralisms for remedies. Consequently, they became increasingly escapist, wallowing in sentimentalism and nostalgia. Longing for a simple, secure time when there were no problems, they looked back to an idealized past. (186-7) Furthering Toll’s analysis of the nostalgia and sentimentalism of blackface, Alexander Saxton (1975) relates these themes to the “homelessness” experienced by many people migrating to and within the rapidly expanding United States (14-15). So, as was the case with early blackface entertainment, the contemporary concerns of white performers and audiences were not always immediately to do with race, but are inseparable from race. For example, the above-listed songs about old slaves and lost love often express their nostalgia for “the good old days” through a racial essentialism in which black people either lament for a return to slavery, or are represented as not being naturally free (that is, they are represented as not being able to provide for themselves because of their race, not because of social racism). Such nostalgic songs are indicative of how blackface minstrelsy combined social, cultural and racial concerns. However, as blackface performance became a staple of popular entertainment, it becomes harder to establish the explicit racial discourse pulsing through the narrative of blackface minstrelsy. Seemingly, a paradox emerges in blackface minstrelsy song narratives; blackness is at once racially denigrated (in the figure of an incompetent and uneducated buffoon), but it is also the medium for a culturally subversive discourse on humanity (love, religion, culture and class).

The ballad “Had I the Wings of a Fairy Gay” (c.1854) is an example of how explicitly racial themes, such as those presented in “Zip Coon”, were becoming more and more concealed.46 This ballad was performed by Samuel Sanford in the 1850s. In the previous decade Sanford had specialised in comic songs that explicitly demean and racially essentialise blackness, such as “Lucy Long”. The final verse of “Fairy Gay” ran: Thro’ ev’ry region I’d take my flight, And bound o’er the earth in a ray of light Or follow the storm midst the light’nings glare, Then anon to some desert cave repair. Such a ballad was no doubt performed for its musical merit more than for its characterisation. The lyrics are typical of the sentimental, heightened emotion of many other ballads of the period. And as in many of the popular songs performed in blackface during this time, there is no mention of blackness, grotesque or otherwise. Because so few playbills survive, how such a ballad related to other songs is nearly impossible to determine. However, the blackface of the performer and the song’s incorporation in the broader narrative of a blackface minstrel show do lend the song a racial context. The song would have been introduced with some comic banter, possibly about runaway slaves who desire freedom. Perhaps it is telling that the narrator rarely acquires freedom or finds his lost loves. Such narratives reveal a white fantasy where black rebellion is all but impossible and further, reveal that a popular white belief was that there was no reproductive or social future for black people. Thus, as long as they were played out within the context of blackface entertainment, white anxieties and desires were always racially loaded. White songs about homelessness, migration and nostalgia also contributed to the discourse of blackness by incorporating narratives about the dispersion of family, the futility and impossibility of black resistance, and the disruption of social organisation. Blackface minstrelsy insidiously undermined the dignity and hope of black people, effectively protecting white privilege from beneath a blackface mask.

It is beyond the scope of this study to provide a close reading of every song, joke and play from the period of blackface minstrelsy in order to search for an overall theme.

46 Other examples include: “Thou Art Gone From My Gaze”, “Willie We Have Missed You”, “Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming”, “Gustavus Adolphus Green”, “A Smile Was All She Gave Me”, “Love Among the Roses”, and “Beautiful Dreamer”.

Arguably, no overall theme existed, only fragmentary narratives. Nevertheless, it is critically productive to consider how a broad story of blackface entertainment might develop. In his history of blackface minstrelsy, Robert Toll (1977) quotes various blackface minstrel performers who recollect the first time they saw a minstrel show. For example, Ben Cotton recalled: “[a] minstrel show came to town, and I thought of nothing else for weeks” (quoted in Toll 33). George Thatcher, who would become one of the most popular stars of blackface minstrelsy in the 1860s and 1870s, enthused: “I found myself dreaming of minstrels; I would awake with an imaginary tambourine in my hand, and rub my face with my hands to see if I was blacked up” (quoted in Toll 33). It may sound like a nightmare today, but Thatcher’s comment provides sound evidence for Toll’s conclusion that “Everywhere it played, minstrelsy seemed to have a magnetic, almost hypnotic, impact on its audiences” (33). Innovative critical methodologies can productively interrogate the magnetic story that played out for audiences of blackface minstrelsy.

Fictocriticism allows for researched and informed speculation on the multiple stories and themes that were interwoven for audiences who saw blackface minstrelsy performances. The below fictocritical piece also brings together the socio-political and the socio-racial aspects of blackface minstrelsy. The socio-political, here, operates through the most obvious contemporary themes of blackface minstrelsy (c. 1850s): nostalgia, sentimentalism, and lost love. These themes are played out through the popular black characters of the period, and I aim to give a sense of the narrative that a blackface minstrel show might provide. The following fictocritical piece is the result of my close reading of over twenty song sheets contained in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre at the University of Austin in Texas, as well as hundreds of song- sheets available online via Brown University Library’s African-American Sheet Music Collection (1820-1920).47 The fictocritical piece covers the period of blackface minstrelsy (in which the influence of early blackface lingers), and tells a story about the fabricated constructions of alterity by blackface minstrels. The following fictocritical

47 The ambiguous status of the songs—as white or black “things”—is evident in their description as “African American” songs in many library catalogues. Chapters One and Two are at pains to describe that the songs were performed by white people as part of white popular culture.

section is the result of weaving together the stories of the well-known characters of blackface minstrelsy.

* * *

Fictocriticism: Oh! Susannah; or, a Plantation Melody

It is here precisely that a danger lies. For the temptation toward self-congratulation which comes from seeing these [racist] films and sharing in their emotional release is apt to blind us to the true nature of what is unfolding—or failing to unfold—before our eyes. (Ralph Ellison, “The Shadow and the Act” 280)

I am an academic, audience member, author, critic, director, musician, performer, politician, reader, researcher, teacher, viewer, and writer. And I am white. I play with a dangerous history. As I move through the past I am strangely affected by sentimentalism and romance. I am trying to touch the hard kernel of the real, to see an image that won’t develop, to find a story that refuses to dance before me.

I crept down to an old log cabin called Susannah. I was looking for blackness.

The night had no moon. There was thunder and lightning. During the brightest flashes my shadow outlined everything I saw. My shadow came from many directions; there were troupes of shadows whispering songs that lingered just above consciousness— songs like a hundred footnotes to sentences that don’t exist. In the moments where everything was clear I saw a story.

There were whispers about the old man—he was Uncle Josh to some, Sam White to others; in the stories that were told after he died he was just the fine old coloured gentleman. He walked out the back door—his head tilted like he knew I was there. The first flash threw my shadow everywhere, and this gnarled old man, in his old three piece suit, on his way to the wood pile, stood as if in a frieze. His right knee twisted in, his right arm bent, his spine curved forward—my shadow fell over everything. Rumbling in the distance were lines and lines of verse—the fine old man was good to his family, and loved his ole massa. Imagination was confused for memory.

The thunder didn’t roar with the second flash of lightning. The thunder whispered legends about the old man: as a young man he courted Lucy Long. She told him to wait

and be good, so that he would not be sent away. He waited and anxiously tolerated the ole massa, trying not to be sent away. As the first pieces of wool dropped from the old man’s head, it was Lucy, his love, who was sold down-river. He was, from then on, a pained old man suffering from love denied. Lucy Long, his promise and love, was gone.

There were other whispers too, but I couldn’t hear them properly—they were chants, old songs in different voices. This second flash of lightning was so intense that it nearly shone through my shadows. And, at that moment, the distorted old man was gone. In his place was a giant man: eleven foot tall, strong, handsome, capable of anything. The tails of his coat—his long tail blue—were a deep, intense colour: here was a man who was there when blackness began, an eleven-foot tall man who could finish Jim Crow in a fisticuff, a man straighter than Zip Coon or Dandy Jim. And although Jim Crow could never be slighted, old Blue (or whatever name the thunder grumbled) was once just a love-letter away from stealing Crow’s girl. But Dinah Crow, too, now is gone, drowned in the river, leaving Jim a mourning old fool. The old man stood in this flash as a legend, but as the blackness returned, he lurched forward as the old man, tormented by his lost love, Lucy Long.

Not long after the old man has collected a log for the fire and limped back to his bunk, his snoring begins. Before he is pulled into his nightmares, the old man whispers something to a boy named Dan—an amusing aside about a song the old man used to play on his banjo as a boy: a song called “Go It While You’re Young”. The old man’s soft chuckles fade into the darkness and his eleven-foot frame crumples into the small bunk. He begins to dream monstrous nightmares in which he contorts into a ball of failed potential. His snoring slurs a song of the future, grating sounds that keep the others awake. His nightmares scare them all, telling of their past and future fate. It’s a nightly ritual that tonight flows from the old man through my mind and into my future.

The young man, Dan Tucker, is tired of the same old story. He pulls out his fife, plays and sings to the room, putting them all to sleep. He sings of days before blackness, when they all walked tall, when becoming “twisted” was not a possibility. Later that night, with the cabin all asleep, the fine old man drew in a breath that turned the wind and expired.

The mourning was felt across the land, by white and black folk. Ole massa and his wife cried when they were alone, and couldn’t say anything but he war a farn ole’ col’d gennelman. Black folk came from other states to see this fallen legend. Dan found a banjo and played the old man’s song so sweetly that they said it was the old man himself. They said the banjo had the old man’s bones for the neck; that the wool from the old man’s head had been wound into pure, sweet strings; that the old man had been skinned to make the head of the banjo. Dan—with his body of music—took the dread out of the cabin, if only in glimpses, replacing the old man’s nightmares. But while others heard glee in the banjo, Dan heard a warning: be careful, you’ll end up like me.

Dan tried to stir people to protest. He married Lucy Neale, but didn’t settle down. He would enjoy making massa feel threatened; he pretended to steal and show up to work drunk, just to see massa’s angry face. The boss’s revenge was to sell Dan down-river to a man named Haley.

As Dan left the wharf, his eyes held Lucy’s and she whispered: Farewell. On the boat to Louisiana, Dan sang to Lucy, miles away, O Poor Lucy Neale, If I only had you by my side, how happy I would be. Dan was preparing to run and return to his love when he received a letter; it was brief, but weighty: Your love is dead... forever. Thunder announced to Dan that fate wanted to twist him fine. Fate had taken his love.

With his banjo strapped to his back, and hungry for vengeance, Dan made haste for his former plantation. That dark, stormy night, Haley took chase. In a flash of light, Haley thought he saw the fugitive’s head. He fired once, straight through the head... of the banjo, striking Dan’s liver instead. But Dan pushed on, a young man growing old in legend. He found the town where his old massa was out drinking. Two drops of poison fell into the ole massa’s glass as the cry went ‘round, ole Dan Tucker’s come to town.

In the morning, with the fog whispering farewell along the river, Dan sat bleeding on a fence. He played his bullet-holed banjo with tiring fingers and sang: Now ole’ massa dead and gone, a dose of poison helped him on. Then Dan, happy and lost, played the last refrain of Susannah—a stirring number of lost love and former times, about searching for a memory with a banjo on your knee. It was to be his last song, for one of Haley’s slaves had been given the job of finding the fugitive’s body. He had tracked

through the night until the trail of blood led to this fence and Dan’s lingering last refrain. The cold steel of a rifle pushed into Dan’s head, though he, tired from dying, didn’t feel it. He certainly didn’t feel the bullet.

While the good slave ran home, hoping that he would now follow Haley to heaven, Dan was buried between his two loves; on his left, Lucy Neale, and by his right side, the banjo. The lineage of legends had perished with the last pieces of the fine ole coloured gentleman buried at Dan’s side. The age of Susannah was over, left now to be imagined, longed for, forgotten.

With the final flash of lightning my troupe of shadows was stark against the cabin. As they danced the thunder sang—you’re too late to come to supper.48 The melody of the storm was rumbling to its conclusion—you’re too late to come to supper. My shadows on the cabin are so clear now—their contorted dance is escape, nostalgia, mourning, forgetting and the yearning for control. As the light fades to blackness, the shadows overwhelm the cabin. Susannah lingers on the edge of recognition, between shadow and light, blackness and possibility, a legend that can only be imagined beneath the grotesque foliage that has overrun the old log cabin.

* * *

48 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks: “You come too late, much too late. There will always be a world—a white world—between you and us…” (86).

“Oh! Susannah; or, a Plantation Melody” is the result of adding narrative after narrative of blackface minstrel song.49 It would be difficult for a standard essay, or scholarly prose, to investigate the narrative compatibility of such a large number of texts— particularly within the scope of a single chapter. Thus, I have used fictocriticism as a “method of inquiry” (Richardson [2000] 923). For the purposes of this section, fictocriticism as a method of inquiry has involved drawing together a large number of song narratives into one narrative, in order to find commonalities, patterns, and themes. One common theme that emerged is the white control of black mobility.50 In blackface

49 The main songs interweaved in the piece are the Dan Emmett songs “Old Dan Tucker” and “The Fine Old Coloured Gentleman” (the latter is very similar to other songs such as “Uncle Ned”, “Oh Boys Carry Me ‘Long”, “Old Mose; or, Freedom is Coming”, “Old Black Joe” and “Old Jessy”, in which the slave owners mourn the deaths of old slaves). Also, “Walk in the Parlour” tells of a black man named thunder, who courts a girl named Lightning. From these songs I take some narrative, but also themes of nostalgia and a rebellious youth that leads to death (Dan Tucker), or amounts to an implied complicity with the institution of slavery (in the case of the mourned, old, once-happy slaves). Other songs with themes of nostalgia include: “Carry Me Back to Old Virginia”, “Happy are We Darkies So Gay”, “My Old Kentucky Home”, “Old Folks at Home”, “Row, Row Your Boat; or, the Old Log Hut”, “The Dissipated Steamboat; Plantation Joe”, “I Wish I Was in Dixie’s Land”, and “Oh! Susannah” (which also tells of a slave not being able to find his love). The theme of love denied derives from a number of songs, usually with narratives of either lover being sold away or dying, including: “Coal Black Rose”, “Clare de Kitchen”, “Lucy Long”, “Miss Lucy Neal”, “Rosa Lee”, “Dinah Crow”, “Darkey’s Lament”, “Nancy Fat and My Polly Ann”, “The Old Grey Goose”, “Mary Blane”, “Flora May”, “Minnie May”, and “Nelly Vale”. Jim Crow is figured as a mythic figure, as too is Blue, while the buffoon dandy is derived from songs such as “Zip Coon”, “Dandy Jim of Caroline” and “Darkey’s Lament”. The song “The Racoon Hunt; or, Sitting on a Rail” mentions a master who is poisoned; while the song “Long Time Ago” contains the story of a slave, desiring to follow his master to heaven, who hunts down and shoots another black man who was shot in the liver by the slave’s master. 50 In Trafficking Subjects (2005), Mark Simpson reads “black mobility” as an anxious presence within nineteenth-century American culture, an anxiety that was “addressed yet extended in the Fugitive Slave Law—a piece of legislation that, in serving to secure the proper relations and movements of persons within the nation by making disclosure about fugitives the duty and the business of citizens, worked least to marshal the common knowledge it compelled against secrets troublesome to social and national hegemony” (59). My reading of blackface minstrelsy’s disruption of black mobility builds upon Simpson’s point that such cultural narratives were extensions of the desires to contain the threat to social hegemony posed by runaway slaves and the white people who helped them. Charles Bolton, in Poor Whites of the Antebellum South (1994), states that white people sometimes aided runaway slaves in this period, but at considerable risk to themselves, as “the reward for the capture of guilty whites was usually

minstrelsy, the movement of characters is heavily patrolled by white “bosses”: rebellious characters are sold down-river and lovers are separated by the slave trade. One remarkable ballad that Samuel Sanford was known for tells of a child being taken on horseback away from its mother (“I Hear the Hoof; or, the Last Child”). In the early 1850s, the control over black mobility was, no doubt, a controversial issue. Gradual legal reforms granted freedom to some black slaves but not others and created obligations for members of the white population to either break the law, or report or imprison runaway slaves.51 The movements of black people were heavily regulated by white citizens and government. In the song narratives, threats posed by free black people (cheap labour, perceived moral disintegration, miscegenation, white self-doubt) are closed down as free-travelling black characters are moved “down-river” (to the southern states, commonly perceived to be more brutal), or even hunted and killed. Blackface minstrelsy song narratives created a fantasy of an impotent black agency. In such narratives, black people are often represented without a desire, and always without the means, to oppose the institutions and systems which commoditised and oppressed them.

The sentimentalism of lost love is a related theme. In almost no mid-nineteenth-century texts do romantic relationships between black characters survive. Initially, such narratives of pathos might seem to fit within the overall tone of sentimentality that saturated American culture in the 1840s and 1850s. According to Cassandra Cleghorn (1999), prior to the Civil War the theme of “sentimentalism permeated […] American language, literature, and culture” (163). Blackface minstrelsy was clearly a part of this broad cultural trend. Thus, the enforced separation of black characters is used to evoke sentimentalism. The theme of lost love can be broadened to represent metaphorically a more than double that for the return of the runaways” (49). Clearly, the greater fear was of whites who betrayed the slave system. 51 William Link, in Roots of Secession (2003), states that it is “not clear whether the numbers of fugitives increased during the late antebellum period. What was new to the 1850s was the extent to which runaway slaves became a prominent political focal point” (107). Link argues that the perceived failure of the Fugitive Slave Act of the 1850s was one of the complex reasons Southern states seceded from the United States leading up to the Civil War. Writing of the state of Virginia, Link states: “In reality, the Fugitive Slave Act was less of a failure than its critics believed: during the 1850s, some 332 runaways were returned to their masters, and federal commissioners freed only eleven. Still, perception was more important than reality” (108).

destruction of loving blackness.52 The phrase “loving blackness” has been used by bell hooks (1996) to refer to the love of black people and things, by both white and black people. Loving blackness is defined by hooks as a social and cultural taboo, but it can be recuperated to form the basis of political resistance: Collectively, black people and our allies in struggle are empowered when we practice self-love as a revolutionary intervention that undermines practices of domination. Loving blackness as political resistance transforms our ways of looking and being, and thus creates the conditions necessary for us to move against the forces of domination and death and reclaim black life. (Killing Rage 162) It is entirely possible that the seeds for a hatred of blackness (even a self-hatred in the form of black people desiring the privileges that typically accompany being white) were sown in the aberrant images of early blackface entertainment. A hatred of blackness was further entrenched as the “comic”, malformed images from early blackface were combined with a popular sentimentalism during the 1840s and 1850s. The recurring narrative of a loss of black love in blackface minstrelsy is not simply a cause, but is certainly an articulation of the social taboo of loving blackness. It is a taboo that justified policies of segregation and assimilation in the history of the United States. These policies—along with the heinous view that black people are unable to maintain a family and care for their children, which blackface entertainment’s distorted caricatures undoubtedly contributed to—have justified devastating government policies and institutional biases that further result in, for example, removal of nonwhite children from their families, as well as higher incarceration rates for nonwhite people. One possible way to energise loving blackness as a resistance to the fantasy of white domination is to understand how the hatred of blackness is a cultural fabrication that has become entrenched as social fact.

In the first half of this chapter I have read blackface minstrelsy as a site where whiteness used blackness in order to express white social concerns and to justify white racism.

52 Shirley Samuels, in her “Introduction” to the edited collection Culture of Sentiment (1992), suggests, in antebellum American culture “frequently operating as social commentary or critique, sentimentalism acts in conjunction with the problem of the body and what it embodies, how social, political, racial, and gendered meanings are determined through their differential embodiments” (5). Although Samuels does not investigate blackface minstrelsy, it is not surprising that sentimentalism has been read by others as raising questions about embodiment, given blackface minstrelsy enacted a mass professionalisation of black biological racial essentialism.

Algernon Austin (2006) states that, while race might develop as a discourse “to address a specific political or economic situation, once the idea of race exists in society it becomes a tool that can be used in new or redefined situations of conflict” (195). Blackness had developed through the period of early blackface entertainment as a brutish racial essentialism. Arguably, while blackface entertainment had the power to trouble audiences, during the period of blackface minstrelsy the rebellious aspects of blackness were even further curtailed. The institutionalisation of blackface and its financial rewards meant that white performers were even more secure and comfortable with manipulating blackness to their own ends. The next part of this chapter will analyse the ease with which one blackface minstrel performer and manager—Samuel Sanford—inhabited the myopic worldview of whiteness as he engaged with blackness.

Inhabiting the Fantasy of Whiteness: Samuel Sanford’s Manuscript Samuel Sanford was born in New York on 1 January 1821. He debuted at age nine as a vocalist at Dan Neuman’s Ballroom in Philadelphia (Baines [1967] 3). At age fourteen he joined his uncle, Hugh Lindsey, in the circus. Lindsey and Sanford featured as the circus’ “Negro specialists”, performing songs such as “Coal Black Rose” and “Sittin’ on a Rail” (Baines 3). T. Allston Brown (a historian of early American theatre) ventured that Lindsey “in his day, by his born natural talent and wit, probably contributed as much to the hilarity, mirth and amusement of mankind as any man living” (quoted in Baines 3). Sanford and Lindsey clearly had their fingers on the pulse of blackface entertainment. They were quick to incorporate new material, and Sanford was among the first to sing “Lucy Long”—where the narrator waits indefinitely to marry Lucy Long. In a similar fashion to “Coal Black Rose”, this song probably garnered laughs by having another blackface performer dressed as a “wench” onstage playing up to the singer. In 1845 Sanford took on the management of a formerly non-blackface family minstrel troupe named “the Buckleys Serenaders”. Having emigrated from England in 1839, the Buckleys began performing in blackface in 1843. They were talented musicians and it appears Sanford added the clowning “negro element” that the Buckleys required in their transition from minstrels to blackface minstrels.

It is important to note the specificity of the time period in which blackface minstrelsy emerged. Many scholars fail to do so and, thus, refer to performers like Rice and Dixon as minstrels. Blackface performers prior to 1843 were not minstrels; “minstrels” during

the period of early blackface refers to a (European) genre of concert performances by respectable, well-trained singing groups (as opposed to the rowdy, rebellious, working- class blackface performers). The genre of minstrelsy (without blackface) was becoming popular among middle- and upper- class audiences in the first few years of the 1840s. A blackface performer—Dan Emmett, who would later lead the Virginia Minstrels—was one of the first to refer to himself as a blackface minstrel, in late 1842. Dale Cockrell (1997), in discussing the history of the term “minstrel”, states that Emmett’s initial use was intended to satirise middle-class values and mannerisms. But, according to Cockrell, “[f]rom a marketing perspective the name had the advantage of being readable from two contrary perspectives: as satire by the common classes, and as descriptive by the middle class” (152). When Emmett led the Virginia Minstrels in February 1843, he began a new period in blackface entertainment, one that would go beyond the working- class audiences of early blackface, and incorporate the higher classes. This simple turn of phrase—blackface minstrelsy—helped popularise blackface entertainment beyond the working classes, and led to the formation of blackface minstrelsy as an industry.

The collaboration of Sanford and the Buckleys seems to have been a success in the emerging industry of blackface minstrelsy. In Washington, most likely in 1846, Sanford and the Buckleys (under the name the Congo Serenaders) performed at the White House for an audience including President James Polk and statesman Henry Clay. The President even officially endorsed the minstrels by presenting the troupe’s leader, Fred Buckley, with a diamond ring (Sanford 19). This endorsement certainly confirms that blackface minstrelsy had turned blackface entertainment into more than a lower-class entertainment. Later—during their very successful tour of Britain, Ireland and Scotland—Sanford and the Buckleys performed for the Duke of Wellington, the Queen and her children, and were joined onstage by Charles Dickens, no less. By the 1850s, blackface minstrelsy was seen by the world as America’s national entertainment export.

Sanford became one of the wealthiest managers of the nineteenth century. From his profits as an actor/manager, he opened several theatres, including the first concert-hall entirely devoted to blackface minstrelsy, the Twelfth Street Theatre in Philadelphia in August 1853 (it burned down in December the same year), the famous Eleventh Street Theatre in Philadelphia in 1855, and a theatre at Harrisburg. The manuscript of Sanford’s unpublished memoirs, probably written in part in 1875 and added to until the

early 1890s, recount one of the most significant careers during the period of blackface minstrelsy. Further, Sanford’s manuscript, while unreliable as history, epitomises a central theme that audiences of blackface minstrelsy endorsed: the free movement into and out of blackness for personal pleasure, psychological comfort, and material and cultural gains.

Several anecdotes in Sanford’s memoir are historically inaccurate, but do reveal the nature of whiteness within blackface minstrelsy. According to Sanford’s memoir, his troupe’s “mimicry” of blackness was so effective as to occasionally become very dangerous. One example occurred shortly after their White House appearance in 1846. The troupe, around this time, was performing variously as the New Orleans Serenaders or the Ethiopian Serenaders. They had success in Vicksburg and New Orleans. However, the luxury of the White House performance was severely contrasted when they reached Vicksburg: it was here where a scene was enacted not on the bill. At the commencement of the first part, the curtain rising and discovering us before our chairs. Just as we got seated a man who had been drinking rose in the audience with pistol in hand screaming by G-d are we to sit here and hear these black ------. Let’s shoot every one of them, when BANG went the pistol, the ball just grazing Rainer’s head. (Sanford 23)53 Sanford claims that Rainer was shot at for being black. The Buckleys retreated to their dressing rooms until the local constabulary established order. Possibly, underlying Sanford’s story here is a joke similar to the sad ballad introduction (earlier quoted in the discussion of blackface minstrelsy humour).54 The account of being mistaken for actual black people is similar to several other anecdotes in Sanford’s memoir where his performances (“personations” as opposed to “impersonations”, in his words) are praised as authentic mimicries of black people.55 However, Sanford’s argument is apparently

53 To aid understanding, I have made slight grammatical adjustments to Sanford’s manuscript, including the italicisation of speech, spelling corrections, and occasional additions of full stops, apostrophes and capital letters (which Sanford rarely used). 54 “The first time I ever sang a sad ballad, was this afternoon. I didn’t know how it would go, so I asked the stage-manager to stand in the wings and tell me if it would do. So he did. He said: ‘That’ll do’. It was an awful sad song. It was so sad that a man in the audience tried to commit suicide while I was singing it. He shot at himself twice, but he missed himself and the bullets came right by my head” (Taylor 7). 55 John G. Blair, in “Blackface Minstrels as Cultural Export” (1997), suggests that “[a]s of the later nineteenth century, particularly after the end of slavery, rationalizations of minstrelsy tended to claim that

inconsistent with an account of the Buckleys’ first tour of England, where an “Englishman” observed that the Buckleys, performing as the “Ethiopian Serenaders”, did not want to be seen as having the “least drop of black blood in their veins; so they lost no time in publishing portraits of themselves with the white faces bestowed upon them by nature” (quoted in Toll 38-40). Such images—displaying performers in and out of blackface—were regularly published by blackface performers, emphasising the movement into and out of blackness that was at the heart of blackface minstrelsy. Sanford’s account of the shooting can be read as an ideological representation of the skill of his troupe’s movement through blackness. Sanford does go on to recount several other occasions where the Buckleys were mistaken for real black people: by people waiting to meet the performers but not recognising them without their make-up (62), and by a publican who didn’t believe them to be actors because he had seen the performance and believed that the actors were black (63). I would read these stories sceptically, emphasising, instead of historical (in)accuracy, their value as an insight into the ways in which a performer inhabited, shaped and represented blackness.

W.T. Lhamon, in Raising Cain (1998), considers whether blackface performers were mistaken for real black people. Lhamon reads reports such as Sanford’s as evidence that most in the audience actually understood the true nature of the performance: Audience members sometimes made mistakes about what they saw, but it would merely compound their mistake to understand the anomaly as typical, as the response which blackface conventions generally elicited. (Lhamon Raising 174) For Lhamon, Sanford’s account is about emphasising the in-joke of blackface minstrelsy (that is, the understanding that racial fabrication is unimportant: it’s the social rebellion that counts), and that some people did not actually get it. For Lhamon, blackface minstrelsy formed communities of people who understood the joke and

the performers were motivated by a desire to depict authentically the life of blacks […] This after-the-fact justification does not hold up well under inspection” (56). Sanford’s memoirs were written after the abolition of slavery, and Sanford often claims that he accurately and authentically represented black people and culture. I am hesitant, however, to say that this was purely an after-the-fact justification. It is more likely that authenticity claims inhered in blackface minstrelsy prior to the abolition of slavery as well. This makes it difficult to classify blackface minstrelsy as abolitionist or pro-slavery. In fact, the paradoxical nature of blackface minstrelsy (authentic/fabricated, abolitionist/pro-slavery) contributed to its mass success, as audience members with differing political views could enjoy the same show for vastly different reasons.

mocked those who didn’t (including those who got the joke but thought it racist). I think Lhamon is correct that blackface entertainment appealed to audiences who understood the in-joke of minstrelsy, but would emphasise that the formation of communities was not as conscious as Lhamon implies. Jokes such as those that Sanford repeated were retellings of popular jokes that affirmed audiences’ belief that blackness was an object of their control. Neither performers nor audiences were completely conscious that they had moved into a discourse of blackness, cloaked in the reverie of whiteness. It is far more likely that performers and audiences delighted in the “play”, and were not concerned with separating their “play” from understandings of blackness. That is, the audiences that endorsed blackface minstrelsy may well have enjoyed the movement into and out of blackness (a movement that alleviated some of their socio-political doubts), but the representation of blackness did influence how they understood blackness in the real world. Blackface minstrelsy’s representation of blackness at least provided audiences with a culturally-constructed ideological escape that they could take whenever their privilege was threatened by the agency of real black people. Thus, a central white privilege that was endorsed by blackface minstrelsy was not simply the freedom to move into and manipulate representations of blackness, but to choose whether or not black agency and humanity would be recognised and on what terms. So naturalised had this privileged movement become, as stories that will be discussed in a moment show, that Sanford himself felt free to associate with black people when it suited him, but to disrespect black people and treat them inhumanely when his fantasy of white control was threatened.

One of the central delusions of whiteness is that black people have no agency. This assumption allows whiteness to believe it can inhabit Otherness and manage the Other’s identity and livelihood. One of Sanford’s anecdotes reveals how central this assumption was to blackface minstrelsy. Among Sanford’s most successful characterisations was “Uncle Josh”. In his “Reminiscences” he recalls how he created the role. In the story entitled “The Itinerant Preacher” Sanford recalls how he fooled an old Black preacher who held services on street corners in Philadelphia. One day Sanford has a short discussion with the preacher, who then asks his name. Sanford tells the preacher he is Jake Budd (another famous Philadelphian actor, who is apparently, “well liked by the col’d people”; “The Itinerant Preacher” n.p.). However, the preacher is hostile towards Sanford, who is pretending to be Jake Budd: “Jake Bud, why, use [you is] de man dat

makes fun of us Col’d people. You’re bad man. Good day Sa” (“The Itinerant Preacher” n.p.). By itself, this statement may well attest to the fact that there was some anger in the black community at blackface minstrels for their representations of blackness. Sanford leaves, but on another occasion he gets the final laugh (at least in his own story) when he walks past the preacher in the middle of a street-corner sermon. The preacher recognises Sanford (but still assumes he is Jake Budd). The preacher interrupts his own sermon in front of a big crowd to declare: look yer [here], Mr Jake Bud, I don’t want you to go take me off in your theatre. The crowd screamed. The old man got completely broke up and dismissed his audience. (“The Itinerant Preacher” n.p.) That is, Sanford walks past the preacher who tells Sanford he does not want to be impersonated (the preacher is still assuming Sanford is a different actor, Jake Budd); the crowd, recognising Sanford for who he really is, laughs at the preacher, whose composure is disrupted and his sermon dismissed. As in other anecdotes, Sanford delineates between an audience that understands blackface minstrelsy (the crowd who recognise Sanford) and one that doesn’t understand blackface minstrelsy (the preacher, who becomes a shared joke for the in-crowd). Again, though, in making this joke Sanford slips to reveal that there was some animosity on the part of black people toward blackface performers. Nevertheless, Sanford delights in making further fun out of the preacher: I made one of the best characters ever portrayed [in] my first night as Uncle Josh [… I] took the gallery by surprise and when I opened the bag and took out the coat to put on they began to realise my personation. Then, book in hand, it was deafening. (“The Itinerant Preacher” n.p.) It would not be hard to imagine Sanford’s “personation” of the preacher. It was probably a stump speech that involved a large book with “dictionary” printed across it. Sanford goes on to state: “this sketch […] was the feature of the season and never failed to fill the negro gallery” (“The Itinerant Preacher” n.p.). Sanford, in blackface minstrel style, slips into the blackface character to claim an affinity with black audience members. However, claiming that the appropriation of blackness is ethical because black people enjoyed it misses the point that 1) such performances still justified white domination (even within the theatre), and 2) few, if any, black people had the cultural capital to mount significant challenges against Sanford. In any case, the solipsism of whiteness is enacted within Sanford’s manuscript and he ultimately reiterates his own white privilege: believing he can define blackness.

Sanford also tells the story of Pete Henderson, a black man performing odd jobs and manual labour near Sanford’s Philadelphia theatre. In an anonymous newspaper clipping glued into Sanford’s manuscript, Henderson is described as a “model […] for the minstrel playwrights” (142). The clipping continues Pete was known and his acquaintance sought by all the ambitious personators of negro characters and singers of negro songs […] He was lame in one leg and very often [minstrel-manager] Carncross would get his troupe around Pete so they could imitate the limping. The limp is now seen on all the minstrel stages throughout the country. (142) The humiliation that would most likely accompany a group of actors surrounding someone to imitate their disability is of no concern to the reporter. This image of minstrel actors imitating a man’s limp can be read as a metaphor for minstrelsy itself. Certainly, white actors sought to highlight and represent as universal to blackness the most unflattering traits. Their cultural capital enabled them to accentuate the aspects of blackness that they saw as authentic (that is, the aspects of blackness that troubled them the least). Further, agency in the above quotation is reserved for actors, managers, and Pete’s limp (not Pete), which travels the country once it is legitimated by white performers and their audiences.

The blackface minstrels inhabited black characters and commodified blackness in order to assuage white socio-political and psychological anxieties. They did this within an institution of performance that allowed no resistance (no agency) from actual black people and effectively presented a discourse of blackness that was determined by whiteness. The absence of black agency, however, was an illusion, and a careful reading of Sanford’s memoirs reveals moments where this conceit of whiteness was disturbed. Sanford continues from the printed article about Pete Henderson with a hand-written story: on one occasion Dan Gardner [an actor working for Sanford] put a job up on Pete. Getting him in the front entrance after the stage was clear, [Dan] handed him a hammer, saying, with a push, run quick, take this to Mr Sanford. Pete started looking ahead of him [and] did not discover his situation until in the centre of the stage, when such a yell was given [that] Pete stopped, looked at the audience, and said I don’t care a damn. Mr Dan Gardner told me to take dis to Massa Sam and I am gwan to do it. This was Pete’s final and last appearance as he never could be induced to appear again. (142)

Again, the joke here is on Pete in an unflattering way. Presumably the humour of the story is that Pete is too proud to realise that he is controlled and enslaved by white people. This joke, then, is linked to at least one theme of blackface minstrelsy, as stated in the first half of this chapter—a significant white privilege is the assumed control of black mobility. Thus, Sanford’s anecdote about Pete Henderson is not so much a true record of Pete, as much as a true record of how blackface minstrels viewed and treated black people.

It is likely that blackface minstrels, in viewing blackness through the prism of their own white privilege, would overlook significant challenges to their authority. After Sanford’s written addendum to the newspaper article about Pete Henderson, the printed article concludes: Persuasion, money, drinks, everything was offered him if he would roll his street push-cart across the stage, but Pete swore that he was not cut out for an actor. (142) Two possible readings are striking about the conclusion to this article. Firstly, Pete is imagined as being uninterested in the cultural capital of his own blackness. For him to be on stage would bring him commercial benefit, given that his blackness was seen to be a commodity. Nevertheless, Pete stubbornly refuses. That Pete’s denial is based on acting ability normalises the commodity status of his own body. His denial also works to justify the white performers’ appropriation of his commodity. Secondly, Pete swears that he is “not cut out for an actor”. The phrasing of Pete’s resistance, in true conundrum style, insists that Pete does not want to be an actor, and we can also infer that he does not want the outline of his identity (his cut-out) to be used by an actor. While this reading is more creative than was likely intended, there is some benefit to reading black agency into a record of white domination. Such readings can remind us that blackface minstrelsy did not occur because black people were essentially unable or unwilling to resist, but because the workings of white domination ensured that their resistances would be silenced, overlooked, obfuscated, censored, or powerfully prevented. Nevertheless, both of these readings reveal how blackface minstrelsy figured blackness as a commodity. The white privilege associated with this manoeuvre is the right of white people to take cultural capital from blackness. Discursively, this enabled the continual appropriation of blackness, as well as the enactment of a fantasy that

justified white domination, in the forms of slavery, racial violence, controlled mobility and the denial of love.

It is important to read representations of black resistance within a record of white dominance. Herman Gray (2004) has argued, in relation to recent American television, that reading a site of discursive conflict “in terms of its multiple logics, social contexts, and contradictions is a way of keeping black people in the game as agents of our image construction” (xiv). The unnamed preacher and Pete Henderson, remarkably, remained in the game against Sanford, even though Sanford had the advantage of immense cultural capital accruing from his position within whiteness. That their resistances are not more completely and clearly articulated does not suggest that there were not black people who felt injured and outraged by blackface minstrelsy, but rather it is evidence of the power-politics of the time. Sanford held the cultural capital and the position within whiteness to commodify blackness for his own (and his audience’s) ends. Those ends may have had nothing (immediately) to do with race, but they had consequences to do with race. Sanford’s performances eased white social and cultural tensions, and also energised racial essentialisms that worked to justify white domination.

Blackface minstrelsy institutionalised the grotesque racisms that played out ambivalently during the period of early blackface performance. Along with the institutionalisation of blackface minstrelsy, white performers and audiences gained privileges that ensured the continuation of white domination in America. White people experienced blackness as something they could inhabit and manipulate, and emerged from the encounter reassured of their higher social, cultural and economic positions. David Roediger (1991) has argued along these lines in suggesting that: Minstrelsy’s genius was then to be able to both display and reject the “natural self”, to be able to take on blackness convincingly and to take off blackness convincingly. (Wages 116) The “genius” of blackface minstrelsy can be read as the ability to neutralise troubling elements of the representation of blackness (to take blackness on) by owning, performing and manipulating blackness (performing a take-off). But the “genius” of blackface minstrelsy can also be read as the ability of performers and audiences to move into blackness (to apply blackface, or align oneself with its arguments), and to move out

of blackness (to take the blackface off, to see it a commodity, or to disengage from black humanity).

Conclusion: “the white world between you and us” The discourse of blackness was (over)determined by the anxieties and desires of white people throughout the nineteenth century in America. This history has permeated race relations to the present day. Frantz Fanon, in Black Skin, White Masks (1968), explores a history of blackness. Fanon searches for a “third-person consciousness” of his body, a way to reconcile self and body through a conscious understanding of the corporeal schema (78). However, after recounting a history of blackness that is actually a history of white ideas about blackness, his reconciliation is stifled: “[y]ou come too late, much too late. There will always be a world—a white world—between you and us…” (87). Fanon is arguing that there is a white world of blackness that intervenes between ideas of blackness and actual black bodies. The “you” here is the ideal of blackness as a perfect representation of the black self. However, this perfect correlation between body and representation (the unimpeded “us”) does not occur. The crisis that Fanon experiences arises from the realisation that his desire for a blackness that represents the self has “come too late”, it is after history, his blackness has been irreversibly and irrecoverably historicised (79). Fanon’s reading of the history of blackness begins with the notion that “not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man” (77). Such a comment reflects, no doubt, on Fanon’s French-Algerian colonial context.56 The above quote establishes the inter-subjective nature of race: that white people and black people relate to each other through contests within the field of blackness; that white people affect the way black people understand and express their identity; and that black people are “in the game” as well. Fanon examines his body’s blackness—his “corporeal

56 In using Fanon to discuss my study of representations of blackness in America, I acknowledge that his work is somewhat out of context. However, I follow critics like Max Silverman (2005): “while agreeing that the Anglophone postcolonial appropriation of Fanon and Peau Noire [Black Skin] has often erased important contexts within which the text should usefully be situated (especially the francophone context), I also believe that the power of the text resides in its ability to travel across the frontiers of place, history and politics and speak in different voices to different readers” (2). I would add, further, that Fanon’s work is appropriate to studies of race in America, Australia and elsewhere, because of the influence of his work in these places. His work has helped shape the way race is discussed and understood critically today.

schema”—and finds that it is inseparable from a “historico-racial schema”, the product of “the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories” (78-9). This final point emphasises that Fanon sees his blackness, in the words of Stuart Hall (1996), as “cultural and discursive, not genetic or physiological” (“After-life” 16). The process that Fanon describes in Black Skin, White Masks, which intrigues Hall, is how the historico-racial schema becomes linked to the corporeal schema, or the process of “epidermalization: literally, the inscription of race on the skin” (“After-Life” 16). This is precisely a process that Part One of this dissertation has highlighted: how white ideas—details, anecdotes, stories—about blackness have been linked to black bodies; how racial essentialism occurs. I have described in Chapter One how racial essentialism occurs in many ways and is due to many different, sometimes contradictory forces. In this sense, blackness is overdetermined. The overdetermination of blackness is the source of Fanon’s frustration, evident when he states: “I am given no chance. I am overdetermined from without. I am the slave not [of] the ‘idea’ that others have of me but of my own appearance” (82). That is, blackness is determined historically by multiple social, political, and cultural forces. It is not just one idea, but that all of these ideas have become inscribed onto skin and linked to the body. This frustrates Fanon because he cannot challenge one idea to escape his epidermal containment, he must somehow (impossibly) challenge a history of ideas about race and blackness.

Part One has provided an analysis of two particular historical periods during which certain imagined essences were linked to blackness. In the period of early blackface entertainment, blackness was initially polarised: threatening (in the case of “Long Tail Blue”) but dysfunctional (in the case of “Coal Black Rose”). These polarities then inverted—wheeled and spun—into the “body” of Jim Crow, or Zip Coon. However, I have argued that these polarities were always present in single characters. Blue was threatening and untrustworthy, the characters of “Coal Black Rose” were unsettling and inverted, Jim Crow and Zip Coon were appealing, ambitious, patriotic and monstrously distorted. The lithographs of all these characters—as did the performer’s actions and black make-up—emphasised that these characteristics (these essences) were linked to black bodies. The lithographs exaggerate posteriors, faces, eyes, hands, knees, feet and blackness (see Fig. 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5). These are the visual manifestations of the characters’ grotesque essences. Even if the representation of blackness in blackface entertainment was, at times, threatening and troubling for white audiences, this visual

language nullified these potential challenges to whiteness by epidermalising demeaning, dehumanising, and corrupted characteristics. Whiteness inhered in blackface entertainment, manipulating the discourse of blackness into a twisted ideology of white authority.

Even so, the demeaning representation of blackness was not always part of an overtly or consciously racist strategy to oppress black people. Reading blackness as overdetermined—that is, derived from multiple directions—allowed Chapter One to show that, in the period of early blackface entertainment, many desires and anxieties coalesced within the representation of blackness. Performers evoked anxieties about industrialisation, urbanisation, class, gender, nation and culture. They also enacted desires for the working class to be the epitome of civilised masculinity, as well as contradictory desires to be uncivilised, rebellious and anti-authoritarian. These are just some of the anxieties and desires that circulate behind the American blackface mask; no doubt, there are more. Many of these factors do not, on the surface, seem to have anything to do with race. Nevertheless, they energised, and were in turn energised by, a discourse of race. Further, they naturalised white people as the controlling influence within this discourse.

These anxieties and desires continued into the period of blackface minstrelsy. Some of the concerns remained, some were no longer relevant, and some new concerns were added: anxieties about religion, science, migration, national culture, and black mobility. The narrative of blackface minstrelsy shows the inter-relatedness of these concerns and representations of race. During this period, as the blackface minstrels and their audiences perfected the movement into and out of blackness to ease their concerns, the representations of blackness became even more dehumanising and demeaning to black people. What is more, the desire for white control over alterity became even more firmly naturalised as the discourse of blackness became the realm of whiteness. With the institutionalisation of blackface minstrelsy, the fantasies of whiteness inherent in blackface entertainment were strengthened and influentially placed within the discourse of blackness. Performers such as Samuel Sanford naturalised the self-perpetuating use of white privilege to control, determine, intervene in, and manipulate blackness. Overall, the two chapters in Part One have shown that whiteness provided an underlying ideology that became increasingly dominant within the politics of representing

blackness in America from 1825 to 1875. Blackness in this period was made and remade so that whiteness could be made and remade.

Recognising the discursive nature of blackness has several implications today. Firstly, critical studies of blackness must recognise the ideological nature of the texts they study. This is true for disciplines outside of theatre and performance studies. Literary studies, for example, must acknowledge how race functions in texts not simply to oppress or denigrate nonwhite people, but to address other apparently non-racial concerns as well. Political studies, too, can reflect on the ideological nature of “facts” used in determining new strategies. Secondly, understanding blackness as a discourse can help us defamiliarise the assumptions of whiteness. Mary F. Brewer (2005) has stated that, during the nineteenth century, “any suggestion of Whiteness as a concept with porous borders threatened the [white] position at the top of the colonial order” (4). Part One has revealed that whiteness was constantly anxious about its imagined borders. Recognising the permeability of whiteness places critics, artists and audiences alike “in the game”; both whiteness and blackness are open for renegotiation. And, so, thirdly, coming face-to-face with blackface performers can cause white people to reflect on the assumptions they make and perpetuate about blackness. How do jokes, music, stories, anecdotes, and history contribute to the white world of blackness? Finally, the discourse of blackness did not depend upon a neat correlation between representation and reality. Thus, it travelled relatively easily to other places. Blackface entertainment, too, travelled (perhaps indicative of the fact that fantasies of whiteness had travelled or developed elsewhere). Recognising that there is a fantasy of whiteness within the discourse of blackness allows us to examine how that fantasy has been transposed into other cultures. We can now ask, for example, what was the influence of blackface entertainment on Australian culture?

90 PART TWO

Transnational Fantasies: Nineteenth-century Blackface Entertainment in Australia

CHAPTER THREE

The Transnational Blackface: Aboriginality and Blackness in Early Australian Theatre

The three chapters in Part Two of this dissertation argue that there was a transnational connection between the American discourse of blackness and the Australian discourse of Aboriginality during the nineteenth century. Specifically, this analysis will focus on blackface entertainment in Australia during the nineteenth century. Even before American blackface entertainment was popularised in Australia, there were commonalities between American and Australian representations of Otherness. For example, white socio-political anxieties were circulating beneath and through fictions of Otherness in both the Australian representation of Aboriginality and the American imagining of blackness. While it took a long time for a stylistic relationship to develop between Australian representations of Aboriginality and American blackface entertainment, from the moment it arrived in Australia, American blackface entertainment strengthened and confirmed the centrality of whiteness within representations of Aboriginality. These chapters continue the reading strategy established in Part One by reading race as a culturally constructed discourse. Further, the fantasies beneath the discourse of blackness in America and Aboriginality in Australia are seen to be very similar. Even though the specific nature of the social, political and cultural concerns differed in the two nations, Otherness was used to articulate and assuage white concerns in Australia as in America.

Part Two situates Australian culture within a global network of discursive theory and debate. The first section of this chapter will theorise transnationalism as a reading practice, while later sections and the other two chapters in Part Two will employ a transnational reading strategy to analyse Australian theatre and literature from 1834 to 1882. This is not a chronological progression from Part One; the texts discussed in the following chapters were performed at the same time as the developments in American blackface entertainment were occurring. For example, as “Jim Crow” was first being performed in America, the first licenced theatre in Australia was opening its doors; as

Samuel Sanford was writing his memoirs in America, Australian audiences were enjoying blackface bushranging dramas. Ideally, Part Two would examine the adaptation of American blackface characters in Australian plays across a survey of early Australian play-scripts. However, due to the nature of early colonial theatre and culture, few play-scripts survive. Among the scripts that do survive are plays that were rarely or never performed. The records that remain provide a sense of the way white Australians regarded both Aboriginal people generally and American blackface performances. Part Two refers to play-scripts and contemporary summaries, reviews, and ephemera, as well as recent critical material, to piece together how American blackface entertainment entered into, and was adapted within, Australian culture.

Part Two charts the way American blackface entertainment was received and adapted in Australian culture. Richard Waterhouse’s From Minstrel Show to Vaudeville (1990) is the only full-length work to analyse and interrogate blackface entertainment in nineteenth-century Australian culture. Waterhouse’s work focuses specifically on American minstrel troupes in Australia. While Waterhouse does not provide an extended analysis of blackface Aboriginal characters, central to my examination is his observation that “to some extent, at least, the prism through which Australians viewed the Aborigines was one cut by the [blackface] minstrels” (Minstrel 100). Part Two interrogates Waterhouse’s observation, asking to what extent blackface entertainment affected representations of Aboriginality; it also asks how blackface developed in Australia, and what was the nature of the cultural prism through which Australians viewed Aboriginal people. To answer these questions I am examining performances of American blackface characters, as well as the first theatrical representations of Aboriginal people in Australian culture. When American blackface entertainment travelled to Australia, it brought with it an adaptable set of beliefs that worked alongside local beliefs to secure ideologically the white Australian domination that was evident in a spectrum of policies and practices. These included militaristic campaigns against Aboriginal people, the restriction of Aboriginal people to missions/stations, the sexual abuse of Aboriginal women and the use of Aboriginal people as unpaid labour (domestic and otherwise). Like the discourse of blackness in America, blackface entertainment in Australia represented and entrenched a discourse of Otherness that was strongly informed by the dream of white domination. Blackface entertainment in

Australia, then, reinforced and disseminated myths that justified dispossession, enslavement, oppression and murder of Aboriginal people and communities.

Following the theorisation of transnationalism in the first section of this chapter, the remainder of the chapter will be specifically concerned with the development of ideas about blackness and Aboriginality in Australian culture from the beginnings of legitimate (that is, licenced) theatre (around 1830) until the popularisation of American blackface minstrelsy in Australia (1849). Due to the scarcity of Australian-authored scripts from this period, the plays selected for study do not represent a conclusive sample (in fact, two out of the three were never performed in Australia), but they do suggest how blackness and Aboriginality were perceived in Australia at this time. Because few theatrical texts are available, this chapter also utilises cultural ephemera from this period including reports of fancy-dress balls, as well as a poetic account of one such ball, to cast further light on how Australians performed blackness and Aboriginality from the 1820s to the 1840s. This chapter, then, provides some insights into the first encounters between the discourse of Aboriginality in Australia and an American discourse of blackness. It will be seen that the relationships between cultural ideologies and racial essentialism were similar in the two nations: white socio-political concerns energised racial myths that became epidermalised onto the skin of Others. Further, as American blackface characters and Australian blackface performances of Aboriginality played out alongside each other, the two discourses leaked into each other. American blackface characters, when performed in Australia, were infused with peculiarly Australian stereotypes and vice versa; representations of Aboriginal characters were influenced by narratives and styles of American blackface performance. Despite this, the connection between blackness and Aboriginality was relatively tenuous. A much more intense connection was the fantasy of whiteness that was a significant presence within both discourses of Otherness.

Transnational Australian Studies Critics of Australian literature and culture have always been aware of the transnational connections influencing Australian culture. As early as 1950, A.A. Phillips’ notion of the “cultural cringe” highlighted a national fear that local literary products could not be favourably compared to the writings of more established literatures such as those of England and America. In the 1970s, Bruce Bennett highlighted a “concern for the

growth of Australian culture, but a concern also that it should not grow up egotistically unaware of its relations with other cultures” (79). In the 1980s, David Carter wrote about a “‘new’ critical nationalism” that would fit within a form of internationalism based not on the universalist assumption of a dominant culture but on pluralism, on the circulation of differences, on regionalisms held in suspension. (“Natives” 177) Yet again, in 1999, Leigh Dale, in a special issue of Australian Literary Studies entitled “New Directions in Australian Literary Studies”, stressed that Australian literary critics need to think about Australian literature “not in terms of its exclusivity and difference, but (also) in terms of its connections to other literatures” (133). Essentially, these arguments are discussing the same notion: that Australian literature should be analysed in an international context while acknowledging its local specificities. I would term such a methodology a transnational approach to Australian literary texts, and it is just as applicable to the wider field of cultural studies. That these three arguments were made over a period of thirty-three years highlights the intermittent development of transnational cultural studies practice in Australia. David Carter (2004), revisiting his earlier terminology, recently observed that “cyclical periods of nationalist cultural and political activity” have led to current Australian studies being “long overdue for the next resurgence of creative Australian (inter)nationalism” (“Minor Miracle” 109). One way to practice “(inter)nationalism” in Australian studies is to employ a transnational methodology; that is, to examine the connectivities between cultures such as America and Australia.

Any discussion of transnationalism must distinguish transnationalism from theories of globalisation, diaspora, or cosmopolitanism. Critically, these cognate terms investigate different tensions stemming from the same broad question: within a global context, what is the nature of actual and ideological connections between different local concerns and conditions? The critical practices related to each concept have various strengths and weaknesses. Inderpal Grewal (2005), for example, argues that studies of globalisation risk homogenising culture by overlooking “the heterogeneous and multiple transnational connectivities that produced various meanings of the ‘global’” (22). Nineteenth-century blackface entertainment is a good example of the failure of the concept of globalisation to account for different local experiences of the same phenomenon; nineteenth-century blackface entertainment was not experienced in

Australia identically to how it was experienced in America, or in Britain, India, New Zealand or South Africa, for that matter. Arguably, the concept of transnationalism is more accommodating of local specificities and accounts for varying strengths of connection between different aspects of blackness and Aboriginality in nineteenth- century Australian culture.

In regards to the category of diaspora, Satzewich and Wong (2006) argue that studies of diaspora focus primarily on relationships between a country of origin and a location of settlement. Transnational communities, they argue, “encompass diasporas, but not all transnational communities are diasporas” (6). My investigation of blackface entertainment in Australia is not concerned with the experience of American performers in Australia; rather, I am investigating the way the “local” population (Australians) received and shaped blackface entertainment within their own contexts. Even if white Australians are seen to be diasporic (with predominantly British origins), the relationship between American and Australian culture is not diasporic. Transnationalism can be differentiated from globalisation and diaspora studies by its non-insistence on uniform global cultures and cultural origins. For this reason I find that it allows for a more nuanced reading of nineteenth-century blackface entertainment.

When transnationalism is compared to studies of cosmopolitanism, almost identical methodologies emerge. Writing in 1996, Arjun Appadurai coined the term “ethnoscapes”: In any particular ethnoscape (a term we might wish to substitute for earlier wholes such as villages, communities, and localities), the genealogies of cosmopolitanism are not likely to be the same as its histories: while the genealogies reveal the cultural spaces within which new forms can become indigenized [...], the histories of these forms may lead outward to transnational sources and structures. (64-65) That is, ethnoscapes have genealogies that are cosmopolitan and histories that are transnational. In her discussion of Nietzsche, Judith Shklar (1998) articulates the difference between history and genealogy: “Unlike history, ‘genealogy’ refers to both the past and the present simultaneously” (149). If this is how the terms are to be read in Appadurai’s writing, then he is arguing for cosmopolitanism and transnationalism to be combined so that ethnoscapes are understood as globally-connected, present-day

environments that have been shaped in the past by global movements of people and international cultural exchanges. Appadurai goes on to argue that the most appropriate way to study ethnoscapes is to enable genealogy and history to confront each other, thus leaving the terrain open for interpretations of the ways in which local historical trajectories flow into complex transnational structures. (65) While ethnoscapes are usually studied through either a cosmopolitan lens that maps their continual adaptation to local conditions, or a transnational lens that maps their place in a global history, Appadurai combines the two approaches to examine both local specificities and global interactions of an ethnoscape.

In a recent study of cross-cultural transactions in Australasian performance, Gilbert and Lo (2007) practised a similar methodology. They sought to examine indigenous and other minoritarian experiences and cultural practices within the nation that might be considered cosmopolitan [… in order to] challenge prevailing thinking about cosmopolitanism as a transnational phenomenon characterized by an encounter with Otherness beyond the nation. (emphasis in original 212) Like Appadurai, the assumption in this approach is that there is a cosmopolitanism located within and a transnationalism located outside the nation. Whereas Appadurai combines the two in the term “new global ethnoscapes” (65), Gilbert and Lo (2007) combine cosmopolitanism and transnationalism in their term “cosmopolitics”, which they define as the “hybrid spaces, entangled histories and complex human corporeographies” of worldy cosmopolitanism (11). Ultimately, both works are interested in how the local is positioned and adapted in international contexts. This dissertation—and Part Two in particular—incorporates the arguments of Appadurai and Gilbert and Lo as nuances within the concept of transnationalism.

There is a broad spectrum of theories about transnationalism. Among scholars and editors such as Michael P. Smith (Transnational Urbanism, 2001), Inderpal Grewal (Transnational America, 2005), Wong and Satzewich (Ed. Transnational Identities and Practices in Canada, 2006), and Ezra and Rowden (Ed. Transnational Cinema, 2006), the summary by Grant, Levine and Trentmann in Beyond Sovereignty (2007) seems encompassing: “Instead of distracting from the realities of national power, the study of transnationalism can inform a more realistic understanding of the nation by placing it in the context of expanding transnational networks of power and identity” (13).

Transnational studies do not overlook the complexities of national (or local) livelihoods and subjectivities, but highlight them as being connected to and influenced by international networks of communication, information, politics and ideology. Thus, in Australia, the growing nationalism which was enabled by Australian blackface entertainment was also part of an international network of blackface performance.

In highlighting transnationalism’s focus on the local and national as part of international networks of communication and exchange, Inderpal Grewal’s work on “transnational connectivities” is exceptional. Grewal argues that discourses travel through various international networks consisting of “strong and weak connectivities” (23). Studies of transnationalism can productively focus on how ideologies travel through these networks: “some get translated and transcoded, [...] some are unevenly connected, others strongly connected, and still others incommensurable and untranslatable” (23). For Grewal, the term “connectivities” recalls the term “collectivities” to indicate that transnational networks produce groups, identities, nationalisms; that the power of many discourses to be understood, translated, and used in a variety of sites means that subjects become constituted and connected through these new technologies and rationalities. (23) That is, discourses travel the globe through technologies and are received locally in an unpredictable manner. Some are significantly altered as they are adapted, others require less adaptation. Technologies may actually change so that they are only partially linked to similar technologies. Technologies may stay the same but the discourse they represent may change in local situations. The technologies themselves vary: from books, films, documentaries, costumes, uniforms, and clothing, to television, the internet, radio, or actual people bringing or displaying, consciously or not, information from other places. Part Two of this dissertation considers blackface entertainment as a transnational technology. Blackface performance created frameworks for the expression of alterity, as well as creating connectivities of whiteness. The phrase “connectivity of whiteness” refers to the white communities/collectivities on either side of the Pacific, connected through a discourse of white hegemony that is manifested in different nationalisms and cultural stories. Blackface is a site for the performance and strengthening of this connectivity. In each location, blackface is incorporated (and transmuted) within national cultures but maintains a transnational connectivity: it is linked to ideologies and communities of whiteness beyond the borders of the nation.

Transnational studies typically analyse one or a number of technologies, showing how they have travelled, how they have changed and how they have been received, and ask why a technology travelled a certain route. These studies highlight how various aspects of a transnational technology contribute to international connectivities while other aspects forge national or local connectivities.57 Blackface entertainment was not performed for African American or black audiences; when I talk of a blackface connectivity, I am referring to the connection that enabled a certain collectivity to share their beliefs and imaginings. That collectivity consists of white Americans and white Australians. The ideology that united them was whiteness, even as whiteness operated in specific ways within the nation. It is beyond the scope of this study to examine how the discourse of Aboriginality (and the specifically Australian codes of whiteness within it) affected American culture; rather, I am discussing the nature and effects of the Australian/American connectivities of whiteness within Australia. Transnationalism provides the methodology for an (inter)national Australian cultural studies.

The following sections of this chapter investigate how a transnational connectivity between Australia and America was formed through blackface entertainment. The section immediately following this one will set the scene for the arrival of American blackface entertainment in Australia. I will describe the establishment of legitimate theatre in Australia and analyse two early plays that contained Aboriginal characters performed in blackface. My analysis of these plays reveals how Aboriginality was presented in blackface to raise and ease white tensions about land ownership and the horrific treatment of Aboriginal people. The third section of this chapter will examine

57 Robert Dixon’s Prosthetic Gods (2001), for example, analyses travel writing to suggest that the fragility of technologies of (Western) modernity—such as cameras, microscopes, drugs, electricity, medical instruments—in the colonies contributed to a “colonial psychosis” for white travellers through Melanesia in the early twentieth century (21). David Mosler and Robert Catley, in America and Americans in Australia (1998), suggest that American entertainment technologies—actors, productions, dramatic techniques—enabled “social and political values” such as white egalitarianism to be imported into Australian society (13). Mosler and Catley suggest that some American ideas were influential in Australian society, while others were more controversial: “Overall, however, the American connections with Australian political change in the 1850s were superficial and relatively insignificant” (13). That is, Mosler and Catley investigate a weak or minor connectivity between Australian and American political cultures.

the piecemeal arrival of American blackface characters in Australia. This will include an analysis of the character of Jim Brown, as represented in the play Life in Sydney; or, the Ran Dan Club (1843). The characterisation of Jim Brown in Life in Sydney typifies the relatively weak connectivity between Australian conceptions of Aboriginality and American conceptions of blackness at this time. Finally, in concluding this chapter, I will analyse a popular Australian fancy-dress character: the Australian Chief. An analysis of the Australian Chief shows that, not only did American blackface characters become somewhat Aboriginalised in Australia, but Aboriginal characters became somewhat Americanised after the popular arrival of American blackface entertainment to Australia. Overall, the results of these analyses suggest that blackface entertainment in Australia during the 1830s and 1840s was the site for both weak and intense transnational connections between Australia and America. American representations of blackness were not simply imposed or mimicked when Australians represented Aboriginal people, but a negotiation and adaptation occurred between the two hallucinations of Otherness. A far stronger, though far less visible, transnational connectivity was linked through the various cultural imaginings of Otherness. As the fantasy of whiteness circulated within and beneath the discourses of blackness and Aboriginality in the 1830s and 1840s, whiteness became a significant, transnationally supported, cultural determinant.

Aboriginal Characters in Early Australian Culture: The Bushrangers (1829) and Norwood Vale (1834) Even before there was a licenced theatre in Australia, some writers had attempted to create a specifically national culture. This included writing about characters that were seen as specifically Australian: convicts, bushrangers, convict-bushrangers, squatters and Aboriginal people. While there were sporadic theatrical performances throughout the new Australian colonies in the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, all attempts at establishing a legitimate theatre failed until 1832, when a change of governor led to Barnett Levey gaining the first licence for a theatre in Australia. By the following year Levey no longer relied on his Royal Hotel in Sydney, which could only house 150 patrons, as construction had finished on his Theatre Royal, “with an audience capacity of 1000” (Waterhouse Minstrel 22). Levey died in 1837; a year later Joseph Wyatt opened the Royal Victoria Theatre in Pitt Street (Sydney), which had a capacity of 1900, and which remained in operation until 1880, indicating, as Richard Waterhouse

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notes, “that by the late 1830s theatre was an important and popular form of colonial cultural expression” (Minstrel 22). Theatres were established in Hobart in 1834 (the Argyle Rooms) and 1837 (Theatre Royal); theatres were also established in Adelaide in 1838 (Theatre Royal, which was not successful until the late 1840s); and they were opened in Melbourne in 1841 (the Pavillion, which “swayed in the wind” and where “sensible patrons brought their umbrellas for protection from leaks in the roof”) and 1845 (Queens Theatre Royal, with a stock company led by the reputable George Coppin) (Minstrel 22). Sydney’s Olympic Ampitheatre opened in Hunter St in 1842, and the Royal City Theatre opened in 1843. These two theatres embody the beginning of what Waterhouse argues is the “bifurcation of the Australian stage” during the nineteenth century (Minstrel 26). For Waterhouse, Australian theatre became bifurcated into “popular” and “legitimate” theatres with, for example, upper classes viewing operas and Shakespearian productions at the Royal City Theatre, and the Olympic theatre presenting “tightrope dancing, equestrian performances and clown and blackface entertainments” (Minstrel 26). Even though the Olympic Ampitheatre failed and closed after a short period of time, Sydney hotels had noticed the shift and by the mid 1840s were advertising “free and easys”—replicating the British music halls (Minstrel 26). Whether the free and easys existed in some form prior to this, but were only “advertised” since the 1840s, is a matter for speculation. Arguably, their advertisement suggests their growing popularity. The rowdy backrooms of hotels and public bars provide something of an offstage story of Australian drama, one that is often overlooked, firstly, if too narrow a definition of “theatre” is held, and secondly, because there are so few contemporary sources that discuss such “low”, “unofficial”, and often illegal performances. Thus, particularly in the early days of the Australian stage, the perception of a moral theatre in Australia is undermined by the continuance of “low” theatre in the music halls and circuses that became more and more popular as the established theatres played to the tastes of wealthier patrons who, especially prior to 1850, did not attend burlesques, blackface, and anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment styles of theatre. Unfortunately, very little of the story of theatre played out in the backrooms of hotels remains. Nevertheless, there are surviving scripts from around 1830 that contain blackface Aboriginal characters.

Aboriginal characters appeared sporadically in early Australian theatre. Margaret Williams (1983) has called The Bushrangers (1829) by David Burn the “first play

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written out of a direct experience of Australian life” (3), though it might be more accurately described as one of the first plays written from Australian experience.58 The Bushrangers was never performed in Australia prior to 1971. There was no formal Australian theatre at the time it was written, and so Burn took it home to Edinburgh and saw it performed at the Caledonian Theatre in 1829. Burn had arrived in 1826 in Tasmania, where his mother was running a large property. The Bushrangers, for which he is best known today, was not published in his Plays, and Fugitive Pieces in Verse (1842). Besides this publication and The Bushrangers, Burn has no other major literary works. He edited several periodicals and newspapers, notably in Auckland—where he moved in 1847, after he and his mother became insolvent. D.H. Borchardt (1966) states that Burn’s longer writings are overly ornate and his writing is “at his best in brief journalistic accounts” (182). Nevertheless, The Bushrangers—not brief enough to be his best writing—will remain an important work due to its historical importance as one of the first Australian-themed plays.

The Bushrangers is based on an actual Tasmanian bushranger—Matthew Brady—who was hanged in May 1826. Even though it was never performed (or published) in nineteenth-century Australia, the play does reveal how non-Indigenous people viewed the country’s Aboriginal population. In a remote setting during Act II a family comes into contact with a group of local Aboriginal people. The Aboriginal people, through their “Chief” Tom and his wife Sal, request bread, tea and sugar from the family. Jemmy, the man of the family, obliges in his thick accent: JEMMY: Yes. Peggy, do’ee fetch some bread an’ tea SAL: Iss. An’ leetel shuggy shugger? TOM: An’ back-a-na? JEMMY: Break my neck! What’s that? TOM: De poff-poff. (Imitates smoking.) PEGGY: Och, then, an’ isn’t he a black dandy. Sure it’s aither a seegar or baccy he manes. TOM: Iss. White fello gin hab right. Iss—baccy. Him murry large goot nice. JEMMY: Well, Peggy, fetch a fig or two o’ Negro head. (30)

58 Eric Irvin (1969) reveals that, in fact, three plays with Australian themes were produced prior to the opening of Levey’s theatre: “The first, in 1821, was J. Amherst’s Michael Howe, the Terror of Van Diemen’s Land; the second, David Burn’s The Bushrangers, produced in 1829, and the third W.T. Moncrieff’s Van Diemen’s Land; or, Settlers and Natives, produced in 1830” (“Australia’s ‘First’ Dramatists” 18-19).

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The characters here are set up to be humorous: with misunderstanding and the corruption of the English language (by all characters) the vehicle of the joke. Further, the relationship between Tom and tobacco is revealing. The linking in this play of Aboriginal people to tobacco (and later rum [31]) represents the earliest representation by white authors of Aboriginal people as substance-addicted beggars (which continues in the popular media today). Such a representation serves several purposes. Firstly, Aboriginal people are depicted as desiring the products of western civilisation. This portrays western civilisation as superior, especially against Aboriginal culture, which is seen as having no real worth (hence, the need to beg). Secondly, the fact that Sal and Tom must ask for basic provisions like bread and tea portray Aboriginal people as unable to provide for themselves. Hence, this scene enacts a conceit of white superiority as well as an imagined justification for both the putative dying out of Aboriginal people (they can’t provide for themselves) and the white detainment of Aboriginal people (so that they might be provided for). Concealing such fantasies and justifications under racially essentialist beggarly behaviour overwrites the complexities of why Aboriginal people may have actually needed to ask for basic provisions; that is, the incursion of European invaders upon Aboriginal lands, and the introduction of species (plant and animal) that destroyed the food sources of both Aboriginal people and the animals they hunted. Rather naively, Aboriginal people are represented as the victims not of colonisation, but of their own racial biology; needless to say, for white audiences this would have displaced much guilt and anxiety about occupying Aboriginal lands.

Further, the reference to “Negro head” tobacco in the above quote commoditises blackness and indicates a (naturalised) racial hierarchy. In her article “Realism, Fetishism, and Genocide” (2002), Elaine Freedgood describes “Negro head” tobacco as an American tobacco which “was dried, then mixed with molasses and pressed into cakes, or ‘plugs,’ making it particularly resistant to heat and humidity and thus especially well-suited for export to places like Australia” (27). Freedgood then argues that in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations: the presence of “Negro head” tobacco symbolizes the crime of Aboriginal genocide, without requiring conscious acknowledgement of it, and that therefore there is no need to deny, repress, or oppose the fact of genocide. (27) Such an argument is not easily transferable to Burn’s play, but the appearance of “Negro head” in The Bushrangers may indeed reveal something of Burn’s use of

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blackness in the play. Freedgood describes nineteenth-century advertisements for “Negro head” tobacco, which include images of black African American slaves working in tobacco fields while white plantation owners lounge in the background smoking pipes (32). Both in name and associated images, the tobacco “actually calls to mind the suffering and death that made the cultivation of tobacco possible in the first place” (32- 33). It almost goes without saying that such images of production were racially loaded and added to an ideation of race that suggested the guiltless ease with which white people could enjoy the fruits of black labour. Consciously or not, Burn reproduces such an ideology when he has Jemmy give Tom “Negro head” tobacco. The implication of Tom within such a myopic cultural imagining not only reveals the transnational complexities of racial discourses in nineteenth-century Australia, but reminds the audience of how the various characters figure within a natural (given that it is internationally verifiable) hierarchy of race. Not only is Tom—like the slave representations in “Negro head” iconography—reduced to a mere body which enables white leisure, entertainment and profit, but he is a body to be governed by white people. Be it the playwright, actor, audience, or the character Jemmy, white people aspire to occupy a governmental position within whiteness in order to superintend Aboriginality and assert their position at the centre of the nation.

The racial ideology activated by a reference to tobacco works alongside caricatures of Aboriginal culture to foreshadow (and fore-ease) the presumed inevitable doom of the Aboriginal characters. While Peggy has exited to retrieve the tobacco, bread, sugar and tea, there is an interlude performance by the black characters. The interlude aimed to present a faux anthropological spectacle, staging Aboriginal characters that cook a kangaroo on a fire and eat it while “gabbling” (30). Then: When they have done, they all exclaim, “Corobbora – Corobbora!” They then start up and perform a rude dance in which they go spinning round and round and throwing their arms about in an extravagant manner and singing. (30) This perverse mimicry of Aboriginal custom may itself be seen in hindsight as a comic cultural misunderstanding on Burn’s part, but even that is to understate the serious cultural implications and consequences of such performances. Offered to contemporary audiences as comic interludes, such dances—most likely performed by white actors in black woollen body-suits, with blackened hands and faces—also serve to re-enact white misunderstandings of (or the unwillingness to attempt to understand) Aboriginal culture

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and white efforts to domesticate alterity. By rendering comic something that is essentially a complex religious, spiritual, legal, and cultural ceremony, Burn’s play performs a blackface enactment of terra nullius; it strips Aboriginal culture of meaning and meaningful relationships to place.59 Tellingly, however, we can see how the doctrine of terra nullius was based not on reality, but on a blackface reality. This blackface reality reflects how white people imagined Aboriginal culture and society. If it wasn’t secured by ideology energised by the reference to “Negro head” tobacco, the guilt-free nature of the representation of the Aboriginal characters’ impending doom is all but certain after this crude, belittling dance that strips the characters of human dignity.

By this point in Burn’s play, Aboriginal characters are seen to be culture-less and subhuman.60 Such a representation justified (for the colonisers) the horrors of colonisation, which Burn did not shy away from. As Tom argues with Jemmy for rum, Peggy retrieves Jemmy’s rifle and hands it to him: JEMMY: Kill me, will you? You mun digest a couple o’ radical pills first. TOM: Parawa! Parawa! You gun no goot, you dam white fello. (Music. The BLACKS assume menacing attitudes. DOLLY and MRS BROADHEAD scream. TOM poises his spear. JEMMY levels at him and fires. At the same moment shots are fired from behind. TOM and one or two BLACKS fall. The others shriek and fly. Then enter BRADY, MacCABE, BIRD, COHEN and all the BUSHRANGERS, […] JEMMY

59 Deborah Bird Rose and Richard Davis, in Dislocating the Frontier (2005), define terra nullius as the principle that “Australia was uninhabited or at best inhabited by peoples who had no systems of social organisation and property ownership that compelled colonial recognition, [which] gave exclusive radical title of Australian lands to the Crown” (13). In Aboriginal Sovereignty (1996) Henry Reynolds argues that terra nullius was a legal doctrine and a “legend”: “The Australian colonists […] lived out the legend of terra nullius. Aboriginal culture, laws, customs and interests could be ignored. Central to this view was the cultural condescension and racial contempt that was immured in the legal and constitutional foundations” (xii-xiii). 60 Part Three of this dissertation returns to the idea of the “subhuman” debate. In part Three, I refer to Kay Anderson’s Race and the Crisis of Humanism (2007), which discusses the philosophical and scientific debates of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries about whether Aboriginal people were, in fact, human, or were lower in the order of nature.

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goes to TOM and looks at him.) JEMMY: My gun no good, beant it? Too good for you, matta, I reckon. (31-32) The reference here to “radical pills” is a reference to the radical nationalist movement of the period, where, in its most utopian incantation, it was argued that the land should be unlocked so that it would be available for purchase and occupation by all classes of colonist.61 Tellingly, the radical nationalism that Jemmy represents had a devastating effect on the Aboriginal people who occupied the lands in question. For the audience, the shock that might normally accompany a scene of mass-murder has been foreshadowed and allayed by the ideology of blackness that precedes the gun-fight. The Aboriginal characters, through their relationship to addiction, cultural nonsense, and slavery, have been sufficiently dehumanised to allow for their murder and “dispersal”. The extra gunfire to aid this eradication came, of course, from the escaped convicts turned bushrangers heroicised in the play. One specifically Australian icon—the Aboriginal—has been dispersed to make way for another two, compounded in the figure of Brady: the wrongly accused convict and bushranger. The representation of Aboriginality in this play—one of the earliest Australian plays—justified the “clearing” of an Aboriginal presence from the landscape. From its very beginnings, the discourse of Aboriginality has been distorted into cultural fabrications that seek to ease white anxieties about Aboriginal dispossession and the violence committed against Aboriginal people.

Even though Burn’s The Bushrangers was performed in Edinburgh in 1829, it is difficult to date the representation of Aboriginal people in the play. The manuscript of the play held in Sydney’s Mitchell Library has been interpreted as being the result of two drafts: the first draft for the 1829 performance, and the second draft occurring in 1835, after Burn returned to Australia from his trip to Edinburgh (See Williams [7] and W. and J.E. Hiener [v]). It is highly likely that the Aboriginal characters were part of the original draft, given Burn’s desire to present unique Australian characters. Nevertheless, the Aboriginal characters are representative of Australian attitudes toward Aboriginal

61 In reading Jemmy’s use of the word “radical” as a nationalist, anti-empire invocation I am following the lead of Veronica Kelly (“Hybridity and Performance” 1999) and Helen Gilbert (2003) who each read colonial popular theatre as a site for the delivery of “powerfully subversive performances of empire” (Gilbert “Millennial Blues” 16).

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people, circa 1830. In 1834 another play named The Bushrangers was performed on the Australian stage. The Bushrangers; or, Norwood Vale (henceforth called Norwood Vale to avoid confusion with Burn’s play) was written by Henry Melville.

Melville had arrived in Hobart in 1828. Over the next six years he acquired magazines such as the Colonial Times (1830, through which he published the first Australian novel—Quintus Servinton), the Tasmanian (1831), and Hobart Town Magazine (1833). To the latter Melville contributed articles, and Norwood Vale was also published within its pages. Melville was a rebellious author who published criticism of the government and even spent a short period of time in jail for “contempt of court” over an article criticising a Supreme Court case relating to cattle-stealing (Flinn 221). Further, his history of Tasmania, which was highly critical of the colonial government, was finished while he was in jail, and he smuggled his manuscript to London to have it published. He experienced financial troubles in the late 1840s and returned to London in 1849, spending the next 24 years of his life there. Norwood Vale is by no means the most accomplished of Melville’s works; but it holds the title as his most significant: the first play to be written, published, and performed in Australia (no doubt aided by his virtual monopoly of the Tasmanian press). Of the actors who performed in Norwood Vale’s debut, only one went on to have a career of note. Performing in the role of the Harry Fawkes—“outlaw and would-be rapist”—J.H.S. (John) Lee then went on to become “one of the major comedians of the 1830s and 1840s, introducing dog acts and blackface routines in several colonies” (Melville NV fn 10). Even though Lee would go on from Norwood Vale to become a blackface performer of grotesque black characters, Norwood Vale’s Aboriginal hero Murrahwa is not in the mould of American blackface entertainment.

In fact, the representation of Aboriginality in Norwood Vale can be read as an extension of Melville’s subversive politics. Melville’s The Present State of Australia, published in 1851, for example, contains a chapter on “The Aborigines of Van Diemen’s Land” that ridicules the various approaches taken by the government. Melville describes the “black line” of 1830—where colonists, convicts and soldiers attempted to create an organised front that could move across the country and eradicate any indigenous people. While describing some horrific scenes of violence, Melville states: “[t]he whole scheme proved a complete failure, as any reasonable man might have anticipated […] His

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Excellency, however, to finish the comedy in all due form, issued a Government order, thanking the colonists for their exertions” (PSA 369). The fact that Melville calls this genocidal campaign a “comedy” suggests that his alignment with Aboriginal rights is more to do with his anti-government sentiments than it is to do with an acknowledgement of Aboriginal humanity. Nevertheless, Melville goes on to state that by 1848 the numbers of Aboriginal Tasmanians “are so reduced, and their habits so changed, that terrible as they formerly were in the estimation of the inhabitants, they are now only regarded with compassion” (PSA 370). There is an important distinction here, though the extent to which Melville himself is aware of it is debatable: the Aboriginal people are not said to be actually terrible, but terrible “in the estimation of the inhabitants”. That is, the negative figuration of Aboriginal people was seen by Melville as a fiction within the minds of colonists. Arguably, Melville had staged this nuanced reading of Aboriginality sixteen years earlier in Norwood Vale.

The bushrangers in Melville’s play are not as sympathetically portrayed as in Burn’s play. In Norwood Vale the bushrangers—Fellows, Fawkes and Hoodwink—are villains. The actors most likely had deep voices and even blackened faces so that they would be instantly recognised as villains. As will be seen in the following reading of the play, Melville separates blackness and Aboriginality in order to unsettle (and eventually resolve through the conventions of melodrama) socio-political concerns. The other main characters are Norwood (a property owner), his daughter Marian, her suitor Frederick, and Murrahwa. Prior to the action of the play, Norwood had reported the bushrangers to the police. However, the bushrangers escaped the police (and a certain hanging). In their first appearance in the play, the bushrangers plan their revenge: to kill both Norwood and his daughter. They then abduct the heroine, Marian. Norwood, unaware that two of the bushrangers are coming to murder him, waits at home while Frederick and Murrahwa search for Marian. The play then leads to two rescues: firstly, Frederick’s rescue of Marian, who is being guarded by Fawkes (who himself escapes to help the other bushrangers in their assassination attempt on Norwood); and secondly, the rescue of Norwood from the bushrangers. Murrahwa (variously referred to in the script by name or as “Native” or “Native Chief”) is involved in both of these rescues.

The first time Murrahwa is seen in the play, he is asking Norwood’s servant Ellen for “baccy and bredly” (NV 18). The beggarly stereotype seen in Burn’s play appears to

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have been widely held. Murrahwa is only granted his request after he “sings and dances a corroberee” (NV 18). Exactly what the dance involves is not clear, but presumably it would have involved a similarly crude portrayal as in The Bushrangers. Melville, however, goes further in highlighting the apparent crudeness of a corroboree by juxtaposing the song and dance with a song by Ellen. In this way the play almost functions as a space where cultural artefacts intertwine and are exchanged between an Aboriginal character and a white character. However, the biopolitics in the setting are obvious as the “Native” sings for basic rations and blankets (it is a system he is addicted to via “baccy”/tobacco, much to the benefit of white settlers), while Ellen sings for her own leisure and entertainment. Further, the Aboriginal song is likely to have been improvised (it is not included in the script) whereas Ellen’s song is transcribed into the script—elevated to the status of language. It then becomes apparent that, just as the bread and tobacco are Murrahwa’s “payment” for his performance, Ellen’s song is not for free: ELLEN: There now, will you promise not to send begging here, any of your gins and piccaninnies […] I don’t know which is worst, the bushrangers or you natives—the one obtain from us what they want without leave, whilst the other ask permission first—there, take your bread and tobacco, I have got no blanket for you. (NV 19) The payment demanded by Ellen, then, is the disappearance not just of Aboriginal people, but of responsibility toward Aboriginal people. Ellen’s command that Murrahwa leave is the equivalent of Jemmy’s homicide in The Bushrangers. In both cases, it is the representation of Aboriginal people as beggarly and uncultured that evacuates the land for white occupation. However, Melville’s representation is somewhat more complex.

The remarkable thing about Melville’s play is just how conscious he appears to have been about the injustice of Aboriginal dispossession. Not only does Murrahwa remain onstage to defy Ellen’s order to leave, but he responds to Ellen’s comparison of Aboriginal people and bushrangers with a significant protest. Murrahwa declares that any ill-feeling between Aboriginal people and white people is the result of the murder of Aboriginal women and children by white men:

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NATIVE: Bushranger rob, steal, kill, murder—little make them savage—black native love white man, till murder wife, piccaninny. ELLEN: Come be off, here comes a stranger […] (To NATIVE.) Be off, I tell you. (NATIVE remains.) (NV 19-20) Melville’s characterisation of Murrahwa in this scene seems to be intended to juxtapose the treatment of Aboriginal people by white women (who wish not to see Aboriginal people) and white men (who are responsible for the actual extermination of Aboriginal people). Between Ellen and the murdering white men, Murrahwa might well wonder which is worse. The stubborn presence of Murrahwa, who remains onstage, can also be read as a metaphor for the lingering presence of a question about personal responsibility for the way the land is emptied of an Aboriginal presence. In being forced to recognise the presence of Murrahwa, audience members are also forced to consider their relationship to Aboriginal people and their own role in the attempt to obliterate Aboriginality from the Australian landscape. The bushranger’s actual violence against Murrahwa and his family, and Ellen’s demand that he leave, are not entirely disparate actions: both centre Aboriginal people as objects of non-Aboriginal control, but, importantly for Melville, both attempts to eradicate an Aboriginal presence fail.

In the following scene Melville continues to unsettle representations of Aboriginality such as that contained in Burn’s play. With Murrahwa still in the background, Marian— the heroine—is reunited with her suitor, Frederick. At the sight of Marian and Frederick in each other’s arms, Murrahwa is seen in the background crying. Ellen’s response is harsh: ELLEN: (To the BLACK) I say, you black ugly fellow, be off with you, don’t be piping there like a child, because you can’t get a blanket [… FREDERICK and MARIAN exit] You big, black fool, I say, be off. Whilst I could cry to see my mistress so happy, you— you unfeeling, black, ugly mug, are blubbering about an old blanket. NATIVE: Me no cry lady, for blanket. Me cry for me once love like mistress—me made prisoner— me separated long time—me met like mistress—Oh! Happy—me all happy, had wife—had piccaninnies—when white men came, hunted kangaroo—hunted wife, and murdered piccaninnies—No, lady, me great

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man ‘mong black natives – me no cry for blanket—me cry for poor mistress—for poor gemmen, bushranger murder them. (NV 21) Initially, Ellen misunderstands Murrahwa to comic effect. However, the revelation of her misunderstanding allows Murrahwa the space to voice grievances against Aboriginal containment, the treatment of Aboriginal people as animals (hunted like Kangaroos), and to mourn the death of his wife and children. However, this second act of mourning serves several purposes. Firstly, it establishes Murrahwa’s relationship to his former wife as a mirror to Frederick and Marian’s relationship, effectively foreshadowing the impending separation to be caused by the bushrangers. Knowing that the bushrangers have murdered Murrahwa’s family intensifies the terror that the audience will feel upon Marian’s abduction. Secondly, the qualification that Murrahwa’s family was not murdered by just any white men, but by bushrangers, to some extent alleviates audience complicity with the Aboriginal murders. Thirdly, Ellen is allowed to make amends for her misunderstandings, not only coming to sympathise with Murrahwa, but also acknowledging that he has a “soul” trapped in his “black skin”: ELLEN: Poor fellow! You make me pity you. (Eyeing him.) What a sad thing it is your skin is black—you have a good soul—I will get you a blanket off my own bed. NATIVE: No, lady, me no blanket. (Exeunt) (NV 21) Thus, Murrahwa, in the opening scenes of Norwood Vale, is represented momentarily (for the equivalent of 10 minutes or so, in stage time) as a troubling character for white audience members—accusing them of murder, defying orders, and setting white women up as comic figures. There is a correlation between the way Murrahwa is treated during these short scenes and Melville’s description—quoted above—of the failed policy of the “black line”. In both texts there are failed though devastating attempts to clear the landscape of an Aboriginal presence, and the remaining Aboriginal people are treated with pity. Despite Murrahwa’s defiant exit after Ellen recognises his good soul, he later returns as a clichéd noble savage, aiding in the rescue of Marian and Norwood, and exacting fatal revenge upon the bushranger responsible for murdering his family. By the play’s conclusion there is little doubt that it is the bushrangers who are blackened with vice (along with anyone who simply assumes that Aboriginal people are soulless), and Murrahwa is a noble hero with a good soul. Order, however, is restored as Murrahwa slips back into a familiar noble savage stereotype, to be pitied as (even perhaps because) he alleviates white guilt. Murrahwa, in these ways, presents a temporary rebellion that is

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(eventually though inevitably) masked by racial stereotype. Even if the racial framing is not the same as in early blackface in America, the characterisation of Murrahwa shows that Aboriginality was similarly used in Australian culture during the 1830s as an ambivalent, threatening cultural presence. The threat of Murrahwa is that he encourages audiences to move into Aboriginality, like Ellen, and recognise colonial violence and Aboriginal humanity (even though that humanity is constructed by Melville).

Having established the danger of the bushrangers through the character of Murrahwa, the following scenes of Norwood Vale bring the bushrangers onstage. Essentially, the bushrangers are clichéd villains. Fawkes is exposed as a hypocrite: first saying he does not believe in murder before it is revealed that he is the murderer of Murrahwa’s family. His response to Hoodwink’s accusation of hypocrisy provides a true conundrum: FAWKES: I’m talking of whites, not of blacks—those blacks have no more feeling than dogs, they are only men and women in shape, nothing more—but what’s use talking […] HOODWINK: Good luck to you, Fawkes, dream of the black woman and her piccaninnies. (NV 22) The conundrum here is in Melville’s construction of Fawkes as a straw-man. To agree with him is to be aligned with a villain. In this way, the text invites audiences to move into Aboriginality and, unlike Fawkes, view Aboriginal people as people, not as soulless animals. Melville’s (paternalistic) politics in the play call for greater sympathy and pity for the plight of Aboriginal people.

The next scene begins with a villainous cliché—the bushrangers wake from their nightmares. Fellows wakes, screaming: “I did not your Honor—I am not guilty!—Oh! (awakes and laughs.) Ah! It’s only the customary dream which troubles me” (NV 24). On the other hand, Fawkes’ true nature is revealed as he wakes shouting “It’s only a black thief; shoot him—he has no soul!” (NV 25). These two awakenings are juxtaposed for dramatic effect as well. While Fellows can only claim his innocence by denying whatever crime he has been dreaming of, Fawkes is a true criminal who does not deny his crime but justifies it by representing his black victim as soulless. Not only is Fawkes’ hypocrisy reiterated to the audience, who would remember Ellen just minutes earlier recognising Murrahwa’s soul despite his blackness, but, immediately preceding the awakening, Hoodwink has robbed Fawkes in his sleep. Thus Fawkes’ dream refers

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simultaneously to Murrahwa and Hoodwink. In terms of a soulless blackness, then, Melville uses blackness as a synonym for villainy and urges the audience to recognise the blackness/villainy of the bushrangers rather than see Murrahwa as a black villain.

The bushrangers are juxtaposed with Murrahwa several more times in the play. During the abduction of Marian, Fellows attempts to kiss her. Marian gasps: “Monster! rather let me be shot than polluted with a kiss from such a horrid wretch” (NV 27). This protest recalls Ellen’s initial sarcastic observation of Murrahwa: “you would make a charming suitor for a pretty girl […] fancy him kissing one! oh!” (NV 18). These juxtapositions foreshadow the final climax, as Murrahwa and Fawkes come into direct conflict. Marian has been rescued by Murrahwa and Frederick, but the three bushrangers are in Norwood’s house about to murder him. In the melee that follows, Murrahwa kills Fawkes with his waddy and Norwood shoots and kills Fellows, while Hoodwink surrenders. In the final tableau, Murrahwa is kneeling beside Fawkes’ body “glorying in his revenge” and says “No more murder gin—no more murder piccaninny”, while the lovers embrace and Ellen concludes: “Happiness to the inhabitants of Norwood Vale” (NV 38). All appears to be resolved, including any reason for Murrahwa to be angered about the horrors of colonisation.

The remaining question surrounding Melville’s portrayal of Aboriginality appears to be whether Murrahwa is a challenging presence, or simply a dramatic device to blacken the bushrangers. Margaret Williams argues that: Where the Aboriginals of Burn’s play had been, like the stage natives of English drama, crudely drawn “Sambo” figures, [in Melville’s play] the native is a pathetic, even tragic, figure […] The attitude to the black man, usually presented on the stage as a grotesque comic figure, is one of the most interesting aspects of Melville’s play. (10) On the other hand, my reading of Melville’s manipulation of the affects of blackness seems to suggest that Murrahwa is at times far more than pathetic and tragic; he is often outright rebellious, threatening and dangerous. And what’s more, unlike Tom in The Bushrangers, Murrahwa lives to tell the tale. Seemingly, Murrahwa is more than a dramatic device. Nevertheless, Robert Dixon (1998) has written of Norwood Vale that “Melville’s moral scheme endorses the dominant social order. Its plot, character groupings and social point of view anticipate, in a simple way, a good deal of emigrant fiction written during and about the pre-gold-rush era” (“Literature” 70). My reading

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suggests that the end-result of Norwood Vale might be a reaffirmation of the dominant social order, but Melville does not present his endorsement in a simple way (possibly no melodrama did). Audiences are challenged by Murrahwa’s presence, and by his account of colonial violence. Murrahwa, for at least the first Act, impels audiences to confront their presumptions about Aboriginality. The Aboriginality he represents is far more complex than that seen in Burn’s The Bushrangers. Melville is using Murrahwa as a dramatic device, but also as a device to argue against the injustices committed against Aboriginal people. However, in keeping with the tradition of melodrama (which would dominate the Australian stage for the rest of the century) the dramatic resolution spells an end to any such rebellious point. Order is restored as the death of Fawkes gives no further reason for black rebellion. Margaret Williams is incorrect when she states that blackness at this time in history was usually presented as grotesque. Blackness at this time in history was actually a shadowy presence whose meaning was shifting; it could be an anxious presence, dignified, unsettling or grotesque. The simultaneous cultural presence of these various characteristics in the Australian imagination suggests that Aboriginality was a far more ambiguous presence on the early Australian stage than has been previously thought. Similarly to the dichotomy between “Long Tail Blue” and “Coal Black Rose” in America, Norwood Vale presents an Aboriginal character whose threatening presence is presented simultaneously alongside racial essentialisms. Closer to Blue, as a revolutionary upstart, than the characters of “Coal Black Rose” as malformed caricatures, Melville’s representation of Aboriginality is difficult to define: with soulful emotions, Murrahwa is not a simple stereotype, but nor does he threaten the white landscape of Norwood Vale.

Stereotypes of noble savagery do not necessarily upset white occupation of the land. For example, ideologies of noble savagery could exist simultaneously with theories of Aboriginal people as a “doomed race”.62 Such simultaneous theories could have several

62 In Creating Frames (2004), Maryrose Casey states that nineteenth-century constructions of Aboriginality represented colonial beliefs and theories that changed in specific content and logic throughout history, but always generated a racial/cultural hierarchy that privileged whiteness (11). Her brief description of nineteenth-century Australian theatre emphasises Social Darwinism as a major philosophical influence on contemporary beliefs about and representations of Aboriginality (11). The plays considered in this chapter were all written prior to Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859); while they can be read as products of the philosophical/scientific debates about how to

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narratives. One such narrative that was formulated in the 1830s held that Aboriginal people are the “debased remnants of a formerly civilised people,” and will inevitably (naturally) continue deteriorating unto extinction (McGregor [1997] 14). Aboriginal people, then, are both noble and doomed to die. Another narrative based the inevitable extinction of all Aboriginal people on Aboriginal women’s (mystical) lack of fertility after sexual encounters with white men (McGregor 16). Such theories were based solely on opinion and do not reflect actual facts (such as the sexually transmitted diseases with which white men might have infected Aboriginal women). If anything, such theories reflect white desires for a natural right to occupy Australia (a right that would alleviate any guilt over the violence actually being committed against Aboriginal people). Whether Melville was relying on any of these theories, Murrahwa was, no doubt, less threatening to the audience because of the prevalence of such theories (many people could, similarly, believe in the wrongs of colonial violence as well as doomed race theories, and/or theories of Aboriginal inferiority; McGregor 18). That is, theories such as that of the doomed race allow the audience, having momentarily encountered Aboriginal humanity and the violence of colonialism, to disengage from Aboriginality. This movement is an exercise of the white privilege to choose how (or for how long) Aboriginal humanity is recognised. So, while it is certainly significant that Murrahwa can (nobly) survive, he is no threat to the future (given that his wife and children have been murdered), and no threat to the audience’s position within the colonial order. Murrahwa represents (one way or another) a noble, but doomed, race.

In these ways the blackface in Australian culture was developing a discourse of Aboriginality. Similarly to the developments that were occurring in America, this set of cultural myths reflected white concerns rather than actual facts. Even though Tom and Murrahwa may seem like dichotomies (one beggarly and barbaric, the other noble and doomed), they both reflect white tensions about land occupation and the abuse of human rights. When Aboriginal culture, religion and spirituality are imagined to be meaningless—as when whites in blackface perform demeaning, comic corroborees—the scientifically classify Aboriginal people, which Darwin also engaged in, they should not be read as products of Social Darwinism. On the transnational context of Darwin’s theories, Mike Hawkins, in Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860-1945 (1997) has observed: “Darwin’s theory of natural selection—the theory that forms the nub of the modern theory of evolution—was embedded within and formed part of a wider world view” (30).

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doctrine of terra nullius is made defensible (as there is no structured, meaningful society seen to be “properly” using the land). Murder and genocide are imagined to be warranted, as Aboriginal people are imagined to be soulless, uncultured and dehumanised savages. Philip Mead (2008) has argued that “national-genocidal desires were further underwritten by assumptions about Aboriginal linguistic inferiority […] embedded in the colonising culture” (411). An assumed linguistic inferiority was central to the representation of Aboriginality in the plays I have just discussed: Aboriginal characters speak in a corrupted pidgin language, which colonial playwrights assumed to be an extension of Aboriginal people’s natural subhumanity. Even when Aboriginal people are presented as noble and their murder is represented as unjustified, terra nullius can still hold due to their imagined inevitable extinction (both culturally and racially). In this way, performers and audiences could momentarily engage with an Aboriginal humanity, in order to express and confront the paradoxes and anxieties of colonial violence against Aboriginal people, before disengaging from any identification with Aboriginal people. This engagement and disengagement resolved the paradoxes and anxieties of colonialism and transformed theories such as terra nullius and the doomed race into natural facts. In this way, blackface imaginations about Aboriginal people ensure that the land is available for white inhabitation.

I want to be careful here not to make too ambitious a claim for the transnational connections between American and Australian blackface entertainment prior to 1850. Margaret Williams (1983), who was quoted above as reading early dramatic representations of Aboriginality in line with English “Sambo” characters, also reads American theatrical influences into early representations of Aboriginality by authors such as Melville: “[t]he Aboriginal is […] grotesquely attired in hand-me-downs and with a good deal of the caricatured quality of stage American black-face types […] in something of the style of the minstrel show” (267). Terry Goldie (1989) follows Williams to suggest that “the stage conventions established by the American popular theatre seemed applicable to the Aborigine in Australia” (176). Goldie, in fact, includes the above quote from Williams during a reading of Melville’s play and nineteenth- century representations of Aboriginality.

More nuanced readings of nineteenth-century Australian-American transnational cultural networks are possible following the later work of Richard Waterhouse (1998).

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Waterhouse follows Williams’ and Goldie’s suggestions about a connection between American and Australian blackface in the 1830s, though Waterhouse is more cautious in reading American theatre’s influence on nineteenth-century representations of Aboriginality. In his reading of Norwood Vale, Waterhouse states that Murrahwa’s strength and bravery are distinctively Australian additions to “an American Stage stereotype” that “could not encompass the full or even partial range of Aboriginal characters or their experiences” (“Popular” 50). In emphasising the local adaptations of international dramatic conventions, Waterhouse’s argument about the nature of American-Australian networks of representation can be read as typically transnational (though he doesn’t use this term): The manner in which the playwrights added strength and bravery to Aboriginal characters [… reveals] the complexity of the cultural processes that were taking place in late nineteenth century Australia and the manner in which American influence was both direct and obvious but also sometimes piecemeal and less visible. (“Popular” 50) Waterhouse’s reading of transnational complexity is invaluable, but there is a slight problem with his incorporation of Melville’s work into his reading of late nineteenth- century American-Australian cultural relationships. Norwood Vale was published in 1834 and should not be read in the same manner as later cultural productions of Aboriginality in Australia. While Murrahwa was undoubtedly performed in blackface, he was not the perfect equivalent of Jim Crow and he was certainly not, given he predates the Virginia Minstrels by a decade, anything like a blackface minstrel. Burn’s and Melville’s characters, however, can be read as transnational products indicating a weak thematic connectivity between American and Australian blackface technologies. Arguably, the vaguely similar representations were the result of a strong transnational connectivity regarding the ideological hegemony of whiteness. The next section of this chapter suggests that the transnational connectivity of whiteness was strengthened through the presence (and minor influence) of American blackface entertainment in Australia.

Early American Blackface Entertainment in Australia There were certainly similarities between the effects of Australian and American blackface performance prior to 1834. However, the similarities were more ideological than stylistic, even though there had been American blackface performances in

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Australia, prior to 1834. According to Richard Waterhouse (1990), blackface performances may have occurred even before Levey’s theatre opened in 1834: The earliest negro impersonations here [in Australia] probably occurred as part of the entertainments provided by publicans at horseracing meetings. In the 1820s and 1830s at the Regentville and Killarney races the incidental amusements included skittles, Punch and Judy shows, “a big black American conjurer”, and “Black Simon playing the tambourine”. (Minstrel 27) It may be assumed, given that Australian theatre did not officially begin until 1834, that Australian audiences missed the early representations of blackness such as were occurring on the American stage. However, the mention of “Black Simon playing the tambourine” is almost certainly a reference to a blackface performance similar to those that Dixon and Rice were doing at this time. The actor playing Black Simon may have been American and/or actually witnessed early blackface performance in the United States; just as likely, he may have learned of such performances from contemporary newspapers and song sheets. Nevertheless, we can only speculate as to how Australians learned of popular entertainments across the globe, and, even more so, how they may have unofficially recreated such performances at race meets or in the backrooms of hotels.

As stated in Chapter One, T.D. Rice first “jumped Jim Crow” in 1830. Within two years the song was headlining performances in New York, and from 1836 to 1841 Rice had continual success in England. The first official record of the song in Australia dates to 1838. According to Richard Waterhouse: when “Jim Crow” first appeared on the colonial stage in 1838, at Sydney’s Royal Victoria, the critics were not amused. The Herald denounced the routine as “a mass of vulgar buffoonery and impiety” and expressed confidence that the management “will not allow the ears of decent people to be annoyed by it anymore.” The Herald’s trust proved misplaced, however […] “Jim Crow,” and to a lesser extent his counterpart, “Zip Coon,” proved favourites with both Sydney and Melbourne audiences. (Minstrel 27) More than likely, the newspaper reports reflected a middle-class fear of the possibility that rowdy characters such as Jim Crow and Zip Coon might taint an emerging national culture. That is, reports of early blackface, similarly to reports in America, are evidence more of the middle-class cultural cringe than popular opinion. Perhaps the first official Australian performance of “Jim Crow”, by the performer Morris Phillips in Sydney in 1838, represents not the first actual performance of this character in Australia, but the

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first official recognition of him.63 I would suggest that the success of the first official performance of “Jim Crow” in Australia in 1838 is not because of its “newness”, but because, by 1838, there was already space in the popular imagination of Australian audiences for such characters; this space probably emanated from the crude imitations at race-meets or in hotel back-rooms—or from the stories told about such characters in American and British newspapers, or by international travellers.

After 1838, Jim Crow remained a constant figure in Australian culture for at least the next forty years. In her fascinating study of Australian visual ephemera, Anita Callaway (2000) reveals the figure of Jim Crow to have been a common character at Australian balls. Isaac Solomon, perhaps an early larrikin, was arrested in 1839 for his attendance at a “disreputable private fancy-dress party” disguised as “the American Jim Crow” (91). That this disguise might be punishable by imprisonment may seem harsh, but colonial culture and society (especially as regards anything that might be considered socially disruptive, like carnivalesque masquerades) was heavily censored and regulated. The first public masquerade ball advertised in Australia was proposed by Levey to take place at his Theatre Royal on 31 January 1834. However, the Colonial Secretary banned the event, citing the fact that Levey’s licence did not allow masquerades. Masquerades were even banned in England at this time, for fear of class infiltrations by “adulteresses, concubines and prostitutes” (the Colonial Secretary, quoted in Callaway 87). While Callaway concedes there were many other disreputable masquerade balls, she has found no other evidence of the attendees and costumes at such functions. This is not to say that such masquerades and performances did not exist, just that they did not exist officially. In the script of a play which was never performed, however, there is evidence to suggest that rowdy blackface performances were occurring off the record.

An American blackface character appeared in the early Australian play, Life in Sydney; or, The Ran Dan Club (1843). The play is based on a popular English play of the time,

63 The lag between the first performance of “Jim Crow” in America and the first official performance of him in Australia is probably due to the climate of censorship in Australia at the time. Once “Jim Crow” had been approved and successful in England (rather than America) performances in Australia would have been approved. The characterisation may have been well-known in Australia well before 1838 (just not officially recognised).

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Tom and Jerry (1820-21). Both plays provide episodic skits set in various locations of a city; Life in Sydney is obviously set in Sydney, while Tom and Jerry is set in London. Both attempt to parody several of their city’s personalities and celebrities. In this, early Australian theatre can be seen to be transnational—an English play’s structure is mimicked, but the material is adapted to local situations. However, relating to this chapter, there is a peripheral transnational character that appears in Life in Sydney—Jim Brown, a black American. As the main characters move through settings such as Macquarie Place, near Circular Quay in Sydney, they eventually arrive at the Shakespeare Tavern. This tavern was a real location on Pitt Street opposite the Royal Victoria Theatre. The setting itself immediately implies the existence of a counter- theatre in Australia, outside and across the road from the normal bounds of theatre. The scene is set in a room of the tavern where “several parties” sit drinking and “playing a game of cards” (A.B.C. 68). The characters sit down, order drinks, begin to play cards and order from the barman (Dan) some entertainment in the form of Jim Brown:

TOM: I say Dan, glasses round, cigars etc—by the bye where’s Jim Brown— JERRY: Who’s Jim Brown, Tom. TOM: Jim Brown, my boy, is a Celebrated Nigger, came all the way from New York, to astonish the natives with his songs,—you have often seen and heard Rice I dare say, but this fellow is an original black and sings Jim Brown in a most successful manner, I say Dan send Jim in with the strings. (A.B.C. 70) The “natives” in the above passage refers to Australian-born white people, not Aboriginal people.64 The barman and main characters make some remarks parodying a real classical violinist, emphasising that this is a play about actual personalities. In fact, as Richard Fotheringham, the editor of a recent edition of the play, makes clear, even

64 In The Native Born: the First White Australians (2000), John Neylon Molony describes a number of appellations referring to white people born in Australia: “colonial youth”, “rising colonists”, “natives”, “cornstalkers”, “currency lads and lasses”, and so on. The former terms, incorporating variations of “colonial”, were generally avoided after the 1840s because “the use of ‘colonial’ and its derivatives [… implied] provincialism, coarseness, vulgarity and implicit inferiority” (24). The use of “native” can thus be read as a white nationalist invocation, with anti-Empire sentiment, which attempts to evade being derided as a lower class of whiteness at the same time as it erases the presence of actual “natives”— Aboriginal people.

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Jim Brown was a character advertised at the Royal Victoria Theatre in 1841. The “real” Jim Brown act was popular enough to last eighteen months in legitimate Sydney theatres (A.B.C. fn 70). Tom’s description of Jim Brown reads almost as a newspaper advert (emphasising the “real” blackness of the character even though it was undoubtedly a blackface performance), perhaps indicating that the same actor was intended for this role. Regardless of whether this Jim Brown was to be the same character that performed in a theatre, the setting of this scene indicates something more about blackface in early Australian society. As the barman leaves to prepare the drinks and find Jim Brown, another man watches out the door ready to warn the publican if the police (or “traps”) are sighted. As Tom explains: “this is Dans [sic] private room, and as the Big wigs are so devilish moral here, a game of cards is almost equal to High treason” (A.B.C. 70). Thus, in many ways, the scene is set off the record—in an illegal gaming house where not only are card games played, but so are blackface songs, perhaps even more ribald than Rice’s “Jim Crow” or the published lyrics of “Jim Brown”. Life in Sydney, then, undermines the myth of Sydney’s “moral” theatre by presenting an alternate drama that occurs unofficially. The reference to Jim Brown is also, then, a reference to more than Jim Brown—that across the road from the theatre in which this play may have been performed there are to be found performances of similar libellous entertainments, including blackface entertainment.

In the play, Jim appears in a typical early-blackface characterisation. He brings the main characters their drinks before wittily attempting to gain some payment from them: TOM: Well Jim my boy how are you, hows [sic] your windpipe to night, all right for a tune— JIM: Yes Massa him windpipe all right, cepting him rather dusty in the corners, but him wery soon wash him clean if massa give him leave. JERRY: A devilish sensible fellow, oh fire way. I’ll stand whatever you like to drink. (A.B.C. 71) Thus, Tom and Jerry are knowingly scammed into buying Jim a drink. It is advantageous to suggest that the representation of blackness (vis Aboriginality) in Australia as beggarly is the sole reason Jim Brown is represented as scamming a drink from Tom and Jerry, but there is, no doubt, a connection between the two discourses that audiences would have noticed. There is something of a similarity to the description of Jim as “devilish sensible,” and the devilish lithographs of “Long Tail Blue” discussed in Chapter One (See Figs 1.1 and 1.2). There, the character of Blue was drawn as

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respectable with a hint of devilishness. Both in Australia and in the States, the characters of Blue, Jim Brown, and Aboriginal beggars were somewhat related.

The Jim Brown song that was to be sung in Life in Sydney would most likely have followed an existing version. The script lists the song performed by Jim Brown as “Jim Brown No2”. Fotheringham quotes from an early blackface tune entitled “Jim Brown” as a suggestion as to what the tune may have been, resigned to the fact that “the tune has not been located” (71). I can only be as speculative in indicating that “Jim Brown” was indeed a popular blackface act in the United States during the mid to late 1830s. Two cover pages of New York sheet music publications for “Jim Brown” (1835-6) are reproduced in Fig. 3.1 and Fig. 3.2. It is highly likely that the Jim Brown character in Life in Sydney was to have been dressed as a band leader, as in these publications. Like the lithograph of “Coal Black Rose”, and from the same early American blackface period, the lithographs of Jim Brown are overtly sexualised. In Fig 3.1 the trumpet is positioned in a phallic manner, while the “appendages” (as Eric Lott (1993) calls them, referring to the same image that is reproduced in Fig 3.2) are strategically positioned to convey the threatening sexuality of the character (120). This is mirrored in the song lyrics as Jim Brown sings: De gals in de city dey all run arter me, Because I am so hansome de like dey neber see: Dey coax me to choose one ob dem, but I don’t know who shall be, Dey are such lubly creters, and dey all lubs me […] O den I’ll hab de encores, from all de lubly sex, An wen I choose one for my wife, O, de rest ob dem be vex. Presumably, “Jim Brown” appealed to Australian audiences in the early 1840s because of its trumpeting of both masculinity and whiteness.65 After all, the audience can enjoy Brown’s misogynistic desires, while also being comforted that the audibly-illiterate and overly-pretentious black man would fail in any actual attempt at sexual conquest with a civilised white woman. As was the case in America, it is possible that the ribald blackface entertainments—allowed because of myths about black hyper-sexuality— actually contributed to the softening of censorship policies more generally during the

65 In the American context Brown is often read as a dandy (see, for example Mahar [1998] and Cockrell [1997]), though his character and costume suggests that he is a band leader or a band member.

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mid to late nineteenth century. Arguably, too, such songs entrenched the assumed right of white men to pursue non-white women for sexual “entertainment”.

Fig. 3.1: “Jim Brown” (Endicott, Fig. 3.2: “Jim Brown” (Hewitt, 1835). c.1836).

Life in Sydney provides a fascinating glimpse at blackface on the Australian stage in the early 1840s. How did audiences react? Quite simply, they didn’t; or, rather, they weren’t, officially at least, given the opportunity. At the time Life in Sydney was written, the Colonial Secretary was still required to approve all plays performed in Australia. The Colonial Secretary in 1843 was Edward Deas Thomson. He initially refused to approve the play as it had no author listed—just the pseudonym “A.B.C.”. Shortly afterwards, H.C. O’Flaherty (not necessarily the author—the play may even have been co-authored according to Richard Fotheringham [46]) sent a letter to the Colonial Secretary claiming to act on behalf of the author, and asking that the play now be considered. It was considered and, again, denied, Thomson noting on the play itself: Inform Mr O’Flaherty that I regret I cannot sanction the representation of this piece at the theatre as it contains matter of a libellous character independently of other objections. (quoted in Fotheringham 42) Just what “matter” the Colonial Secretary found libellous is unclear. Presumably, the scene recounted above was among Life in Sydney’s more unsettling—revealing illegal

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gaming and “low” entertainment, not to mention the simple immorality of displaying, even championing, improper sexual pursuits, drinking and men at leisure. Despite the fact that it was never performed, it provides a glimpse of popular entertainment through the eyes of a contemporary playwright. In fact, the scene recounted above may even suggest that the censorship by the Colonial Secretary was not preventing certain entertainments (such as rowdy blackface songs), but simply forcing them into a different venue. Overall, the representation of Jim Brown in Life in Sydney suggests that American blackface entertainment was not a significant influence on representations of Aboriginal characters (and vice versa), but there were similarities between the two portrayals that indicate a foundation for the influence that American blackface entertainment would later have on representations of Aboriginality.

Conclusion: The Australian Chief In 1845 John Rae wrote a poem about the first official fancy-dress (not masked) ball; one of the characters was “An Australian Chief”.66 According to Anita Callaway, David Burn held ticket number 1000 for the event, to be held on “21 August 1844 at the Royal Victoria Theatre, where the pit had been temporarily boarded over to make one large ballroom by combining auditorium and stage” (88). I do not think Burn was the “Australian Chief”, but he would have been reminded of The Bushrangers when the blackfaced Chief made his entrance. Both an official drawing of the ball and John Rae’s poem reflect on the moment when:

66 In Science, Sexuality, and Race in the United States and Australia (2009), Gregory Smithers analyses the circulation of scientific discourses of whiteness and race between America and Australia. For Smithers, the related discourses of whiteness and race worked to restrict “the social mobility of African- Americans, Native Americans, and Australian Aborigines” (5). The fact that Aboriginal people are often referred to in Australian culture as “Chiefs” suggests that discursive connections were drawn between Aboriginal people and Native American people. Further investigations into this area might examine the relationship between cultural representations of Aboriginality and popular American shows such as “Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show”, which toured Europe and received a lot of international press. Cody toured with a large company of white American and Native American performers. Further, one of Cody’s business partners, William F. Carver, established his own Wild West show and toured Europe in 1889 and Australia in 1890. According to Roger Hall’s Performing the American Frontier (2001), Carver’s “Wild America” production featured in “spectacular melodramas in Australia” (150). Arguably, while this dissertation is limited to the connections between discourses of blackness and Aboriginality, discourses of blackness and Indianness influenced representations of Aboriginality in complex ways.

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An Australian Chief, with his blanket, vaults, With hop, step, and jump, to the midst of the waltz; And, armed with a wommera, waddy, and lance, Exults in a wild Aboriginal dance! (quoted in Callaway 90) Callaway notes that this is the first Aboriginal costume at an official fancy-dress ball. Further, could it be the first instance of an Aboriginal character hopping over, “dubble trubble”? There is more than a hint of Jim Crow to Rae’s description of the Chief’s interruption of a waltz (which itself is an action Jim Crow would have enjoyed—an invasion of upper class entertainment).

In fact, there were two patrons dressed as Aboriginal characters at the 1844 ball: Rae mentions one of them dancing, and the other using entertaining “lingo” (Callaway 90). Crude mimicries of black lingo were, of course, central to certain representations of blackness: the characters of “Coal Black Rose”, for example, sing in lingo, as do characters in T.D. Rice’s plays, and as would have Jim Brown in Life in Sydney. Given both Rae’s description of Aboriginal lingo and the above discussion of the corrupted pidgin in The Bushrangers and Norwood Vale, it seems that, if not by 1843, then by 1844, the styles of American blackface entertainment were beginning to be adapted to representations of Aboriginality in Australian culture. In his Sydney Morning Herald article covering the event, Rae prefigured his poem by mentioning the invasion of the waltz: One of these sable heroes, arrayed in a tattered blanket, enlivened the audience vastly on one occasion, by bursting into the centre of a circle of waltzers, and giving a ludicrous facsimile of an Aboriginal dance. (quoted in Callaway 91) It is highly likely that this facsimile—much like the “rude dance in which they go spinning round and round and throwing their arms about in an extravagant manner and singing” in Burn’s play (30)—was a mélange of crude imitation with a Jim Crow-style “hop, step, and jump”. Rae’s description of an Aboriginal character in 1844 highlights the fact that, at least as far as the few scarce pieces of evidence go, a change in the representation of Aboriginal people may have been occurring: from Murrahwa to Tom, a new “ludicrous facsimile” of Aboriginality was developing. The evidence presented in this chapter suggests that the discourses of blackness in America and Aboriginality in Australia were becoming intertwined. It can be said with confidence that, in both cases, Otherness had become, by 1844, a tool for white performers to use in order to energise themes relating to race, class, gender, and sexuality. Further, it has been argued that the

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representation of Aboriginality during this period was similar to blackness in America at the same time; both discourses allowed white performers and audiences to inhabit Otherness and domesticate alterity in order to resolve the anxieties of their local situations. There was, even if it was only “weak”, a transnational connection between American discourses of blackness and Australian discourses of Aboriginality between the 1820s and 1845.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Strengthened Connectivities: The Influence of Blackface Minstrelsy in Australia

During the third quarter of the nineteenth century the connections between American blackface entertainment and Australian representations of Aboriginality were strengthened. To a large extent the transnational connectivities67 between American and Australian cultures of blackness were strengthened because of the arrival of American blackface minstrels en masse in Australia from 1849. Chapter Three argued that in early theatrical representations of Aboriginal people, there was a relatively weak connection between American representations of blackness and Australian cultural characterisations of Aboriginality, but suggested that there were robust transnational connectivities between American and Australian hegemonies of whiteness. Chapter Four will continue to investigate these American-Australian connectivities. For example, this chapter uncovers further links between American blackface entertainment and representations of Aboriginality in nineteenth-century Australian culture. Firstly, it will examine the character of Warren Warren from the play Arabin (1849). This section will suggest that Warren Warren can be read as an Australian blackface minstrel character, stylistically incorporating elements of the American blackface minstrel show. Following this discussion, I will analyse two bushranging dramas containing Aboriginal characters. This second section will examine some of the factors that shaped the blackface representation of Aboriginality. Overall, this chapter argues that nineteenth-century Australian blackface entertainment, like American blackface entertainment, provided the opportunity for performers and audiences to move through Otherness and resolve political and racial anxieties. When they represented and viewed Aboriginality, Australian performers and audiences were engaged with debates about the content and destiny of whiteness. The fantasy of a white hegemony, enacted in representations of Aboriginality, was supported in Australia through the importation of American

67 I will continue to refer to “connectivities”, as defined by Grewal (2005), and cited in Chapter Three, as the identities and groups constituted, supported and connected through transnational networks and exchanges (23).

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blackface entertainment. In fact, the nineteenth-century dialogue between American and Australian blackface entertainment contributed to and strengthened the transnational connectivity of whiteness.

Blackface Minstrelsy and Aboriginality in Australia Blackface minstrelsy had become very popular in America during the early 1840s, and continued to be the most popular form of entertainment in America throughout the 1850s and 1860s. Its popularity began to decline during the 1870s and it was superseded by vaudeville in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Blackface was still used, however, and blackface minstrelsy was still seen in its original formats, albeit as part of novelty or amateur performances. The nature of the popularity of blackface minstrelsy was slightly different in Australia. Waterhouse asserts that, while “‘Jim Crow’, and to a lesser extent his counterpart, ‘Zip Coon’, proved favourites with both Sydney and Melbourne audiences […] in the second half of the century the structured minstrel show monopolised the colonial popular stage” (27). In addition to the characters from the period of early American blackface entertainment (1820s-1843), blackface minstrelsy (with multiple performers providing an entire evening’s entertainment) was popularised in Australia around 1850, largely by American troupes who toured Australia.

Samuel Sanford’s memoirs refer to his close friend, J.C. Rainer, as leading a blackface minstrel troupe to Australia. In 1851, J.C. Rainer (who had been in the Buckleys with Sanford), fortunate to be alive after narrowly avoiding a bullet some years earlier in Vicksburg, left the Buckleys and travelled to Australia with his own troupe to capitalise on the booming numbers of people travelling to the Australian gold rush. According to information compiled by Rainer’s great grandson, Tony Rainer, Rainer’s Ethiopian Serenaders had toured San Francisco before departing for Australia onboard the Speed in 1852.68 Rainer’s troupe arrived in Sydney on 19 September 1852, and began performing almost immediately. In 1853 they arrived in Melbourne.69 An undated article by “Restless Jimmy” (c. late-1870s), apparently written by someone who had

68 Even though J.C. Rainer’s name appears in playbills for Sanford’s various troupes for the remainder of the 1850s, it was common at the time for performers to rename themselves (or be renamed by a manager like Sanford) to capitalise on someone else’s popularity. Nevertheless, the first mention of Rainer’s Serenaders is in a playbill for Rainer and Donaldson’s Serenaders in San Francisco on 3 January 1851. 69 This information has been provided by Tony Rainer in personal correspondence with me.

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performed with Rainer, incorrectly labels Rainer’s Serenaders “the first minstrel troupe in Victoria” (Restless Jimmy, “The First Minstrel Troupe in Australia”). Nevertheless, Rainer’s Serenaders were among the first American blackface minstrels in Australia.

The first blackface minstrel troupe in Australia, according to Richard Waterhouse (1990), was the Blythe Waterland Serenaders, who were organised in England by Henry Burton and arrived in Australia in late 1849 (Minstrel 33). Burton’s troupe contained minstrel performers J.W. Reading and the brothers C.V. and G.B. Howard. In the saloon of Sydney’s Royal Hotel in early 1850, the Blythe Waterland Serenaders performed “a successful series of twenty-three concerts before engaging on a country [NSW] tour” (Minstrel 33). The troupe dispersed and the Howard brothers then led “Howard’s Ethiopian Serenaders”, who were popular throughout the 1850s and beyond. American troupes that followed the gold rush from the Pacific Slope of California to the fields of Ballarat included the “New York Serenaders (1851), Rainer’s Original Ethiopian Serenaders (1852) and the Backus Minstrels (1855)” (Minstrel 36). Rainer’s Serenaders were successful in Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart, but presumably, like other performers, when they arrived at the gold fields of Ballarat in 1854 they struggled to find a theatre (none had actually been built). Waterhouse states that Rainer “hired and erected a large tent at Bendigo, announcing that his company expected to be there for ‘the next few months’” (Minstrel 37). However, it seems that Rainer did not anticipate the troubles in Ballarat following the events that would become known as the Eureka Stockade. “Restless Jimmy” (n.d.) wrote of Rainer’s troupe: [they] procured a canvas outfit and started for the gold-fields, but I think they only pitched their tent once. […] The company, unfortunately, arrived at Ballarat at the time of the disturbance between the diggers and the government concerning the gold licence. Martial law had been proclaimed, and any tent having a light burning after 8 P.M. was liable to be fired into by the military; no one could be out after that hour without the countersign, and in no case could more than two people be seen conversing together. This put a damper on the show business, and they returned to Melbourne. (Restless Jimmy, “First Minstrel”) Thus, if it wasn’t already clear to Rainer from his experience in the major Australian cities, his experience in Ballarat following the Eureka Stockade would have crystallised for him the specifically local concerns in the everyday lives of many Australians at this time. American blackface minstrelsy had to adapt or risk becoming irrelevant.

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Waterhouse’s exemplary monograph, From Minstrel Show to Vaudeville, traces the cultural penetration of blackface minstrelsy in Australia. There are a number of surviving reviews and advertisements for blackface minstrel shows but, in addition to these, Waterhouse documents the amateur performances that catered to the popular demand for blackface minstrelsy. Among these were performances on ferries by blackface bands and amateur acting groups, sporting clubs and schools holding blackface minstrel show benefit nights (Minstrel 98). Further, according to Waterhouse: Such was the cultural penetration of [blackface] minstrelsy into the country that in shearing sheds of the Riverina the men sometimes put on “Christy Minstrel” concerts for the amusement of themselves and the bosses’ families. (Minstrel 85) And also, blackface minstrel songs were to be heard inside almost any home with a piano: As early as 1854 the Sydney firm of Marsh and Company was advertising songsheets of Ethiopian Melodies; while from the 1870s Moore’s, the well- known Sydney booksellers, stocked a cornucopia of imported minstrel songbooks, joke-books, stump speeches and burlesques […] As a result of this cultural penetration blackface images became common-place and minstrel language passed into the everyday use of colonial Australians. (Minstrel 99) With such proliferation it is no wonder that characters such as Jim Crow remained in the Australian imaginary. In The Currency Lass; or, My Native Girl (1844), the heroine Susan has many disguises, among them the (undoubtedly blackface) disguise of “Jack Tar” (Williams 31). A similar character to Jack Tar, Jubilee Jake is central to the plot of a popular Australian melodrama from 1872, Hazard, or Pearce Dyceton’s Crime (Fotheringham 315-84), and Jim Crow appears on roller-skates in a painting of a (yet another) fancy-dress ball in 1878 (Callaway 98). Clearly the arrival of the minstrels in the early 1850s led to the proliferation of a (blackfaced) discourse about blackness at many levels of Australian society.

However, there is some contention as to the content presented through the blackfaced discourse blackness in Australia. Waterhouse, for instance, notes that during the 1860s “the influx of American minstrels into the Australian colonies ceased”, largely due to the poor prospects and the hazardous voyage across the Pacific (Minstrel 39). British blackface minstrel troupes continued to prosper, largely without the “negro business”. Presumably, by “negro business” Waterhouse is referring to the racist jokes and grotesque characterisations that had been central to American minstrelsy. Jon Stratton

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(2007) has drawn on Waterhouse’s historical observation to argue that “Australians liked the new popular music that the minstrel troupes brought with them but were less interested in the ‘Negro business’” and, further, that minstrel music influenced Australian popular music “without the [influence of] ‘Negro business’ which, after all, had little emotional resonance in Australia” (163).70 Part Two of this dissertation strongly contests this statement. It is cleat that Stratton’s information regarding the scarcity of American blackface minstrel troupes as well as blackface minstrel materials throughout the 1860s is inaccurate for at least four reasons. Firstly, it is questionable to simplify the racial politics of blackface minstrelsy by implying that the American troupes were racist while the British troupes were not. Part One of this dissertation has shown that even when race is not immediately apparent, blackfaced representation always contributes to a white ideology of blackness. Secondly, Stratton overlooks the history of blackface minstrelsy in the 1870s and 1880s. Waterhouse notes that—due to cheaper and safer travel across the Pacific—there was a “resurgence” in the number of American troupes by 1870. This is evidenced by the opening (by an American minstrel troupe manager) in 1869 of Australia’s first theatre committed solely to blackface minstrel entertainment: Weston’s Opera House in Melbourne (Minstrel 43). Weston’s Opera House was short-lived, but other minstrelsy-committed theatres opened around this time throughout the colonies. If the “negro business” of blackface entertainment was absent for a relatively short period during the 1860s, it had returned to the Australian stage by the 1870s. Thirdly, it is not the case that a transnational exchange between Australia and America ceased because blackface minstrel troupes stopped coming to Australia. There was a continued trade in songbooks and song sheets, jokebooks and amateur guides, as well as reviews from newspapers and overseas publications. Fourthly, it is a central argument of this chapter that there were many “emotional resonances” with “negro business” for Australian audiences. For example, Richard Waterhouse supposes that “to some extent, at least, the prism through which Australians viewed the Aborigines was one cut by the [blackface] minstrels” (Minstrel 100). I would qualify this statement to suggest that the prism through which Australians

70 This argument is also made by John G. Blair in “Blackface Minstrels as Cultural Export” (1997). Blair argues that “The Australians, like the British, delighted in blackface premises for entertainment but both wanted […] no religion or politics to mar the laughter. Thus an American troupe might well put on a ‘British’ program in Australia” (61-2). It would appear the both Stratton and Blair base their arguments on Waterhouse’s observations.

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viewed Aboriginal people was one that, between 1849 and 1870, gradually became more aligned with the myopic vision of blackness as it was presented by the (American) blackface minstrels.

In the same year that the Blythe Waterland Serenaders arrived in Australia, a local play was performed. Entitled Arabin; or, the Adventures of a Settler (1849), it was James R. McLaughlin’s adaptation of a novel by Thomas McCombie. McCombie was born in Scotland in 1819 and arrived in Australia in 1841 desirous of becoming a squatter (Farrow 132). According to Richard Fotheringham (2006), in the year he penned Arabin (1845), McCombie had “risen to prominence as a Melbourne city councillor and editor and owner of the Port Phillip Gazette” (97). McLaughlin was not as notable; he was a schoolmaster with considerable artistic potential that remained unfulfilled because, according to “Garryowen’s” [Edmund Finn’s] Chronicles of Early Melbourne (1888), McLaughlin “was too fond of the tavern” (quoted in Fotheringham 99). McLaughlin and McCombie had collaborated to author a bushranging drama entitled Jackey Jackey the N.S.W. Bushranger in 1844, which was initially banned by the Colonial Secretary, although it was later performed in Victoria in 1852 (Fotheringham 102). In the meantime, McLaughlin adapted McCombie’s novel for a one-off performance in March 1849.

In McLaughlin’s stage adaptation of Arabin there are no Aboriginal characters central to the story, but there is a peripheral Aboriginal character. Warren Warren, an “Aboriginal Chief” (McLaughlin 115), appears in two scenes; both times as comic relief. In Warren Warren’s first appearance, Arabin asks him for directions. Warren Warren demands money before he will guide Arabin to Willis’s station. Once he is paid (under the assumption that he will accompany Arabin), Warren Warren only points in the direction and laughs. Warren Warren—a trickster rather than a dehumanised beggar—is more similar to Jim Brown (from Life in Sydney) than Tom (from The Bushrangers). He scams Arabin rather than simply begging. Terry Goldie (1989), in his study of representations of indigeneity in Australia and Canada, states that the character of Warren Warren indicates a shift in Australian representations of Aboriginality, away from British forms of representation toward a style of representation that “might be

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linked to the stage black of the nineteenth-century American theatre” (175).71 Goldie bases this reading on the trickster nature of Warren Warren’s character as well as the character’s crude comedy and musical outburst. Warren Warren can be read as signalling a minor alignment between American and Australian styles of representing of Otherness. Arguably, the minor alignment of blackface styles worked to support and deepen the nature of the already-existing transnational connectivity between Australian and American reveries of whiteness. Further investigation into the character of Warren Warren will explicate this argument.

Warren Warren’s second appearance in Arabin appears to be mainly a comic interlude. He sits around the fire with several other Aboriginal characters before singing a song, probably performed according to the stage conventions of a blackface minstrelsy chorus song. According to this reading, the other Aboriginal characters would have sat in a semicircle around the fire, facing the audience. Warren Warren would have stood in front of the group to sing the verses, with the others joining in for the chorus: “Merri jig, me sing – Wah! Wah!” (McLaughlin 155). Further, the lyrics represent a strange conflation of American blackface lyrics with Australian topics. The opening verse refers to an opossum that is caught by the tail. This occurrence is very similar to the early blackface song “Sittin’ on the Rail; or, the Racoon Hunt” (1834). The song then typecasts Aboriginality through a pastiche of “Aboriginal signs”: kangaroo-hunting with a boomerang, Aboriginal superstition, and Warren Warren’s desire for “backy”, “flour”, “tea” and “a leetle rum” (McLaughlin 155-56).

Even though the character of Warren Warren seems thinly drawn when compared to the heroism and courage of Murrahwa from Melville’s play fifteen years earlier, some character elements are common to both portrayals. For example, there is a common portrayal of Aboriginal people as dependant on white rations, tobacco and rum. Further,

71 In Chapter Three I criticised Goldie’s reading of Melville’s Norwood Vale for a lack of historical specificity. In reading his argument here, about a shift from British influences toward American blackface entertainment influences on representations of Aboriginality, I am deliberately overlooking his reading of Norwood Vale. Goldie’s reading of Norwood Vale should be classified as an ambitious attempt to include an early Australian play as part of a shift that actually took place around 1850. It is still an important argument.

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Warren Warren’s “Merri Jig” contains some potentially subversive references to white civilisation: Merri jig, me sing, No jaily at de spring, Him white fellow berry berry bad; Him need a constable, And a Wiggy, and a Jail, And him parson preach […] And me laugh at him white fellow too – Him preach , and him pray, And him go de debil way, While him black fellow hunt kangaroo – Merri jig me sing – Wah! Wah! (McLaughlin 155-56) Warren Warren, living in a state of nature, provides a subversive contrast to whiteness. Warren Warren’s argument here is that the legal system (police, judges—“Wiggy”) and the jail are evidence that white people are inherently bad. Further, religion is also mocked, as the preacher is sinful (“go de debil way”) while Warren Warren finds happiness hunting kangaroo. Contrasting Warren Warren with the preacher in this way appears at first to evoke a typical image of the noble savage, happily and peacefully at home in nature, in order to criticise white civilisation. Richard Nile and Christian Clerk (1996) have defined noble savagery as a criticism of “the forces that were shaping industrializing Europe” (116). Such criticism elevated and praised indigenous peoples living in a “‘state of nature’ in which innocent, prelapsarian man lived a virtuous and happy life uncorrupted and degraded by artificial society” (Nile and Clerk 116). Warren Warren appears to be an ideal noble savage and thereby a criticism of civilisation and the industrial world but, nevertheless, the irony of his “exulted” status cannot be overlooked. That is, the absence of law and religion in Warren Warren’s world of noble savagery, which is the very basis of the apparent criticism of civilisation, also provides the foundation of terra nullius—that Aboriginal people did not have law, agriculture, culture or religion. The characteristics that allow Warren Warren to function as a theatrical device that criticises white society are also the characteristics that make him a theatrical device for the dissemination of myths about Aboriginality; Warren Warren represents the myths that work culturally to reinforce the legend of terra nullius.

In a similar way to American blackface minstrelsy, then, this peculiar Aboriginal minstrelsy may have been read by the predominantly white audiences as social criticism against legal and religious institutions—responsible, as they were, for restrictions of

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personal freedom. However, similarly to American blackface minstrelsy, the song is also about Warren Warren’s intellectual, ceremonial, and cultural inferiority. The oscillation of these characteristics—rebelliousness and racial essentialism—suggest a thematic similarity between American blackface minstrelsy and Warren Warren’s song. Such a similarity suggests that the structure, themes and style of blackface minstrelsy were at least familiar to Australian audiences, and may even have preceded the Blythe Waterland Serenaders across the Pacific. Richard Fotheringham reads Warren Warren’s performance as “stage ‘Jim Crow’—a parody by a white actor in blackface […] popularised by Thomas D. Rice in the previous decade” (McLaughlin fn 97). Possibly, though, Warren Warren’s song appears to be more sensitive to the slight shifts in representations of blackness that had occurred during the 1840s in America (and, possibly, in Australia). Warren Warren’s song is not so much Jim Crow (early blackface), as Virginia Minstrels (blackface minstrelsy). Overall, however, the transgressive aspects of Warren Warren’s character are contained by an essentialised inferiority, allowing audiences to relate to his rebelliousness (that is, to move into Aboriginality) even as they patronise him (thus moving out of Aboriginality).

The character of Warren Warren shows how blackface minstrelsy was beginning to influence the representation of Aboriginality. Aboriginality in Arabin was a comic interlude with little effect on the drama of the main event (like early blackface), but performed in blackface minstrelsy style. Warren Warren presented grievances against religious, spiritual and legal authority. Could Warren Warren actually be among the first representations of Australia’s emerging national characteristics of egalitarianism and anti-authoritarianism? Perhaps blackface was the necessary mask under which these controversial attitudes could be expressed in a highly-censored culture. However, blackface risked bringing white subjectivity and black subjectivity together. To contain the effects of this cross-racial engagement, various representations of Otherness—both the grotesque, dehumanised caricature from America and the noble savagery myth from Australia—aligned in the character of Warren Warren. The transnational connection provided a platform from which to express anti-establishment (national) ideologies at the same time as energising racisms to exclude Aboriginal people from these ideologies.

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Catching the Kellys and the (Re)making of Whiteness Following the mass arrival of American blackface minstrels from 1850 onward, representations of Aboriginality kept up to date with worldwide trends in representing blackness.72 Whether the increase in the number of plays representing Aboriginal characters was because of a general fascination with alterity (as evidenced by the expansion of blackface minstrelsy), or because the creation of separate colonies in Australia loosened the censor’s stronghold and thereby opened the door to more local productions, there was an increase in the number of plays with local themes and characters after 1850 in Australia. Eric Irvin (1975) has noted the increase in plays written and produced in Australia by Australian residents, post-1850: Between 1834 and 1850 there were four Australian plays produced in Tasmania, twenty-two in Sydney, and five in Melbourne. In the period 1851-1870 inclusive there were fourty-four Australian plays produced in Sydney, seventy-seven in Melbourne, and one in Tasmania. (“Early Drama” 363-4) That is, in the first seventeen years of Australian theatre, just thirty one Australian plays were produced; over the next twenty years, this number rose to 121. The reasons for the increase in the production of Australian plays are various, but a substantial factor was, no doubt, a change in censorship policy. The Colonial Secretary had not been encouraging of plays with Australian characters prior to 1850. Richard Fotheringham quotes a letter written by the Colonial Secretary in 1844 as stating that “nothing ‘local, political, sectarian, or immoral’ was allowed” on the Australian stage (6). However, plays previously approved by the Lord Chamberlain were allowed, which may have been how some blackface acts were approved by proxy, as it were. Once acts were performed and approved in London—like “Jim Crow”—they could be performed in Australia. It is uncertain how many plays after 1850 presented Aboriginal characters, but the pattern for representing blackness had been established. In Australia, blackface continued to be used as a mask for controversial, nationalist, white sentiments. However, blackface also prevented any lasting engagements between white audiences and Otherness by simultaneously disseminating a cruel and distorted racial essentialism. Thus, white audiences could move into and out of blackface, revelling in the radical

72 I am yet to find evidence that a full evening’s performance in blackface Aboriginal costume ever took place and I do not think such a performance occurred. For the purposes of this chapter, I am suggesting that the blackfaced representation of Aboriginal characters in plays, songs and comic interludes during the nineteenth century presented a similar kind of blackness (rebellious, racist, commoditised, and so on) as that presented by the blackface minstrels in America and Australia.

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local concerns, and then returning to their normalised colonial selves at the conclusion of the performance.

One of the most controversial genres of performance throughout nineteenth-century Australian theatre was the bushranging drama. In the 1860s, blackness was used as a device in many of these dramas in order to ensure that the socially threatening figure of the bushranger was not overly heroicised. The faces of villains and bushrangers were routinely blackened, even when the characters were Anglo-Celtic. While censorship had relaxed somewhat during the 1860s, the bushranger was still a controversial figure, according to Margaret Williams (108). In December 1863 a bushranger melodrama was staged at the Victoria Theatre in Sydney: Canowindra; or, The Darky Highwayman and the Settlers’ Homes on the Abercrombie. As the title crudely suggests, the drama of the piece was to centre on the escapades of a black bushranger. It is unclear whether the bushranger was to be portrayed as Aboriginal, or was to be more in line with American minstrelsy’s black characterisation (both might have been called “darky” in the lingo of the day). Nevertheless, among the play’s attractions was a “Champion Rattlesnake Jig and Juba Dance” (advertised in the Sydney Morning Herald; quoted in Williams 108). There is a peculiar alignment here between the oriental snake-charmer and a minstrelsy- style dance (Juba was one of the first African American blackface minstrels in the 1840s)—a reflection perhaps of Australia’s split vision of an Otherness derived from fantasies within the Empire (in India perhaps) and imaginings from the New World (America). Nevertheless, there was some kind of blackface-style interlude planned for the performance. Whether this dance was to be performed by an American-style minor character or by the main character, in a performance reminiscent of Warren Warren’s conflation of American blackface minstrelsy and Aboriginal stereotypes, is unclear. What is known is that Aboriginal bushrangers or bushmen would appear in later plays, such as Catching the Kellys (1879), which also incorporated an American blackface character, and Alfred Dampier’s adaptation of Robbery Under Arms (1890), which was laden with the mythology of noble savagery.

Bushranging was still likely to be seen as a dangerous subject in 1863 (mainly for its presumed influence on young Australians). The literal blackness of the bushranger in Canowindra serves to assuage any possible revolutionary readings of the play. A review in Empire stated that:

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the moral of the piece does not degenerate in making the darky a hero, Mr. Burford’s acting contributed materially in displaying the robber in his true colours. The piece contains nothing to influence the rising generation with a desire for bushranging. (quoted in Williams 108) Blackness in Canowindra serves, according to this critic, to disengage the audience from the bushranger; in essence, it makes the bushranger villainous. Where Melville had attempted to manipulate blackness in order to represent Aboriginality sympathetically, here the blackness of the bushranger’s skin is synonymous with his vices. In Chapter Three I discussed how Melville unsettled the relationship between race and character through a series of ironic juxtapositions (where goodness did not essentially relate to skin colour—much to the surprise of some characters). Canowindra, in contrast to Melville’s subversive separation of blackness and Aboriginality, appears to have conflated black skin and poor character in order to make obvious the villainy of bushranging. The result is the demonisation of blackness itself which is used to make bushranging unappealing. As discussed in Chapter One, the epidermalising of blackness (that is, the depiction of blackness as causally determining criminal behaviour) to this extent was a hallmark of American blackface entertainment’s representation of blackness.

Canowindra clearly didn’t work as a tool of social instruction, or if it did, Edward Kelly was not among its patrons. Throughout the 1870s, critics condemned a number of bushranging dramas (Williams 109), clearly showing that, in the main, the Colonial Secretary had loosened his strict censure of Australian themes. The critics of bushranging dramas were likely to have felt vindicated when, for two years toward the end of the 1870s, Edward Kelly led a group of his friends and family to become the most renowned bushranging gang in Australian history. Critics argued, as recounted in Margaret William’s history of nineteenth-century Australian drama (108-16), that the gang’s escapades were in no small way due to the romanticisation of bushrangers on the Australian stage. Such arguments led Joseph Pickersgill to write a burlesque of bushranging melodramas. With the Kelly Gang still accruing notoriety and defying police, Catching the Kellys opened in Melbourne on the 29 March 1879. The play was only about half an hour long, but the theatre was overcrowded on opening night (Irvin 83). One critic suggested this was no doubt due to the “magic name of Kelly” (quoted in Irvin 83). Despite harsh contemporary criticism for a play that ridiculed the police “at a time when they most require the moral support of the community” (quoted in Irvin 83),

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the play ran for eleven consecutive performances in Melbourne, four performances at Sydney’s Queen Theatre, and a revival at the People’s Theatre in Melbourne the following year. Melissa Bellanta (2009) has recently argued that the popularity of such shows was due to the affinity Australia’s larrikin population shared with both Ned Kelly and blackness (read rebelliousness) (4). Bellanta further states that larrikins were known to black-up for fun, and that constant sale of blackface paraphernalia was reported in suburbs where larrikins were known to congregate (4). In the case of Catching the Kellys, such a large number of performances for a locally-written play was apparently very unusual for the time, and indicated that the critics were failing to deter audiences from such an attractive subject (Irvin 83).

Three characters in Catching the Kellys display the peculiar form of blackness that was emerging on the Australian stage. The first is the standard minstrel-type character. Bellanta has read the character of Henderson Africanus in Catching the Kellys thus: “[a]lmost certainly portrayed in blackface, he no doubt provided laughs by delivering stump-speeches in […] dialect, a standard feature of the minstrel show” (5). Further, I would add, Africanus had little to do with the plot, adding a stock comic character to a burlesque performance (likely the result of a particular troupe member’s ability rather than a narrative requirement for this particular character). The far more interesting characters are the two police trackers. The story revolves around a bush sergeant (and self-proclaimed “celebrated bushranger-catcher”) from Queensland, who arrives in Victoria with two Aboriginal trackers to help the Victorian troopers catch the Kelly Gang (Williams 110). The party wander aimlessly through the bush, occasionally shoot at each other, and are eventually caught by the “Kellys”. A review from the Argus tells the rest of the story: The supposed Kellys, however, get drunk, when the valiant sergeant and his men overpower them, and then it appears that their prisoners are not Kellys at all, but only a company of amateur policemen who were having a lark! The denouement is reached by the black trackers proving Irishmen in disguise. (quoted in Williams 110) In true burlesque fashion, the play climaxes with the revelation of a fruitless plot: the Kellys do not exist, and the party has been led on this wild goose chase by Irish larrikins in blackface pretending to be Aboriginal police trackers. There has been absolutely no drama to speak of. The revelation of counter plots is mirrored in the revelation of counter-identities, so clearly articulated in the trackers’ transformation from Aboriginal

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to white. Soon-to-be national characteristics of anti-authoritarianism and larrikinism are clearly dominant in this play. 73 Through the onstage revelation of whiteness underneath blackness, Catching the Kellys also represents a certain kind of white privilege which might be said to be at the heart of both Australian and American culture at the time: the right to move into Otherness and determine, manipulate and control it, before moving out of Otherness and returning to a subject position at the centre of an emerging national identity.

Conclusion This chapter has shown that Australian discourse about Aboriginality and American ideologies of blackness, originally only weakly connected in Australian culture, gradually aligned from 1849-1879. To echo the critical theorist Arjun Appadurai (1996), blackface provided a shared “cultural space” where American discourses about blackness became “indigenized”, where one historical “trajectory” of Aboriginality in Australian culture “flows into [a] complex transnational structure” such as American blackface entertainment (64-5). The transnational connectivity between Australia and America, provided through (blackface) technology, strengthened throughout the nineteenth century. This is not to say that the American discourse about blackness didn’t change; it most certainly adapted to represent Aboriginal characters and local (white) concerns. The main relationship that was convened through transnational blackface entertainment was between American and Australian white masculinities. The evidence considered in this and previous chapters suggest that, while blackness is overdetermined, it is overwhelmingly overdetermined with white (masculine) desires to rationalise white dominance of land and (non-white) people.

This chapter has provided readings of Australian blackface entertainment as an imagined justification for Aboriginal dispossession. Such readings can force us to consider the importance of land to both Australian and American blackface entertainers and audiences. In one of the very few critical studies of American blackface and

73 The scope of this chapter does not permit me to theorise colonial/national identity. Catching the Kellys and many of the other plays mentioned in this chapter precede the date of Australian Federation (1901) and the formal establishment of an Australian nation. However, I would argue that a national consciousness was forming well before Federation.

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Aboriginality, Helen Gilbert (2003) has argued that there is a connection between blackface, landscape and colonialism: Because of its power to signify different kinds of Otherness, blackface minstrelsy might be seen as the symptomatic nineteenth-century stage form for an era of territorial expansion, not just in the United States but also in other settler colonies with growing non-indigenous populations. Critics note the immense popularity of minstrel shows in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, as well as in Britain […]. (“Black and White” 683) Thus, a significant connectivity between Australia and America is the use of white representations of Otherness to provide an apparently “justified” white territorial expansion. By determining Otherness, white performers eased anxieties about the dispossession of Indigenous people. Further, the popular nationalism of blackface entertainment in America might force us to consider (as I have done in my discussion of Warren Warren and the bushrangers) the popular nationalism that blackface entertainment energised in Australia. While Gilbert does not discuss this, she does concede that “the transnational flows of [blackface] minstrelsy were complex and extensive” (Gilbert 683), as were, we can add, the transnational flows of early American blackface entertainment. Blackface entertainment connected Australia to an American discourse about blackness. The cultural representation of blackness and Aboriginality that was already operating in Australia aligned with the American style of representation in ways that suggest that whiteness was central to both. The next chapter will now go on to consider the material effects on Aboriginal people of the transnational alignment of American and Australian discourses about Otherness.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Blackfaced Aboriginality: Charles Never and No Mercy (1882)

From the very first moment writing enters Indigenous people’s awareness, it is clothed in Indigenous ideology. (Penny van Toorn, Writing Never Arrives Naked 20)

While Chapters Three and Four have considered the ideological relationship between blackness in Australia and America during the nineteenth century, this chapter will provide a case study of the life of Charles Never to investigate some of the material effects that the transnational discourse of Otherness in the nineteenth-century had upon Aboriginal lives. Further, this chapter will use transnational literary analysis and fictocriticism to investigate the ethics of writing about Otherness. The case of Charles Never proves instructive in an analysis of the problems and benefits that can come from intercultural dialogues. Charles Never was an Aboriginal dandy who is described in the memoirs of Lucy Anna Edgar, Among the Black Boys (1865). Edgar’s representation of Charles Never is consistent with other cultural representations of Aboriginal and black dandies in Australia at the time. It is the work of critics to evaluate and uncover the various layers of ideology that cloak the representation of Aboriginality. The surviving literature regarding Charles Never provides a case study of how the discourse about blackness that was entrenched in blackface entertainment affected the representation of Aboriginal people in Australia. Through a fictocritical reading of Charles Never and the two letters he supposedly wrote, I suggest that the agency of Charles Never is ignored in the cultural representation of him. Finally, this chapter will conclude with an analysis of an Aboriginal character named Charley from the play No Mercy, written in 1882 by Julian Thomas. The cases of Charles Never and the stage character named Charley suggest, overall, that white authors believed they controlled the cultural representation of Aboriginality in mid to late nineteenth-century Australia. Such a fantasy of white dominance was the most intense connectivity between American and Australian discourses of Otherness at the time.

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Charles Never and the Merri Creek School Among the students of the Merri Creek experimental school for Aboriginal students in 1848 was Murrumwiller, later named Charley and, later still, Charles Never. According to Among the Black Boys (1865)—the memoirs of the headmaster’s daughter, Lucy Anna Edgar—Charles Never produced two pieces of writing: one was a love letter and the other was a letter to the Queen. All that remains of the letters is Edgar’s account of them. If they had survived, they could be read to reveal an Indigenous ideology that is suggestive of how Aboriginal people were negotiating colonialism in the 1850s. In Penny van Toorn’s Writing Never Arrives Naked (2006), she argues that early Aboriginal writing is always clothed in Indigenous ideology. The notion that ideologies cloak writing leads not only to work that, like van Toorn’s, investigates the restrictive ideologies that contain early Aboriginal written expression, but to work that uncovers the white ideologies cloaking white writing about Others. These two directions— investigating hidden discourses in both Aboriginal writing and white writing about Aboriginality—appear to be intertwined in the case of Charles Never’s letters. Never’s letters only survive through Edgar’s recollection of them. Edgar’s account of the letters is, no doubt, masked by colonial ideology. The letters, this chapter suggests, are doubly clothed. This section reads Edgar’s recollection of the letters in light of a popular form of entertainment of which she would have been aware (and perhaps even a fan): blackface minstrelsy. By uncovering some of the racial ideology that codes her recollection, it is possible to speculate on the intentions behind the letters that Charles Never wrote.

The Merri Creek School was an experiment in Aboriginal education. The school began as a Sunday school in 1845, with Aboriginal students attending mainly for the free food (Patton 126). Throughout 1846 the school averaged daily student numbers of between 17 and 21. However, an exodus of students in 1847—due to local Aboriginal parents moving away from an influenza epidemic—prompted the school’s administrators to “recruit” (read capture) non-local Aboriginal children with the aid of the often-violent Native Police Corps (Clark and Heydon 66-67; Patton 131). Once the Aboriginal students were forcibly brought from outside districts to the Merri Creek school, they risked traditional law punishments, including death, if they were found alone by local Aboriginal people. Barry Patton (2009), a historian, states that students who had been removed from their families to attend the boarding school at Merri Creek were “free but

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unfree, confined without appearing to be confined. Fear was their invisible restraint and Aboriginal law the unseen authority that enforced their removals” (Patton 132). Many students, forced to attend the school, were coerced to live and remain there. Nevertheless, the school’s numbers dwindled again; by May 1848 there were just three students in attendance. Within six months, though, a new headmaster was appointed— Lucy Anna Edgar’s father, Francis. Former students returned (including Charley), or were forcibly returned, and the school lasted into the early 1850s, when a lack of students again forced the school’s closure (Clark and Heydon 68).

In his recent history of Aboriginal people in Victoria, Richard Broome (2005) records continual concerns from the parents that their children were being used for slave labour (49). In all likelihood, the school was attempting to educate the students for a career in trade. Broome observes that students had “pleasant, even amusing times with the Edgar family”, but that, also, “a melancholy intermittently haunted the boys” (50). This melancholy involved a lack of interest in their lessons and chores, as well as a refusal to eat for several days. While Lucy Anna Edgar interpreted the students’ melancholy as a reversion to their “savage” origins, Broome redresses this racial essentialism by reading the melancholy as an alienation or depression, experienced by youths separated from their families, culture and their home country, and placed amidst an experiment in social change to form them into Christian labourers. (50) As a student, Charley was dealing with torturous life changes. His perseverance led him into an apprenticeship in Melbourne. For others, his education may have been an experiment, but for Charley it was part of his struggle against oppressive colonial forces.

The Edgars’ idea was to develop a level of education among the boys so that they might each take up a labouring apprenticeship. Charley, however, had aspirations to do more than an apprenticeship. According to Richard Broome, Charley admired the men of the School Committee and others about Melbourne with their fine clothes and horses. If Charley was to join white society, he aimed to join its upper ranks, not the lower ranks as imagined by European humanitarians. Charley knew where power and status lay. (50) Charley displayed a rebelliousness that was the result of a very keen observation of white society. He saw the link between material possession, race and status in society

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and rebelled against the apparent racial restrictions on social mobility, claiming: “I like to be a gentleman. Black gentleman as good as white” (Edgar 28). He described the uniforms of the Native Police Corps as gentlemanly and desired to join their ranks, perhaps wishing, as one historian has suggested, to become “a part of the new authority structure in Port Phillip” (Hansen Fels 94). In pursuit of his dreams of upward social mobility, Charley gave himself a surname (the intriguing “Never”), and found an apprenticeship in April 1850.

Seemingly, this series of events was a strategic manoeuvre by Never to infiltrate the upper classes of society. Richard Broome, in summarising Edgar, states that soon after Never took up his apprenticeship (along with his more formal first name): Charles Never was […] parading around Melbourne like a dandy in black coat, trousers and waistcoat with a white starched stand-up collar, black boots, black kid gloves, a black satin stock (whip), and a tall black hat, apparently to the mirth of passers-by […] Aboriginal people were enjoined to become like whites, but derided when they sought to aim high, and do it in style. (Broome 52) Broome, arguably because he reads Edgar’s account as historically accurate, suggests that Never’s mimicry was futile and only ever likely to result in derision. In their brief discussion about a portrait of Never, Creed and Hoorn, in Body Trade (2001), draw on Michael Taussig’s theory of “mimetic excess” to state that Never’s mimicry manipulates the society and culture in which it is enacted (59). Such readings productively use postcolonial theory to unpack the complexity of Never’s mimicry of white culture.

In defining “mimetic excess” as the result of “mimetic self-awareness”, Michael Taussig is describes the agency of the mimic as a transformative will to alter (or abandon) identity categories (252). In Mimesis and Alterity (1993), Taussig argues that the self is inscribed in the Alter that the self needs to define itself against. This accounts for the combination of fear and pleasure that mimetically capacious machines can create when interacted with mimetic reflections of the West as portrayed in the bodies, eyes, and handiwork of its Alters. (252) For Taussig, the colonial subject is fascinated even as their own identity and the identities they have prescribed for Others are destabilised by mimetic performances. In such performances, the Other inhabits, transforms, resists and manipulates the limits of alterity established by colonial culture. A similar argument is made by Homi Bhabha in

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The Location of Culture (1994), where he famously reads mimicry as double-edged, a colonial strategy to reform the Other and a strategy whereby the Other’s mimicry threatens the colonial order (86). This dissertation reads mimicry as a powerful tool that can be used by Others to challenge and renegotiate the identity categories that have been socially and culturally entrenched by the fantasy of whiteness.

One effect of ignoring the ambivalence of mimicry is that the agency of the mimic is overlooked. Broome relies heavily on Edgar in his reading of Never, and both underestimate the agency of Never. For example, Broome’s description of the amusement Never caused in Melbourne streets is an echo of Edgar’s description of the meeting between Charles and the Merri Creek Pastor’s wife in the streets of Melbourne: “CHARLES NEVER, Ma’am!” said our hero, taking off his black hat to her with a flourish, that attracted considerable attention, and truly indicated the character of this black dandy […] Poor foolish Charley! If he only [saw] himself as others saw him, he would not have made himself such a laughing stock. (Edgar 93) This quote highlights the problems associated with using, as Broome does, Edgar as an accurate historical account of Charles Never. Edgar’s narrative actually testifies to the fictional nature of this encounter; not only is Never described melodramatically as a “hero”, but Edgar acknowledges that there are two world-views at play (Never’s image of himself, and the image others have of him). Fictionalising the account in this way neutralises Never’s agency: his will (exaggerated as heroic) is contrasted with the author’s rational perspective (which pities Never’s pretentiousness) in order to make Never’s desire laughable. Edgar’s representation of Never provides a myopic reading of colonial mimicry. It is a reading of mimicry that functions to protect Edgar’s own identity and social position, which relies heavily on Never’s position as a pitiable savage. Her comic portrayal is designed to keep him in his place (at least within her own imagination).

Problematically, between Edgar’s and Broome’s portrayal of Never, he moves from being a fictionalised character in Edgar’s fanciful account to become an actual person in Broome’s historical (factual) account. This shift in portrayal—possibly a misreading of Edgar’s work on Broome’s behalf—ignores the colonial ideology that clothes Edgar’s account. Edgar’s account can be positioned somewhere between a blindness of and a deliberate obfuscation of Charles Never’s complex resistance against colonial

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oppression. Rereading Never as a fictional construct within Edgar’s fantasy about Aboriginality can paradoxically reveal Never’s agency. The necessary first step in this reading is to highlight the myths and popular beliefs that influenced Edgar’s representation of Never. For example, the ridicule of black dandyism was central to a form of popular entertainment that was at its height in Australia from 1850, and well- known by the time Edgar was writing her memoirs in 1865. There is little doubt that blackface minstrelsy was a significant influence on both Edgar’s representation of Charles Never and the way he was received within the working class of Melbourne.

Aboriginal Blackface Dandyism in Nineteenth-Century Australia By 1865—the year Lucy Anna Edgar published Among the Black Boys—the stereotypes of blackness that blackface minstrelsy disseminated were already entrenched in Australian culture. The following year, for example, S.T. Gill—well known as the “Artist of the Goldfields” (Morgan 444)—created a lithograph entitled Native Dignity (See Fig 5.1). The lithograph displays an Aboriginal couple parading down a side-walk. The Aboriginal dandy wears a crumpled top-hat, tattered jacket, smokes a pipe and carries a cane. He wears no pants. The Aboriginal lady wears a dress and hat, and carries an umbrella. The frame of her skirt is uncovered, revealing her naked legs. A dignified-looking white couple look on as the Aboriginal dandies attempt elegance despite their state of undress. Recently, Mulligan and Hill (2001)—incorrectly, I believe— have described Gill as “probably the first white Australian artist to produce relatively unbiased images of Aboriginal people and their cultural practices” (46). Their mistake is likely due to their mis-reading of Native Dignity as a direct assault on prejudicial stereotyping of Aboriginal people because it depicted a virile young Aboriginal couple dressed in rather formal European clothes striding rather arrogantly down the street while some rather scruffy looking white people look on mournfully. (46) The Aboriginal couple are not formally dressed (at least not completely), and the white couple in the background are neither scruffy nor mournful. In regards to much of Gill’s work, Mulligan and Hill may be right to claim his work is “undervalued” because it “often resembled caricature” (46); however, Native Dignity is indubitably caricature (a point apparently missed by Mulligan and Hill), particularly when it is placed within the context of contemporary popular culture. Like the underlying joke of blackface minstrelsy, Gill’s lithograph attempts to portray humorously an Aboriginal dandy who is unaware of the ridiculousness of his aspirations. The similarities between minstrelsy

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and Gill’s lithograph further develop Richard Waterhouse’s observation that “the prism through which Australians viewed the Aborigines was one cut by the minstrels” (Minstrel 100).

Figure has been removed due to Copyright restrictions

Fig. 5.1: Samuel Thomas (S.T.) Gill, Native Dignity (1866).

It may be the case that Gill was satirising the way white people viewed Aboriginal people, just as it may have been the case that Edgar was mocking those who were amused at Charles Never’s dandyism. It is more likely, I think, that both Gill and Edgar were debasing Aboriginal mimicry and stripping it of its political agency in order to distance Aboriginal dandies from the troubling “inappropriate” style of mimicry that Bhabha describes (86).74 That is, Gill and Edgar support the fiction that Aboriginal

74 In The Location of Culture (1994), Homi Bhabha states “Mimicry is, thus, the sign of double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which ‘appropriates’ the Other as it visualizes power. Mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate, however, a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to both ‘normalized’ knowledges and disciplinary powers” (emphasis added 86). I read inappropriate mimicry as a performance that utilises dominant tools to enact a counter-will. I am suggesting that Broome and Edgar read Never’s mimicry only as appropriate (the Other conceding to the dominant culture). Bhabha suggests that mimicry is always appropriate and inappropriate in this sense (a concession that threatens).

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people could not become “civilised”—not completely, at least—in order to defuse the threat posed by recognising the adaptive skills of Aboriginal people. After all, recognising that Aboriginal people choose to engage with British civilisation challenges the fantasy that Aboriginal people are objects defined by and positioned within colonialism. The neutralisation of black agency and threatening mimicry was central to nineteenth-century blackface entertainment. Edgar’s chapter on Charles Never can be read through the prism of nineteenth-century popular entertainment, as a ridicule of black dandyism.

Arguably, other elements of blackface minstrelsy had an effect on Edgar’s portrayal of Charles Never. In addition to his dressing “white”, Edgar mentions that Never, once he had left the school and begun work as a tailor, desired to marry a white woman—the daughter of his boss. This may have been a further attempt on Never’s part to gain status and power in the white, colonial world. For Edgar, the mere thought of a cross- racial relationship between Never and a white woman in a homologous position to herself would probably have been both threatening and fascinating.75 Perhaps, even, the constant infantilising of Never—she mentions, after recounting how Never became indignant after she called him “Charley”, “he never could make us remember to call him Charles” (90)—served in Edgar’s mind to defuse any threat he posed. To further this point, Edgar trivialises Never’s love letter: The sheet of paper whereon the wonderful letter that was to win Mrs. Charles Never to his side was to have been written, was found lying about by his master; Charley’s natural carelessness having prevented him from taking better care of his precious attempt at a billet-doux. “My dear Mary, “I love you sweet as honey.” Poor Charley! If he had only known how much fun was made of his scrap of a love-letter! (95)

75 For Jan Jindy Pettman in “Race, Ethnicity and Gender in Australia” (1995), the mere “possibility of relations between Aboriginal men and white women was deemed unthinkable, so that any suggestion was read into a moral panic about the black rapist” (72). In “Corrupt Desires” (2008), Jessie Mitchell states that, in the few cultural suggestions of relationships between white women and Aboriginal men in the nineteenth century, there was a “particular importance to colonial agendas of stories about Aboriginal men posing a sexual threat to white women” (230). Edgar attempts to neutralise the threat to colonial agendas in her narrative by portraying Never’s romantic attempts as laughable. Arguably, the presence of any threat at all serves a (white masculine) nation-building purpose, to encourage people to prevent Aboriginal men from pursuing white women.

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In her memoir, Edgar is not outraged by Never’s desire to marry a white woman, but finds his “aspiration” laughable, particularly due to the simplicity of Never’s love-letter. In her attempt at humorous ridicule she, consciously or not, references standard blackface minstrel cross-fire. One typical joke from the period—entitled “Sweet”—has two minstrels talking about a “sweet” girl: Why, how sweet was she? Wal, she was de wery essence ob eberyting dat was sweet! Yes, sir! her lips is so sweet dat dey stick togeder ebry mornin’ by de honey dey distill […] She’ll be a treasure to whoeber gits her. Yes! no doubt on account of her sweetness. Well, not so much on dat ‘count, as dat she can occasionally— What, Julius? —Keep her mouf shut. (Burnt Cork Joker 15-16) Another typical joke—entitled “Poetic”—mocks a black dandy for his attempt to woo a woman with bad poetry: Sam, I’d been courtin’ a gal seven years, and at last here’s what I said to her— Sugar is sweet, molasses too— If you love me, as I love you, Just say de word, to church we go! What answer did she make, Julius? Why, Sam, she pucker’d up her beautiful mouth and—now, what do you tink she said? I really don’t know. What did she say? She bust out laughing, and said—“you’re de darndest fool I ever did see!” (Burnt Cork Joker 24) It was a common minstrel joke to mock a black dandy’s attempt to court a woman, particularly punning on “sweetness” and ridiculing love letters. Minstrel jokes such as the above are a possible influence on Edgar’s account of Never’s love letter. The comparison between Edgar’s account of Never’s love letter and blackface minstrel jokes has two effects. Firstly, the comparison suggests the possibility that Never’s love letter may never have existed and may simply have been invented by Edgar to mimic popular jokes of the day. Secondly, however, if Never’s letter did exist, the comparison suggests that Edgar’s account of it was likely influenced by popular discourses about blackness at the time. In either case, holes are exposed in the clothing of Edgar’s memoir, and the actual existence of Never’s love letter remains only a possibility.

Edgar’s memoir is touched with pathos even as it ridicules Charles Never. Having dismissed him as being of no real threat to social hierarchies and colonial order, perhaps Edgar felt confident to discuss one of Never’s more rebellious moments. Edgar recalled

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that Never intended to write a letter to the Queen demanding land and money. Edgar dscribes an incensed Never, greatly upset at her dampening of his plan: “And yet she send white man out here, take black fellar’s land, and drive them away, and shoot them, and build planty [sic] house and garden on my land; and when I say, I ask her to give me back a piece of my land and money to build a house, you say she think I not know better. I know better. This land, my land first of all.” And Charley grew quite excited at the Queen’s injustice. […] “Land belong to black man, and white man come and drive him away, and take all. And I want a piece of my land back again, and 400 [pound] to build my house. 400 [pound] not much to the Queen, and she take planty [sic] from me. That all I want, and you not let me do it!” And Mr. Never waxed grievously indignant. (94) It is worth quoting Never’s protest at length, as it is quite remarkable in the context of 1865. However, there is also much to analyse in terms of Edgar’s portrayal of the protest. The idiom that Edgar employs here may be an accurate account of Never’s diction (English was not likely to have been one of his first languages, given that he was around 20 when he joined the school); however, historians seem to agree that he mastered spoken English (Clark and Heydon 70, Broome 50). It is far more likely that Edgar uses misspellings and poor grammar for her representation of Never as a result of being influenced by the dialects of blackness that were used in many minstrel shows (See, for example, the above-quoted joke: “Sweet”). The use of such language positions Never (or blackness or Aboriginality, more generally) socially: an inability to use language “properly”, for colonial audiences at least, is an indication that there is no real threat to the institutions that secure and maintain the colonial order. Edgar implies that the Queen would not read “letters like that”, not so much for their content but because they are not written in “proper” English: “Why, Charley, the Queen does not receive letters like that. They have to be written out properly—you would not know how—and forwarded to a gentleman, the Secretary for the Colonies; and if you were to send your letter, he would not pay attention to it; he would think you were some ignorant fellow who knew no better.” (93) Edgar’s retort to Never produces the “safe” result—for a coloniser—that, firstly, the colonial order will not be disrupted because rebellious letters will not travel through the proper channels and, secondly, ordinary citizens can overlook such protests because they are perceived as “ignorant”, or unlearned. This reading of Never’s language extends my reading in Chapter Three of the corrupted pidgin used in early Australian plays, and strengthens Philip Mead’s (2008) suggestion that representations of

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Aboriginal “linguistic inferiority” enact “national-genocidal desires” (411). The inaccessibility of language and bureaucracy prevents highly significant grievances against colonialism from being seriously entertained. It seems that, simmering beneath Never’s surface of dandyist restraint, there was an angry and rebellious man. We can only imagine the frustration he must have experienced at being silenced by colonial protocol and by Edgar’s patronisation. Richard Broome recounts that Never was offered land from the School Committee “if he worked better”, but Never refused to do so (this, too, may be an invocation of a popular stereotype, rather than reality) and his “letter […] was never sent” (52).

Having uncovered some of the ideological clothing of Edgar’s account of Charles Never, I venture the suggestion that, even though some truth might remain, the majority of Edgar’s representation is highly fictionalised. Perhaps, in Never, there existed an aspiration to challenge authority, or to garner some power from a colonial order that was against him. Perhaps he had written an actual letter to the Queen. We may speculate about what such a letter said, how it was worded, or what script it was written in. We might seek to imagine the indigenous ideology that it was clothed in or whether the letter was a challenge, demand or resistance. Perhaps the letter was fashioned in a similar way to Never himself, more in line with the history of European dandyism: outwardly sophisticated and restrained, but subversive, witty and rebellious at heart. Any attempt to know Charles Never must clothe him in our own fictions. I would like to think that, in dandy style, the exterior is not the main point—that the point was not the letter itself, but was the opportunity to discuss land rights and financial reimbursement. Perhaps Charles never wrote a letter, or if he did it stayed in his pocket.

* * *

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Fictocriticism: “my land first of all”

Charles Never ... works for a tailor. Charles ... never works for a tailor. He had chosen a good name. A crease that could not be ironed out. A perfect fold that doubled the volume of the cravat.

He reached for his own cravat now. Felt it between his fingers and smiled softly. Well, it wasn’t so much a smile as the tightening of his lips. Was the scarlet neck-tie right? How should it be tied? Should he represent feeling, passion, humanity? No, the emerald must be right: creativity, wealth, an independent man. There was a choice to be made. Lately he had been wearing the scarlet in the fashion of the sentimentale.76 He wanted them to know, simply, that he felt. He wanted a fold that would double his feeling.

He shoved the letter into his inside coat pocket.

Later that day, when the girl saw him, she giggled: “What’ve you got in your pocket, Charley boy?”

“Charles”, he corrected her, “Charles Never”.

“Well, Charley boy, tell me what you got. A letter to your girlfriend I bet. Oooo.”

Charles wanted to bite, but reminded himself: restraint. “Yes, of course I have a love- letter. It reads ‘Mary Belle, I love you sweet as honey’.” She giggled uncontrollably. “Good morning, Miss Lucy.”

Charles thought himself better dressed than the white men who looked down on him in the street, and he’d do better things with their power. But the power was not simply in their clothes, as he remembered thinking as a younger man.

76 See Brian Dillon, “A Poet of Cloth”.

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There was a group of young people who often stopped to talk to Charley as he read the paper. Three young men and a young lady (her chaperone kept a distance). HARRY: Oi, black boy! I’ll pitch a penny into your mouth.77 The youths laugh. ELLEN intervenes. ELLEN: Don’t be crude Harry, that’s Charles Never. Youths stop laughing and look at HARRY. Anxious. CHARLES: Charles [pause] never lets a penny be pitched into his mouth. The result was instant. The group laughed. But not at him, he had diverted it. Charles ran his finger along the fold in his tie. “You’re a regular Mr. Johnson, Charles”, one of the youths said as he slapped Harry on the shoulder and they walked on. Charles fingered the letter in his pocket and asked where they were going. “To the theatre. To see the minstrels.” Charles pushed the letter back into his pocket.

Later Charles asked Mr. Edgar about “Mr. Johnson”. Edgar smiled and said “Charley, my boy, you’re a perfect dandy you are.” There was not going to be an answer, Charley realised, as Edgar left the room humming “zip a doodem doodem day.”78

The next time Charles saw Ellen was four days later. Charles looked over the top of his paper to see her group walking towards him. They were laughing. Charles sat straighter as they approached. His cravat today was tied in the very difficult Oriental style—completely smooth and round, no creases or dents, very firm to prevent impulsive movements. His hand reached for the letter in his inside coat pocket but paused.

The boy—Harry—was with them again. His voice made Charles feel naked, ridiculed, like he wasn’t wearing any pants.79 Charles lifted his paper and did not want to speak to them today. HARRY: I see you am busy readin’ de paper today, Mr. Johnson. Would you be so kind as to enlighten us

77 See the “Cuff and Crow” myth, where the “original” blackface entertainer—T.D. Rice—is said to take the stage wearing the clothes of a black man who makes money by letting boys pitch pennies into his mouth (LeRoy Rice 8-10). 78 See the chorus to the popular blackface song Zip Coon (1828). 79 See S.T. Gill, Native Dignity (1866).

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upon de principal topicks ob de day? Laughter. YOUTH sits on bench next to CHARLES. ELLEN: Leave him alone Harry. He’s just… CHARLES lowers the newspaper. YOUTH: [interrupting, pretending to be Charles] Dah, dah, dah has been a storm dat flipped all de ships upside down. CHARLES looks confused. HARRY: Why Mistuh Johnson… ALL BOYS: “You’se got de papah upside down!”80 His paper was not upside down. Charles had heard such accents before. And the laughter that followed. The boys who pointed at him in the street spoke and laughed like that sometimes—it placed his dignity on slippery ground. He felt like the land was falling away from under him.

Ellen wiped a tear from the corner of her eye as the group turned to leave. Seeing this moment of sympathy and desperate to take again the upper hand he moved for the letter again. Charles stood and pressed his feet hard into the soles of his shoes, determined to hold his ground. “Miss Ellen—”

The group turned to face him. Charles, reaching for the letter, saw something on Ellen’s face that made him reconsider. He felt his high, starched, brilliant-white Oriental cravat dig into his jaw as his head tilted. She was smiling with tears of laughter. Words raged through his mind.

Charles Never is a gentleman. Charles Never is composed. Charles Never is a picture of reserved emotions.

He sat down and opened his paper, the news removing them from view.

80 A very similar joke was used in the popular blackface play by T.D. Rice: “Oh! Hush! Or, The Virginny Cupids” (1833).

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Later Mr. Edgar told him about blackface minstrels. “One of these characters is named Mr. Johnson and he is a dandy.”

“It’s a good thing”, said Charles, “that I am nothing like Mr. Johnson.”

“Oh, but you are Charley boy. You are to them.”

Charles had taken to wearing the cascade style cravat—an excessive, flowing style that could only be worn without adjustment—once the knot was tied, beauty must be left somewhat to chance. Of course, you could repeat the tie as many times as it took to get right.

Some years later, Harry saw Charles attracting a crowd on a street corner. It was a routine Charles had been practising: CHARLES: Excuse me Sir, could I trouble you for a moment of your time please. MAN: I don’t have any baccy, and no change. CHARLES: It’s not that Sir, it’s just that I require some advice in posting a letter. [CHARLES reveals a letter from his pocket, as man stops and waits for CHARLES to keep talking] I have a stamp. But, you see, I have this important letter that requires urgent posting and I do not have the address. Crowd begins to gather. MAN: Alright. Alright. Well, who’s it to? CHARLES: Well, Sir, this is a letter to the Queen— Laughter from MAN and CROWD. CHARLES nods his head. Crowd increases. MAN: The Queen! Oh, that’s rich. CHARLES: —Well, I’m sorry Sir. [Voice tenses and raises slightly] Would you like me to explain the contents? MAN: Oh, by all means Sir; you have our very earnest and humble attention— Charles, all the while, would nod his head like someone who knows the joke. He would then tell them of the request for land and 400 pounds. More laughter. And more

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expectant nodding from Charles. He would then raise his voice, waving an envelope in the air, and explain the debt the Queen owed to the nation’s original inhabitants. He would present himself as the exception to their arguments about evolution and native backwardness. And he would deliver his emotional, sadly knowing, false-ending:

“Charles Never will get his land back!”

His final line boomed above any laughter.

“It was my land first of all”.

With piercing, melancholic eyes, and his dandyish reserve momentarily unfolded and cascading, any laughter after this line was less confident. Men shuffled their feet as if the ground underneath was, albeit momentarily, falling away.

* * *

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The first half of this chapter analysed Lucy Anna Edgar’s memoir, exposing the fiction at the core of her account of Charles Never. Criticism might traditionally leave Edgar’s text there: her text re-evaluated as evidence of white solipsism rather than a factual account of an Aboriginal person. Fictocriticism, as Scott Brook (2002) has argued, is a genre that is concerned “with the conditions of possibility for knowledge-production that criticism traditionally occludes” (106). In using fictocriticism I have attempted to keep producing knowledge from a text that has been factually de-valued. As Stephen Muecke (2008) has written of fictocriticism: when we couple criticism to fiction, to the imaginative, we seek to perform a kind of ethics by asking, what can that thing do that it couldn’t do before? What can that sentence say? (Joe 15) The above fictocritical piece does not tell the real story of Never. Instead, it speculates on how we know anything about Never, and what we can take from the story about Never. This fictocritical piece provokes discussion on the methods of indigenous resistance, and it expresses a sense of frustration with the barriers faced by Aboriginal people who wish to write and voice their criticisms and opinions of colonialism. By negotiating the complex web of colonial ideologies that restrict the way they can speak, act and write, Aboriginal artists continually present creative challenges to widely held assumptions about Aboriginality in Australian culture. The above fictocritical piece speculates on how Never might have engaged with the stereotypes he encountered; how he might have employed them in order to subvert them; and how we might inevitably re-enact them when we write about Aboriginal people. Possibly, an awareness of the layers with which we dress Aboriginality is an important step in negotiating an ethics of intercultural dialogue. At the very least, this recognition can open the way to important readings of significant Aboriginal historical figures. For example, Never’s resistance was successful enough to have left a trace of significant protest in Edgar’s account of him, one that rises above the ridicule and positions him as an early advocate for Aboriginal land rights.

Through literary analysis and fictocriticism I have sought to recover the story of Charles Never’s letters. In the end I can only allow the playfulness of Never’s chosen surname speak for itself: Charles Never wrote two letters. Did he? Didn’t he? He was certainly literate. William Strutt (an English artist in Australia between 1850 and 1862) saw evidence of Never’s writing. While drawing members of Victoria’s Native Police, Strutt

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produced the only surviving portraits of Never (it seems that Never did eventually work as a tailor for the Native Police): One young man who could read and write well, and whose name was “Charlie Never” was the tailor to the force, but he in turn got murdered; he became much attached to me, and I wish I could have kept him as a servant. (Strutt Journals 32) Strutt’s drawings of Never express far more dignity than Edgar’s accounts. Perhaps this, too, was part of Never’s strategy, his reason for “becoming attached” to Strutt: to have drawings of him produced that challenged present-day stereotypes of Aboriginal people as uncivilised (among other things). One drawing shows Never sitting in a chair, wearing an immaculate three-piece suit with a high collar, and holding a hat and cane (See Fig. 5.2). In another drawing, two profiles of Never appear side-by-side (See Fig. 5.3). Both drawings show a refined, intelligent and attractive young man; clearly not the black stereotypes of the day. Further, I like the suggestion in this bifurcated profile of Never that he cannot be essentialised, that he cannot be captured in a single vision, and that he exceeds any attempt to enforce a single subjectivity upon him. This second drawing, however, also seems to betray an anthropological/phrenological fascination on the behalf of the artist, a desire to get the measurements right (especially so, given the drawing appear in a collection, as the second half of the title states, of “Scenes, Sketches and Jottings from Nature”). Despite his intelligence, and the dignity captured in the drawings, even Strutt admits that Never could never be seen by white people as any more than a servant.

Strutt’s recollection of Charles Never confirms Edgar’s statement that Never was murdered by Aboriginal people while guiding missionaries (110). Such a death indicates the danger of subtle rebellions. By some Aboriginal people of the time, he was likely seen as a traitor, and by many white people he was likely seen as inferior. Even Strutt, whose drawings of Charles Never suggest such dignity and refinement, is paternalistic, wishing Charles to be his servant, and his accounts appear to confer onto the figure of the urban black dandy myths such as noble savagery or the doomed race. Whether represented by noble savagery in the name of paternalism, or by blackface minstrelsy in the name of entertainment, the representation of Aboriginal people is often framed by a discourse that works in the interests of the author. By assimilating him into their views of Aboriginality, neither Edgar nor Strutt had to confront Charles Never’s challenges. Just as Samuel Sanford chose to identify with and overlook the humanity of

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Pete Henderson and the preacher in ways that suited him, so Edgar and Strutt move freely into and out of Aboriginality in their engagements with Charles Never. There is a danger that, in painting Never as a rebellious cultural warrior, we too might be identifying Charles Never in ways that overlook his main point. Charles Never defied expectations of Aboriginality (embodying a case for the recognition of Aboriginalities, in the plural). He called for land rights and reimbursement with a suitably ambiguous catch-cry that powerfully declares both the original and ongoing sovereignty of Aboriginal people: “This land, my land first of all”.

Figure has Figure has been removed been removed due to due to Copyright Copyright restrictions restrictions

Fig. 5.2: William Strutt, “Charles Never Fig. 5.3: William Strutt, “Charles Never [a]” [c.1850], in Victoria the Golden. [b]” [c.1850], in Victoria the Golden.

Ultimately, the fictocritical piece “my land first of all”, performs a kind of ethics that interrogate how perceptions of Aboriginality are shaped by dominant ideologies. The research in the first half of this chapter made it obvious that Among Black Boys cannot be read as a biography of Charles Never—it is too heavily clothed in colonial ideology. Edgar, in fact, is seeking to construct a reader who will move through a fantasy of whiteness with her, a reader who will feel centred when they construct Otherness to validate their own subjectivity. Muecke, in Joe in the Andamans, theorises a different relationship between Otherness and “being centred”: I have opted for “being centred”: the possibility of being beyond desire to the extent that the desire of the Other can have a place connected to one’s centre, like an empty place at the negotiating table, a permanent visitor’s room in the house. (57)

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For Muecke, “being centred” represents an alternative mode for belonging in Australia—in a sense, an alternative nationalism—that has at its core a vision of the self as flexibly centred in relation to the visions and wills of Others. I would like to suggest a reading method that correlates to “being centred”. It is a reading strategy that reserves the possibility that the desire of the Other has been overwritten, misunderstood, or misrepresented. My reading of Charles Never, for example, reserves an empty space for Never’s agency. In the fictocritical piece “my land first of all”, I dwell on how Never is clothed, how he is fabricated. I do not fill the “empty place” of his desire, but centre my relationship to Among Black Boys with the knowledge that Never did actually have agency, even if Edgar did not acknowledge it. The fictocritical piece “my land first of all” performs a reading strategy for Among Black Boys (and, by association, similar colonial records that disguise Aboriginal agency). It is a reading strategy that recognises and entertains the possibility of creatively undressing the ideologies of the archive and redressing the ideologies that inhere within the archive.

Chapters Three, Four and Five have revealed the nature of the discursive connectivities between American and Australian representations of Otherness. Chapter Three suggested that the connectivity between the American discourse about blackness and Australian discourses about Aboriginality was stylistically weak but ideologically strong in the period up to 1844. Both discourses protected and maintained similar white privileges, such as white people’s assumed freedom to appropriate, discipline and reform Otherness. Chapter Four argued that the stylistic and ideological connectivity between American and Australian cultural representations of Otherness strengthened even further during the third quarter of the nineteenth century. However, the nature of this connectivity was not simply to impose or transplant American styles into an Australian landscape. The connectivity involved the adaptation of American representations of blackness to Australian anxieties, concerns and settings. Thus, the connectivity was particularly transnational. Chapter Five showed that this transnational connection was discursive. Ideas of blackness and Aboriginality combined to influence the way Charles Never was represented and the way he could live his life, voice dissent, or be heard. The example of Charles Never reflects the restrictions that many Aboriginal people encountered in nineteenth-century Australia. The remarkable thing about Charles Never is that he found a way voice his dissent, even if it has largely gone unnoticed for nearly 150 years. How many more protests have suffered a similar fate?

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No Mercy There are some stylistic similarities between Edgar’s representation of Never and other cultural texts of the nineteenth century. For example, the play No Mercy was written in 1882 under the pseudonym “The Vagabond” (a.k.a John Stanley James; a.k.a Julian Thomas).81 James was born in England and began a legal career with his father. After a falling out, however, and a failed attempt at journalism in London, James changed his name to Julian Thomas and moved to Virginia in the United States. After three years in Virginia, he moved to Sydney in 1875 (Barnes 469). Apparently Thomas had literary aspirations, and received the patronage of a famous actor of the time—Alfred Dampier—to write an Australian version of an Italian play. According to Eric Irvin (1981): The Vagabond “Australianised” his version of the drama [La Morte Civile] not only by setting the major portion of its action in Australia, but also introducing four new characters: an Aboriginal, to provide the comedy touch (played, of course by a white man); a “heavy” magistrate who is the villain of the piece; an Irishman visiting Australia, and an Australian girl whose “talk is of horses and paddocks.” (“Vagabond” 113) The Aboriginal character in No Mercy—named Charley and arguably lifted from Edgar’s narrative—is of little significance to the plot, but was inserted by Thomas for comic relief. The actual plot of No Mercy involves an Oxford gentleman who is sentenced to a life of penal servitude in Australia after accidentally killing his brother- in-law. The gentleman’s wife and young daughter also come to Australia where they meet a widowed doctor who takes pity on them. The convict escapes prison and arrives at the doctor’s property only to discover that his wife would marry the doctor if her husband were not alive. The husband, with nothing left to live for, commits suicide (Irvin, “Vagabond” 114; Williams 136).

The play appears to have been popular. It opened in Sydney in March 1882 and ran for twelve nights. This, in itself, is above average for a local production at the time. The play then went to Adelaide where it ran for thirteen nights from 24 July to 5 August. During October in Melbourne later that year, No Mercy ran for six nights at the Theatre Royal before moving to the Bijou Theatre, where it ran for another nine nights. After these initial performances, the play remained in Dampier’s repertoire, and he restaged it

81 As with other plays that do not have a script available, No Mercy is not listed in the Works Cited.

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“at infrequent intervals over the next two years” (Irvin, “Vagabond” 120). According to Margaret Williams (1983), the press was initially ambivalent about the play, with many critics focusing on “the improbabilities of the plot” (136). Irvin notes that “when first presented the play was talky and disjointed. Its saving moments came when the two comic characters, an Irishman and an Aboriginal, were on stage” (“Vagabond” 115). Thomas most likely “tightened” the script before it was staged in Adelaide, and success was thereafter assured (Irvin, “Vagabond” 116). However, the script’s improvement does not mean that the comic characters became less important. In fact, Williams suggests, had Thomas been less worried about his Aboriginal character being plagiarised by audience members, the play might have become the first Australian classic (138).

The success of No Mercy had everything to do with its local characteristics. The Herald praised the scenic backcloth “for we have seldom seen a more genuine and artistic presentment of Australian inland scenery” (quoted in Williams 137). And, further, the Australasian suggested that the Aboriginal character of Charley, played by Sam Poole, “stole the show”. Further, the Australasian suggested, Charley is the best representation of a blackfellow we have ever had upon the Melbourne stage. Most stage aboriginals have been modified negroes, but this aboriginal is like what many of us have seen. To be sure, he is not habited in a blanket nor an opossum rug, and he carries neither spear, waddy, nor boomerang; but he is a real native for all that, and for all that he has undergone the process of civilisation, and wears a trooper’s dress, and swears like any white man. (quoted in Williams 137) This description summarises some of the aspects of characters that have been discussed in Part Two: the “Australian Chief” (a “modified” Jim Crow), Tom, Murrahwa and Warren Warren (“habited in a blanket [… or] opossum rug”). Further, the description of Charley as civilised and dressed in a trooper’s uniform suggests that the character of Charley, if not a direct appropriation, was very similar to Edgar’s representation of Charles Never.82 Finally, the reviewer appears to have followed Sam Poole into blackface, feeling at ease in discussing what constitutes a “real native”. Such statements arise from the same mentality that naturalises the contemporary statement “you’re not

82 Creed and Hoorn (2001) state that Strutt’s illustration of Never was published in the Illustrated Australia Magazine in 1851. Both Strutt’s illustration and Edgar’s account identify Never as both a member of the Native Police and a dandy.

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really Aboriginal”; it is a blackfaced mentality that reveals how the fantasy of whiteness operates through discourse about Otherness.

However, there is much to offset any speculation that Charles Never was the inspiration for Charley in No Mercy, least of all the fact that Never was killed close to thirty years earlier and twenty years before Thomas had even arrived in Australia. The above review and the coincidental comparisons to Charles Never indicate, however, that the Aboriginal dandy (or, rather, an Aboriginal character seen as civilised) was known to Australian audiences, perhaps more so in reality than onstage. Take, for example, how another contemporary reviewer, this time for the Adelaide Register, “praised” Charley: The “yabber-yabber” with which Mr Poole deluged the other characters; his comical antics and capital makeup, instantly set people wondering why our own blackfellows are not seen oftener on the colonial stage. The nigger and Chinamen are both played out; there is now ample room for the corroboree- chanting native. (quoted in Irvin, “Vagabond” 116) It would be repetitive to point out in detail the similarities between this description of Charley, and previously studied examples of Aboriginal characters onstage. It is suffice to point out that the “yabber-yabber” that confuses other characters, and “corroboree- chanting” are both features of the earlier Aboriginal characters. Certainly, I would suggest, the similarity between earlier portrayals of black, Oriental and Aboriginal characters and Charley may actually have been more significant than this reviewer makes out. Charley, in all likelihood, was not so distinct from other portrayals of blackness to warrant being called “new”. It cannot be forgotten just how intertwined various representations of Otherness were in nineteenth-century Australian culture.

For the author of No Mercy, success brought with it paranoia that his play would be plagiarised, and a publicised argument over the origins of Charley. On the day of the final performance at the Bijou, two papers in which Thomas had previously published carried advertisements signed by “the Vagabond,” offering a fifty pound reward for information on plagiarists: The above REWARD will be paid by me for the conviction of the literary thief who has been surreptitiously taking down in shorthand the words of the part of “KING CHARLEY” […] For the robber who would steal the product of my brains I will have NO MERCY. I claim that “KING CHARLEY” is a creation different to anything yet represented upon the stage. I claim that in every detail it is a perfect picture of the Queensland station blackfellow […] Anyone seen taking notes will be expelled from the theatre. (quoted in Williams 137)

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In true blackface fashion, Charley is championed as both a “perfect picture” of reality and “the product of my brains”: one authentically documentary, and the other fictionalised. Thomas, here, is using his cultural capital (and access to newspaper publication) simultaneously to claim more cultural capital for his creativity, and to authenticate a representation of blackness. This contradiction reveals that the author of No Mercy was slipping in and out of blackface.

According to Williams, the Bulletin capitalised on its chance to contradict Thomas (toward whom they were “never very sympathetic”). The Bulletin did this not by pointing out Thomas’ contradictions, but by revealing early in 1883 “that Sam Poole claimed to have worked up the character himself, and that any words and business ‘beyond a crude conception’ were his own” (Williams 137-8). Thus, a battle over authorship was enacted, and nowhere to be seen was the “Queensland station blackfellow” whose identity had been appropriated for the role. That the creation of Aboriginality in No Mercy ended in a battle for authorship between two non-Aboriginal people is the perfect metaphor to sum up the first two parts of this dissertation: while local concerns energised the racisms inherent to discourses about Otherness in America and Australia, the end result of these specificities was the same in both places—white control over black identity. By 1880, blackness (or Aboriginality) no longer belonged to black people or Aboriginal people, but had become a field of negotiation predominantly managed by white people. The driving argument of the dissertation to this point has been that, from the 1820s to the 1880s in America and Australia, blackness and Aboriginality were performed to ease a range of white anxieties that were not always obviously to do with race, but often to do with an emerging (white, manly) nationalism. Overall, blackface performances in Australia and America during the nineteenth century contributed to a discourse about Otherness that was heavily influenced by the fantasies of whiteness.

Conclusion This dissertation—and Part Two in particular—is not suggesting that the American discourse of blackness was an origin for an Australian discourse of Aboriginality; nor that, by the end of the nineteenth century, discourses of blackness in American and Australia were homologous. Part Two has followed a transnational methodology by analysing the complex and varied ways that the American discourse of blackness was

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enacted and adapted in Australia from the 1820s to the 1880s. The analyses contained in Part Two of this dissertation have many implications. Firstly, Aboriginality in the nineteenth century is seen to be an imagined discourse that is significantly manipulated by whiteness. In identifying the many white desires that went into and the benefits that came from, white representations of Aboriginality, commonly held beliefs about Aboriginal people are exposed as cultural fiction. Whiteness is at its most insidious when it is not recognised as the author of fictions of Otherness, when its cultural constructions of Otherness become social fact. In an attempt to destabilise what white people think they know about Aboriginal people, Part Two has revealed the way whiteness has invented Aboriginality throughout the nineteenth century. Secondly, it is hoped that this revelation disrupts the white fantasy that Aboriginality is something white people can and should determine. Thirdly, only when this fantasy is disrupted will white people begin to move beyond their imagined stake in discourses about Aboriginality. Overall, then, the intentions behind this study are to disrupt whiteness. However, because whiteness will continue to remake itself in light of such challenges, the challenge then is to ask, what will whiteness become?

Part Three of this dissertation looks at two case studies that display how whiteness and Aboriginality were intertwined throughout the first half of the twentieth century. During this time, Aboriginal artists strove for the right to self-determination, while white people continued to protect the fantasy of whiteness by attempting to manage the representation of Aboriginality. In short, the discursive negotiations between Aboriginality and whiteness were ongoing into the twentieth century, and whiteness continued to create and protect white privilege through representations of Otherness. There is much in these intersubjective negotiations that can contribute to a debate about the possibilities and dangers of formulating a politics of remaking whiteness.

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Remaking Whiteness: Twentieth-century Intercultural Dialogues in Australian Culture

CHAPTER SIX

Recognising Aboriginal Agency: The Performative Dandyism of David Unaipon

In Australian culture, whiteness and Aboriginality are interdependent and intersubjective categories. Part Three investigates the role of an Aboriginal author, David Unaipon, and a white filmmaker, Charles Chauvel, in cultural renegotiations of Aboriginality and whiteness. Together, the final two chapters of this dissertation propose that Aboriginality and whiteness are constantly remade through each other. The case studies of David Unaipon and Charles Chauvel suggest that Aboriginality is remade through an engagement with whiteness, and vice versa, whiteness is reconfigured through an engagement with Aboriginality. Blackface is not a central concern of either of these artists, but it does provide a useful framework through which to understand the mutually co-dependant and performative nature of Aboriginality and whiteness. Further, examining Unaipon’s resistance strategy as a type of metaphoric blackface, and reading actual uses of blackface and their metaphoric significance in Chauvel’s films, suggests an ongoing transnational connectivity between Australia and America. While this argument is only examined in an Australian context, there was an ongoing transnational connection between Australian and American representations of Otherness, predominantly because whiteness remained a phantasmal presence within representations of Otherness in both countries. The two chapters that follow argue that, while whiteness continued to manipulate cultural representations of Otherness to normalise white privilege, early twentieth-century Australian culture also featured creative resistance strategies by Aboriginal artists like David Unaipon, who engaged with the fantasy of whiteness in order to prompt a reconsideration of colonialism’s fixed identity categories.

Metaphorically speaking, David Unaipon’s resistance to colonialism—the subject of this chapter—occurred in the space between whiteness and whiteness’ blackface mask of Aboriginality. In the second section of this chapter I describe Unaipon’s occupation of the interstice between whiteness and Aboriginality as a performative resistance.

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Particularly, I draw on the theory of Kimberley W. Benston (2000), who suggests that black performativity involves a “style of subversion” that undermines “rigid classificatory norms by seeming to fulfil them with such spirited devotion” (emphasis in original 17). Reading Unaipon’s performative resistances provides the foundation from which I can assert that Unaipon resisted whiteness and the white stereotypes of Aboriginality by becoming proximate to them. In the final section of this chapter I use Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) theory of becoming to describe the space of Unaipon’s resistance as “a zone of proximity and indiscernibility” (293). Unaipon inhabited a position that was so close to whiteness that he could reshape the way Aboriginality was imagined by white people. Unaipon, in some senses, was proximate to blackface and whiteness in two senses of the word; he inhabited the blackface mask (to be close to the site where whiteness defines its others) in order to transform it (to shape what whiteness and Aboriginality would become).

Chapter Seven investigates blackface as a habitual practice of whiteness that responds to the agency of Others. In the films of Charles Chauvel, made between 1925 and 1955, blackface is symptomatic of the broader transnational politics of representing Otherness and remaking whiteness: a cultural politics that ignores or only partially recognises the agency of Others. Part Three of this dissertation (chapters six and seven) examines how an Aboriginal artist and a white artist have each attempted to redefine whiteness and Aboriginality: Unaipon is analysed as representing the struggles facing Aboriginal artists coming into representation, and Chauvel’s cinema is examined as representative of the way the fantasy of whiteness attempts to limit Aboriginal agency. What emerges from these case studies is that Aboriginality and whiteness are thoroughly interlaced and remake each other as they remake themselves (even if that is not how the encounter is consciously or intentionally imagined). A major privilege of whiteness is that it attempts to appear unaffected and in control during the ongoing processes of intersubjective identity formation in Australian culture.

Chapter Six begins by examining some definitions of Aboriginality from cultural theory. Following the review of Aboriginality theory, this chapter investigates the life of David Unaipon and the transnational strategy he employed to disrupt the dominant cultural fantasy of whiteness (that is, the belief that whiteness could know, define and control Aboriginality). Chapter Six shows Unaipon’s resistance strategy to be

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remarkably similar to the resistances of an African American dandy active at the turn of the century. The similarities between Unaipon and an African American are not necessarily due to a conscious Aboriginal – African American collaboration. Instead, the similarities are the result of each party’s specific resistances to a common oppressive force: the transnational fantasy of whiteness. There are, then, two related transnationalisms described in this chapter (the first is arguably a product of the second): firstly, the coincidental connectivity between Aboriginal and African American dandyisms; and secondly, the stronger connectivity between Australian and American whiteness. These transnationalisms are examined within an Australian context.83

The Discourse of Aboriginality As discourses of identity, Aboriginality and whiteness have always been intertwined. Some critics define Aboriginality as created by colonisers. Sonja Kurtzer (1988), for example, states: The concept of Aboriginality did not even exist before the coming of the European. […] it has been the oppressor who has sought to define Aboriginality. (182) This argument has been reiterated, more recently, by other influential Aboriginal academics, such as Anita Heiss (2007): “Since the point of invasion in 1788, the concept of Aboriginality has been an ongoing construction of colonizers, an imposed definition” (41). According to Kurtzer and Heiss, the cultural category of Aboriginality resulted from colonialism; that is, the colonisers’ attempts to understand and manage their new environment resulted in a felt need to categorise the many nations and clans of Aboriginal people with one definition.84 Heiss’ observation that this was an “imposed definition” signals the material effects of an ideology of Aboriginality on Aboriginal people’s autonomy.

Aboriginal people are not wholly passive in relation to the discourse of Aboriginality. Kurtzer investigates how Aboriginal writers challenge non-Aboriginal preconceptions

83 It is beyond the scope of this dissertation to examine the nature of these connectivities in an American context, though I suspect such a study would contribute to an understanding of American nationalism as the product of worldwide flows of intellectual thought, cultural entertainment and political strategies. 84 The colonisers, in the main, were probably unaware that there were many nations and clans of Aboriginal people. Most likely, the homogenisation of Aboriginality made it easier to create and apply strategies and policies for the treatment of Aboriginal people.

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of Aboriginality. Kurtzer suggests that Aboriginal people do and should engage with how Aboriginality has been imagined so that they can clear space for their own voices (181). Anita Heiss goes further, stating that defining Aboriginality in relation to and against dominant stereotypes is not only a resistance strategy for Aboriginal people, but that it is expected of Aboriginal people by both white and Aboriginal audiences (albeit for vastly different purposes): “The problem and practice of classifying Aboriginality is something that has been given to and expected of Aboriginal people” (44). Even though definitions of Aboriginality are imposed by white people upon Aboriginal people, Heiss argues that Aboriginal people have become participants in the definition of Aboriginality. However, Aboriginal people are expected to define Aboriginality within the frameworks established by colonisers. Aboriginality, then, can be understood as a field of signification that both Aboriginal people and non-Aboriginal people manipulate and control through artistic and/or reading and viewing practices. Aboriginality is not necessarily what it means to be Aboriginal, but the discourse about what it means to be Aboriginal. Defining Aboriginality as a discourse allows us to see that Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people have very different motivations and investments in defining what it means to be Aboriginal.

Both Kurtzer and Heiss (and most other commentators who analyse the discourse of Aboriginality) have been influenced by Marcia Langton’s groundbreaking work “Well, I heard it on the radio and I saw it on the television” (1993). In that work, Langton identifies “three broad categories of cultural and textual construction[s] of Aboriginality” (34): the first category involves the experiences of Aboriginal people interacting with other Aboriginal people; the second category involves the “stereotyping, iconising and mythologising of Aboriginal people by white people” who do not have substantial relationships with Aboriginal people (34); and the third category involves Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in dialogue, testing and readjusting “imagined models of [each] other” (35). Out of these three “Aboriginalities”, Langton forcefully states that the second category takes prominence in Australian culture and society: The most dense relationship is not between actual people, but between white Australians and the symbols created by their predecessors. Australians do not know and relate to Aboriginal people. They relate to stories told by former colonists. (33)

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In Langton’s description of this second category of Aboriginality there are echoes of Fanon (1968): “the white man […] had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories” (78-79). This dissertation follows Langton’s statement and has highlighted— due to the influence of Fanon’s argument about how such stories are epidermalised— the discursive nature of this category of Aboriginality. Fanon and Langton, in their various contexts, highlight how stories, jokes, symbols, and anecdotes about African American and Aboriginal people establish and confirm power geographies within various legal, media, educational, cultural and social institutions, and how these stories and their effects are forced, directly and indirectly, upon African American and Aboriginal people. Cultural analyses of these stories, jokes and symbols can potentially disrupt both the effects of the stories and the power geographies they uphold. Even though Langton argues that the third category of Aboriginality is the most important— “the need to test [each other’s] imagined models against each other” (“I heard it” 35)— I have focused, up to this point, on the second category of Aboriginality (white- constructed symbols and stories). Nevertheless, the neat separation between Langton’s second and third categories can be productively disrupted. Chapter Seven blurs these categories to argue that the stories about Others disseminated by whiteness influences both individual and cultural power relationships, as well as the institutional contexts that determine how these models are tested and assessed. This dissertation, overall, is concerned with analysing the (transnational) beliefs that circulate within and beneath the stories, anecdotes, and mythologies about African American and Aboriginal people.

Cultural constructions of what it means to be Aboriginal have been deployed by the state to justify harsh political policies. These policies work to maintain white privilege. For example, Michael Dodson (1994) has clearly articulated the institutional deployments of definitions of Aboriginality. He states that such definitions have served to meet various and changing interests and aspirations of those who constructed them, the colonising “modern” state. Where there was a need to create a boundary between “primitive” and “modern man”, to legitimise “progress”, to justify particular economic and political developments, to promote a national identity for the colonial nation, or more specifically to control, manage or assimilate Indigenous cultures, Aboriginality has been made to fit the bill. In other words, Aboriginality became part of the ideology that legitimised and supported the policies and practices of the state. (33-34) Dodson’s account maps the material effects of a white fantasy of control over Aboriginality. Further, Dodson hints that Aboriginality is overdetermined: it is the

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product of scientific and bureaucratic discourses of the human, civilisation, national identity, civilisation, national values, and so on. The origins of and influences on Aboriginality can never be fully mapped, but elements of the ideologies that saturate such discourses can be. Dodson makes clear that Aboriginality is discursively constructed and authenticated by people and institutions that presume they are the guardians of Aboriginality. For Dodson, Aboriginal people are expected to conform to an identity that is authenticated by the state—an identity that “fits the bill”. It can be argued that national myths and stories perform the same legitimation function culturally as the state provides practically; in fact, the two are not distinct even though this dissertation focuses on the cultural factors that delimit Aboriginality. Often, Aboriginal artists can only manipulate national cultural demarcations in subtle ways, but the effects of even a slight subversion may be great.

When Aboriginality is understood as a discourse, rather than a biological essence, its far-reaching effects can be seen. Discourses about Aboriginality appear in many fields of thought. Baker and Worby (2007) state that Aboriginality is central to: legal terms like native title, settled territory, terra nullius, extinguishment, treaty and sovereignty; cultural and social terms like colonial, belonging, reconciliation, race and whiteness; and moral and ethical terms like rights, restitution, and apology. (20) Discussions about any of these terms are always a discussion about (perceptions of) Aboriginality. The intricate nature of these terms mean that Baker and Worby can only define Aboriginality as an “unstable term” where “the legal becomes moral, the cultural becomes legal, and all becomes political and economic” (20). Because Aboriginality is such a permeating discourse, analyses of the way Aboriginality is represented culturally can provide a wider touchstone for legal, moral, ethical and social thought concerning race and belonging in Australia. Further, because whiteness circulates through Aboriginality, it effects these various terms in hidden ways. In fact, it can be argued that whiteness actuates certain representations of Otherness in an attempt to control legal, cultural, social, moral and ethical issues. This white propagation of Aboriginality attempts to justify white sovereignty, white belonging and white dominance in the minds of white people, and it also protects the ways in which these privileges are entrenched and enacted.

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This chapter now moves on to analyse how David Unaipon’s life and literature display an embodied, performative resistance to the fantasy of whiteness through the subtle manipulation of the discourse of Aboriginality. After providing a brief biography of Unaipon’s life, this chapter will analyse Unaipon’s embodied dandyism. I will demonstrate that several of Unaipon’s short stories, such as “Confusion of Tongue”, can be productively analysed through a lens of performative dandyism. I argue that performative dandyism was a transnational resistance method. This chapter will then analyse responses to Unaipon’s work, suggesting that they overlook a major theme in Unaipon’s life and literature. The theme of self-fashioning—of becoming—will be analysed in another of his short stories, “Gool Lun Nag (Green Frog)”. Unaipon’s literature displays a performative engagement with discourses of Aboriginality in an attempt to remake whiteness’ assumptions about Aboriginality. Unaipon’s own philosophy, as demonstrated in the two short stories I analyse in this chapter, suggests that Aboriginality (and identity more generally) is constantly reconfigured. The method through which Unaipon intimated this philosophy was, remarkably, fashioned at a time when whiteness was privileged by a colonial order that significantly restricted how Aboriginal people could voice alternative ontologies.

Aboriginal Dandyism and Performativity David Unaipon was born in 1872 at Point McLeay Mission Station, South Australia, the son of James and Nymbulda Unaipon (Ngunaitponi). His early years were spent balancing the Indigenous lessons of his father—an initiated Ngarrindjeri man—with the lessons on scripture and etiquette provided by the mission deacon and AFA secretary, George Taplin. Unaipon’s father, himself a remarkable man who worked within the confines of a Christian and colonial regime to preserve Ngarrindjeri culture, was the first Ngarrindjeri deacon of Point McLeay church, having been unanimously elected in 1871. James Unaipon was also a storehouse of Indigenous culture, helping with the transcription of Ngarrindjeri stories for Taplin’s many publications. The historian Graham Jenkin, in Conquest of the Ngarrindjeri (1979), examined the relationship between James Unaipon and Taplin: Over a period of six years, James explained the social structure, recounted legends, taught the language, corrected translations, and recalled the recent history of the Ngarrindjeri. [Taplin’s] journals from 1873 onwards show clearly how great a part James Ngunaitponi played in recording his own rich cultural and linguistic heritage […] James Ngunaitponi was certainly the assistant

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author, and could possibly have claimed to be co-author of [these] important works. (153) Among Taplin’s many publications, James Unaipon’s hand is most evident in The Narrinyeri (1873), and Folklore, Manners, Customs and Languages of the Aborigines of Australia (1879). James was clearly a strong figure who constantly sought new ways to ensure the survival of Indigenous culture in spite of the destructive and oppressive tendencies of the colonial regimes of the time. James Unaipon’s influence was not lost upon his son.

David Unaipon wrote two short and intriguing autobiographies (My Life Story in 1951, and “Leaves of Memory” in 1953) that shed light not only on his life, but on his reasons for authoring collections of Aboriginal legends. As he read these autobiographies aloud to the Christian organisation that would eventually publish them (the Aborigines Friends Association—AFA), Unaipon did not entirely acquiesce to the expectations of his Christian audience. In his first autobiography, My Life Story (1951), David Unaipon fondly recalls his father’s lessons: [My father] became a good liaison officer between the white and black races […] He used to take me into the solitude of the bush, read the bible to me and pray that I might grow up to be a good man and live at peace with all men. I owe much to his example and influence. (3-4) In the solitude of the bush, it is entirely possible that David learnt more than just biblical stories. It is my conjecture that this is where David received an “unofficial” education— the importance of learning one thing (the Aboriginal cultural stories that Unaipon valued throughout his life) under the guise of learning another. It is, perhaps, here that David became a performative learner, years before he engaged the stereotypes of white Australia in the name of social transformation. Just what James Unaipon taught his son about “religion” is unknowable, but fascinating in its possibility. While Unaipon was formally educated both at the Point McLeay Mission School and while living, labouring and learning at the home of an ex-AFA secretary (C.B. Young), he clearly valued the example of his father.

Like James Unaipon, David worked to enlighten the white world about his own culture which was rapidly disappearing due to colonialism. In his short 1953 autobiography “Leaves of Memory”, Unaipon spoke of the restricting influences of the Mission. Yet he also subtly revealed his own remarkable talent for manipulating restrictions to aid in his

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own resistances. Unaipon utilised the platform given to him by the AFA to criticise the policies of “containment” practised by the Mission. With a desire “for a walkabout among the white race” and “armed with [some] legends”, Unaipon speaks of his defiance of the “efforts […] made to detain me at the Mission”: it occurred to me that I might take up a course of lecturing on the aborigines, and while going round the country awaken interest in the aboriginal problem by selling some literature on the subject. I wrote up some legends for this purpose. (“Leaves” 8-9) Unfortunately little survives of the literature Unaipon created for this purpose. The pamphlets and stories that do survive, however, are remarkable documents deserving attention not only for their historical importance but for their advanced ideas that strike at the heart of modern-day Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations in Australia.

The bulk of Unaipon’s legends survive in a manuscript housed at Sydney’s Mitchell Library. This manuscript, edited by Stephen Muecke and Adam Shoemaker (2001), has recently been published under Unaipon’s name by Miegunyah Press. However, this is not the first time that the stories in Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines have been published. Questions of literary appropriation and contracts gone awry (between Unaipon and the publishers Angus and Robertson) surround a 1930 publication, Myths and Legends of the Australian Aboriginals.85 This publication, ostensibly authored by a Scottish anthropologist, William Ramsay Smith, contains twenty-eight stories edited from Unaipon’s manuscript. But nowhere in Myths and Legends does Smith mention Unaipon. Stories from Unaipon’s manuscript—composed in the early 1920s—also appear in contemporary newspapers, as well as in an edited format in a little known magazine published between January 1952 and April 1969 (Dawn: A Magazine for the Aboriginal People of N.S.W.). Dawn was an assimilationist magazine published by the N.S.W. Aborigines Welfare Board. It primarily published articles that portrayed certain Aboriginal people as exemplars of the government’s assimilation policy. Some of Unaipon’s stories in Dawn were edited in an attempt to convey an assimilationist theme. The various editorial changes made to Unaipon’s stories by William Ramsay Smith (1930) and Michael Sawtell (editor of Dawn) suggest a potentially subversive allegorical significance in Unaipon’s original work that Smith and Sawtell attempted to

85 In their Introduction to Unaipon’s Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines, the editors Muecke and Shoemaker provide an account of how William Ramsay Smith appropriated Unaipon’s manuscript.

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alter or remove. Even the editorial process of Muecke and Shoemaker raises (and answers some) questions about the difficulties faced by modern scholars, academics and editors who attempt to edit and/or publish Indigenous literary and historical texts.86

In addition to these publications, Unaipon was much quoted as a representative of Aboriginal people in newspapers of the day (1907-64) and he produced articles such as “What Have You Done for My People?” (1930) and “The Aborigines’ Point-of-View” (1936), both published in South Australian newspapers. Unaipon directly intervened in the politics of the day by providing evidence in front of two Royal Commissions (1913 and 1926), as well as helping to prepare a petition titled “A Model Aboriginal State”, submitted to Parliament in October 1927, which called for the Government to “cause to be constituted a model Aboriginal State to be ultimately managed by a native tribunal as far as possible according to their own laws and customs” (House of Representatives 1927). In 1929 Unaipon produced a substantial publication entitled Native Legends. This publication—referred to as the first publication solely by an Aboriginal author— contains five legends that are not in the Mitchell manuscript and one legend, “Hungarrda”, which had been published previously in a pamphlet entitled “Aboriginal Legends” (c. 1927). Following this, Unaipon produced an emotional article, published at least twice, entitled “An Aboriginal Pleads for His Race” (c.1930s), which famously stated “the aborigine must not be left alone in the middle of civilization. That would be like an aborigine leaving a white man alone in the middle of the bush” (n.p.). Unaipon died (“poor and somewhat bitter” according to Muecke and Shoemaker (2000); “Unaipon” 724) just months before the referendum of 1967, and was buried at Raukkan (Point McLeay). With his death Unaipon left the public eye and there was little discussion of the man or his ideas until the year before Australia’s bicentenary. A flurry of academic activity (that will be reviewed later in this chapter) provided valuable research recognising Unaipon’s importance to the nation’s literary heritage. Nevertheless, the emergence of Unaipon into the colonial present has its own problems.

86 Philip Jones (July 2002) considers the recent publication of Unaipon’s work “far from satisfactory” (9), while Sue Hosking (2003) sees the editors’ “self-congratulatory Introduction” as “compromising Unaipon’s agency as author” (9). It is beyond the scope of this chapter to analyse the layout and editorial changes of Muecke and Shoemaker.

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To talk of the colonial present is perhaps to talk of the Reserve Bank of Australia’s website, where there is a picture of David Unaipon on the fifty dollar note. Stamped across this picture (as it is across all images of notes on the website) is the word, in capitals, “SPECIMEN” (RBA n.p). The word resonates uncomfortably with Australia’s colonial history of collecting Aboriginal people and things for scientific observation. But the word is perhaps even more disturbing to those who study Unaipon; as he becomes an object under discussion in academic work, his own words challenge any discourse that attempts to pin him down, or to contain him, as a specimen for study. Writing against segregationist policies in the late 1930s, Unaipon urged: There have been enough scientific investigations already, and no new facts have come to light, and yet there is still a plea to segregate the natives, keeping them practically in bush museums for scientific purposes. (The Age, 18 January 1938; quoted in Markus 79) Despite this protest, there is evidence to suggest that Unaipon was complicit with colonial practices such as the collection of sacred stories, items and Indigenous remains.87 Further, Unaipon has been seen as a supporter of assimilation, Aboriginal child removal and boarding schools for Aboriginal children.88

Any discussion of Unaipon’s life and writing must either be filled with contradictions or omit certain parts of the story. Other apparent contradictions include Unaipon’s spiritual belief (he often appears a devout Christian, but remarked at age 90 that Christianity is a “blasphemy” in terms of Ngarrindjeri spiritual beliefs),89 his manner of dress (despite his extreme poverty he often dressed in a suit and tie), his accent (often noted as Scottish), as well as his literary writings (his Aboriginal legends obviously reference Biblical stories and mimic classical styles). Contradictions, by their very nature, can

87 For example, Unaipon is described in a newspaper article from 1930 as being “at present on the Murray collecting blackfellows’ skulls, nardoo stones and other stone implements for Dr. Angas Johnson” (from The Register News-Pictorial 30 July 1930; quoted in Gale “A Biographical Sketch” 81). 88 See, for instance, Unaipon’s testimony to the 1913 Royal Commission on the Aborigines, where he states “In regard to the young people here I would suggest that when the children leave school they should be taken in hand by some one educated to some trade or other useful employment so that they can become independent and self-supporting” (South Australian Government 33). 89 “I don’t believe in Jesus Christ … No, Ngayaringunand is what is bore in us – the Great Spirit. Not Jesus Christ, the son of the Virgin Mary. It’s an insult to say that … And saved by the Holy Ghost. That’s blasphemy, is it?” (from an interview with Dr. Cath Ellis, February 1963; quoted in Gale “A Biographical Sketch” 60).

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only exist where binaries exist. Even more to the point, to seek certainty by finding which element of the contradiction is the “truth” is necessarily to render the other element “fabrication”. Often the sheer difficulty of such a hierarchical ordering of truth leads to the dismissal of significant Aboriginal resistance work (be it written, spoken, worn or performed) as uncertain or, worse, illogical. Understanding the style of David Unaipon—be it his dress or art—can help destabilise the colonial order.

It is immediately risky to remark on Unaipon’s style of dressing; it might be seen to imply that Aboriginal people can’t dress well. However, it is germane to recognise the fact that Aboriginal resistance is often an embodied practice. As Aileen Moreton- Robinson (2003) has argued: The message of resistance is embedded in local histories and is performed in embodied daily practices such as the public display of the Aboriginal flag and colours on Indigenous bodies [...] resistances do not always lead to conflict or self-destruction. Rather, they are profoundly political acts containing logic that is incomprehensible to most white folk [...] who want us to perform our politics according to their ideas [...]. (“Resistance” 127) Wearing a “cook-who?” or “GST: Genocide, Sovereignty, Treaty” t-shirt, or the colours of the Aboriginal flag, then, might form part of a message of colonial resistance that signifies, among other things, a declaration of Aboriginal sovereignty. That Unaipon’s dress suggested dignity, refinement and intelligence is no less significant. Or, as Stephen Muecke (2000) has argued: Unaipon’s cultivation [...] is intended to prove the point that ‘Aboriginal people can do it too’, his cultivation becomes a culture brought out into battle against the primitivising and historicising tendencies to ‘keep the natives in their place’. (“Between” 17) Derek Gregory (2004), drawing on Said, highlights that similar historicising forces are part of modernity’s “order of things”: a fabricated regime of truth that provides an “imaginative geography” of power relationships (Gregory 3-4). Such a world is binaristic, where “the double-headed coin of colonial modernity” has two sides of differing value (Gregory 3). One side, “the face of modernity as (for example) [...] a partitioned, hierarchical, and disciplined space”, is valued over the reverse side, which “exhibit[s] modernity’s other as (for example) primitive, wild, [...] irregular, multiple, and labyrinthine” (3-4). Gregory’s argument in The Colonial Present is that this order still operates today. Thus, to simply recognise Unaipon’s contradictions (his irregular style, for example) may not be enough. Unaipon must be understood as the reverse side

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of colonial modernity’s fabricated order (perhaps the coin must be seen spinning in motion). Logic must be seen to be labyrinthine. Illogicality must be seen to be ordered.

In the colonial order of things, where modernity would be well dressed while its Other would be poorly dressed (if at all), Unaipon’s suit and tie are not curiosities, but are part of an embodied performance that challenges the truth value of colonialism’s imaginings. There is a long history to such a style of resistance, where the individual’s use of cloth battles the fabric/ation of a naturalised social order. Such a strategy does not begin with colonialism. The particular style in which Unaipon’s fashionable resistance was forged stretches back to the dandyism of the nineteenth century. In Europe the dandy rose to prominence as the embodiment of social mobility. From 1805, Beau Brummell became a London hero as his dress and social wit earned him friendships with Princes and regular attendances at Royal balls and courts. Brummell, moving from the lower-class into high society—proved that a hereditary social order was not a natural fact. The dandy also became popular in France, not just as an embodied challenge to hereditary classism, but as a “refinement of intellectual rebellion” (Moers 13). In his Vanity Fair article of 1920 (entitled “The Golden Age of the Dandy”) John Peale Bishop nostalgically quoted Barbey d’Aurevilly, suggesting that dandyism is “something more than ‘the art of costume [...] Dandyism is a manner of being, entirely composed of nuances’” (n.p). As someone who resisted upper-class snobbery by mimicking it, the dandy made a nuanced rebellion against hereditary (or essentialised) class structures and his manner of dress became an obsession for many nineteenth-century artists. Stylistic mimicry and subtle irony were the dandy’s tools for nuanced intellectual rebellion. Despite such readings of the dandy, for the working class he was nothing but a display of the worst traits of the aristocracy—laziness, unmanliness, and physical weakness. As a result, the dandy himself was mimicked in popular culture to consolidate working-class values. Particularly in nineteenth-century culture, the dandy, as a figure of social and intellectual rebellion, is ambivalently tethered to his parody in working-class entertainment—from comic-strip caricatures to the nineteenth century’s most popular form of stage entertainment: blackface minstrelsy.

As discussed in Chapter One, Barbara Lewis’ (1996) study of the minstrel dandy eloquently balances the relationship between real black dandies of the 1820s and 1830s

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and their fictional onstage counterparts, white actors in blackface make-up. Lewis states that the fictional character of Long Tail Blue (a blackfaced dandy, initially dignified and socially transgressive) enjoyed a short period of “pandemonic fascination and consternation” (258). She goes on to show, however, that under a new egalitarian president, Andrew Jackson, working-class anxieties toward the growing population of free blacks emerged onstage through the creation of two minstrelsy stereotypes—Jim Crow (a raggedy, trickster, plantation slave) and Zip Coon (a bumbling, pretentious dandy). In opposition to the dignity of Long Tail Blue, such characters quickly made a grotesquery of blackness and ended the transgressive potential of the black stage dandy. Lewis tentatively suggests that the demeaning representation of blackness onstage coincided with actual violence by working-class whites against real black dandies. Lewis cites a riot in Philadelphia in 1834, where over 300 policemen were required to stop white people injuring black people and destroying their property, houses and churches. Lewis does not suggest that blackface entertainment caused the actual violence, but that the closeness in date between Dixon’s portrayal of Zip Coon and the outbreak of mob violence is worth note. The intensity of the riot and the choice of scapegoats toward whom the rioters chose to direct their assaults can be seen as a measure of the animosity white Philadelphians harboured against privileged blacks. This same enmity undergirded the popularity of Zip Coon. (269) Audiences no doubt also enjoyed how the blackfaced stage dandy “blackened” the image of the white aristocracy. However, the main role of the blackface dandy was to supply a fiction of race that reduced blackness to being both unwilling and unable to participate in the American working-class. Such a regime of “truth” operated against an emerging class of free black labourers in order to present the working-class as naturally and exclusively white.

Ironically, when a black performer wears blackface and performs the dandy, derogatory fictions of race are undermined. Barbara Webb (2001) has made explicit the links between European dandies and the dandyism (both onstage and in “real life”) of African American blackface minstrel performer George Walker (active in the 1890s and early twentieth century). Webb, applying Foucault’s theories of self-fashioning to a reading of African American identity, conceptualises Walker’s dandyism within a history of European dandyism. Reading a self-fashioning agency into Walker’s everyday life, Webb looks to how this resistance was evident in his art:

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Instead of satirizing his character, however, Walker emphasized the dandy’s point of view. He sought to fuse everyday life and performance in a way that staked out a dandyist claim for the dignity and humanity of African Americans. Walker lived out this claim at a time when performing a dandy in everyday life was still sometimes risky, even dangerous, for a black man. (15) In a sense, Walker bridges the tentative relationship that Lewis suggested, between the stage and the street, in order to make significant, albeit nuanced, rebellions. Webb’s argument is that African American performers and dandies such as George Walker engaged audiences through the trope of the blackface dandy principally to subvert their audience’s (pre)conceptions of blackness. For Walker, dandyism was not simply a way to challenge imagined constructions of blackness; it was an embodied way of life similar to that of the early European dandies. Black dandyism, then, involves turning the embodied, intellectual and artistic dandyism of Europe against expectations of blackness created in popular culture in order to challenge perceived norms of black identity. There is a transnational resonance between this style of resistance and David Unaipon’s style of resistance, even if the only connectivity between the two is the permeation of whiteness within the cultural contexts in which they performed their subtle challenges to racial oppression.

The dandyism of David Unaipon also has strong links to the representation of Aboriginal people on the early Australian stage. Such representations were discussed in Part Two of this dissertation. For example, in Chapter Five I read S.T. Gill’s crudely drawn image of two Aboriginal dandies who are unaware of their ridiculousness, entitled Native Dignity (1866), as a parody of actual Aboriginal people who were attempting to be well-dressed and socially mobile. That Gill is sometimes said to represent Aboriginal people as they really were displays the slippage between representation and reality that caused the discourse about Aboriginality to have harsh effects for Aboriginal people. Also, the play No Mercy, written by Julian Thomas (a.k.a. “the Vagabond”) in 1882, contained an Aboriginal character named Charley. The character, according to The Australasian, had “undergone the process of civilization” to be “the best representation of a blackfellow we have ever had upon the Melbourne stage” (quoted in Williams 137). Charley, who was well-dressed although crudely spoken, was no doubt an adapted version of the American blackface dandy. An argument between Thomas (the author of No Mercy) and Sam Poole (the actor portraying Charley) over who was the true creator of character displays the

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ambivalences of blackface dandyism: various white authors/actors admit their creative invention of blackness precisely as they claim the authenticity of their representations of blackness. Circulating beneath these representations was a transnational fantasy of whiteness. It is into such a context that Unaipon, like Walker, had to become recognisably Other (a category largely defined by whiteness) before attempting to performatively renegotiate popular perceptions of Otherness.

Performativity is performance in motion. Homi Bhabha (1990), for example, would argue that performative language is to be found in any narrative where meanings may be partial because they are in medias res; and history may be half-made because it is in the process of being made; and the image of cultural authority may be ambivalent because it is caught, uncertainly, in the act of “composing” its powerful image. (“Narrating” 3) Performativity is the sign in the process of becoming, caught in a state of multiple possible significations. Performativity underscores set meanings, historical fact and cultural authority. It upsets knowledge (in the singular) and provokes an awareness of possible multiple epistemologies. The dandy performed a certain role to combat classism. George Walker performatively embodied a certain role to subvert it. His rebellion was performative in that he engaged an audience to negotiate the humanity and agency of blackness. By embodying dandyism the performance never ended and authenticity was undermined. Walker brought a lingering element of his stage persona into everyday life and vice versa. He put blackness itself in medias res. The performative negotiation of blackness is the basis of a style of resistance that has been theorised in American performance studies.

Performativity, because it opens textual meanings to negotiation and renegotiation, can transform audience opinions and expectations. Della Pollock (1998), for example, has stated that performative texts make questions of fact and fiction secondary to the concerns of the performance (21). Performative texts, she continues, move readers and users into a space animated by conflict, possibility, efficacy, and exchange [...] Performance is thus characterised by the vitality, erotics, and transformative dynamics of subject-subject exchange. Whether articulated through such media as photographs or literary texts or deployed in designated theatre spaces, performance concentrates its effects in bodily trades and transfers. (Pollock 21-22)

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That is, if white people assume they are the end-point in authenticating Aboriginality, Aboriginal authors often performatively engage white readers in order to open an intersubjective space of exchange, where both Aboriginality and whiteness are open to renegotiation and transformation (the politics of this space of intersubjectivity is examined more closely in the next chapter). This engagement, however, is not a simple invitation: it involves a logic incomprehensible to most white people, a logic of “fitting the bill” in order to transform it.

Kimberley W. Benston (2000), writing on African American modernism, bases his work on the complications that performativity raises for any essentialised conception of blackness. Benston suggests that “the determination of performance’s construction [operates] in a diversified network of choices and constraints, not bland reiteration of received ontology or iconicity” (16). The “determination of performance’s construction” might be thought of as, for example, blackness negotiated through performance. Caught in the act of performance, and within the realm of critical interpretation, the performance is ongoing. For Benston, the artist can performatively open the bounds of blackness for negotiation in spite of, even sometimes because of, artistic restrictions such as audience expectations, publishing opportunities, institutionalised racism, and so on. Contradictions are not so incompatible when the artist is seen as choosing a style that negotiates such restrictions.

The artist’s method of negotiating a path through the various constraints and received iconicity crosses many disciplines. Benston, following Stephen Henderson (1973), a critic of black poetry, considers the performance of blackness a “theoretical as well as aesthetic/political activity” (16). The politico-aesthetic theory that Benston derives from black modernist performance is the artist’s “style of subversion, an elegant cunning that doubles (and thereby slyly ruffles) the appearance of conformity, undermining rigid classificatory norms by seeming to fulfil them with such spirited devotion” (emphasis in original 17). Dandies, appearing to conform to the very thing they subtly critique, are haunted by the same sense of contradiction. No doubt, Walker and Unaipon could each be read as complicit in white methods of oppression; such an accusation is the result of their particular resistive styles. Walker and Unaipon each employed a strategic use of the conditions of their (apparent) conformity in order to stress the humanity and agency (among other things) of themselves as individuals and blackness/Aboriginality more

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generally. Almost any account of Unaipon mentions his manner of dress because he, like Walker, wore his resistance into everyday life. Given that Aboriginal resistance is embodied as much as it is performed (in writing, theatre, music or art, for example), an analysis of how Unaipon’s fashion of resistance is mirrored in his writing is long overdue.

Unaipon’s “Confusion of Tongue”, penned in the early 1920s and published under his name for the first time in Legendary Tales (2001), begins in an Aboriginal language and sets the scene of a creation landscape where the Animal, Bird, Reptile, and Insect tribes were linked by a common language. The drama unfolds as a disagreement arises over marriage laws—the tribes are split, with the Kangaroo, Emus, Dingoes, Goannas, Carpet Snakes, Koalas, Pelicans, Cockatoos, and Lyre Birds against the Tortoises, Frogs and Crows (each tribe personified in a single character): These three stood out against the whole of the tribes. The majority felt within themselves that they had a great and cunning antagonist in the Crow, for they knew that his wit and cunning would be sufficient to overcome their brute force. (14) The revered skills of the three opponents of the majority are not to do with strength or fighting abilities, they are to do with performance skills: First, the Crow was a great composer of native songs and an active dancer and impersonator; the Frog was one of the greatest dancers—more so than the Crow—and he was an artist and painted designs on his body that were unique with colouring that was much sought after and he was the possessor of a wonderful bass voice which could be heard for miles, and what was most remarkable, he was a ventriloquist. The Tortoise possessed neither voice nor agility. (15) Dancing, singing, disguise through body-paint (the literal embodiment of performance) and ventriloquism are the skills of the three opponents. The three decide that by distracting the others from their hunger they can make them hungrier and angry, thus exacting revenge following the disagreement over marriage laws. They hold the majority in awe of a magnificent performance. Firstly, the Crow sings the song of the Kangaroo while “a figure approached the footlights” (15). That figure is the Frog, who amazes the audience by pretending to be the Tortoise and performing the dance of the Kangaroo. The introduction of “footlights” to a dreamtime narrative might indicate that Unaipon’s knowledge of Aboriginal culture was incomplete, or that he had only ever witnessed “staged” traditional Aboriginal performances. However, the footlights should not be described as a narrative slip, given that they are contained in a story about

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performance and impersonation. In fact, I would suggest that Unaipon has embedded an argument in his narrative. Reading the footlights as a conscious inclusion by Unaipon indicates that he is staging the legends for (white) entertainment. Reading Unaipon’s legends in this light releases the text—and, arguably his other writings—from debates about authenticity, and frees critics to consider what Unaipon intended by deliberately and strategically contaminating his narrative.

The narrative hyperbolises the theme of performativity. After the Frog pretends to be the Tortoise performing a Kangaroo dance, the actual Tortoise pretends to sing the Swan song, but the song is not performed by the Tortoise—“really it was the cunning Frog ventriloquist” (“Confusion of Tongue” 16). As the Tortoise mimes the Frog’s rendition of the Swan song, the Crow dances the Swan dance. The effect of these mimicries, masks, and ventriloquisms is to destabilise the authenticity of identity. This is a significant point by an artist who felt contained in the Mission system, and struggled to deconstruct—through his fashion, intelligence, and writing—binaristic stereotypes about Aboriginality. Further, Unaipon warns that an inability to see and understand the fluidity of identity can have devastating consequences for any attempts at intercultural understanding. Eventually, after three days and nights of the Crow, Frog and Tortoise’s performances, the audience become tired, hungry and agitated. The three opponents stage a disagreement over fishing laws that results in an inter-tribal war: the cunning Frog threw his voice, making it appear that it came from the Kangaroo in support of the Crow. Presently it appeared that the voice of the Kangaroo was insulting the Emu, then the Goanna commenced to insult the Koo Ka Ku, and the Wombat and the Dingo [. . .] there was a terrible pandemonium of sound. The only tribe which stood aloof and took no part in using insulting words, and which strove to bring about reconciliation, was the Lyre Bird, and no one would listen to his entreaties. That is why Animal, Bird, Reptile, and Insect tribes have adopted a language of their own, and that the Lyre Bird is able to imitate them all. (16) The tribes become warring, segregated parties due to their failure to recognise that identity is performative and unstable. In the actual narrative, as in many of the legends, Unaipon performs the role of the “Lyre Bird” figure, searching for a redemptive harmony in his own deliberate “confusion” of language, style and form. The dangers of performance are rife, “Confusion of Tongue” insists, as meaning is never guaranteed; though perhaps this is precisely the “meaning” Unaipon sought to highlight.

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Unaipon’s performative resistance opens a space for dialogic, multi-valanced, open- ended interpretations of identity—a telling resistance to a culture of whiteness so intent on delimiting Aboriginality in order to maintain its own hegemony. Unaipon, I believe, is careful in “Confusion of Tongue” to mask his speaking position and to defy a unitary, set, rational and logical meaning (rationalism, logic and fixed meanings are, of course, the central tenets of the colonial order). The speaking position—the site of enunciation—in “Confusion of Tongue” is never fixed. The crowd applauds a Tortoise who is really a Frog in disguise dancing a Kangaroo dance to the music of a Crow singing a Kangaroo song. The crowd applauds a Tortoise miming a Frog’s version of a Swan song while the Crow dances the Swan song. Unaipon appears to have understood implicitly the discursive nature of identity. In the pandemonium of sound the Frog’s agitating words are not anchored in reality until they become the words of the Goanna: “it appeared that the voice of the Kangaroo was insulting the Emu, then the Goanna commenced to insult the Koo Ka Ku [ . . . ]” (“Confusion of Tongue” 16; my italics). The insults oscillate from the Frog’s ventriloquism (the appearance of speech) to the actual speech acts by the other Animals. This highlights the continual oscillation from performance to embodiment (the appearance of speech to actual speech) that is typical of performativity—just as Aboriginality and whiteness appear to exist then commence to exist, are made and unmade, inhabited and disowned, in an ongoing performative oscillation that defies determination and containment. Unaipon embodied the figure of an urban Christian Aboriginal, a performance that opened the space for a performative resistance. His story functions as entertainment (enticement), resistance (cunning subversion), cultural preservation (describing traditional totems, laws and performances), “reconciliation” (like the Lyre Bird), and a performative defiance of set meaning, racial essentialism and Aboriginal containment. His message is performed (as language is hybridised), and embodied in both his assumption of a conforming Christianity and in his remarkable creation of all these speaking positions.

The significance of resistive Aboriginal performance is heightened by the embodiment violently demanded by whiteness in the name of recognition. Aboriginal bodies wear the marks of this demand, and often willingly perform this expectation in order to engage a rearticulation of whiteness and Aboriginality. E. Patrick Johnson (2003) has stated that “Blackness, too, is slippery—ever beyond the reach of one’s grasp. Once you

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think you have a hold on it, it transforms into something else and travels in another direction” (2). This is certainly true of Unaipon’s work, performed, perhaps, with a desire to expose and transform whiteness’ desire for fixed definitions. Further, Unaipon’s resistance must be seen in the context of 1920s Australia. In the colonial order of that period it is remarkable that Unaipon’s stories were accepted for publication. Yet, tellingly, they were not published under Unaipon’s name; eventually they were edited, stripped of much of their subversive content, and published, in an attempt to garner cultural capital, by William Ramsay Smith. Since a copy of Unaipon’s manuscript was “discovered” in Sydney’s Mitchell Library in the late 1980s and repatriated under Unaipon’s name in 2001, recent academic readings of Unaipon have risked overlooking Unaipon’s agency as an inventive postcolonial artist.

While Unaipon as a cultural figure has been the subject of a number of published articles, his actual stories have not received very much critical attention. As early as 1979 John Beston may have been closest to understanding the performative nature of Unaipon’s writing: The Christianising of the legends enabled Unaipon to gain the interest of his audience without alienating them by presenting values other than their own. But Unaipon is not simply deferring to his white readers: he is also displaying pride in his own Aboriginal culture as of great value. (341) Undoubtedly, “Confusion of Tongue” utilises religious imagery and language, but the extent to which it is a concession, an actual belief or a performance is unknowable. We are left only with the remnants of his performance. Cliff Watego (1988) has written of Unaipon’s use of Christianity to engage an audience work: When forced to sacrifice specifics (especially of Aboriginal lore) to generalities to achieve [an audience], there was the usual disadvantage of the work being open to several levels of interpretation. (17) The “confusion” apparent in Unaipon’s manuscript was continually read as a disadvantage. In 1988, for example, Muecke, Davis and Shoemaker criticise Unaipon as “posing as an expert on traditional Aboriginal customs” (37-38). This criticism precedes the 1989 monograph in which Shoemaker argues that Unaipon was “indoctrinated by the AFA” (Black Words 44). In a now dated criticism recalling Gregory’s definition of the colonial order, Shoemaker states that Unaipon’s Christianised stories bordered on the “schizophrenic”, striving for “synthesis [...] at the expense of logic” (46). Shoemaker, seeking authenticity, can only conclude from the “sanitised European form”

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of Unaipon’s stories that he “did not have a very great knowledge of traditional Aboriginal matters” (49). Such a reading ignores the contextual restrictions Unaipon had to creatively negotiate, as well as the possibility that his real aim was not only to recount Aboriginal culture, but to also challenge the restrictions of colonialism that only allowed him to speak through traditional Aboriginal culture. With the notable exceptions of Stephen Muecke’s “Between the Church and the Stage” (2000) and Susan Hosking’s work (1995 and 2003), scholarly criticism may well have failed to recognise, and thus has unconsciously elided, a powerful dimension of Unaipon’s stories. Despite this, Shoemaker and Muecke’s efforts to publish Unaipon’s manuscript (and particularly the recent paperback edition) have finally made Unaipon’s work widely available for consideration in Australian literature and cultural studies curricula. With the publication of Unaipon’s work might come the recognition that his performative resistance opened a space for dialogic, multi-valanced, open-ended interpretation—a telling resistance to the fantasy of whiteness that attempted to define Aboriginality in order to maintain its own hegemony.

Aside from Muecke and Shoemaker, whose recent individual publications do not undertake close readings of Unaipon’s work,90 Mary-Anne Gale (2006) and Sue Hosking (2003) have recently published on Unaipon. Gale’s publication conducts a reading of Unaipon’s “Legendary Tales” manuscript in order to find consistent themes, styles and rhetoric so that she can suggest Unaipon also authored the 21 stories from Smith’s 1930 publication that are not included in Unaipon’s “Legendary Tales” manuscript. She finds his style “sometimes Biblical sometimes Miltonic”, and notes Unaipon’s “fondness for exotic characters that are arguably more reminiscent of Greek, Roman or Egyptian mythology, than that of Indigenous Australia” (“Giving Credit” 65). Hosking’s most recent survey of Unaipon’s writing concludes that his “imagination and acquired knowledges [...] make many distinctive stories. Of course there are times when undigested ideologies clog up the narrative” (11). Contradiction, it seems, plagues Unaipon. However, Hosking allows that Unaipon’s parallels between Christianity and Aboriginal spirituality offer “a syncretic world view and assum[e] the potential for racial harmony” (12). While this view is by far the most nuanced to date, both Gale and Hosking, as with many before them, overlook the agency of Unaipon’s writing. A

90 Muecke, “Between the Church and Stage” (2000); and Shoemaker, “The Headless State” (2000).

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narrative does not always directly reflect the belief of the author; it occasionally represents many choices and concessions within a restricted order of possible self- representations. Further scholarly debate centring on close readings of Unaipon’s work is required if he is to be granted the authorial agency he deserves as one of the most necessarily inventive writers in the history of Australian literature. This chapter suggests that recognising Unaipon within the trope of a self-fashioning dandy emphasises his role as a creative and wilful author.

Becoming and “Gool Lun Naga (Green Frog)” Among Unaipon’s Legendary Tales is “Gool Lun Naga (Green Frog)”. It is a creation story about a Water Spirit, who desires to enter the material world. A Lyre Bird, who is adept at singing the songs of other animals, is asked by a spirit to sing into the stream. After much beautiful singing a Being emerges from the water. The Lyre Bird names the Being “Gool lun naga, a son of the clear running stream of water” (54). The Lyre Bird teaches the Gool lun naga to imitate the noises of other things. The Gool lun naga becomes so adept at this that he tricks even his teacher, who admits that the Gool lun naga is “better in the art of ventriloquism than he himself” (56). The Gool lun naga then becomes even better until he is a “hypnotist”, causing visions of the very thing he is mimicking. A performance is arranged so that “the great army of Beings—the Kangaroo with all his family, the Animal tribe, the Eagle Hawk and family with his tribe, Snake, Reptile, and Insect tribes” can witness the hypnotism of this strange new Being (58). After the performance, the Water Spirit gives the Gool lun naga a wife. However, the Gool lun naga swells with so much pride while singing to his wife that his voice is strained so that “today he is only heard to Croak-Croak, never more to sing the song of the Birds” (59).

There is a genre of Aboriginal writing comprising stories of how particular animals developed distinctive traits. Adam Shoemaker described such stories as “Unaipon’s more juvenile stories” (Black Words 48). Unaipon’s stories occasionally suggest they are for juvenile audiences, as in the third paragraph of “Gool Lun Naga (Green Frog)”: “Now some of you little readers will or have noticed some water-courses that have the water-flow murmuring and gurgling songs of these Water Spirits” (53). However, as with most of Unaipon’s writing, and Aboriginal creation stories more generally, the stories are of far greater import than the narrative might initially seem to suggest. While

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Unaipon’s stories no doubt hold great significance for Indigenous communities for cultural, religious and spiritual reasons, they are also significant documents revealing Unaipon’s engagement with colonialism.

Read as narratives of “becoming”, Unaipon’s creation stories mirror his own negotiation of the politics of identification and Aboriginality. In “Gool Lun Naga (Green Frog)”, for example, Unaipon’s opening paragraph is parenthesised within the following two sentences: “This is one of the many stories of a strange Being that came into existence”, and “Everything that exists has some life apart from itself” (53). The story is one of doubled existence. Such doubling is further apparent in the title: “Gool Lun Naga (Green Frog)”. The very subject of the story is suspended between European and Aboriginal linguistic and ontological realms: “Gool Lun Naga [...]” (traditional Aboriginality) and “[...] (Green Frog)” (Anglicised colonial modernity). The story, however, does not function solely to privilege one possibility over the other. In choosing to write narratives about the way certain animals come into being, Unaipon evaded resolving the politics of identity formation. The critical concept of becoming can be useful for thinking about how Unaipon unsettles identity within “Gool Lun Naga (Green Frog)”. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) argue: A becoming is neither one nor two, nor the relation of the two; it is the in- between [...] constitut[ing] a zone of proximity and indiscernibility, a no-man’s land, a nonlocalizable relation sweeping up the two distant or contiguous points, carrying one into the proximity of the other—and the border-proximity is indifferent to both contiguity and distance. (293) Through his becoming, Unaipon’s Gool lun naga represents the potential of “carrying one [existence] into the proximity of the other”. The Gool lun naga is a powerful character that transcends the perceived space between the spiritual and material world. Both are the potential identities of this mythical Being. The narrative further complicates its potential subject through free indirect discourse. Such a narrative device, where the thoughts of a character appear within an apparent third-person narrative focalisation, works to implicate the author within the action of the story. It is a subtle way that Unaipon inserts his voice into the text: the Bubble Spirit sat and watched the little fishes sporting and swimming, darting here and there in the clear waters of the pool. It would watch some strange tiny objects wiggling in the water, then burst forth and take wing and fly out over the water and away to the reeds and rushes and then among the flowers that grew upon the bank. Oh, what a wonderful life to live, to go where you will and come back in your own approved time. (emphasis added, 54)

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This slippage in the narrative voice between third-person narration and first-person expression can be read as Unaipon’s direct enunciation of a desire for freedom of movement (the movement of Aboriginal people in the 1920s was heavily controlled by missionary and state authorities). When Unaipon wanted to travel away from the mission he, like most Aboriginal people at the time, had to seek permission from the relevant authorities. Such narrative slippage occurs more than once in Unaipon’s writing. In the following passage the Water Spirit watches in wonderment at the merry laughter of the Kookaburras, their forms reflected in the clear water as they sat upon the overhanging branch of a large gum tree. Oh, what a wonderful realisation to be able to become part of the material world. (54) This passage is evidence of Unaipon’s skill as a writer. While again emphasising a desire for unrestricted existence, this passage also collapses the distance between narrator and narrative subject. Foreshadowing the themes of performativity and mimicry that are to follow, Unaipon has the Kookaburra’s image literally float upon the Water Spirit. The image of a character superimposed upon a spirit suggests that identity is indiscernible. The Kookaburra and the Water Spirit are placed in proximity to each other; both in a spatial sense (the two come into contact) and in a temporal sense (as the Water Spirit muses about what he is about to become). Further, in this image the ancient (Water Spirit) coalesces with the present (the Kookaburra). Unaipon stages this story (and, arguably, others) through both traditional Aboriginality and colonial modernity. In the narratives, these realms of existence are so proximal as to be almost indiscernible.91 But, no matter how ideal they may seem in Unaipon’s fictional world, this is no ideal setting. The narrative slippages emphasise that the stories are not entirely distinct from the complicated power relationships influencing Unaipon’s own becoming. The freely- stated desires of Gool lun naga (doubled in the same sentence with the narrator’s own desires) articulate Unaipon’s frustrations with the physical restrictions upon his

91 In others of the Legendary Tales, certain slippages occur (what Stephen Slemon [1988] might call allegorical cues) that indicate how Unaipon’s stories transcend the space between Aboriginal tradition and colonial modernity. For example, in “Confusion of Tongue” traditional beings perform a ceremony in front of modern stage “footlights” (15); in “Naroondarie’s Wives” a traditional spiritual leader— Nebalee—lives at the “Point McLeay Mission” (123), while the legendary wives sleep “near the estate of the late T. R. Bowman” (125). Further, Unaipon describes Aboriginal myths, legends and stories as “stories that stand today as a link between the dawn of the world and our latest civilisation” (“Aboriginal Folklore” 4). Importantly, in this latter statement, the stories are not historical relics, but “stand today” in the present, a link between tradition (“the dawn of the world”) and modernity (“our latest civilisation”).

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movements and potentials. In Unaipon’s writing, everything that exists, including the narrative itself, has some life apart from that which is immediately apparent.

“Gool Lun Naga (Green Frog)” also provides key insights to how Unaipon sought to overcome performatively the restricted space of becoming in which he was entwined. The centrality of performativity to Unaipon’s particular style of resistance is mirrored in the Gool lun naga’s narrative of becoming. After the Water Spirit has materialised as Gool lun naga, its first wish, as expressed to the Lyre Bird, is “to be able to sing like the Magpie and laugh like the Kookaburra” (55). Mimicry, referred to as “the art of ventriloquism” by Unaipon, is key to the Gool lun naga’s becoming (56). However, the Gool lun naga’s becoming exceeds mimicry, suggesting that a becoming can never simply be a mimicry. Deleuze and Guattari state: We fall into a false alternative if we say that you either imitate or you are. What is real is the becoming itself, the block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which that which becomes passes. (238) Becoming undermines the essentialism of identity’s origins and destinations—the becoming identity is itself the reality. For Deleuze and Guattari there is no point at which identity can be defined. Identity is only ever in process. Further, there is no discernable origin or destination in the process of identity making. Identity, then, has no set narrative—it is only ever the product of the individual’s agency in context; how it will be self-fashioned is completely uncertain.

Aboriginal writing often contains its own theorisations. For example, “Gool Lun Naga (Green Frog)” cannot simply be explained by critical theory on mimicry and becoming, but can be read in itself as a theory of these concepts. Gool lun naga surpasses the skills of his teacher to become not just the best ventriloquist (mimic) in the land, but also a “hypnotist”: He would make the sound of a Magpie at a certain spot and would speak to his audience in such a manner that they would imagine the sound and were sure they saw him settling there. (56) Gool lun naga is not only a mimic. He begins to control the imagination of his audiences—he alters what it is his audience sees. Unaipon, too, might be thought of as attempting to “hypnotise” his audience and transform their perceptions of Aboriginality. In the story, Unaipon has the Gool lun naga organise a great performance for all of the Animals:

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So when the night-time approached they were all seated on the bank, and the Beings heard some wonderful songs all round, and when the sun rose the Gool lun naga still performed his wonderful feats; in the still air they imagined the noise of a mighty wind, in the clear sky they fancied they saw the flash of lightning and heard the thunder roar, the sound of rain and hail lashed by the fury of a mighty wind. They all scattered and ran to seek shelter. Suddenly the storm ceased and they all looked about themselves and saw a clear sky, which had been there all the while [...] And they all shouted: “Kay hey, kay hey”. [translated in the Glossary as approving applause] (58) This is the moment when the Gool lun naga has seemingly reached the destination of his journey of becoming: “the Beings all went away to their homes, and for many days afterwards they spoke to each other of the wonderful thing they had seen” (58-59). However much this might seem like an appropriate point to end the narrative, the Gool lun naga’s becoming is not finalised. After the Water Spirit gives him a wife, and he sings to her so much that his pride swells and his voice is ruined, he has now become (again) something different: an everyday, croaking Green Frog.

Several things emerge from this series of events. Firstly, Unaipon, not surprisingly in a narrative where everything is doubled, provides two endings. As far as is possible within a narrative episode, he seems to be impelling the reader to recognise that becoming itself is never final. Identity is always open for (re)definition. Secondly, performance is a key trope through which Unaipon destabilises identity as a fixed and discernable category. “Hypnotism” functions in the story to exceed mimicry and undermine notions of mimicry as a fixed identity in itself. Seemingly, Gool lun naga has no identity other than that of a mimic, but his mimicry is so convincing that it becomes real (if only fleetingly). Unaipon’s hypnotism performatively opens the borders between reality and illusion in regards to both identity (the Magpie) and nature (the storm), thus undermining regimes of truth that inform both. Thus, for Unaipon, becoming is performative, a hypnotism that opens the space between reality and fiction to undermine any essential quality to identity (racial, classed, gendered, and so on). Such a strategy restores agency to the individual’s continual self-fashioning.

Unaipon’s own theorisation of belonging, agency and mimicry can cast new light on understandings of his work. Reading agency into Unaipon’s writing can force us to consider the stylistic arguments embedded in his writing. Unaipon, who was familiar with classical writers such as John Bunyan, was no doubt capable of making stylistic

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arguments. John Bunyan, particularly in his preface to The Pilgrim’s Progress (entitled “The Author’s Apology for His Book”), was known to overtly discuss how his form and method were part of his argument: Yea, that I might them better palliate, I did too with them thus expostulate. May I not write in such a style as this? In such a method too, and yet not miss Mine end, thy good? why may it not be done? (32) Bunyan was keenly aware of how style and method might “palliate” the expectations of hostile readers. Unaipon’s familiarity with such a text should not be forgotten when considering his self-styling as an author. In her survey of Legendary Tales Sue Hosking states: Unaipon identifies freely with “my race”, while continually drawing attention to the “Aborigine’s primitive mind” and “our little brain capacity.” He is at once of “them”, and apart: distanced from the “primitive” (non-Christian) beliefs and practices which, he claims at the end of “Witchcraft”, have “prevented the increase of my race”. (“Introducing David Unaipon” 10) I would argue that Hosking has underestimated Unaipon’s agency as author on this point. “Gool Lun Naga (Green Frog)” begins: This is one of the many stories of a strange Being that came into existence. No doubt somewhere in the many stories I have written I think I have mentioned that to the Aborigine’s primitive mind there are many Spirits which exist in the elements—Myeyea (Wind Spirit); Pa nee (Rain Spirit); Kallitthie (Hail Spirit) [...]. (53) In a story where everything is doubled, Unaipon’s comment must not be isolated as a derogatory comment on Indigenous intelligence. He brackets the comment with the fact that he has written many stories (a clear indication of intelligence), and a listing of Indigenous beliefs (where English translations appear secondary and parenthesised). If not English itself, it is the language of science and anthropology that comes under attack in Unaipon’s referencing to “primitive minds” and “little brain capacity”, which may be read as ironic. If we read the derogatory comment ironically we begin to glimpse the complexity of Unaipon’s style of resistance. After all, the paragraph with the derogatory comments ends with Unaipon’s great theme: “Everything that exists has some life apart from itself” (53).

Conclusion Unaipon’s life and writing can be read as the continual passage through and beyond essentialised identity. Metaphors of performance continually emerge in both Unaipon’s

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work and in readings of his life and writing. Performance was a key theme for Unaipon because of his attempt to disrupt the epistemological practices of colonialism. Kimberly Benston (2000) has written that “Metaphors of performance proliferate, unsurprisingly, in those discourses that, however derivative of Enlightenment, begin by questioning its hierarchical relation between the observer and the scene of knowledge” (20). Unaipon’s performativity (in dress and literature) resists being restricted to either face of colonial modernity’s currency. Unaipon was the agent of his own self-fashioning. He is not modern at the expense of tradition, or vice versa. If the authenticity of his stories is in question, the words of Stuart Hall should put the issue to rest. Identities, Hall states, involve the “invention of tradition as much as [...] tradition itself” (“Who Needs Identity” 4). For Unaipon, at least, identities are (performatively in the process of invention) an always modern tradition that undermines the hierarchical relationship between the modern anthropological observer and the passive pre-modern specimen. That his resistance to the colonial order took place in intercultural forums shows that Unaipon was keenly aware of the role whiteness plays in the definition of Aboriginality. Even today Unaipon might continue to actively engage audiences in a discussion of Aboriginality if his life and writing are given more than a segregated specimen-status in studies of Australian literature. Unaipon’s style of subversion (similar as it was to the strategies of resistance practised by African American performers such as George Walker) can be understood as foreshadowing, perhaps even enabling, more recent Aboriginal resistance strategies. Such resistances work with and against a present, transnational colonial discourse that attempts to continue limiting and defining blackness and Aboriginality.

It becomes clear from the readings of Unaipon’s work that Unaipon, no matter how he attempted to overcome preconceptions of Aboriginality performatively, will always be embroiled in debates about the influence and effect of colonial power. While Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of “becoming-imperceptible” in a “zone of proximity and indiscernibility” (293) is useful for providing a language with which to discuss Unaipon’s resistances against essentialised identities, it must be remembered that these resistances took place within the power economics of a transnational colonial order. As Gregory reminds us, the currency of modernity is powerful enough to significantly influence everyday lives and relationships. The colonial order was ingrained in the discourse of 1920s Australia, as it arguably still is today. Unaipon desired to intertwine

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Aboriginality and whiteness into a space of equality in order to escape the discursive effects (restrictions on mobility, autonomy and self-determination) of colonial definitions of Aboriginality. But his efforts were delimited by the colonial order. As he continually failed to transcend the colonial order in his attempts to make its hierarchy indiscernible, he had continually to alter his method of resistance. Such a performative style of resistance has led to many irreconcilable contradictions in the historic record of his life. For example, Unaipon once helped draft a document to establish a separate Aboriginal state (House of Representatives), yet three years later he was passionately against the segregation of Aboriginal people from the Australian nation. Tellingly, he saw (Government sanctioned) segregation as a “bush museum” for the scientific determination of Aboriginality.

The performative contradictions of Unaipon’s identity are products of his refusal to acquiesce to a colonial order which remained largely unaltered as he attempted various ways to seek freedom from mission and state controls (as Unaipon state,“[o]h, what a wonderful life to live”). Ironically perhaps, the contradictions which result from an intractable colonial order led to Unaipon’s becoming-imperceptible. That is, as Unaipon sought to overcome restrictive definitions of Aboriginality, he was pinned down and defined in various moments of his life. However, he changed and the various definitions of him changed (assimilationist, segregationist, Christian, Ngarrindjeri, and so on). Unaipon, who did not want to be defined, now exists in the colonial record of his life as a contradiction. I am suggesting, alternatively, that we can read this record as representing the inability of the colonial record to capture and define Unaipon.

In the overall scheme of this dissertation, Unaipon’s resistance both utilised blackface (metaphorically), playing the role in order to transform it, and attempted to transform Aboriginality into what it has always been—something indiscernible, or something, at least, that western epistemology can only imagine to know. The next chapter examines some of Charles Chauvel’s films that were made during Unaipon’s lifetime. These two artists could be classified as opposing sides of the coin of colonial modernity—Chauvel representing modernity and Unaipon representing modernity’s Other. But such a coin is just a fantasy. Unaipon is not modernity’s Other, but an agent of Indigenous modernity. Stephen Muecke, in Ancient and Modern, defines the indigenous modern as “the inventive adaptations—aesthetic, social or technological—to the rapid changes brought

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by colonisation” (139). Recognising Unaipon’s inventive adaptations implies that indigenous people are not modernity’s Others but agents of indigenous modernity. The concept of modernity’s Other is the invention of a fantasy of whiteness, where the Other is defined by whiteness as being without agency and outside modernity. Indigenous modernity, enacted through the agency of Aboriginal people, disrupts the fantasy of whiteness. The next chapter will examine how whiteness responds to the disruption of its solipsism, that is, how it remakes itself and Otherness in order to protect white privilege. Together these two chapters suggest that Australian culture is a field of contesting agencies, where Aboriginality is remade in negotiation with whiteness and whiteness is altered and remade as a result of its negotiation with Aboriginality.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Blackfaced Landscapes: Intercultural Dialogues in Charles Chauvel’s Cinema

This chapter argues that the fantasy of whiteness conceals or stifles Aboriginal agency in order to imagine an absence of Aboriginal sovereignty and to invalidate or derail the need for, or possibility of, intercultural dialogue. The last chapter acknowledged the agency of David Unaipon, suggesting that his agency as a creative author was overlooked during his lifetime and has, at times, been overlooked since. The obfuscation of Unaipon’s agency is, arguably, a white habit to avoid a conscious engagement with the Other on the Other’s terms. This chapter investigates whiteness’ solipsism further, reading selected films by Charles Chauvel. I argue that Chauvel’s films, particularly Jedda (1955), fantasise the expunction of Aboriginal agency. As discussed in previous chapters, the evacuation of Otherness is at the heart of white appropriations of Otherness. In this chapter I identify two related effects of the imagined erasure of Aboriginal autonomy in Chauvel’s films: firstly, the Australian landscape is claimed as a white possession; and secondly, whiteness abrogates the need for an intercultural dialogue that might question, unsettle or transform the assumed ontological privilege of white people. The assumed absence of the Other’s efficacy inaugurates an illusion of whiteness as settled and impervious to any challenges, whereas whiteness is actually only stable and protected until the will of the Other goads it to its next modification.

The argument of this chapter is divided into two main sections. The first section briefly analyses Chauvel’s use of blackface in The Moth of Moonbi (1925) before providing readings of Chauvel’s explicit articulation of whiteness in Uncivilised (1936) and his obscured formulation of whiteness in Jedda (1955). These readings focus on the relationship between whiteness, Aboriginality and landscape to suggest that blackface in Chauvel’s cinema (particularly Jedda) is symptomatic of his investment in

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representations of Otherness that affirm white sovereignty.92 This analysis suggests that Chauvel’s “locationism”—his intense focus on the Australian landscape—is a local manifestation of transnational habits of whiteness. The second section of this chapter expands on my reading of Jedda and investigates possible ways to disrupt habits of white privilege. The erasure of Aboriginal agency in Jedda is read as thwarting the possibility of intercultural dialogue, even as the film appears to do the opposite. This reading suggests that white-authored or collaborative texts that attempt to engage Otherness must first acknowledge how whiteness occludes recognition of the Other’s will. This section suggests that fictocriticism may be able to transform the environment of academic writing in order to acknowledge Aboriginal agency. While the creative acknowledgement of Aboriginal autonomy in this section does not present an intercultural dialogue, it does recognise and acknowledge the limits to which academic writing can represent Aboriginal agency and identity. Overall, these two sections suggest that the conscious and habitual erasure of Aboriginal efficacy in Chauvel’s cinema enacts the cultural equivalent of the legal doctrine of terra nullius and refuses to acknowledge the need for ongoing intercultural engagements. Ironically perhaps, whiteness’ fantasy of domination is continually disrupted by that which it seeks to erase: Aboriginal sovereignty (both individual and national). The reconfiguration of whiteness that is evident in Chauvel’s cinema is a paranoid acknowledgement that any articulation of white sovereignty will only ever have a tenuous and delicate grasp on the intercultural landscape of Australian culture.

Habits of Whiteness Charles Chauvel travelled to America in 1921 in the hope that he might break into the cinema industry. During this time Chauvel experienced Hollywood. He was playing

92 I am referring here to Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s (2004) argument that “the possessive logic of patriarchal white sovereignty works ideologically, that is it operates at the level of beliefs, and discursively at the level of epistemology, to naturalise the nation as a white possession” (“Possessive Logic” par.5). Moreton-Robinson goes on to state that white sovereignty “is a regime of power that derives from the illegal act of possession and is most acutely manifested in the form of the Crown and the judiciary” (“Possessive Logic” par.5). I argue in this chapter that Chauvel manipulates beliefs about Aboriginality and about landscape in various ways, but always to confirm a power hierarchy with patriarchal whiteness in possessive control of the nation space. Chauvel’s cinema can be read as a cultural justification of white sovereignty that enables and supports white privilege.

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roles in silent films to survive (in dark make-up as Mexicans and Arabs), and also worked as a publicity agent for the popular Douglas Fairbanks Snr, an actor famed for his role in dark make-up as an Arab in The Thief of Baghdad (Chauvel Carlsson 29-30). Chauvel’s early experience in and with blackface was a significant influence on his own films. Michael Pate (1989)—an actor Chauvel “discovered”, and who went on to star in the hit Australian TV show, Homicide—recalls Chauvel’s time in Hollywood: [he], of course, handled himself like a true Australian bushie, in one shot galloping right-to-left as a Red Indian, the next hurtling by in the same direction, even on the same horse, as a cowboy chasing the same Red Indian ([that is,]himself). (x)93 This image of Chauvel, “like a true Australian bushie”, chasing his own racial creations across the screen can be read as a striking comment on Australian culture’s imagination of race. Reading Chauvel in blackface reflects his fictions of race back onto himself— he is “cowboy” and “Indian”. Such blackfaced performances reveal a desire for white control and governance over Otherness, as well as displaying an assumed white ontological mobility. There are instances of blackface performance in some of Chauvel’s films, and blackfaced desires “leak” into other aspects of his work, such as his focus on landscape. Blackface and the representation of race in Chauvel’s work reveal how whiteness pervades his engagement with Aboriginality and the Australian landscape.

Charles Chauvel was born in October 1897. During his career—from his first silent short film in 1926 until his early death in 1959—he was perhaps the best-known of the small number of Australian filmmakers. Charles’ uncle was the well-known military Lighthorseman General Sir Harry Chauvel, and his father (Major Alan Chauvel) also held a high military post. But the Chauvels at the time of Charles’ upbringing made a living on the land. Charles’ decision to become a filmmaker—shortly after his brother had joined the clergy—left his father dismayed that his two eldest sons should leave the land. This seemed nothing short of sacrilege to him; that they would turn their backs on the soil

93 This story of Chauvel appears to have been well known. Elsa Chauvel (1973) recalls “His riding stood him in good stead, as he managed to obtain some work as an ‘extra’ in the western horse operas. He would be an Indian one minute thundering down the rocky hillside, then change his costume to be a cowboy, and gallop round the same clump of rocks after the same Indian. As Charles put it, ‘I was chasing myself’” (My Life 19).

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notwithstanding that [Charles …] did everything in his power to write of it, film it, and sing its praises for the rest of his life. (Elsa Chauvel My Life 13) Charles had earlier worked as a jackeroo, and also managed the family property while his father fought alongside Sir Harry Chauvel in Sinai. However, upon his father’s return there was a “great altercation between father and son, when Charles announced his intention to leave […] and go to Sydney to study art” (Elsa Chauvel My Life 13). The influence of his father and uncle on Chauvel was no doubt significant. Generally, his films romanticise the landscape and are patriotic toward both Britain and, predominantly, Australia. Stuart Cunningham (1991), in his monograph on Chauvel, summarises Chauvel’s nationalist filmmaking, stating: The general consensus on Chauvel is that he was the architect of the most avowedly nationalist filmmaking in Australia. We begin to see that this nationalism was subject to historically available discourses, with their thorough and often contradictory mix of ideas of empire, colony and nation, as well as to governing principles of stylistic intelligibility derived from Hollywood classicism (19) Chauvel’s films were truly transnational. They were influenced as much by Hollywood cinema, American Broadway theatre, British theatrical melodrama and popular music, as by transnational whiteness (though I focus only on the latter). Cunningham implies that harsh criticism of “the ‘badness’ of the films: bad scripting, anachronistic acting, poor continuity, and so on” is misguided, failing to account for the impact of the above discourses on his work (19). Cunningham himself labels Chauvel’s films bold and advantageous, exclaiming: “no wonder some of them falter under such Promethean ambition!” (19). Chauvel’s ambition to use Hollywood and existing performance conventions to create an original documentation of the Australian landscape led him into the transnational complexities of whiteness, Aboriginality, sovereignty and nationalism in Australia.

Chauvel’s first film—The Moth of Moonbi (1925)—was an Australian version of the Western-style films he worked on (and appeared in) in Hollywood. The Moth of Moonbi is an adaptation of Mabel Forrest’s The Wild Moth (1924). The narrative involves a country girl who is attracted to the lights of the big city. She goes to the city and is embarrassingly swindled by a man there. She returns home, where she is rescued by an ex-suitor from the attentions of her father’s colleague. There is no complete version of Chauvel’s adaptation available, although from the thirty minutes of footage that remain at the National Screen and Sound Archives it appears that Chauvel has the heroine

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kidnapped by her father’s colleague. In the remaining footage there is also a cameo performance by Chauvel. Chauvel plays an Aboriginal stockman, the male member of a blackfaced Aboriginal couple (see Fig. 7.1). In vaudevillian slapstick style, the female Aboriginal character is a drunken, blundering fool, while the male Aboriginal character—after some comic-relief—alerts the ex-suitor to the kidnapping that is taking place. The ex-suitor, with the assistance of the Aboriginal stockman (Chauvel), then rescues the heroine. There are overly long passages of cattle-droving and landscapes which point to the fact that capturing the country was Chauvel’s passion from the outset. Most likely, The Moth of Moonbi would have been accompanied by an “ad-lib” piano score, with nostalgic tunes to reinforce the homeliness of the landscape shots. Perhaps, too, comic tunes similar to “Zip Coon” or “Jim Crow”, played while the Aboriginal characters were onstage, would reinforce the representation of Aboriginal characters not as troubling presences (who raise the spectre of Aboriginal sovereignty), but simply as the comic, grotesque, beggarly stereotypes their costumes represent. Such an emphasis erases any disturbing questions about white sovereignty and makes Chauvel’s patriotic attachment to landscape possible.

Chauvel made one other silent film, Greenhide, before moving into the “talkies” genre in 1933. His next film, In the Wake of the Bounty, was the debut for a young Errol Flynn—whom Elsa Chauvel would later claim to be “our old protégé” (142). By 1936 Chauvel had returned to the use of blackface with Uncivilised (which I analyse below). After Uncivilised, Chauvel produced a series of popular films: Forty Thousand Horsemen (based on the battle at which his uncle was made famous), The Rats of Tobruk, and The Sons of Matthew. According to Elsa Chauvel (1973), Charles felt he had “won his spurs” with these films; he could now form his own company and return to his passion (My Life 116). Chauvel sought overseas success for an Australian theme, and was inspired by an American journalist’s joke that Chauvel could make film history by creating a lead role for an Aboriginal person and thereby proving “that the untutored savage can have his name blazing in electric light on the screens of the world” (My Life 115). Elsa Chauvel states that, soon after hearing this, Charles settled on “the idea of the Northern Territory and its Stone Age men [which] was always playing hide and seek enticingly in Charles’s mind” (My Life 116). The resultant film was to be Jedda. The image of Charles Chauvel playing hide and seek with his own idea of an Aboriginal character is rather like him chasing himself across the screen of a western horse opera

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dressed as a “Red Indian”. In both cases Chauvel superintends the representation of Otherness.

Figure has been removed due to Copyright restrictions

Fig. 7.1: Charles Chauvel [left], as an Aboriginal stockmen, sitting next to the “suitably blackened”, according to Susanne Chauvel Carlsson, Billy Stokes [right] for The Moth of Moonbi. (Photo taken from Chauvel Carlsson 47)

In light of Chauvel’s early performances in blackface in America and the continual appearance of blackface in his work, it might be possible to label him a habitual user of a transnational blackface. Part Two of this dissertation argued that a very similar fantasy of whiteness circulated beneath and within discourses about blackness in America and Aboriginality in Australia, even though the representations of blackness and Aboriginality differed. The work of American scholars on the stylistic characteristics of blackness might not be useful in an Australian context, but their work on the whiteness that operates within such discourses can provide insight into the ideologies behind representations of Aboriginality in Australia. W.E.B. Du Bois was an acclaimed African American scholar who published work on the history of racism in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. His insights provide a foundation from which to analyse Chauvel’s cinema in the context of transnational blackface entertainment. In Dusk of Dawn (1940), for example, Du Bois highlights the significance of habit to racial contempt: I now began to realize that in the fight against race prejudice, we were not facing simply the rational, conscious determination of white folk to oppress us; we were facing age-long complexes sunk now largely to unconscious habit and irrational urge. (226)

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Du Bois had been trained in psychology and developed his understanding of unconscious habit through William James’s and Sigmund Freud’s work (Sullivan 22). The notion of unconscious habit is particularly useful in an analysis of blackface in Chauvel’s work, given that Chauvel was not consciously using blackface to oppress Aboriginal people. Coming after a century of blackface entertainment, in which the use of blackface by white performers was to a large extent normalised, Chauvel’s use of blackface may have been intended to be harmless, but is undoubtedly connected to a history of representation with deep transnational connectivities consolidating race prejudice. Chauvel’s use of blackface, the first section of this chapter argues, did contribute to the ongoing oppression of Aboriginal people by representing them as without agency and, therefore, without sovereignty. In this section, blackface is the focal point through which I elucidate some of the white privileges that are entrenched and supported by white representations of Aboriginality.

Whiteness, as discussed in the introduction to this dissertation, is a discourse. White ideas about race—sometimes conscious, sometimes not—are acted upon to secure material white privilege. However, white privilege is more than the material outcome of racist ideologies; white privilege can also refer to how white people act, think, as well as how they relate to Others and the environment. In Revealing Whiteness (2006), Shannon Sullivan exposes some of the spatial assumptions central to whiteness: to be a white person means that one tends to assume that all cultural and social spaces are potentially available for one to inhabit. The habit of ontological expansiveness enables white people to maximise the extent of the world in which they transact […] In the case of race, as in all other cases, it is important to ask: for what does a particular habit empower a person and from what does it limit her? (25) In the context of this dissertation, a habit of whiteness that is strongly related to ontological expansiveness is the assumed right to manipulate and control representations of Otherness. White representations of Otherness often work to humanise white people at the expense of Others, as well as to exculpate colonial practices such as slavery and child removal. They also validate the ontological white privilege with which the cycle began.

Sullivan refers to the cycle whereby ontological privilege leads to control over representations of Otherness, which in turn leads back to ontological privilege, as

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whiteness’ construction of an “appropriate” relationship to the world. In such an ontological relationship, which is itself a cultural imagining, “non-white peoples and cultures” are commodified and transformed into “objects for white appropriation and use” (122). Sullivan argues that the “appropriate” relationship to the environment and people within it is central to colonisation and oppression: “Failure to embody this proper relationship with the world marks one as a subperson, as a quasi-thing that is then legitimately available for, even in need of, appropriation by full persons” (122). We can, thus, read the blackfaced appropriation of Aboriginality by white performers (full persons), as well as their impersonation of Aboriginal people as subpersons (who are not commercially utilising the land), as simultaneously an enactment of an “appropriate” relationship and a justification for the enactment. That is, the benefits to whiteness of an “appropriate” relationship to place include “not merely economic gain, but also increased ontological security” that justifies and enables the exploitative relationship between white people, Others and land (122). This is a critical whiteness studies reading of how appropriation functions in the colonial order to secure white ontological security, white sovereignty, and the ongoing representation (and subsequent treatment) of Aboriginal people as subpersons (not owning, not capable of using and not deserving of land). Australian scholar Kay Anderson’s Race and the Crisis of Humanism (2007), an analysis of how Aboriginal people were classified by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific and legal theory and philosophy, can be read as supporting Sullivan’s argument. Kay Anderson’s research showed that, during this time span, the definition of what it meant to be human was a central concern across many fields of thought: human “being” was theorised and ranked according to specific measures of civilisation. These measures, not least ones of cultivating the earth, drew their logic from the humanist thesis of human distinction from the rest of the world’s life forms […] The nineteenth century doctrine of “race” thus drew upon the thesis of human distinction on earth for its essentialist and hierarchising logic. (194) Both Sullivan and Kay Anderson argue that the representation of indigenous people was largely the product of discourses of civilisation. Such discourses overlooked the significant spiritual, cultural and agricultural practices of indigenous people, instead imagining indigenous people to be uncivilised and savage and, therefore, without sovereignty or agency or, indeed, the status of being human. This fantasy about

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indigeneity is played out in The Moth of Moonbi (above), but also in Uncivilised and Jedda.

Uncivilised is the story of a Beatrice Lynn, a white female journalist captured in the wilderness by a white man, Mara. Mara had become the opera-singing chief of an Aboriginal tribe after he was lost in the bush as a boy. The story revolves around Mara and Lynn’s ambivalent romance, which occurs against the backdrop of an international (Shanghai–Australian) drug-trafficking cartel led by the villainous Afghan, Akbar Jan. At the conclusion of the film, Akbar Jan is revealed to be the disguise of a presumed- murdered British superstar sleuth, Peter Radcliffe. In the narrative, Akbar Jan is a real drug-runner but, unbeknownst to the other characters in the film, he was killed before Radcliffe began impersonating him. Radcliffe had created his Arabic persona with make-up, a turban and a fake beard in order to expose the Shanghai bosses of the drug cartel. Once all of this is revealed, Lynn—despite having the option of leaving—decides to stay with Mara for good. Stuart Cunningham states that the film fits within a 1930s genre of adventure stories established by American films such as the Tarzan films, as well as British boys’-own adventure novels (110). Further, Chauvel added his landscape themes (with extended shots of the tropics of North Queensland) as well as some white Australian fears (the action occurs in the midst of a militaristic campaign by an Aboriginal warrior named Moopil and there is also the corrupting influence of Asian people, represented by drugs from Asia). Radcliffe, by killing Akbar Jan and inhabiting Jan’s identity in order to capture the drug suppliers, solves the latter of these fears. In doing so he serves his role—as Cunningham has described it—as a stock type in British popular culture. The figure of the hero of Empire who disguises himself as a “native” in order to establish the rule of law in far-flung lands was frequent from the nineteenth century onwards. (115) Radcliffe disguises himself as an Arab, while Mara inhabits Aboriginality (only to rule over it). As stock popular-culture characters, their disguises and racial transformations signal deep connections to a transnational colonial order.

The setting of Uncivilised in the tropics of North Queensland taps into discourses about civilisation, colonial identity and the idea of “white Australia”. According to Warwick Anderson (2002) “the tropical frontier” in science and popular literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth century was a “scene of race struggle, and therefore a

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crucible for the production of a virile and robust white national identity” (76). However, in scientific and cultural discourses of the time white identity was not always seen as naturally suited to Australia. The tropics, for example, were where white bodies were most threatened. Warwick Anderson states that in the 1920s “many Australians still believed that a tropical climate would inevitably ‘impoverish’ the blood of any whites who endured it” (122). The fear was that the tropical environment would create physical and mental deterioration. In light of Warwick Anderson’s work, Mara—positioned as he is within the crucible of white national identity—can be read as Chauvel’s test case for the survival of whiteness in Australia. Unsurprisingly for a nationalist like Chauvel, Mara passes the test. Mara is a white Aboriginal chief. His civility is questioned by characters in the film, but ultimately endorsed through Lynn’s acceptance of him. There is little to suggest why Mara should be the Aboriginal tribe’s chief, except for his whiteness. Through the character of Mara, Chauvel essentialises whiteness as an innate property that Mara still has, or can at least recover, despite his being raised outside of “civilisation”. This is in line with Warwick Anderson’s reading of the anxiety provoked by physical and mental illness in the tropics. Of neurasthenia (a mental illness supposedly brought on by tropical heat), for example, Warwick Anderson states: More often, a diagnosis of neurasthenia signalled the beginning of a salvage operation of white identity, not its subversion; it offered a chance of recuperation and redemption, not condemnation. (124) This drama of salvaging white identity is certainly played out in Uncivilised. At one point Akbar Jan tells Mara “Do not forget […] that you are white”, and Mara responds: “Sometimes I do forget”. Uncivilised can be read as the story of Mara remembering his whiteness. It can also be read as Chauvel’s statement about the importance of whiteness and masculinity to the nation.

The final scene of the film sees Lynn and Mara embracing after Lynn has promised that she doesn’t care how long she has to wait for Mara, presumably for him to completely remember his whiteness. Lynn is the civilising influence that can save Mara from turning into a white “savage”. Thus, Mara and Lynn’s relationship addresses both the fear of white miscegenation as well as the fear of whiteness becoming (culturally and socially) “savage” in the wilderness of Australia. Mara’s bizarre opera singing shows that he has not become culturally corrupted, while his relationship with Lynn suggests that ideal, Victorian, gendered relationships are the foundation of a civilised, superior,

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socio-racial whiteness. Civilisation and gender relations have been intertwined concepts since at least the 1800s. Gail Bederman (1996), writing about whiteness and masculinity in America in the first decades of the twentieth century, states that civilisation was sometimes a socio-racial trait: “people sometimes spoke of civilization as if it were itself a racial trait, inherited by all […] ‘advanced’ white races” (25). Bederman then links civilisation as a socio-racial trait to the performance of gender relations: one could identify advanced civilizations by the degree of their sexual differentiation […] men and women of the civilized races had evolved pronounced sexual differences. Civilized women were womanly—delicate, spiritual, dedicated to the home. And civilized men were the most manly ever evolved—firm of character; self-controlled; protectors of women and children. In contrast, gender differences among savages seemed to be blurred. (25) Thus, in Lynn’s submission to Mara (and her implied abandonment of her career as a journalist), as in his manly protection of and devotion to her, we can see traces of a discourse of civilisation. Of course, central to the discourse of civilisation are white privilege and putative superiority.

Other aspects of whiteness—such as the presumed right to govern Otherness and complete ontological freedom—are explicitly displayed in Uncivilised. Mara’s whiteness is the essential trait that sees him positioned at the top of a social order (Aboriginal culture) which exists outside of “civilisation”. The fact that whiteness rules outside of civilisation shows that its dominance is completely natural. White governance, in Uncivilised, is seen to be a natural fact: doxa, normal, essential and real. The character of Radcliffe (the British sleuth who had disguised himself as Akbar Jan) reveals another essential trait of whiteness: its ontological privilege. Radcliffe is free to move in and out of racial identity. Arguably, Radcliffe is free to change “race” because he is a full person while the real Akbar Jan (killed and inhabited by Radcliffe) was a subperson. No one but white people “pass” in Uncivilised. Thus, while Radcliffe need only contain his whiteness in order to affect a change from white to Afghan, Others cannot gain whiteness in order to pass as white. This is a paradox in the film, as whiteness is imagined to be impervious to any “person” wishing to attain white privilege, while the boundaries of Otherness are constantly transcended by white people. Whiteness (a synonym for “full person”) can “pass”, but Otherness (a synonym for “subperson”) cannot. Arguably, then, both Mara’s and Radcliffe’s racial changes are

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fantasies of a white right to delimit Otherness as well as enactments of a desire for whiteness’ absolute ontological mobility.

Uncivilised, set at the frontier of whiteness with characters who cross racial boundaries, can be read as Chauvel’s commentary on “extreme whiteness”. Richard Dyer (1997) has argued that “extreme whiteness” coexists with “ordinary” (less visible) whiteness, and that both are important elements in the discourse of whiteness (222). Ordinary whiteness is normative and invisible (to whites and in representations by whites), whereas extreme whiteness is “exceptional, excessive, marked. It is what whiteness aspires to and also […] fears” (Dyer 222). Possibly, extreme whiteness arises to address racial tensions by powerfully declaring racial boundaries and white superiority. Chauvel, then, can be read as addressing broader social debates that were occurring in Australian society at the time. These included debates about the deterioration of whiteness in the wilderness (seen both as a cultural and biological concern); fears about Asian invasions or, at least, social corruption at the hands of Asian “culture”; the felt need to govern Aboriginal people; and the fear that the empire was in decline (or perhaps, that the empire would not provide aid to Australia in the event of an Asian invasion). In various ways white privilege becomes extreme in order to provide a model to which ordinary Australians can aspire in order to save the nation. Such “extreme” aspirations fit within the cycle of “appropriate” relations to place. Gilbert and Lo state that “Extreme whiteness […] constitutes itself in the field of racial Otherness, deriving ontological power from the threat of that which is ‘not white’” (35). Extreme whiteness in Uncivilised worked to essentialise whiteness, as well as its governing and ontological privileges, in order to assuage racial, social and cultural fears about Otherness.

Chauvel’s final film (written in collaboration with his wife Elsa) was Jedda: “the film only Australia could give the world” (Cunningham 26). A comparison of Uncivilised and Jedda suggests that Chauvel’s representation of whiteness had shifted from being an “extreme” presence in Uncivilised to becoming a hidden, “ordinary” presence in Jedda. While the solipsism behind each film may have been similar, the explicit focus shifted from whiteness to Aboriginality. Jedda is the story of a young Aboriginal girl (played by Rosalie Kunoth-Monks), who is raised by a white woman, Mrs McMahon. Jedda is destined to marry the McMahon’s head stockman, Joe, who was played in

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blackface by Paul Clarke.94 However, when a “tribal” Aboriginal, Marbuck (played by Robert Tudawali) comes to work on the property, Jedda is lured away, and eventually dragged away by him. This leads to a long chase by Joe, ending in the finale only Chauvel could give the world, where Joe pleads with a crazed Marbuck, who, clasping Jedda, slowly backs towards the precipice of a high cliff-top. Sure enough, Marbuck falls along with Jedda, while Joe is left to ponder the pitfalls of the failed assimilation of his would-be bride. Strikingly, commentaries on the film barely examine Joe.95 Joe is the narrator. It is his story. So it is peculiar that he hardly features in the film’s critical heritage. Perhaps, I would like to suggest, it is due to the complete absence of a reading method for (transnational) Australian blackface. Such a reading method can illuminate the role of Joe in this iconic film, and also the role of the film in a long heritage of white Australian representations of Aboriginality.

Joe, unblinkingly presented as an ideal of assimilation, is a central character in Jedda. He is Jedda’s love-interest and the narrator. Jedda is, quite literally, his story. His is a story of assimilation—his attempt to “win” Jedda and assimilate her too. At one point in the film, Joe, desiring to marry Jedda, approaches Mr McMahon to ask for permission: JOE: I wanted to have a talk about Jedda MR McMAHON: If you’re going to tell me you’re in love with her and want to marry her, you don’t have to, I’ve seen it coming for years. JOE: Thanks for saving me all that, boss. How do you think Mrs McMahon will feel about it? MR McMAHON: It’ll be the answer to her worries about Jedda’s future. Her one fear has been that the girl might make with one of the tribe. Now she’ll have you both in a neat little shack with frilly curtains. P’raps all our problems’ll be over. (DVD Ch4) Assimilation, represented in this scene by the “neat little shack with frilly curtains”, was a policy of white containment and control. Jedda is clearly seen by other characters in the text as Mrs McMahon’s possession. Further, Mrs McMahon embodies the desire to

94 Chauvel insisted that Clarke be credited as Paul Reynall. Charles and Elsa Chauvel, who had given Chips Rafferty his name in an earlier film, also renamed Rosalie Kunoth as “Ngarla” and Bobby Wilson as “Robert Tudawali” for the credits. Elsa refers to Wilson’s renaming as her “[giving] him his tribal name” (My Life 123). Rosalie Kunoth has stated her anger at being forced to change her name to her mother’s totem/skin name because Elsa Chauvel did not like the sound of Rosalie’s real totem/skin name (http://www.australianbiography.gov.au/kunothmonks/video3.html). 95 See, for example, Cunningham (1991), Johnson (1987), Langton (1993), Haskins (2004), or Jennings (1993), all of whom provide little or no discussion of Joe.

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assimilate Jedda. Victoria Haskins (2004) has taken issue with the representation of Mrs McMahon as the “female scapegoat” for frontier violence and child removal policies. Such representations, she argues, operate to two problematic ends: firstly, they “serve to obscure the complexities and ambiguities” of white women’s relationships with Aboriginal people and secondly, they alleviate the guilt of white men: In place of the urban politicians and public servants (all white men) who actually formulated and orchestrated these Stolen Generations policies, we are presented with […] scapegoats that clearly operate to remove guilt from certain elements in our society. (156) Haskins might be criticised for obscuring the complexities and ambiguities of public servants in this statement, though her point is well made. Overall, Jedda expostulates on assimilation theories and practices. The assimilation theory presented by the Chauvels is clear, and relies on the discourse of blood percentages that was seriously considered at the time (and that recall the terminology of full persons and subpersons): the only future for Aboriginal people is for them to become culturally and socially white. This narrative is justified by presenting only one other option: doom.96 Aboriginal people without any white “blood”, like Jedda and Marbuck, are doomed to perish. But the narrative of Jedda goes further still. Even those Aboriginal people with white blood, like Joe, are doomed. According to the narrative of Jedda, Aboriginal people are doomed if they do, and doomed if they don’t, assimilate. As discussed in Part Two, doomed race theories often co-existed with other contemporary beliefs about the destiny of Aboriginal people. In Jedda, doomed race theories and assimilation theories cohere with the result that white (male more so than female) guilt is alleviated, and the ideologies of terra nullius prevail.

Race and land are inseparable in Jedda. The assimilation narrative in Jedda is supported by an “authentic” Australian landscape, thus revealing Chauvel’s obsession with

96 My reading of Jedda as a doomed race narrative, stylistically different to the plays analysed in Part Two but thematically similar, is at odds with other readings of Chauvel’s view on the racial destiny of Aboriginal people. Stuart Cunningham (1991) , for example, states that Chauvel was aware of anthropological theories of social integration, such as that proposed be A.P. Elkin (158). Cunningham suggests that Chauvel’s “racial views” were centred on a “utopian vision of cultural assimilation based on intermarriage”, and that they were radical, based on the assumption that “deep understanding of cultural difference is necessary before true national unity can be achieved” (160). Possibly, the bleaker future for Aboriginal people that I read as evident in Jedda reflects Chauvel’s pessimism about the possibility of deep understandings of cultural difference developing in Australia.

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making the landscape central to his narratives. Joe begins the film’s narrative by discussing the authenticity of the extended landscape sequence: JOE: (voiceover) This is part of the oldest land in the world, the Northern Territory of Australia. It is my land, and the land of Jedda, the girl I love. My name is Joe. I am the half-caste son of an Afghan teamster and an Australian Aborigine woman. I was reared by a white woman and her husband, who educated me and made me their head stockman. This is a land . . . (DVD Ch1) The second sentence of the voiceover can be read subversively. Is Joe claiming the land as an Aboriginal possession? The film is built on a style of (blackface) presentation that vacates the land of Aboriginal occupation, even as it might suggest the opposite. That Jedda would be a story about race and landscape is not surprising. The Aboriginal presence in Jedda is part of Chauvel’s nationalism. The representation of Aboriginality in Jedda is typical of Chauvel’s general commitment to landscape which Stuart Cunningham has termed “locationism”. Cunningham describes locationism as “Chauvel’s intense commitment, despite the massive technical and financial obstacles, to shooting the ‘true’ country” (26). Cunningham suggests in this statement that Chauvel’s commitment to locationism is paradoxical: Chauvel insists he is capturing the true country, but he has carefully selected all locations. I do not read the socio-racial and locationist aspects of the film as separate entities, or as “strengths” and “weaknesses”, as Cunningham does when he concludes that: “The weaknesses of Jedda are indissolubly linked to its strengths” (164). I read Chauvel’s locationism as a reflection of his assimilationist ideals which, perhaps unconsciously, render “authentic” Aboriginality as a dangerous, violent, but ultimately fading (or falling) presence. This dangerous and inevitably doomed Aboriginality leaves both the land and Aboriginal identity open for occupation. It is Chauvel’s compounding of race and landscape (indeed, his assumption that a biologically “essentialised” Aboriginality is part of the landscape) that clears the space for blackface to operate as securing the fiction of terra nullius. That the story is told by Joe in blackface represents how whiteness inhabits Otherness to tell potentially subversive stories (that move into Aboriginality). However, these subversive stories actually support the colonial order by positioning Aboriginality as lesser than whiteness and in need of whiteness’ continuing paternalism. The fictional (or made up) aspects of the story do not end with Joe’s make up. His blackface is reflected in the narrative and landscape as a whole.

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Considering his centrality to this iconic film, it is strange that Paul Clarke, who played Joe, never acted again. So, when Gino Moliterno “accidentally” met Clarke at a family Christmas party in 2004, he and Ken Berryman quickly organised an Oral History interview for the Australian Screen and Sound Archives (AFC n.p.). In that interview Clarke revealed some of the technical aspects of the production of Jedda. These technical aspects show just how the blackface of Joe is reflected in the narrative as a whole. Included in the details provided by Clarke is the fact that the film was dubbed. This dubbing can be instantly recognised in the “BBC” accent of Joe’s voiceover. The film was dubbed in England, and not by the original actors. Joe was dubbed by an English actor because the producers weren’t happy with the Australian accent (Clarke CD1 Track69). Ironically Clarke, who acted in blackface, was angered at the dubbing of his Australian accent (CD2 Track3-4). While he was willing to appropriate Aboriginality, he felt that his “voice” should not be appropriated. Clarke’s (paradoxical) indignation implies that white identity (in Clarke’s view) correlates to the category “full person” (who should not have their voice or culture taken from them), while Aboriginal people are thought of as “subpersons” (and free to be occupied). Clarke’s shock is that the BBC considered his Australianness to be a space for subpersons (free to be appropriated and manipulated by full persons such as the British). Thus, there is a hierarchy of whiteness; white Australians might be positioned at the top of the colonial order in the Australian nation, but globally, in the 1950s at least, white Australians were seen and treated as slightly lesser than white, British people. The character of Jedda was dubbed by a South African actress (CD1 Track70), while it appears as if the two Aboriginal house-keepers who dote on the baby Jedda have been dubbed with a Caribbean accent (Jedda DVD Ch2). In British blackface entertainment of the nineteenth century, black-talk was often performed in a Caribbean accent, in a loose mimicry of Caribbean plantation workers. While a discussion of British blackface entertainment is outside the scope of this dissertation, the Caribbean connection in Jedda emphasises that the transnational flows of blackface included many nations, not just America and Australia. Arguably too, the hegemony of whiteness circulated through the broader transnational blackface and formed various connectivities globally. Nevertheless, for the purposes of this dissertation the housemaids’ Caribbean accents can be read as an indication that Aboriginality was thought of in similar ways as other enslaved black people around the world.

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Blackface moves further still into the narrative of Jedda. Joe remarks of Mrs McMahon, the white adoptive mother bathing her baby Jedda: JOE: (voiceover) She would have laughed if anyone had suggested that she was growing fond of baby Jedda, but somehow Jedda remained [with Mrs McMahon] and, like Topsy, “just growed”. (DVD Ch3) “Just grow’d” is a colloquialism that is derived from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous American novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). The line was later adapted in blackface minstrel shows to become the version used by Chauvel. The original line comes from the character of a black servant named Topsy, who is asked about her parents: “Do you know who made you?” “Nobody, as I knows on,” said the child [Topsy] with a short laugh. The idea appeared to amuse her considerably; for her eyes twinkled, and she added, “I spect I grow’d. Don’t think nobody never made me.” (277) Joe’s analogy between Jedda and Topsy is a potentially subversive comment, where Jedda is recognised as being raised to be a slave. This drastically undercuts the benevolence of Mrs McMahon, who tells Jedda: “I want you to go on living like a white girl, like my own daughter” (DVD Ch4). Stowe’s novel was serialised before publication. Even while the novel was still being serialised, and not yet printed in its entirety, a phenomenon emerged on the American stage known as “Tom Shows”, in which characters from Stowe’s abolitionist novel were adapted and performed by blackface minstrels (see Waterhouse, 70-74; and Lott, 211-233). This adaptation went on for the rest of the century, and Stowe’s characters became further entangled in demeaning stereotypes and the racism inherent in blackface. It might even be suggested that the fact that the colloquialism became “just growed” is an indication that the phrase in Jedda is derived from adapted film and stage versions (in blackface) of Stowe’s novel. In any case, Joe’s narrative gestures to either an inspiration for minstrel shows or the minstrel shows themselves. The violence of blackface, it seems, doesn’t go away when you look away; Joe’s narrative actually reflects the blackface he wears.

This blackface narrative has violent consequences for the real Aboriginal bodies in the film. Jedda is a character full of potential. She is possibly intended as a site of intercultural dialogue: fluent in white culture as well as learning something of Aboriginal culture. However, this vision of Jedda as a space where cultures meet on an equal footing is constantly undermined. In a famous scene, Jedda plays at the piano and breaks down in frustrated tears as the “tribal songs” she hears in her head interrupt her

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recitation. The interruption represents, according to Joe, “the ghost of your tribe chasing you with a big stick” (DVD Ch4). Any attempt by Jedda to associate with her “tribe” has violent consequences (like being beaten with a stick). Further, in Joe’s view, Jedda’s tribe is a ghost; it has already perished. Jedda, too, is figured in the narrative as destined to perish. Laughing at one moment in the film, Doug McMahon states of Joe and Jedda’s romance: “Well, that Jezebel, not satisfied with claiming my wife, she claims my head stockman too” (DVD Ch3). Aligning Jedda with Jezebel is not only a biblical reference—to the woman commonly referred to as the most evil woman in the Old Testament, who is killed by being thrown from the upper-story window of a building—it is also a popular culture reference. Jezebel is a 1938 Bette Davis film about a Southern American woman whose relationship with a Southern gentleman is thrown into turmoil as she begins espousing the abolitionist ideals of the North. In being linked to Jezebel, Jedda is not simply marked as destined to die in a great fall, but she embodies debates over Aboriginal slavery (read assimilation) in 1950s Australia. In conjunction with Joe’s blacking-up of Jedda through his reference to Topsy (a slave and reminder of her backward naiveté), the narrative posits that an inherent weakness is to blame for Jedda’s inability to function as an ideal site of cultural exchange. Seemingly paradoxically, this biologically essentialised representation of “race” is provided by a blackface narrator.

Reading Jedda as a blackface narrative emphasises the fiction of race (inherent weaknesses and naïveté, for example, are seen to be invented, not innate qualities of Aboriginality). Further, Jedda as a blackface story becomes an example of how whiteness constructs its own self-supporting narratives about Otherness. This is a vital point that I believe Victoria Haskins (2004) overlooks in her discussion of the female scapegoat. Haskins suggests that Chauvel’s narrative places the blame for Jedda’s adoption (which she reads as representing the Stolen Generation) on Sarah McMahon, thereby alleviating white men of any responsibility for such colonial practices. According to the narrative logic of the film, Aboriginality is to blame for the tragedy in Jedda, not whiteness. Haskins’ work, though, can still be productively read as an examination of a white viewer’s experience. Within the text, the idea that Jedda might be to blame (or fate might be to blame) for her tortured existence and her eventual death alleviates, to some extent, any guilt that might be felt by her white foster parents or assimilated fiancé. This reading of Jedda indicates a shift from the extreme whiteness

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evidenced in the narrative of Uncivilised to the concealed whiteness of Jedda. In Uncivilised whiteness is clear to see. In Jedda whiteness is concealed; it is a solipsism that operates beneath the façade of Aboriginality. Whether the altered representation of whiteness occurred consciously or not, a comparison between Uncivilised and Jedda reveals the possibility that whiteness was becoming increasingly disavowed and therefore submerged in the white representations of Aboriginality between 1930 and 1960. This may have been due to the decline of empire or the rise of civil rights movements; either way, the Chauvels masked ideologies of whiteness with an intense focus on Otherness in Jedda. This intense focus on Aboriginality paradoxically allows Chauvel to claim the Australian landscape as a white possession.

The figure of the doomed Aboriginal intersects with Chauvel’s concept of locationism. In the Oral History Interview with Paul Clarke, his interviewers were hoping to shed light on, among other things, the disappearance of Clarke from Australia’s film and theatre scene. When asked why Chauvel cast Joe with a non-Aboriginal actor, Clarke justifies the use of blackface: “Actors”, he states, weren’t incredibly important to Chauvel. When I say that, he didn’t disrespect them, but they were secondary to the background, the scenery, the magnificence and the majesty of the Australian background and bushland […] his main object, I think, was to present Australia, virtually as a travelogue to the world with an Indigenous presentation. (CD1 Track18-20) Essentially, Clarke argues that the use of blackface doesn’t matter because Aboriginal self-representation wasn’t the main point to the film; the main point was a documentation of the landscape. Clarke gives the reason for his own casting as Chauvel’s locationism: that is, the authenticity of the actor didn’t matter so long as Chauvel captured the “true” landscape. However, Chauvel and his wife travelled far and wide to find the two Indigenous actors—the authenticity of the Aboriginal actors was in fact vital to Chauvel (see Elsa Chauvel, “The Jedda Safari”. My Life 127-36). If actors aren’t important, why would Chauvel search so far to find Ngarla Kunoth (Rosalie Kunoth-Monks) and Robert Tudawali (Bobby Wilson)? The authenticity of these two actors was perhaps the most important aspect of the film and is evident in the Chauvel’s insistence that the actor’s use traditional names (even if the names weren’t accurate). Implicit in Clarke’s justification for blackface is the assumption that Kunoth and Tudawali were not actors, but part of Chauvel’s locationism. This relegation of real Aboriginality (as opposed to blackface) to the landscape, or to the “true country”,

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empties Australia of any human presence and re-enacts the fictions of terra nullius. Both the (empty) landscape and (doomed) Aboriginality are available for occupation.

It is, then, not just Joe’s narrative that reflects blackface, but also Chauvel’s beloved “authentic” landscape. With filming completed in 1954, Chauvel travelled back to Sydney. When the plane carrying the last reels of film to London for post-production crashed in Jakarta, Chauvel had neither time nor money to return to the red centre to re- shoot the ending (Clarke CD2 Track7; and Chauvel Carlsson 150). Instead, he shot the footage in the Blue Mountains (see Fig. 7.2). Paul Clarke remarks of this moment: Chauvel got permission, there were no greenies around in those days apparently, he got permission to spray the rocks a reddish-ochre colour, and he shot the scene there. (CD2 Track8-9) Chauvel’s landscape is thus painted-up. Far from locationism, we are closer now to what Colin Johnson has called Chauvel’s “ideological authenticity” (n.p). Locationism is not about the real places, just the most real-looking places that suit Chauvel’s idea of the “true” Australia. This painted-up landscape, this blackface landscape, is rife with danger for the Aboriginal characters. It assimilates them, absorbs them, manoeuvres them and kills them, leaving the land available (via blackface) for white occupation. In this sense, both the landscape and narrative of Chauvel’s Jedda are representations of the assumed right to determine Otherness and the ontological privilege of whiteness. The image of Chauvel re-shooting the finale of Jedda conveys the essence of this (Fig 7.2). Chauvel reaches out to capture and mould the Indigenous actors (or does he push them over the edge?). The actors face Chauvel, with nowhere to go but backwards to their doom. Chauvel views (and makes up with make-up) the entire landscape with the appropriate machinery to put it to good use. Clarke, who can be seen at the left of Fig 7.2 as still being in his blackface costume, helps operate the camera’s crude pulley system; he is part of Chauvel’s manipulation of Aboriginality. Overall, in the confrontation between whiteness and Aboriginality in Jedda, whiteness retains its hegemony.

The first section of this chapter has provided a reading of how the erasure of Aboriginal agency in Chauvel’s cinema provides a justification for white possession of the landscape. Whiteness, thus, is read as the central theme of Uncivilised and Jedda. However, a significant change took place between the two films. In Uncivilised,

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whiteness is extreme: it was explicitly formulated, whereas in Jedda, whiteness is embedded much more subtly and insidiously within the text. Uncivilised provides an example of the making of whiteness in Chauvel’s cinema. By the time Chauvel filmed Jedda he had remade whiteness into a far more “invisible” ideology: it is not his obvious theme but is at the heart of his removal of Aboriginal agency. In this shift— from overt to “invisible” whiteness—the sheer difficulty of both social change and the amelioration of minority disadvantage is made apparent. Shannon Sullivan (2006) states that “[h]abits of white privilege are both capable of transformation and difficult to change because they are dynamic, temporal compositions of the self” (4). Possibly, then, the very nature of whiteness as a constantly changing entity might provide the opportunity to actively intervene and disturb the remaking of the fantasy of whiteness.

Figure has been removed due to Copyright restrictions

Fig. 7.2: Chauvel re-shooting the iconic finale to Jedda. Paul Clarke [far left] is still in his make-up and costume for the role of “Joe”. He is holding a rope that allows the camera, via a pulley, to roll forward, thus creating a “zoom in” effect. (Photo taken from Carlsson Chauvel 150)

In Uncivilised and Jedda, white privilege (the assumed right to govern and to absolute ontological freedom) remains the same while the discursive operation of white privilege differ. In many ways, Uncivilised unmasked whiteness, whereas the return to blackface in Jedda signals deeper habituated connections to a transnational history of racial oppression. The use of blackface in Jedda hid whiteness beneath Otherness. This positioning of whiteness within Aboriginality (white conceptions of Aboriginal identity) can only occur if Aboriginal agency is removed. Further, the shift in representations of whiteness that I analysed in the first half of this chapter suggests that there is immense

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difficulty in attempting to alter the discourse of whiteness because it is mobile and habitually refigured. Sullivan suggests that habits are most effectively altered through environmental modification: Given the difficulty, if not impossibility, of gaining access to unconscious habits of white privilege, the choice to change the space(s) one inhabits is an important, perhaps the primary, way to indirectly modify them. (143-4) Habits of whiteness (and habits generally) are difficult to identify and, thus, difficult to change. Sullivan suggests that the modification of spaces in which habits are enacted is one way to create social transformation. It is possible to explicitly identify blackface performance as a habit of whiteness and perhaps even alter the cultural environment to prevent or reflect on blackface performance. It might be said that blackface has been all but eliminated from culture today, but the habit of determining and governing blackness/Aboriginality/Otherness continues. While blackface has been a useful focal point through which to examine these habits, this chapter now takes up Sullivan’s challenge to find ways of transforming or interrupting the deeper privileges associated with representations of Otherness and to prevent whiteness from continuing to impinge upon Aboriginal agency.

Changing Landscapes of Criticism The erasure of Aboriginal agency enables claims of white sovereignty and refuses intercultural dialogues. The previous section has investigated the relationship between whiteness, Aboriginality and landscape in order to show how Chauvel’s representation of Aboriginality contributed to the naturalisation of a discourse of white sovereignty over Australia. This section now turns to consider how certain representations of Aboriginality block any potential dialogue between whiteness and Aboriginality. As mentioned in Chapter Six, influential Aboriginal critic Marcia Langton (1993) emphasises the need to bring “imagined models” of Aboriginality and whiteness into conversation (“I heard it” 35). This section suggests that white-authored accounts of Aboriginality habitually prevent this dialogue from occurring, and thus prevent the possibility of a transformation of whiteness. This section seeks to identify the limits of white-authored academic works in moving towards an intercultural transformation of whiteness. Such works must encounter and disrupt the habits of whiteness that are entrenched within white epistemology.

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Shannon Sullivan’s theory of changing habits of whiteness through environmental modifications is heavily based on her definition of environment. For Sullivan, environment is not outside of habit (or individuals). She states that the concept of environment that I use in my account of habit is no mere container. Habits are not “in” the world like water is in a plastic cup. Because humans are habituated beings, the world inhabits us as much as we inhabit it. (2) This definition means that any attempt at environmental modification in the service of social justice should always be focused on the relationship of the individual with the environment. An individual creating cultural artefacts is an example of how the individual is embedded in their environment, both drawing on and leaving marks on their surroundings. Thus, for example, environmental modification occurs as authors attempt to define and reflect upon the politics of representation. This is a subjective movement with environmental consequences. Another (related) example might involve a white critic reflecting upon the ways they research, determine and discuss Otherness. This would be the first turn of Sara Ahmed’s (2004) whiteness studies methodology: towards the self. The second turn would consider the self within an environment (“Declarations”). For example, Sullivan attempts to move past the common concern that whiteness studies might reinscribe the white self at the centre of culture. She does this by asking how white privilege can be used against racism: further thinking is needed about how white spatial privilege might be used as a positive tool against racism, as well as the dangers of unconsciously perpetuating white privilege by using it in that way. (166) This quote turns twice: firstly, it turns away from the Other to identify spatial privilege as being central to whiteness; secondly, it turns back to the Other in asking whether spatial privilege can be an effective anti-racist tool. In each part of this dissertation I have experimented with my own spatial privilege in order to attempt a transformation in the environment of academic writing. Through fictocritical methodologies I have (slightly) altered the environment of this dissertation in an attempt to expose and circumvent some unconscious habits of white privilege. But I have intended my fictocriticism to turn twice: firstly towards my own position in the environment of writing about Otherness, and secondly towards an environmental alteration (in the way Otherness is discussed) in order to expose and alter some habits of white privilege. This (risky) double movement will be practised again in this section, through a fictocritical analysis of some scenes from the original script of Jedda. The goal here is to consider whether fictocriticism can open the bounds of academic writing to enable an

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intercultural dialogue that can avoid or disrupt habits of whiteness that overwrite Aboriginal autonomy.

Fictocriticism is an ideal methodology with which to raise questions about subjectivity. Fictocriticism was taken up particularly by feminist academics in the 1980s and has come to be seen as a combatant to the implicit anglo-hetero-masculinity of standard academic narrative practice and the “universal” perspective of orthodox scholarly writing with its putative author-evacuated prose. As Heather Kerr (1995) states: the fictocritical performance, writing as performativity, is being understood as a particular ritualistic practice of a “self” and […] the text is being regarded as a device or armature within particular conducts of life and practices of that self. (94) For Kerr fictocritical writing is an extension of the self (a situated expression). Such a method of writing centres on the body and subjectivity, but is always about writing in general as well. Anne Brewster (2005) states that her use of first person narrativity is intended “to enter into an intimate negotiation with the seductions of subjectivity and narrative” (“Poetics” 401). Fictocriticism mediates the space between the writer’s body and theory/text, opening both to performative, endless (re)interpretations; the body and text are in medias res. Thus, discourses that attempt to normalise or determine subjectivity are often challenged by fictocritical writing, as the body becomes a textual self and the text becomes a bodily extension; each remain performatively open to new interpretations. Brewster (2005) has also referred to this as a simultaneous cognitive and affective dimension of fictocriticism, an “inscription and functioning” of the genre (“Writing Whiteness” n.p). The fictocritical pieces in this dissertation have opened a space in which to explore the construction of Otherness in academic writing. Often, modern academic writing simply avoids writing about Otherness, wishing to avoid the charge of having constructed Otherness. Yet even when explicit comments about Aboriginality are avoided, an implicit representation of Otherness still can remain (when Aboriginal is a synonym for traditional, pre-modern or non-Australian, for example). Perhaps explicitly stating our assumptions about Aboriginality would be central to ethical (especially white) academic practices: to identify and explore the blackfaces of our writing. Such metatextual practices can transform the concept of author as authority (which is problematic in any work that discusses Otherness).

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Critics of fictocriticism are sceptical about such projects and criticise the focus on the writer’s subjectivity. Such critics claim that fictocriticism is obsessed with the writer and denies the reader the kind of agency which it valorises. Although the fictocritical invites the reader to take [...] pleasure in the text, it seems that it is really inviting them to witness someone else’s pleasure. (Robb [1995] 99) Robb’s criticism of fictocriticism is intended to improve fictocritical practices by provoking responses. Rather than denying the agency of readers, I would argue that fictocritical writing attempts to engage the reader as an active presence in the text, more so perhaps than traditional modes of academic writing. Arguably it is readers who deny themselves the agency fictocriticism attempts to recognise and engage. Performative writing not only plays with subjectivity, it can open the bounds of other things for negotiation: history, literature, culture, reality, race, argument, meaning, texts, writers and readers. Fictocriticism, as Scott Brook (2002) has argued, is a genre concerned “with the conditions of possibility for knowledge production that criticism traditionally occludes” (106). The place of readers within this negotiation of knowledge production is vital. One of fictocriticism’s significant movements has been towards recognition of the reader as an agent of knowledge production in critical academic dissemination. Stephen Muecke and Noel King (1991) have suggested that fictocriticism makes knowledge personal while engaging readers. Fictocriticism, they state, can involve “critics […] incorporating stories about how they came to know into accounts of (‘objective’) knowledge and in the process becoming more readable” (emphasis in original, 14). Fictocriticism allows an escape of the critical, writerly self from the role of “knowledge giver” into a more transparent role as the facilitator—between writer and reader/s—in negotiations of critical meaning.

Fictocriticism, then, is performative writing. Anna Gibbs (2003) has described fictocriticism as writing that “uses fictional and poetic strategies to stage theoretical questions” (309). Gibbs’ rhetoric deploys a performance metaphor to suggest that writing is the stage and theory is the player. I would only add to this formulation—from a literary studies perspective—that theory and/or text (literature, film, history, etc.) might be considered the players. My own fictocritical practice performs a transformative theory/practice (altering the environment of academic writing to expose its habits) through recuperation, analysis, play and/or speculation with texts (such as

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song-sheets, novels, history, and film-scripts). In light of Sullivan’s above-quoted theories, my environmental transformation—while aimed at exposing white privilege (as it is embedded in academic writing)—operates as a reflection of my affective connection to the texts and characters (and a recognition of my inability to contain or represent them), as well as presenting my informed, critical opinion of the texts. I find fictocriticism to be particularly useful when interrogating critical ambivalence. It is certainly not within the scope of traditional forms of academic writing to express an emotional and cognitive uncertainty and ambivalence about texts and characters. Fictocriticism can overcome restrictions in academic writing to discover more about texts, and say more about texts.

For a long time I’ve struggled to reconcile critical opinion of Jedda as a bad (racist) film with one short moment in the film that I find particularly moving. That moment comes as Jedda’s father, Jacko, surrenders his baby daughter to the guardianship of white station-owner, Sarah McMahon. Possibly it is stilted acting (either due to Chauvel’s overbearing direction or an inexperienced actor); possibly it is brilliant acting. Either way, Jacko pauses with slight hesitation as his daughter is taken from him. The film’s narrative tells us that this “adoption” is absolutely necessary—Jedda’s mother had died while giving birth and Jacko (regardless of the film’s implicit assumptions that a man, particularly an Aboriginal man, cannot raise a child) needs to continue with the cattle-drive. But Jacko’s pause tells us something different: perhaps he is having second thoughts about giving up his child; perhaps he is wary of Sarah McMahon; perhaps he is struggling to let go of his only tangible connection to his dead wife (whom he may have loved intensely); perhaps he is momentarily considering raising Jedda himself. I find these possibilities quite affecting. Nevertheless, the force of colonialism and racism is against Jacko, and his daughter is informally adopted by Sarah McMahon. Jacko rides out of the film in a cloud of dust.

The way I read Jacko’s pause is highly personalised. Perhaps, I like to think, Charles and/or Elsa Chauvel were similarly affected. Jedda is widely understood to be the work of Charles Chauvel. However, Charles was aided with his script and story by his wife Elsa. Their script, which survives in part in Sydney’s Mitchell Library, contains several scenes that are not in the final cut of the film. These scenes reveal a slightly more revolutionary hand than the film suggests. It is too simple to suggest that the

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revolutionary moments were the conscious and intentional work of Elsa Chauvel, who was subsequently silenced by an overbearing husband. The revolutionary moments were likely to have been cut due to a combination of time restrictions, overseas producers who did not understand the significance of the scenes (or who felt they were too subversive), and a belief that the Aboriginal actors could not complete the scenes. Or perhaps the scenes were lost when a plane carrying the original film crashed over Jakarta and they could not be re-filmed along with the ending in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. Scenes in the script that are not in the film include a closer “study” of Jacko (Jedda’s father), as well as a criticism of child removal policies, where Aboriginal women panic and hide their children as police arrive at Mongala.97

The unfilmed, extended shots of Jacko add complexity to the representation of Aboriginality that appears in the final cut of the film. The script shows, for example, that the Chauvels intended to film a close-up of Jacko on the night of his wife’s death: The man rocks backwards and forwards as he wails and moans, occasionally using strange native words. His dismal wailing for his dead lubra is mingled with the fretful crying of the newly-born child. Felix Romeo rides into scene, dismounts, and […] lights a cigarette and quietly hands it down to the native. The death lament of the other natives can be heard in the distance. (“Papers” 683) Such a scene complicates the unambiguous and emotionless white master/black worker dichotomy that works to separate whiteness and Aboriginality in the colonial order. In the final cut of the film—aside from the ambiguous pause—Jacko is presented as emotionless. Proposed shots, such as that quoted here, would have added complexity to his character and nuanced the representation of Aboriginality. Such nuances are important, particularly in challenging the stereotypes of dysfunction in Aboriginal relationships. Such stereotypes, which stretch back to representations in early Australian theatre of the nineteenth century, justified the harsh government policies that disrupted and devastated Aboriginal families. To challenge them in popular culture of the 1950s might have had a significant effect. It is testimony to the insidious operations of the colonial order that such challenges were, one way or another, left out of the final film. However, some aspects of the unfilmed scenes are also testament to the ambivalence of

97 Such a scene would, no doubt, complicate Victoria Haskins’ (2004) reading of the absence of colonial administrators. However, the absence of the scene might equally confirm her theory that white bureaucratic characters were consciously absent from some Stolen Generations representations.

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colonial racisms. While Jacko’s grief might have been an important complexity in the film’s representation of Aboriginality, other planned shots were not so nuanced. During his encounter with McMahon, Jacko is described as “strained and sad as he replies like a plaintive child” (“Papers” 694). Possibly the unfilmed scenes represent the wider social ambivalence in cultural debates that were taking place during the 1950s. But, importantly for this chapter, the scenes bring Sarah McMann and Jacko into closer proximity.98 They are closer to engaging in an intercultural dialogue that could have transformative effects for whiteness. Nevertheless, no such dialogue took place in the film, and the following fictocritical piece examines whether it would have if the extra scenes were filmed. This piece is both a textual investigation of the original script of “Jedda” and a theoretical interrogation of intercultural dialogues.

* * *

98 The script spells Sarah and Doug’s surname “McMann”, whereas the film credits spell the surname “McMahon”. In this discussion “McMann” is used to refer to the character from the script, not the film.

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“Jacko and Sarah”

In the dust above the restless cattle the mourning songs swirl into a baby’s cry. Firelight flickers into the darkness to reveal the child that killed your wife.

Heavy boots kick dirt onto the fire. The blurred outline of your boss, Felix, holds out a smoke. Felix’s voice sounds distant: “here ya go Jacko, bloody good cook your wife was.”

Stumpy—another Aboriginal stockman—is trying to feed the newborn girl. Felix jokes: “don’t drown the thing Stumpy. P’raps she’s ‘ad enough?”

“How would I know? I can’t understand a word she says.”

At Mongala Homestead Mrs McMann kneads her grief into the morning damper. She has just heard over the pedal wireless about the death of a baby. The damper bears the despair that the death of “the only” baby girl for a thousand miles leaves in the heart of a lonely white woman in the Never Never. Sarah McMann wraps the dough with her emotion into a tea towel and slaps the flour from her apron.

Across the yard, through the dust thrown up from the pack of barking dogs, Felix swings his heavy boot at the dogs. The stockman who is following him barely registers that Felix has come to a halt at the bottom of the veranda stairs.

“How are you Felix? How’s the travelling?”

“Not bad Sarah, but we had a bit of bad luck last night—lost our native cook, wife of me stockman here.” Felix steps to the side to reveal Jacko; and a child in the coolamon in Jacko’s arms.

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Sarah’s voice grates in response—“Poor little mite, it only looks half alive.”

Felix continues: “Thought I might be able to leave it here with you...”

“Oh...”

“... One of your house girls might take pity on it.”

“But Felix...” Sarah is responding slowly, entranced by the object in the coolamon. She hangs out her empty, floured hand.

Felix protests: “Old Jacko’s wife was one of the prettiest girls I ever laid eyes on…”

A dry, white finger floats into your vision, about to touch the child. Before she touches the girl, the baby’s brown hand reaches out and grabs the knuckley finger.

“... Jacko met up with her in the scrub country.”

There is a pause as Felix nudges you. He wants you to speak. About your wife. You reach for words.

“My wife been... properly good... little missus... for me.”

Sarah steps forward and places one hand on the coolamon.

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Sarah looks at Jacko as if he were a plaintive child. He can barely speak a word. For heaven’s sake, look at the milk dried all over the baby’s face: “Come in and let me get you some tucker.”

Felix stamps his boot to scare a dog: “Thanks Missus, but we’ll be pushin’ on. I’m two days late already.”

Sarah grabs the coolamon with both hands: “I take care your piccaninny, Jacko.”

Your mouth opens to say something. There are no lines for you here.

Your empty hands hang in midair.

Sarah turns at the top of the steps, the coolamon in her arms: “Alright, you can leave it here—I’ll pass it on to one of the young mothers. There aren’t enough young ones for Doug’s liking...”

A nervous boot stamps at a dog.

Sarah continues: “... I mean, more children mean more helpers in the future.” Felix nods his hat and turns uncomfortably.

As Felix and Jacko reach their horses, Sarah calls: “Wait, has this one got a name?”

“Its mother’s name was Jedda.”

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Sarah says to herself “Its as good as any other” and stands on her balcony as the men return to the drove. Their trail of dust lingers in the air like a conversation that has barely taken place.

* * *

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“Jacko and Sarah” revolves around several unspoken monologues and conversations in the film and script of Jedda. By prefacing the arrival of Jedda with news of the death of a white baby on another homestead, the original script implies an unspoken monologue for Sarah. Sarah’s despair at the news echoes a general paranoia that the white race might not survive on the Australian frontier. This is a similar fear as is addressed in Uncivilised, though the crucible of white nationalism has shifted from the tropics to the outback. Nevertheless, both films respond to a fear that the white race might fail to completely populate the continent. In the baby Jedda, Sarah sees a child who is biologically suited to the landscape (as she states emphatically upon seeing the baby Jedda for the first time in the final cut of the film, “it would live”; DVD Ch3). For Sarah, the story of Jedda is one of failure: the impossibility of making an Aboriginal child “human” (transforming Jedda from a subhuman “it” into “her”) through the process of cultural assimilation. Hinging on the fate of Jedda, for Sarah at least, is the (cultural) future of whiteness in Australia. The nationalist concern to find a way for the white race to occupy the continent is Sarah’s unspoken monologue and one of her motivations for raising Jedda. In the final cut of the film this nationalist concern is made even more personal to Sarah—it is her own baby that dies prior to the arrival of Jedda.

In both Jedda and “Jacko and Sarah” Sarah’s unspoken monologue is represented through long lingering glazes and a dreamlike tone to her dialogue. Sarah seems to talk past the characters as she stares into the national future. Jacko, too, has an unspoken monologue. The original script includes a close shot of Jacko mourning after the death of his wife, and Felix, “unable to express his rough sympathy” (“Papers” 683). Sarah shows some sympathy with Jacko, even though she speaks “unemotionally” in telling him she’ll take care of his “piccaninny” (“Papers” 697), and nods in understanding as Jacko speaks of his wife “like a plaintive child” (“Papers” 694). In these encounters there is an emotional affect emanating from Jacko that is sensed but not engaged with by the white characters. Textually, the affect arises from Jacko’s grief, as well as his alterity: a difference that Sarah and Felix experience as unknowable, unrelatable and mysterious. In the script the unknown is contained through a paternalistic racialisation of Aboriginality: Jacko is described as a “plaintive child” (“Papers” 694), which translates in the final cut of the film to Felix’s description of Jacko as “our head boy” (my emphasis, DVD Ch 2). “Jacko and Sarah” attempts to extend the mystery of Jacko’s affect beyond the limits of an assimilation-era paternalism. Despite Sarah’s and

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Felix’s attempts to restrict his agency, “Jacko and Sarah” acknowledges Jacko’s autonomy. But while Jacko desires to speak, he finds no lines—a gesture towards a script which does not provide more than one line for him, but also a critical manoeuvre to acknowledge but not explain his agency. As in my reading of Charles Never, then, Jacko has an unknowable potential efficacy: an “empty seat at the negotiating table” to use the words of Stephen Muecke (2008) that I quoted in Chapter Five (Joe 57). Perhaps acknowledging Aboriginal agency as an empty space in the cultural imaginary can productively unsettle whiteness so that it no longer inhabits Otherness in order to define itself. Jacko’s unspoken monologue, then, remains unspoken in “Jacko and Sarah”, but it is an acknowledged absence that has the potential to unsettle whiteness.

The unspoken monologues in “Jacko and Sarah” emphasise that Jedda is a story about a failed intercultural dialogue. In focusing on the ethics of an intercultural dialogue I am investigating what Anne Brewster (2005) has termed “an ethics of relationality” (“Fractured Conversations” n.p.). Brewster uses the phrase in her analysis of Lisa Bellear’s poem “Feelings”. “Feelings” stages a “virtual dialogue” between an Aboriginal woman and a white, female academic, which Brewster reads as creating a space of reading and listening which, while never divested of white power, does produce an affective response (in non-indigenous audiences) and hence the potential for movement and change. (n.p) That is, “virtual dialogues” are potentially transformative because they perform a process of everyday racialisation where whiteness and Aboriginality intertwine to become a cultural site of acknowledgement and reflection for white people. “Jacko and Sarah” performs my own affective response to a failed intercultural dialogue from Jedda. The baby Jedda has metaphorical significance as the site of a potential intercultural dialogue between Jacko and Sarah, but any such dialogue, like the baby in the original text, is doomed from the outset. While the script indicates that Sarah personally takes the child from Jacko, the final edit of the film creates further distance between the two characters by having Sarah’s Aboriginal domestic workers (read slaves) collect the baby from Jacko (DVD Ch2). This editorial change emphasises the context of white power in which Jacko and Sarah meet. The film’s avoidance of an intercultural dialogue, then, is mirrored by Sarah’s lack of physical contact with Jacko and Jedda, and verifies the control of whiteness within the textual space of their encounter.

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“Jacko and Sarah” has attempted to alter the environment of academic writing to identify the limits of white academic writing about Aboriginal agency. By staging an intercultural dialogue from the script of Jedda, I have blurred the boundaries between two of Marcia Langton’s three categories of Aboriginality. Langton (1993) famously argued that there are three categories of Aboriginality. An analysis of the first category—the “experience of the Aboriginal person interacting with other Aboriginal people in social situations located largely within Aboriginal culture” (“I heard it” 34)— is outside the scope of this dissertation. I have stated earlier that the second category— the “familiar stereotypes and the constant stereotyping, iconising and mythologising of Aboriginal people by white people” (“I heard it” 34)—is the main focus of this dissertation. However, in the above staging of an intercultural dialogue, this chapter has created an opening between the white construction of Aboriginality (the second category) and Langton’s third category of Aboriginality: “those constructions which are generated when Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people engage in actual dialogue” (“I heard it” 35). Langton’s third category of Aboriginality can be summarised as the intercultural dialogue about Aboriginality. In such dialogues, Langton states, “the individuals involved will test imagined models of the other to find some satisfactory way of comprehending the other” (“I heard it” 35). That is, intercultural dialogues provide the site for a rearticulation of both whiteness and Aboriginality.

The obvious should be stated here: “Jacko and Sarah” is not an actual intercultural dialogue, but the fictional retelling of a virtual/imagined intercultural encounter. The relationship was first imagined by the Chauvels, and my fictional narrative follows the Chauvels’ script. Thus, “Jacko and Sarah” is a staging of Langton’s third category within the second category. There are two critical points that arise from the creative collapse of these categories. Firstly, investigating the ethics of relationality within a virtual dialogue exposes the limits of a transformative writing methodology that occurs without Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal collaboration. That is, it is impossible for writing from within Langton’s second category to identify the nature of Aboriginal agency. Perhaps, I have suggested, such writing can productively acknowledge Aboriginal agency. Secondly, staging an intercultural dialogue within Langton’s second category highlights the importance of context to understanding such encounters. That is, my writing suggests that Aboriginal autonomy is limited by the environment in which it

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acts or is acknowledged. While intercultural dialogue might assume an idealistic status within the imagined (antiracist) future of Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal affairs, the effectiveness of such conversations will always be limited by their context. For example, this dissertation suggests that the cultural context in which white people encounter Otherness is almost always saturated with the myopic worldview of whiteness. It is a solipsism that severely limits the operation and acknowledgement of the Other’s agency within national cultures, and which in turn limits the extent to which whiteness can be transformed as a result of intercultural encounters.

Conclusion Chapter Seven has argued that the erasure of Aboriginal agency serves two vital roles within the fantasy of whiteness. Firstly, when Aboriginal agency is ignored the landscape is free for white inhabitation, and secondly, ignoring Aboriginal efficacy removes the possibility of intersubjective engagement. Presuming an absence of Aboriginal autonomy allows for the imagined control of the Australian landscape as well as a delusion about the imperviousness of the colonial mind (that is, the colonial psyche cannot be engaged by Others and forced into renegotiation). Tony Birch (2003) has written eloquently of the effect of such imaginings on Australian history: Control of the landscape is vital to the settler psyche. The victors’ histories falsely parade as the history of Australia. These histories are those of absence: of terra nullius. In order to uphold the lie of an “empty land”, Europeans have either denied the Indigenous people’s presence, or have completely devalued our cultures. These hegemonic histories take possession of others’ histories and silence them, or manipulate and “deform” them. (152) The imagined absence Birch identifies can be extended to include Aboriginal agency. The dominant story of the nation deforms, ignores, manipulates, silences or denies the significance of Aboriginal culture and the (personal and possessive) sovereignty of Aboriginal people. What Birch implies, and this dissertation has been at pains to acknowledge, is that this story is fantastical. Aboriginal people have challenged and continue to challenge the hegemonic imagining of the nation. Charles Never may have been among the forerunners of a creative cross-cultural resistance strategy. David Unaipon was certainly among the most well-known of Aboriginal activists in the early twentieth century; his remarkable style of resistance was similar to the resistance strategies of African American artists and activists of the time, not because Aboriginal and African American people were collaborating, but because they were pitted against a

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transnational discourse of whiteness that had many similar features on either side of the Pacific. However, the success of artists such as Charles Chauvel reveals the tenacity of whiteness: whiteness was durable, adaptive, and continually transformed itself. If these transformations are read as responses to the will of Others, then the hegemony of whiteness is disrupted at the most basic level. Similarly, this dissertation should be positioned as a response to the demand by Aboriginal people (artists, activists, politicians) for recognition. Whiteness studies, then, and any transformative methodology that arises from it, is one avenue through which white people are responding to Others who have increasingly found ways to negotiate the fantasy of whiteness and who demand recognition as self-determining individuals, communities and nations.

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CONCLUSION

Whiteness, Blackface and Aboriginal Agency

This dissertation has argued that cultural representations of Aboriginality constitute a site through which a transnational fantasy of whiteness circulates. Part One contained two chapters that analysed the structure and content of nineteenth-century American blackface entertainment and argued that blackness was the product of white social, political and racial fears and desires in American culture at the time. Part Two then looked at the influence of American blackface entertainment on representations of Aboriginality in nineteenth-century Australian theatre and culture. It was argued that blackface entertainment enabled a robust transnational association between American and Australian discourses of white colonial dominance. Part Three then examined the transnational discourse of whiteness in the context of twentieth-century Australian culture, uncovering stylistic similarities between Aboriginal and African American performers and writers as well as white Australian cinema and Hollywood cinema. The stylistic similarities, it was suggested, point to a related underlying doctrine of putative white ascendancy that influenced and manipulated the production and reception of cultural works. Though it was not the focus of this dissertation, my argument could be applied in the context of American cultural studies to investigate how anecdotes, stories, and narratives about Aboriginal people operated discursively in America to support an ideology of white command there. This dissertation has not provided an exhaustive investigation of U.S.-Australian transnational relationships relating to whiteness, blackness and Aboriginality; but it has uncovered significant instances of cultural connectivity and influence between Australia and America. It identifies a transnational ideology of whiteness underpinning nineteenth-century representations of blackness in America and Aboriginality in Australia, which had ongoing effects in twentieth century Australian culture.

This dissertation began with an analysis of the 2008 photographic exhibition “Not Really Aboriginal” by Bindi Cole. Cole’s images of blackfaced Aboriginal people reveal the assumptions behind white desires to legitimate Aboriginality. For example,

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when a white person says to a fair-skinned urban Aboriginal person “you’re not really Aboriginal” they are acting out of the belief that they know Aboriginality and that they have the right to police the boundaries of Otherness. For Cole, white discourses about Aboriginality in contemporary Australia are congruent with nineteenth-century blackfaced representations of Aboriginality. I would go further and suggest that, while the ways Aboriginality is culturally represented and produced may have changed since the nineteenth century, a habitual obfuscation of Aboriginal agency persists in Australian culture. Arguably, artwork such as Cole’s provokes a remaking of whiteness’ fantasy of control, a conceited ideation most obvious in Andrew Bolt’s caustic declaration that Cole is a “white Aborigine” with undeserved political and cultural currency (“So Hip”). Bolt’s comment, in effect, can be read as his desire to demarcate Cole’s agency in a strategic attempt to delimit the influence of her articulation of contemporary racism.

To create the blackfaces in her artwork Bindi Cole used shades of make-up paint, the names of which gesture to the tradition of American blackface entertainment. The make-up, named “Minstrel Black” and “Negro Brown”, suggests a link between African American stereotypes (created by white performers in nineteenth-century American theatre) and contemporary Australian racism. The link between American and Australian racial constructions has been the focus of this dissertation. The two chapters in Part One examine the content and context of nineteenth-century American blackface entertainment. Chapter One argues that blackness was, to use Fanon’s (1968) phrase, “overdetermined from without” (82). That is, blackness on the nineteenth-century American stage was the result of white anxieties, fears and desires. Chapter Two builds on this argument to suggest that blackness was actually a site where whiteness remade itself to ease changing social, cultural, political and racial tensions. Part One thus underpins the argument that continues throughout the rest of the dissertation, that a fanciful posturing of whiteness (which was not always or solely concerned with whiteness, blackness or Aboriginality) circulates within and beneath representations of Otherness.

Part Two builds upon the argument of Part One by examining the discursive connections that were enabled by trans-Pacific blackface entertainment. It provides a transnational reading of Aboriginality in nineteenth-century Australian culture. Chapters

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three, four and five investigate Richard Waterhouse’s (1990) suggestion that the representation of Aboriginal people was disseminated through a prism cut by the American blackface minstrels (Minstrel Show 100). These three chapters reveal stylistic similarities between American and Australian imaginings about Otherness, and that the strongest connectivity was neither the actual images or styles representing Otherness, but the underlying assumptions about the relationship between whiteness and Others. On both sides of the Pacific, then, the cultural record about Otherness suggests that African American people and Aboriginal people were necessarily (for a variety of imagined reasons) dominated by white people. However, Chapter Five, the final chapter of Part Two, positions the cultural representation of white dominance alongside protests by Charles Never. Juxtaposing whiteness with Aboriginal agency reveals that within and beneath representations of Otherness is a conception of white superiority that was intended to justify colonialism, but that, instead, was forced to respond to the will of Aboriginal artists and activists. Part Three builds on this conclusion to examine the ethics and politics of an intercultural dialogue between whiteness and Aboriginality.

Part Three contains two case studies of Australian artists who used Aboriginality either to provoke a remaking of, or to themselves remake, whiteness. Chapter Six theorised David Unaipon’s strategy of resistance. Unaipon used anthropological ways of “knowing” Aboriginality to attempt to engage white audiences and subvert their epistemological presumptions. In Chapter Six I suggested that Unaipon’s style of resistance was similar to the resistance strategies of nineteenth-century African American performers. Chapter Six argues, then, that the parallel between Unaipon’s style of resistance and African American methods of resistance is not due to collaboration between such artists, but due to the similarity and relationship between American and Australian discourses of whiteness. Chapter Six also suggests that some critical readings of Unaipon and his work have overlooked his central challenge to whiteness: that Aboriginal agency is multiple and unknowable. In Chapter Seven I argue that films by Charles Chauvel, whose transnational cinema utilised American cinematic techniques in an Australian context, habitually demarcate Aboriginality in ways that normalise white sovereignty. Chapter Seven moves through two related arguments: firstly, that the imagined absence of Aboriginal agency palliates the white ontological (and actual) invasion into Aboriginal sovereignty and, secondly, that the prefiguring of a restrained Aboriginal autonomy evades the necessity for intercultural

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dialogue. Chapter Seven also highlights the limits of (contemporary) white writing about Aboriginality. On this point I suggest that the recognition, not definition, of Aboriginal agency is of utmost importance in any writing that seeks to generate a more ethical whiteness. Further, the chapters of Part Three add weight to the observation in Part Two that the white control over Otherness is illusory, and suggests some ways to identify both whiteness and Aboriginal agency in order to consciously and vigilantly work within whiteness towards an ethical remaking of the environments that contribute to and support the underlying ideologies that obscure Aboriginal agency and prevent intercultural dialogues.

This dissertation, through the ethical dilemma raised in Chapter Seven, returns full circle to the implication that arises in Bindi Cole’s photography, that there is a link between contemporary racism and nineteenth-century blackface. Nineteenth-century American blackface contributed to and strengthened the presumption that white people can control Aboriginality, and that identity is not a consultative or negotiable process. Blackface in Bindi Cole’s work provides a powerful metaphor for the inappropriateness of white ideas about Aboriginality and the defiance of Aboriginal people within and beyond cultural limits. Cole impels white people to confront and abandon their assumed right to define Aboriginality. It is an argument that echoes the challenge to whiteness posed by David Unaipon (that resembled the style of African American dandies) and that is made by other Aboriginal artists today, such as Wesley Enoch.

Wesley Enoch is an Aboriginal playwright and director. Larissa Behrendt (2007) describes him as “one of Indigenous Australia’s greatest figures in the theatre” (“Introduction” viii). As a director he has brought to life classics of Aboriginal theatre, including The Cherry Pickers (2001), Radiance (1997), The Dreamers (2002), and Stolen (1998), and has also reinterpreted texts by white Australians on Aboriginal themes, such as Fountains Beyond (2000) and Capricornia (2006). As a writer Enoch has contributed to and crafted important plays such as The 7 Stages of Grieving (with Deborah Mailman, 1995), Black Medea (2000) and Cookie’s Table (2008). In many of the plays he has directed Enoch has his Aboriginal actors wear white make-up to play white characters. For example, whiteface was used to powerful effect in Enoch’s production of Capricornia (2006). Capricornia, adapted by Louis Nowra in 1988 from Xavier Herbert’s classic Australian novel published in 1938, is the story of Norman,

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who returns home from boarding school and slowly comes to “discover” his Aboriginal heritage. Enoch’s production combined a huge cloth set with blinding lights to create an atmosphere of harsh, blinding whiteness. Norman literally moves through this whiteness and learns of the restrictions that are placed on his career, relationships and movements as a result of his “outed” Aboriginality. The whitefaced actors contribute to the presentation of whiteness as an abstract, permeating presence. In this light, Aboriginality is also seen to be highly constructed, a metaphoric blackface that Norman is forced to inhabit against his will.

On 24 August 2006, following Capricornia’s run in Sydney, I interviewed Enoch and asked him if Capricornia had been a deliberate attempt to define whiteness. Enoch replied that whiteness is so pervasive that it is virtually impossible to define: Whiteness is never forced to define itself. Whiteness is the status quo. Whiteness is the oxygen you breath. […] To define whiteness is almost impossible because it is in the way this building has been built, in the way governments are run, and the way the roads have been set out. (Interview) Enoch’s definition of an indefinable whiteness suggests that whiteness is environmentally entrenched, an inhabited world(view) that privileges white people. The way in which this world is constructed, perceived and occupied is precisely what I have pointed to in my use of the phrase “the fantasy of whiteness”. While Enoch suggests that whiteness can’t be defined per se, he argues that it is important to build an “intellectual rigour of whiteness” (Interview). Such intellectual rigour interrogates the way Aboriginality is imagined to be biologically essentialised within an environment of whiteness: Blackness has to define itself, and minority cultures have to define themselves. Blackness is totally scrutinised and studied, both ethnographically and anthropologically, and all those kinds of way of studying blackness are there. […] Whiteness is a cultural manifestation, it’s not a colour; in the same way that my argument about blackness is that it is cultural, not colour. (Interview) Whiteness is defined by Enoch as a cultural manifestation, a presence that operates through culture to protect and maintain white privilege. This dissertation has used cultural analysis to identify some of the pervasive and habitual processes of whiteness. To destabilise whiteness, Enoch argues, Aboriginality must also be seen as a cultural manifestation, not, as he has stated elsewhere, as “a museum piece, a remnant of a world long gone” (“Why do we Applaud?” [1996] 13). My dissertation, too, I hope, contributes to an undoing of the museumification of Aboriginality by following Enoch

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in a reading of Aboriginality as a vibrant, unfixed cultural presence. Enoch saw his production of Capricornia as contributing to a discussion about how whiteness attempts to culturally define and position Aboriginality: “it’s about a black person in a white world” (Interview). At one point during rehearsals of Capricornia, Enoch thought that confronting the theatrical history of blackface might be one way of furthering the scrutiny of whiteness.

In my interview with him, Enoch told of a rehearsal where he played “devil’s advocate” to initiate a conversation with his actors about whether to use blackface in Capricornia. After the production group decided not to, Enoch was still clearly fascinated by the potential of staging blackface in front of white audiences: I’d love to do that. Suddenly you’d see a woman come out with blackface on and go: “Oh my god.” […] I’d be going: “I want you to confront your own history by putting blackface on, you feeling really sick to your guts about it and having to work it out.” (emphasis added, Interview) Enoch’s shift into the second person voice at this point in the interview has been influential in my thinking about the topic of blackface in Australian culture. Enoch emphasised that blackface entertainment is a white theatre history, and that by provoking white critics/audiences to confront their history of blackface he could progress his project to alter the environment of Australian culture to provide space for Aboriginal cultural self-determination. But, at the same time, Enoch’s use of a second person voice in the above quote suggests limits to the extent to which white people can contribute to Aboriginal cultural self-determination. Enoch went on to explain: It’s whether we put the blackface on ourselves or other people put it on us. That’s the whole argument of self determination—“we should control our own destiny”—and are we doing that? I don’t know. (Interview) Blackface in this last quote takes on a transhistorical and metaphorical significance that is useful for thinking about the contemporary implications of this dissertation. Enoch’s interest in blackface is clearly about goading white critics, authors, and audiences to work out an ethics of reading through blackface in a way that responds to, but does not impinge upon, Aboriginal self-determination. Metaphorically, blackface represents any coherent assemblage or inhabitation of the cultural markers of Aboriginality. This dissertation argues that whiteness habitually seeks to control the way in which the creation or performance of Aboriginality and Otherness occurs. In an Australian context, such a discussion identifies some aspects of the cultural environment in which

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Aboriginality is defined and negotiated. Understanding the cultural fantasy of whiteness, and how it habitually evades challenges by Aboriginal people, can help alert critics, readers and audiences to the need for ongoing vigilance in both seeking out Aboriginal voices and in engaging with them in ethical ways that acknowledge, respect and respond to Aboriginal agency.

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APPENDIX

Select Bibliography of American Blackface Songs

Where information on composers, lyricists, performers or musicians was available, it is noted in parentheses within the title.

Songs Quoted in the Dissertation and/or Used for Images

Songs quoted in the dissertation are listed in the order that they are quoted. Except for “The Original Jim Crow” and “Had I the Wings of a Fairy Gay”, they are retrievable via the African American Sheet Music Collection (1820-1920). Brown University Library Digital Collection,

“My Long Tail Blue”. New York: Firth, c.1827. “My Long Tail Blue”. New York: Atwill, c.1827. “Coal Black Rose”. New York: Hewitt, c.1828. “The Original Jim Crow” [version A]. New York: Riley, c.1832. W.T. Lhamon, Jr. Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003. 95-102. “Jim Crow: A Comic Song (Sung by Rice at the Chestnut St Theatre)” [version B]. Philadelphia: Edgar, c.1832. “Zip Coon: A Favorite Comic Song (Sung by G.W. Dixon)”. New York: Hewitt, 1834. “Had I the Wings of a Fairy Gay” Sanford’s Songs: As Sung at his Drawing Room Entertainments. Arranged by Stephen Glover. New York: Waters, 1854. from the Minstrel Show Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, Austin, Texas. “Jim Brown: A Celebrated Nigger Song (Written and Arranged by William Clifton)”. New York: Endicott. c.1836. “Jim Brown: A Favorite Comic Song”. New York: Hewitt. 1835.

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From the “Minstrel Show Collection” at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, University of Texas, Austin, U.S.A.

Songs are listed chronologically.

1830s: “Zip Coon”. New York: Endicott, 1834. “Jim Brown”. New York: Hewitt, 1835. “Long Time Ago”. New York: Endicott, 1836 “Sitting on a Rail; or, the Racoon Hunt (A Celebrated Comic Extravaganza as sung by Leicester)”. New York: Firth, 1836. “Clare de Kitchen”. The Crow Quadrilles. Philadelphia: Nunns, 1837.

1840s: “The Fine Old Colored Gentleman (As sung by the Virginia Minstrels, words by D. Emmitt [sic]”. Boston: Keith, 1843. “Carry Me Back to Old Virginia”. New York: Jacques, 1847. “Dandy Jim of Caroline”; “Miss Lucy Long”; “Boatman’s Dance”; “Old Dan Tucker”; “My Old Aunt Sally”; “Miss Lucy Neal”; “The Ole Grey Goose”; “Going Ober de Mountain”; “’Twill Never do to Gib it up So”. Music of the Ethiopian Serenaders: Nine Songs and a set of Cotillions. Philadelphia: Ferrett, c.1844. “Happy are we Darkies so gay”. New York: Jacques, 1847. “Rosa Lee”. New York: Jacques, 1847. “Walk in the Parlour”. New York: Jacques, 1847. “Darkey’s Lament: Campbell’s Melodies (Sung by the Ethiopian Serenaders)”. New York: Hall, 1848. “Dinah Crow: A Celebrated Ethiopian Song, as sung by the Campbell Minstrels (Composed and Arranged for the Piano Forte, by J. H. Burdett)”. New York: Hall, 1848. “Oh! Susanna (Sung by G.N. Christy of the Christy Minstrels)”. New York: Holt, 1848. “The New Mary Blane (as sung by the Christy Minstrels)”. New York: Firth, 1848. “Uncle Ned”. Songs of the Sable Harmonists. Louisville: Peters, 1848. “Witching Dinah Crow (Written, composed and sung by Edwin P. Christy)”. New York: Firth, 1848.

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“I Hear dar Hoofs Upon de Hill (Written and Composed by Nelson Kneass)”. Melodies of the New Orleans Serenaders Operatic Troupe. New York: Firth, 1849. “Old Joe”. Ethiopian Melodies sung by White’s Serenaders. New York: Firth, 1849. “The Virginia Rose Bud; or, I Had a Rose in my Garden Growing (by F. H. Kavanagh)”. Philadelphia: Lee, 1849. “Thou art gone from My Gaze (New Orleans Serenaders)”. New York: Firth, 1849. “Walk in the Parlour (Arranged by E.P. Christy)”. New York: Jacques, 1847.

1850s: “Flora May (for New Orleans’ Operatic Troupe, sung by J. H. Collins)”. Philadelphia: Fiot, 1850. “Nelly Bly (by Stephen Foster)”. New York: Firth, 1850. “Jenny Rose (Myer’s Original Virginia Serenaders, by Ben F. Scull)”. Philadelphia: Couenhoven, 1852. “Massa’s in de Cold Ground (by Stephen Foster)”. New York: Firth, 1852. “My Old Kentucky Home (by Stephen Foster)”. New York: Firth, 1852. “Old Jessy (for Christy’s Minstrels by C. C. Sedgwick)”. Philadelphia: Lee, 1852. “Old Folks At Home (by Stephen Foster)”. New York: Firth, 1852. “My Old Kentucky Home (by Stephen Foster)”. New York: Firth, 1852. “Row, Row, Your Boat; or, the Old Log Hut (as sung by Master Adams of Kunkels Nightingale Opera Troupe, Music by R. Sinclair)”. New York: Firth, 1852. “Minnie May (for Wells’ Minstrels, by George S. Brown)”. Indianapolis: Jones, 1853. “Nelly Vale (for Wood’s Minstrels, by H. Craven Griffiths)”. New York: Waters, 1853. “One Gentle Word”; “Had I the Wings of a Fairy Gay”; “Minnie Gray”; “Love Lake”. Sanford’s Songs: As Sung at his Drawing Room Entertainments. Arranged by Stephen Glover. New York: Waters, 1854. “Willie We Have Missed You (by Stephen Foster)”. New York: Firth, 1854. “Wilt Thou Be Gone Love (from Romeo and Juliet, composed by Stephen C. Foster)”. New York: Firth, 1854. “Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming (by Stephen C. Foster)”. New York: Pond, 1855. “Farewell My Lilly Dear”. New York: Firth, c.1857. “Oh Boys Carry Me ‘Long”. New York: Firth, c.1857.

246

“Young Folks at Home (Wood’s Minstrels by Miss Hattie Livingston)”. New York: Gould, 1858. “Parthenia to Ingomar (written by W. H. McCarthy, composed by Stephen C. Foster)”. New York: Firth, 1859.

1860s: “I Wish I Was In Dixie’s Land (for Bryant’s Minstrels, by Dan. D. Emmett)”. New York: Firth, 1860. “Old Black Joe (by Stephen C. Foster, for Dan Bryant)”. New York: Pond, 1860. “Beautiful Dreamer (by Stephen C. Foster)”. New York: Pond, 1864. “Nancy Fat and My Polly Ann (by Dave Reed, music by T. McNally)”. New York: Pond, 1864. “Ole Mose; or, Freedom is Coming (by Edwyn Wells Foster)”. Boston: Tolman, 1865. “A Smile Was All She Gave Me (by Bobby Newcomb)”. New York: Ditson, 1866. “The Fascinating Nig (by R. Frank Cardella, for Billy Emerson)”. St Louis: Compton, 1868. “Gustavus Adolphus Green (by Ned Straight, for Billy Emerson)”. Cincinnati: Church, 1868. “Pickaninny Nigs (by Ned Straight for Delehanty and Hengler)”. Cincinnati: Dobmeyer, 1868. “The Dissipated Steamboat; Plantation Joe (by Harry G. Richmond)”. New York: Harris, 1869. “Love Among the Roses (by E.N. Catlin)”. Massachusetts: Russell, 1869.

247

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