Encountering Indigeneity: Xavier Herbert, ‘Inky’ Stephensen and the Problems of Settler Nationalism
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Published:
Nov 27, 2017
Keywords:
settler colonialism, nationalism, indigenisation, race, literature
Main Article Content
Abstract
The 1930s in Australia was a period marked by rising awareness of and attention to Australia’s ‘half-caste problem’. Released and promoted in tandem with the 1938 sesquicentenary of Australia’s settler colonisation, Xavier Herbert’s novel Capricornia appeared as a searing protest against the exclusion of so-called ‘half-castes’ from white Australia. The novel itself was published by the Publicist Publishing Company, platform for rationalist and businessman W.J. Miles and editor and polemicist P.R. ‘Inky’ Stephensen, both strict advocates of a racially pure white Australia. Yet together, Herbert and his patrons capitalised on the sesquicentenary, and the Day of Mourning protests they helped organise, to promote what they proclaimed the ‘Great Australian Novel’. This article reads Herbert’s racial understandings in relation to those of Stephensen, and reads them both in relation to the prevailing circumstances of 1930s Australia, as well as the underlying dynamics of settler colonialism. Whereas Stephensen subscribed to the ‘Aryan Aborigines’ hypothesis and emphasised Australia’s supposed racial purity, Herbert celebrated instead the potentiality of ‘Euraustralian’ hybridity. While these approaches are ostensibly at odds, this article argues instead that they share a common drive towards settler indigenisation and independence as their ultimate aims.
Article Details
Section
Xavier Herbert: Forgotten or Repressed? (Peer Reviewed)
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References
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Carter, D., ‘Critics, Writers, Intellectuals’, in Elizabeth Webby (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000. https://doi.org/10.1017/ccol0521651220.011.
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Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics, ‘Official Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia’, Melbourne, 1924.
Commonwealth of Australia, ‘Aboriginal Welfare: Initial Conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities’, Canberra, 1937.
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de Groen, F., and L. Hergenhan (eds), Xavier Herbert: Letters, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 2002.
Docker, J., In a Critical Condition: Reading Australian Literature, Penguin Books, Melbourne, 1984.
Fabian, J., Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, Columbia University Press, New York, 2014. https://doi.org/10.7312/fabi16926.
Franklin, M., Laughter, Not for a Cage, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1956.
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Hope, A.D., ‘The Bunyip Stages a Comeback’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 16 June 1956.
Kiernan, B., ‘Cultural Transmission and Australian Literature: 1788–1998’, Studies in Australian Literary History, Sydney Association for Studies in Society and Culture, Sydney, 1997.
Lawson, A., ‘The Recognition of National Literatures: The Canadian and Australian Examples’, PhD thesis, University of Queensland, 1987. https://doi.org/10.14264/uql.2016.906.
Lawson, A., ‘Postcolonial Theory and the “Settler” Subject’, Essays on Canadian Writing, no. 56, 1995.
McGregor, R., ‘An Aboriginal Caucasian: Some Uses for Racial Kinship in Early Twentieth Century Australia’, Australian Aboriginal Studies, no. 1, 1996, pp. 11–20.
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McGregor, R., ‘“Breed Out the Colour” or the Importance of Being White’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 33, no. 120: 2002, pp. 286–302. https://doi.org/10.1080/10314610208596220.
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Moran, A., ‘As Australia Decolonizes: Indigenizing Settler Nationalism and the Challenges of Settler/Indigenous Relations’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 25, no. 6: 2002, pp. 1013–42. https://doi.org/10.1080/0141987022000009412.
Muirden, B. W., The Puzzled Patriots: The Story of the Australia First Movement, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1968.
Munro, C., Wild Man of Letters: The Story of P.R. Stephensen, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1984.
Munro, C., ‘Introduction’, The Foundations of Culture in Australia: An Essay Towards National Self-Respect, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1986.
Probyn-Rapsey, F., ‘Some Whites are Whiter than Others: The Whitefella Skin Politics of Xavier Herbert and Cecil Cook’, JASAL: Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, Special Issue ‘Spectres, Screens, Shadows, Mirrors’, 2007, pp. 157–73.
Rose, D.B., Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2004.
Rowse, T., ‘Modernism, Indigenism and War: A Comment on The Black Swan of Trespass’, Australian Cultural History, no. 25, 2006, pp. 27–56.
Rowse, T., ‘Indigenous Heterogeneity’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 45, no. 3: 2014, pp. 297–310. https://doi.org/10.1080/1031461x.2014.946523.
Smith, E., ‘Writing Native: The Aboriginal in Australian Cultural Nationalism 1927–1945’, Princeton University, New Jersey, 2012.
Smith, E., ‘White Aborigines’, Interventions, vol. 16, no. 1: 2014, pp. 97–116. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801x.2013.776241.
Stephensen, P.R., ‘The Foundations of History in Australia’, 1937, P.R. Stephensen—Papers and Pictorial Material, ca. 1905–1971, MLMSS 1284, Box 47, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney.
Stephensen, P.R., ‘Letter to Rex Ingamells’, 1941, Rex Ingamells Papers, ca. 1933–1952, MS 6244, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.
Stephensen, P.R., The Foundations of Culture in Australia: An Essay Towards National Self-Respect, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1986.
Stephensen, P.R., ‘The Settlers’, n.d., P.R. Stephensen—Papers and Pictorial Material, ca. 1905–1971, MLMSS 1284, Box 13, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney.
Tout, D., ‘Neither Nationalists nor Universalists: Rex Ingamells and the Jindyworobaks’, Australian Humanities Review, no. 61, 2017, pp. 1–26.
Tout, D., ‘Reframing “Inky” Stephensen’s Place in Australian Cultural History’, Settler Colonial Studies, vol. 7, no. 1: 2017, pp. 72–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473x.2016.1149964.
Veracini, L., Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2010. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230299191.
Walker, D., Dream and Disillusion: A Search for Australian Cultural Identity, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1976.
Ward, S., Australia and the British Embrace: The Demise of the Imperial Ideal, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2001.
White, R., Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688–1980, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1981.
Winter, B., The Australia First Movement and the Publicist, 1936–1942, Glass House Books, Carindale, QLD, 2012.
Wolfe, P., ‘Nation and MiscegeNation: Discursive Continuity in the Post-Mabo Era’, Social Analysis, no. 36, 1994, pp. 93–152.
Wolfe, P., Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London & New York, 1999.
Austin, T., Never Trust a Government Man: Northern Territory Aboriginal Policy 1911–1939, NTU Press, Darwin, 1997.
Austin, T., ‘McGinness, Valentine Bynoe (1910–1988)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 2012, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/mcginness-valentine-bynoe-14671/text25807.
Birch, T., ‘Whitefella Jump Up: Correspondence’, Quarterly Essay, no. 12, 2003, pp. 84–7.
Bird, D. S., Nazi Dreamtime: Australian Enthusiasts for Hitler’s Germany, Australian Scholarly Publishing, North Melbourne, 2012.
Byrne, D., ‘Deep Nation: Australia’s Acquisition of an Indigenous Past’, Aboriginal History, vol. 20, 1996, pp. 82–107.
Carter, D., ‘Critics, Writers, Intellectuals’, in Elizabeth Webby (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000. https://doi.org/10.1017/ccol0521651220.011.
Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics, ‘Official Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia’, Melbourne, 1918.
Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics, ‘Official Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia’, Melbourne, 1924.
Commonwealth of Australia, ‘Aboriginal Welfare: Initial Conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities’, Canberra, 1937.
Conor, L., ‘A “Nation So Ill-Begotten”: Racialized Childhood and Conceptions of National Belonging in Xavier Herbert’s Poor Fellow My Country and Baz Luhrmann’s Australia’, Studies in Australasian Cinema, vol. 4, no. 2: 2010, pp. 97–113.
de Groen, F., Xavier Herbert: A Biography, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1998.
de Groen, F., and L. Hergenhan (eds), Xavier Herbert: Letters, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 2002.
Docker, J., In a Critical Condition: Reading Australian Literature, Penguin Books, Melbourne, 1984.
Fabian, J., Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, Columbia University Press, New York, 2014. https://doi.org/10.7312/fabi16926.
Franklin, M., Laughter, Not for a Cage, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1956.
Goldie, T., Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literatures, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Kingston, Montreal, London, 1989.
Goldie, T., ‘The Man of the Land/The Land of the Man: Patrick White and Scott Symons’, SPAN Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, no. 36, 1993.
Grattan, C.H., Australian Literature, University of Washington Book Store, Seattle, 1929.
Grattan, C.H., ‘On Australian Literature, 1788–1938’, Australian Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 2: 1938, pp. 19–33. https://doi.org/10.2307/20629528.
Grattan, C.H. (ed.), Introducing Australia, 2nd edn, Angus & Robertson, Sydney & London, 1949.
Green, H.M., ‘Literature’, in Australia, ed. C. Hartley Grattan, University of California Press, Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1947.
Hancock, W. K., Australia, Jacaranda Press, Brisbane, 1961.
Healy, J. J., Literature and the Aborigine in Australia, 2nd edn, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1989.
Hodge, B. and V. Mishra, Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1991.
Hope, A.D., ‘The Bunyip Stages a Comeback’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 16 June 1956.
Kiernan, B., ‘Cultural Transmission and Australian Literature: 1788–1998’, Studies in Australian Literary History, Sydney Association for Studies in Society and Culture, Sydney, 1997.
Lawson, A., ‘The Recognition of National Literatures: The Canadian and Australian Examples’, PhD thesis, University of Queensland, 1987. https://doi.org/10.14264/uql.2016.906.
Lawson, A., ‘Postcolonial Theory and the “Settler” Subject’, Essays on Canadian Writing, no. 56, 1995.
McGregor, R., ‘An Aboriginal Caucasian: Some Uses for Racial Kinship in Early Twentieth Century Australia’, Australian Aboriginal Studies, no. 1, 1996, pp. 11–20.
McGregor, R., Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880–1939, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1997.
McGregor, R., ‘“Breed Out the Colour” or the Importance of Being White’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 33, no. 120: 2002, pp. 286–302. https://doi.org/10.1080/10314610208596220.
McQueen, H., A New Britannia: An Argument Concerning the Social Origins of Australian Radicalism and Nationalism, 3rd edn, Penguin, Melbourne, 1986.
Mead, P., ‘Nation, Literature, Location’, in The Cambridge History of Australian Literature, ed. Peter Pierce Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009. https://doi.org/10.1017/chol9780521881654.026.
Monahan, S., A Long and Winding Road: Xavier Herbert’s Literary Journey, University of Western Australia Press, Perth, 2003.
Moran, A., ‘As Australia Decolonizes: Indigenizing Settler Nationalism and the Challenges of Settler/Indigenous Relations’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 25, no. 6: 2002, pp. 1013–42. https://doi.org/10.1080/0141987022000009412.
Muirden, B. W., The Puzzled Patriots: The Story of the Australia First Movement, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1968.
Munro, C., Wild Man of Letters: The Story of P.R. Stephensen, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1984.
Munro, C., ‘Introduction’, The Foundations of Culture in Australia: An Essay Towards National Self-Respect, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1986.
Probyn-Rapsey, F., ‘Some Whites are Whiter than Others: The Whitefella Skin Politics of Xavier Herbert and Cecil Cook’, JASAL: Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, Special Issue ‘Spectres, Screens, Shadows, Mirrors’, 2007, pp. 157–73.
Rose, D.B., Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2004.
Rowse, T., ‘Modernism, Indigenism and War: A Comment on The Black Swan of Trespass’, Australian Cultural History, no. 25, 2006, pp. 27–56.
Rowse, T., ‘Indigenous Heterogeneity’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 45, no. 3: 2014, pp. 297–310. https://doi.org/10.1080/1031461x.2014.946523.
Smith, E., ‘Writing Native: The Aboriginal in Australian Cultural Nationalism 1927–1945’, Princeton University, New Jersey, 2012.
Smith, E., ‘White Aborigines’, Interventions, vol. 16, no. 1: 2014, pp. 97–116. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801x.2013.776241.
Stephensen, P.R., ‘The Foundations of History in Australia’, 1937, P.R. Stephensen—Papers and Pictorial Material, ca. 1905–1971, MLMSS 1284, Box 47, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney.
Stephensen, P.R., ‘Letter to Rex Ingamells’, 1941, Rex Ingamells Papers, ca. 1933–1952, MS 6244, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.
Stephensen, P.R., The Foundations of Culture in Australia: An Essay Towards National Self-Respect, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1986.
Stephensen, P.R., ‘The Settlers’, n.d., P.R. Stephensen—Papers and Pictorial Material, ca. 1905–1971, MLMSS 1284, Box 13, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney.
Tout, D., ‘Neither Nationalists nor Universalists: Rex Ingamells and the Jindyworobaks’, Australian Humanities Review, no. 61, 2017, pp. 1–26.
Tout, D., ‘Reframing “Inky” Stephensen’s Place in Australian Cultural History’, Settler Colonial Studies, vol. 7, no. 1: 2017, pp. 72–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473x.2016.1149964.
Veracini, L., Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2010. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230299191.
Walker, D., Dream and Disillusion: A Search for Australian Cultural Identity, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1976.
Ward, S., Australia and the British Embrace: The Demise of the Imperial Ideal, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2001.
White, R., Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688–1980, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1981.
Winter, B., The Australia First Movement and the Publicist, 1936–1942, Glass House Books, Carindale, QLD, 2012.
Wolfe, P., ‘Nation and MiscegeNation: Discursive Continuity in the Post-Mabo Era’, Social Analysis, no. 36, 1994, pp. 93–152.
Wolfe, P., Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London & New York, 1999.