ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

I was always going to read this book, but I have a reason for reading it now.  Amongst my pile of books for review is an intriguing new one from NLA (National Library of Australia) Publishing.  Written by John Maynard and Victoria Hoskins, it’s called Living with the Locals: Early Europeans’ Experience of Indigenous Life, and this is its blurb:

Living with the Locals comprises the stories of 13 white men, boys and women who were taken in by the Indigenous people of the Torres Strait islands and of eastern Australia and who lived in their communities between the 1790s and the 1870s, from a few months to over 30 years. The white people had been shipwrecked or had escaped the confines of penal servitude and survived only through the Indigenous people’s generosity. Many of them were given Indigenous names—Bunboé, Murrangurk, Duramboi, Waki, Giom, Anco. They assimilated to varying degrees into an Indigenous way of life—several marrying and learning the language—and, for the most part, both parties mourned the white people’s return to European life.

The stories in Living with the Locals provide a glimpse into Indigenous life at the point of early contact between Indigenous people and British colonists. It was a time when negative attitudes towards Indigenous people gave rise to misinterpretation of events and sensationalised versions of the stories. However, many of the white survivors spoke up against the appalling treatment of the Indigenous people, and advocated for conciliation and land rights. They also were unwilling to reveal Indigenous beliefs and customs to unsympathetic colonists.

So as you can see, Finding Eliza, Power and Colonial Storytelling is a perfect companion piece for my reading of a book about how Australia’s indigenous people were written about in the early days of settlement.  And I had to read it first…

Eliza Fraser’s house (Source: Creative Commons, Wikipedia)

Larissa Behrendt of the Eualeyai/Kamilaroi people, is an author, a lawyer and an Aboriginal activist. This book analyses the famous story of Eliza Fraser, shipwrecked in 1836 and taken in by the Butchulla People of K’gari (now Fraser Island), to show how colonial storytelling about Indigenous people in Australia came to be the dominant, mostly negative stereotype, and how that storytelling has contributed to racism to the present day.  And if you have any doubt about the pervasive power of the stories that were told, you have only to look at the Blue Plaque outside Eliza Fraser’s house in the Orkneys.  Like that house, the plaque looks about as solid and dependable as you can get, eh?

Eliza Fraser, artist unknown, Wikipedia Commons

But as Behrendt shows, Mrs Fraser may have been not particularly dependable at all.  Widowed and in need of public sympathy and financial support, she told an horrific story, not of the harrowing moments of shipwreck, but of her captivity at the hands of the Butchulla People.  The story records her enslavement, their brutality, the barbarism (including cannibalism) and her rescue In the Nick of Time from a Fate Worse Than Death.  The story was embroidered with exotic details for different audiences (including bizarre descriptions drawn from her (faulty) knowledge of American Indians) and was retold with variations over time, even by our Nobel Prize winning author Patrick White in A Fringe of Leaves (1976).  Mrs Fraser had motives aplenty for dramatizing her experiences: a ripping yarn that played to her audience’s fears and prejudices was more likely to be marketable…

The oral history of the Butchulla People tells a different story, one of rescue and protection rather than captivity.  And it was fear of cannibalism amongst the shipwrecked sailors that made Captain Fraser agree to a landing after four weeks in the lifeboat.  Behrendt generously suggests that misunderstandings may have accounted for some of the misrepresentations: for example, the women painted Mrs Fraser in a particular way to indicate that she was not to be harmed, and when one of the white men pushed her, he was promptly reprimanded – with some physical emphasis – to make it plain to him that he had to respect the women’s authority in this manner.  You only have to have read Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers to realise that mutual incomprehension bedevilled early relationships between the indigenous people and the settlers; what is not so clear is why these misunderstandings continue to be perpetuated.

Behrendt is particularly interested in two elements of the Fraser story: the representation of Aboriginal women as promiscuous, as bad mothers, as vindictive and also the fear of cannibals.  The author makes a convincing case that the stereotyping says more about the storytellers than about their subjects.  There is an assumption that the Black women are jealous of Eliza, because she is white, and her narrative plays on fears about sexual vulnerability at the hands of lecherous Aboriginal men.  There is also an assumption and that the women are slaves to the men and that they therefore wish to enslave Eliza too.  Believing in her own superiority, Eliza resents being expected to do her share of the work, unaware that the area was in drought and that she is dependent on the generosity of the people who are sharing what little they have.  Eliza, far from being the fragile vulnerable woman of the stories, is a survivor, and the real truth of colonial life is that it was Aboriginal women who were at risk of abduction, rape and enslavement by white men.  But their stories are not the dominant narrative, the captivity narrative excludes them.

Behrendt explores the cannibalism motif extensively.  She points out that there is almost no documentary evidence of cannibalism in any of the colonised societies that are represented in literature, everything from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to R.L.Stevenson’s Robinson Crusoe.   But in colonial Australia, although there were valiant warriors in the frontier wars, the sad statistics show that it was the indigenous people who were most vulnerable to violent death.

The ‘savagery’ of Aboriginal people as it was represented in stories such as Eliza Fraser’s helped to propagate the idea that Aboriginal people needed to be tamed.  When this wasn’t achieved through ‘retaliatory’ lethal violence or atrocities against Aboriginal women, it was done through the implementation of the policies of assimilation and dispossession, or by controlling Aboriginal people within their segregated communities on reserves or missions. (p.76)

Two of the books analysed were of particular interest to me because I’ve read and reviewed one of them, and the other is on my TBR.  Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Coonardoo (1929) is a landmark novel in Australian literature because it depicts a relationship between Hugh Watt, a pastoralist, and Coonardoo, who gives birth to his child but as Behrendt points out, is never accorded the status of an equal partner.  The white characters are represented as benevolent caregivers, fulfilling their duty to take care of their Aboriginal workers, when in fact they have dispossessed them of their land, are not paying them for the work they do, and offer no opportunity for advancement or full participation in the new society.  Prichard never mentions the massacres (please see update below) taking place throughout the period of her novel, nor does she acknowledge the exploitation of Aboriginal women by characters like Mrs Bessie.  I haven’t read this novel yet, but I know now that I will read it differently because I have been made aware of the subtext.

Liam Davison’s The White Woman, (1994) on the other hand, is a story of white men searching for a mythical white woman said to be held captive by the Aborigines.  It has a post-colonial perspective, exploring the motivations of one of the searchers, and the ideologies that inspire the story.

Through this fictional reconstruction, Davison explores themes of the colonial agenda, the amorphous nature of truth, and the victor’s version of history.  He also explores the white woman as a symbol of the Empire and delves into the paternalistic attitudes that white male frontiersmen held about white women.  He highlights the fantasy of playing the ‘saviour’ with all its sexual undertones. He is sensitive to the way in which this construct of white femininity places the Aboriginal woman in the position of the feminine and sexual ‘other’.   (p.100)

As I said in my review:

The search for the woman was motivated by romantic notions of rescue, but the gruesome reality that they uncovered instead was that pioneer settlers on the ungoverned frontier in Gippsland were massacring the indigenous people.  What’s more, the ideals that motivated the narrator were not shared by other members of the expedition: they knew that it was better not to find a ‘sullied’ woman because it was the search itself which furthered their grandiose ambitions.

In the chapter titled ‘Fictionalising Aboriginal Women’ Behrendt brings up the vexed issue of ‘appropriation’.

Successful storytelling requires the writer to create characters that ring true – whether in historical fiction, romance or science fiction.  As readers, we have to believe in their authenticity.  And you cannot create an authentic Aboriginal character unless you are able to deeply and truly understand their experience and perspective. In 1920 when Prichard was writing, the last people to be asked about how issues facing Indigenous people should be dealt with were the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people themselves.  They simply weren’t included in public discourse.  (p. 105)

The point is well made that we should remember this when we are reading narratives about them from the past, and equally so in contemporary narratives, depending on who is writing the narrative and in what context.

There is a great deal more to think about in this slim book of only 200-odd pages, but this post is quite long enough already and I would rather encourage you to get a copy and read it for yourself.  I think that Finding Eliza is essential reading for anyone engaged in Australian literature whether reading, writing, or editing it.

You can find out more about Larissa Behrendt in Sue’s ‘Spotlight’ at Whispering Gums.

Update 15/11/20  Having now read Coonardoo, I know this is not correct.  Saul Hardy, in his reproof to Hugh’s wife Mollie, says in chapter 17:

“You can’t help seein’ the blacks point of view.  White men came, jumped their hunting grounds, went kangaroo shooting for fun.  The blacks speared cattle.  White men got shootin’ blacks to learn ’em.  Blacks speared a white man or two—police rode out on a punishin’ expedition. They still ride out on punishin’ expeditions…” (Coonardoo, by Katharine Susannah Prichard, p.105, Pacific Books, Angus & Robertson, 1961, no ISBN, first published 1929)

There it is, in 1929, Katherine Susannah Prichard acknowledging the massacres.  And Saul goes on to talk about an episode of ‘black-birding’ where the pearler drove them all overboard at gunpoint when he got to sea.

I borrowed Finding Eliza from the library, so I don’t know if the mistake is mine or Larissa Behrendt’s.  The book is on loan at the library but it’s due back on the 23rd of November so I should be able to check it then…

Author: Larissa Behrendt
Title: Finding Eliza, power and colonial storytelling
Publisher: UQP, 2016
ISBN: 9780702253904
Source: Kingston Library

Available from Fishpond: Finding Eliza: Power and Colonial Storytelling