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In Striving for Aboriginal Identity
--Reflections upon Coonardoo, Capricornia and the Chant of Jimmy Smith
Introduction
Since the European settlement of Australia began two hundred years ago, the white man has made countless attempts to contact and understand the Aborigines, the native people of the Australian Continent. ... Australian literature, however, has been a persistent expression of the endeavor to bring the Aborigines into focus and to record the development of Aboriginal-White relations in the last two hundred years odd. ... The destruction and disintegration of the Aboriginal society and culture went hand in hand with the formation of a European society on the Australian soil. ... When this self-consciousness was developed as the turn of the 20th century, the ground was prepared for a reexamination of the relationship of the new Australian community to the dispersed community of Aboriginal Australians. The purpose of this thesis, above anything else, is to investigate three twentieth century Australian novels that emerged from this reexamination and will focus especially on their presentation of aspects of Aboriginal life in Australia, aiming at bring attention to a long-forgotten culture and people. ... First, they are generally considered the best and most representative of the fiction on Aboriginal themes. ...
Secondly, the three novels probe the Aboriginal subject from different angles and present to us in microcosm all aspects of Aboriginal life and culture. ... Coonardoo was in large part an attempt to arouse the social and political conscience of the time, to draw attention to the fact that Aboriginal society and culture were being destroyed by the encroachment of white civilization and values. ... she wrote, “was to draw attention to the abuse of Aboriginal women by white men—a subject that demanded immediate attention,? ... Though each of them wrote only one book on Aboriginal themes, it is just this one that has been acclaimed as the finest of their writings. ... She stayed on the station for some months, talking to the shy Aboriginal girl who helped in the homestead kitchen and even taking part in a ten-day muster. ... "7 Meanwhile she did some character studies, trying to penetrate the workings of Aboriginal minds and see things as the blacks see them. ... Coonardoo, the female protagonist, is a fair-haired, full-blooded Aboriginal brought up from infancy in the company of the station owner’s son, Hugh Watt. ...
For the first time in Australian literature, a genuine curiosity about Aboriginal life which was non-anthropological and non-philanthropic found its way into book-form. ... As a result of his illness, Hugh is a dependent in the Aboriginal world. ... The novel contrasts this with what happens to the Aboriginal Coonardoo when she becomes a helpless stranger in a white man’s world. ... For all the comforts Sheba enjoys in the capacity of one of Sam Geary’s gins, the Aboriginal women on Wytaliba talk about her with a note of contempt. ... The creative energy that enabled a cultivated white woman to apprehend and project a concept of what is feels like to be an Aboriginal woman bred in a different tradition but awakening to western civilization, is unparalleled in literature. ... As Henrietta Drake-Brockman has expressed, “the startling validity of the Aboriginal heroic and the treatment of Australians natives as human beings whose personalities merited serious literary attention both shocked and stimulated. ... Each book adopts a half-caste Aboriginal as its protagonist. ... of Aboriginal blood. ...
Xavier Herbert grew up in a society in which h most European Australians held racist views towards Aboriginal Australians, based on ignorance, a lack of sympathy, and on fanciful racial theories. ...
Jimmie Blacksmith is a highly conscious half-caste Aboriginal. ... 16 Keneally had done the Aboriginal research before he wrote the Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, and the knowledge the acquired form the research contradicted the “savages? ...
In Jimmie’s revenge and subsequent flight, the conflict in him is between his worry about Mort’s possible loss of tribal identity and his desire to retain Mort’s company and assistance. ... in Jimmie prevails that the removes the source of corruption from Mort and preserves Mort’s tribal identity. In order to separate the Blacksmith brothers and end their flight, McCreadie, a school teacher whom Jimmie takes hostage leads them to an Aboriginal initiation site. ... 170)
Coonardoo is an attractive woman in herself as the embodiment of Aboriginal life; Norman Shillingworth is a man of intelligence; Jimmie Blacksmith is a dignified hero with potentialities for love. ... 17 and the bond between the Aboriginal and this landscape is established right from the beginning of the novel, when the young Coonardoo sits along, singing. ... Aboriginal babies are born “Honey-colored? ... For all her disgust at Aboriginal rituals, Mrs. ... She also senses the organic completeness of the tie between Coonardoo, the Aboriginal people, and the earth:
She (Coonardoo) was theirs by blood and bone, and they were weaving her to the earth and to themselves, through all her senses, appetites and instincts. ... It is sonly when Norman loses the possibility of living as a white man and comes to accept this Aboriginal heritage that he can fully respond to the spirit of the land. ... Herbert himself spelled out this feeling in a letter to Arthur Bibley:
Truly, I’ve come to envy these half-castes their heritage; soc much so that for all my love of soil and all my pride in being born of it, I must confess that I’m simply an invader, and that there is no hope of my ever being able to claim the right to live in this land unless I infuse my blood into the Aboriginal race. ... Whereas in the first part of the novel the hero longs to be white, in the second section Jimmie the fugitive loses his white aspiration and becomes more truly Aboriginal, superior to his white pursuers. ... Even the arrogant landowner Newly comes to recognize Jimmie’s identity with the land. ... First of wall, the early Europeans viewed Aboriginal society in terms of European values and thus saw it negatively. ... Seeing the world as they did, they rated their own society as the highest on the scale of the human development and Aboriginal society as one of the lowest. ... They were started by the ritual ornamentation and the animal fat applied to Aboriginal bodies, their flat noses, their black skins and their nakedness. ... denigrated the Aboriginal as being dirty, lazy, fickle, of low intelligence, and treacherous, murderous and aggressive. ... The examination of these characters can bring out this aspects of the Aboriginal life and the Aborigines? ... The bribery involves not only the disruption of Aboriginal custom (for COonardoo was to be Warieda’s woman as soon as she was old enough) but also the disruption of natural harmony (for “Coonardoo was a more suitable wife for Warieda than Meenie, who as so much older than he, old enough to be his mother? ... In order to satisfy their anarchic sexual energies and desires, the predatory whites take up the Aboriginal women in relation not of care but of force, violence and rape.
Ned Krater, the Man of Fire in Capricornia, typified the worst that can be said of the rough-and-tumble adventurer who takes Aboriginal women by violence. ... 17)
Whereas the so-called pioneers like Ned Krater take Aboriginal women by violence, many a squatter uses his economic power to bribe gins to live with him, and they are vulnerable to his approach, particularly as the tribes have become more dependent on the white land-owners. ...
Sam Geary’s desire for Aboriginal women can not be satisfied. ... 197)
In order to protect Aboriginal women from falling victim to the predatory whites, the protectors of Aborigines are officially appointed. ...
As Ned Krater, Same Geary and Humbolt Lace exemplify, Aboriginal women suffered the worst abuse at the bands of the predatory whites, who were so numerous that Kombo-ism became rifle in the tropics. More important, the sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women had two tragic results—the growth of the population of “yeller feller? ... Blaiz denies her womanhood and humanity as she does all the half-caste and full-blooded Aboriginal women:
“Oh for gawdsake don’t go on, Missus. ... She first locates Jimmie as an Aboriginal in terms of economic status, saying, “We don’t want any wood cut, thank you. ... Assuming that an Aboriginal would not want to marry except on some sudden irresponsible impulse, she asks, “Today? ... She then applies an economic test based on an assumption that Jimmie as an Aboriginal is indigent and shiftless: “I suppose you know the normal stipend is a guinea? ... Trelore exercise power and forces Jimmie into a subordinate, menial status in order to restore him, visibly, to his status as an Aboriginal. ...
The Aboriginal nation, as a nation of the spirit, a nation without a flag, a nation without land or hope, a nation of under privilege, has existed from about a generation after Captain Cook landed. For two hundred years, Aboriginal societies have been pounded into extinction, confusion, invisibility. Australians of Aboriginal descent have lived in an abnormal world of fragmented order and limited expectation, where it has been easier to hate than to love, while at the same time, the white has been distorted in nature by his own sheer cussedness. ... 21
This poem was written by Kath Walker, the distinguished Aboriginal poetess, well-known beyond the boundaries of Australia. ... To do this he must accept himself as part Aboriginal, or he will suffer the fate of Charles Ket, whose refusal to acknowledge what he is provokes rebuffs and eventually drives him in bitterness outside any human communion. At this crucial moment, Norman breaks away from his enemies into the bush, into the Aboriginal world which waits for the half-caste. ... Norman’s belated initiation into the tribal traditions engenders his pride in his Aboriginal heritage. ...
Jimmie is a highly conscious half-caste Aboriginal. ... The whites have certain expectations of Jimmie as an Aboriginal. ... When Jimmie works well and behaves in a way that is different from what the whites expect of an Aboriginal, he cuts across this assumption and therefore threatens their sense of superiority. ...
The Gnarler tribe’s alienation from the station owner, Norman’s recognition of his Aboriginal heritage with pride and Jimmie’s realization of the importance of power—all these demonstrate the fact that the Aboriginals are an awakening race who begin to break away from white man’s control, psychological and social, and take their destiny into their own hands. ... Although Coonardoo, Capricorna and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith are all about the Australian Aboriginal, because of the different preoccupations on the part of the authors, each of the books has its distinctive technical features.
In Coonardoo, particular emphasis is laid on the tragedy of the Aboriginal girl Coonardoo whose life-long devotion to her white bosses and especially her faithful love for Hugh not only receive no deserved recognition but incur a tragic death. ...
A little aboriginal girl about nine years old in a faded blue gina-gina, she sat there , part of the shadows? ... Fire in the Aboriginal world is male, but is seen as a life-giving force. ... Jimmie experiences white oppression as the deprivation of personal autonomy When the tenuous tribal identity he possesses as child is lost, his personality become an empty arena in which contradictory roles assigned by whites compete for possession, each offering an appearance of a free choice and a possibility of autonomy which Jimmie, as he desperately grasps for them, finds to be illusory. ... Law and order are represented by senior Constable Farrel, who insults Jimmie and rapes Aboriginal prisoners. The white, Christian point of view has its exemplar in Petra Graf, just as Jimmie’s Aboriginal background, suggested through Tabidgi’s concern as an elder, is depicted through the behaviour and attitudes of his half-brother Mort. ...
Conclusion
The Aborigines were a strange people to the European Australians, and this sense strangeness throughout the nineteenth century during the destruction of most of Aboriginal societies on the continent. ... Also the authors disprove the European mythology that the Aborigines were not effective land-occupiers by creating a new consciousness of the Aborigine’s intimate relationship with his land and conveying a sense of the richness of spiritual meaning with which the Aborigine invests his sacred land, Drawing contrasts between black and white civilizations in their novels ,the authors suggest that it is the Aborigine who is both physically and spiritually superior in his own land
The Aboriginal Australia described in the novels, of course, a world from which white Australians have withdrawn, but this retreat has entailed an immense cost, for so deeply involved with one anther have been the lives of black men and white men on one continent for two hundred years that he who refuses to acknowledge the identity of the black men is by way of losing his own, And thus for Katharine Prichard, Xavier Herbert and Thomas Keneally to explore and exhibit the rich complexity of Aboriginal life is for them to be agent of self-discovery for the nation at large. ...
As for the black response to white dominance, the novels demonstrate the inevitable trend of Aboriginal self-determination. By tracing the Aborigine’s progress from innocence toward awakening, they reflect the tendency of the Aborigine to place distance between himself and white Australia by breaking away from white man’s control and maintaining his distinctive identity in the face of hostility, ignorance and exploitation. ... The history of Aboriginal Australia is different from that of white Australia.
Approximate Word count = 19385
Approximate Pages = 77.5
(250 words per page double spaced)
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