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

Encountering Indigeneity: Xavier Herbert, ‘Inky’ Stephensen and the Problems of Settler Nationalism

“…80 Herbert's position was also a misogynist one, since it assumed the settler father would pass on and reciprocally receive an essence of indigeneity through the very act of procreation with an Aboriginal woman, who represents nothing more than a vessel for the absorption and transmogrification of settler illegitimacy into hybrid indigeneity. 81 This misogyny played out in Herbert's novels where, as Smith points out, '[a]lmost all the Aboriginal women die … and all the Aboriginal mothers die'. Here Smith draws our attention to the correspondences between Baz Luhrmann's Australia and Herbert's novels, but also between Herbert's novels and the endless representations and reiterations of what Tim Rowse calls the 'Dying Native fantasy', so consistently central to settler imaginings of indigenous (settler) futures.…”