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

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.

The sounds of silence in Australian collective memory and popular counter-narratives (Los sonidos del silencio en la memoria colectiva australiana y en los relatos alternativos populares)

“…Herbert wrote about the often violent and troubling interaction between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, loosely reflecting his own experiences. Its publication, timed to coincide with the contested date of 1938, presented a troubled and troubling historical reading of the northern colonial frontier (Herbert, 1938; Tout, 2017). Eleanor Dark’s (1941) novel The Timeless Land is another powerful example that captures the cultural clash between the Eora people and the British colonizers in early Sydney.…”

“…Herbert escribió sobre la interacción a menudo violenta y problemática entre australianos indígenas y no indígenas que, en líneas generales, refleja sus propias experiencias. Su publicación, programada para coincidir con la controvertida fecha de 1938, presentó una lectura histórica preocupada y preocupante de la frontera colonial norte (Herbert, 1938; Tout, 2017). La novela de Eleanor Dark (1941), The Timeless Land , es otro ejemplo potente que captura el choque cultural entre el pueblo Eora y los colonizadores británicos en el Sydney temprano.…”

The negative Commonwealth: Australia as ‘laboratory’, then and now

“…In our respective work we have focused on the political traditions of the 'world turned inside out', and on those of Australian settler-colonial nationalism (Tout, 2017a(Tout, , 2017b(Tout, , 2017c(Tout, , 2020Veracini, 2021). If Christopher Hill (1972) had referred to the 'world turned upside down' as a project of emplaced transformation, the political traditions of 'the world turned inside out' advocated displacement as a response to social upheaval.…”

“…The first set of anxieties required that the nationalist political imagination adopt a radical version of settler-colonial 'indigenisation' (Tout, 2017a(Tout, , 2020Veracini, 2016). Responding to the second set of challenges required an increasingly interventionist state -the state's direct involvement would make settling the land possible again, and the state could be interventionist because in many ways the state preceded society itself (see Clark, 1906;Davidson, 1991;Lake, 2019).…”