Fragments in the Archive: The Subaltern Protests of Charles Never

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the mid-19th century, the Aboriginal dandy Charles Never achieved modest notoriety as the subject of a portrait by travelling artist William Strutt and as a character in the memoirs of Lucy Anna Edgar. More recently, historians have incorporated narratives of his life into wider social histories, a politician has quoted him (or, rather, quoted Edgar’s depiction of him), and an artist has portrayed him as a heroic figure of Indigenous protest in colonial Australian culture. These recent descriptions and portrayals of Never rely heavily on the memoirs of Edgar, problematically elaborating on archival fragments to invent an image of Never that perhaps never existed. Charles Never managed to enter the colonial record in the face of a near totalitarian colonial culture that erased, ventriloquised and wrote of(f) Indigenous people. Examining, as this article does, how academic writing struggles to frame and discuss subaltern figures (and the textual fragments they leave behind) reveals the challenges facing non-Indigenous attempts to acknowledge colonial-era Indigenous protests.