Hansonella: The Morphology of a Modern Folk Tale

Abstract

In this essay I’m interested in the retroactive invention of Hansonella, a fairy-tale heroine created to assimilate the Australian nation’s racist excess. I suggest here, that the fairy story — an essentially conservative and mythologising narrative — provided the retroactive means for the Australian nation to internalise and narrativise the emergence of a populist far-right party in Australia in the1990’s. Intense antipathy to indigenous Australians and non-Anglo migrants has been integral to Australia’s culture and history, but in white mythology, Australia is a culture of an enhanced generosity and goodness. Elsewhere I have called this fantasy structure the Australian Good, and argued that the fantasy of Australia as a good and neighbourly nation repeats and frames a disparate set of cultural practices, discourses and historical epochs. The underbelly of this fantasy of the good nation has been the dispossession of indigenous Australians, The White Australia Policy, the assimilation practices of the twentieth century, a pronounced antipathy towards the feminine and the intellectual, and the continued cultural policing of traits that carry the stain of difference.