Looking the other way: Henrietta Drake-Brockman’s Younger Sons and denial in Australian history

Abstract

In recent years Australian historians have begun to show the ways in which Australia’s black history has simultaneously been concealed and disclosed over a long period of time. This article focuses on one such example of this phenomenon – a 1937 fictionalised family history by the Western Australian writer Henrietta Drake-Brockman – and seeks to uncover the unusual set of biographical, historical, intellectual and generic factors that spurred her to raise questions about this black history rather than look the other way. At the same time, we examine the ways in which Drake-Brockman herself turned a blind eye to the Drake-Brockmans’ entanglement with another racial history.