Romancing Theft

Abstract

This article examines the legacy of Romanticism on Australian settlement, using analysis of early colonial narrative to investigate how a public hungry for writing of all genres and schooled for centuries by the adventure tales of white heroes – ‘free of the complexities of relations with white women’ as Patrick Brantlinger notes – came to authorise the theft of Aboriginal land and the violation of her people. Through the close analysis of an account by one of Victoria’s first settlers, Joseph Tice Gellibrand, this work seeks to unveil how word and action often belie one another in colonial narratives, acting to legitimate what was in fact unlawful through what Michel Foucault refers to as a ‘hazardous play of dominations’ (1981: 52). Drawing on Marxist and post-colonial analysis of the Romantic era and its ‘prevailing anxiety with difference and otherness’ (Saree Makdisi, 2009: 36), I examine how ideas about race and sovereignty were normalised through the expedient use of writing, and in doing so, demonstrate how, in Victoria, the written word has everything to do with authority, property and ownership. I conclude that it is through creative writing that we can help to bring about social change: through work that seeks, as Jen Webb states, ‘to make things visible’, to ‘provide a platform’ (2015: 61) from which to unsettle notions of settlement and sovereignty.