The ‘Piccaninny’: racialized childhood, disinheritance, acquisition and child beauty

Abstract

The dissemination of the Piccaninny type critically depended on the print media whose development coincided with, and underpinned, colonial modernity. Racialized child types such as the Piccaninny were put to work in the colonial imagination to set down very distinct claims to land ownership, inheritance, dispossession and eradication. While a number of such child types reflect ideas of inheritance in colonial discourse, such as the Bush Baby, Wild Child, Street Urchin, Drover's Boy, Half-caste and Lost Child, this paper concentrates on the Piccaninny type, tracing its recurrence and meanings in Australian cultural forms. It accounts for the recurrence of this figure of childhood as a racialized type, and examines the ways Australia put images of Indigenous children to work in producing a mythology of national identity and tenure. The Piccaninny type encapsulated an acquisitive impulse over colonized children that brought about their disinheritance—either through their removal from their families or through the dispossession of their homelands. Within this setting black child beauty as a commodity form for white consumption, in imagery, ceramics, fabrics and popular ephemera, acted as a fetish which disavowed the injury of these children's disinheritance and delimited their cultural presence to cute domestic and tourist bric-a-brac. The Piccaninny denoted racialized children and, this paper argues, was deployed in colonial discourse to outline the lineage of inheritance, particularly in land tenure.