The Reflected Eye: Reading Race in Barbara Baynton's "Billy Skywonkie"

Abstract

When Barbara Baynton’s volume of short stories, Bush Studies, was published by Duckworth in 1902, critics lauded and deplored the realism of the work, often in the same breath. 1 In the majority of contemporary reviews, admiration is tinged with shock and concern. These stories were powerful, surely, but what might they reveal, and to whom? Australian critics were particularly concerned about how Baynton’s “sordid” portrayal of life in the outback might be taken as representative of Australian life by readers overseas. 2 The stories in Bush Studies are deeply unsettling, not least because they are deliberately ambiguous. This ambiguity is one reason the stories have been subject to the process of continued critical reevaluation and dispute noted by Leigh Dale. “Billy Skywonkie” is a story the ambiguity of which seems to have infected its critical reception. This essay seeks to make explicit what is often left unclear in discussions of the story: it is remarkable for presenting a narrative told in part from the point of view of a woman experiencing racism in its intersection with sexual and economic vulnerability in the early years of the twentieth century. As Elizabeth Webby points out, “Billy Skywonkie” reveals Baynton to be a “pioneer” not only in terms of her representation of sexual exploitation in the Australian outback in the nineteenth century, 3 but also in terms of her examination of the relationship of this exploitation to race. In light of this, there has been a surprising lack of critical attention paid to the story and more generally to the representation of race in Baynton’s work. 4 This may be because the narrative uncertainty driving “Billy Skywonkie” is about the race of its protagonist: we are never sure whether this is a tale of racial recognition or mis-recognition. It is difficult even to ascertain what is happening in the story because the action hinges on the judgments of characters whose perspectives we are denied, and vital clues are delivered almost entirely via a vernacular so thick as to be deliberately bamboozling. Baynton controls point of view to spring the suggestion of race upon the reader as a hinted-at after-the-fact explanation of people’s