‘The Shadows of Black People Who Have Disappeared’: Alekos Doukas's Interpretation of the Dying Native Fantasy

Abstract

Between the late 1920s and early 1960s, Alekos Doukas (1900–62), a Greek migrant and writer, engaged with the widely held belief that Australia's Indigenous people were a doomed race. By focusing on letters, articles, and fictional writing by Doukas – all of which were written in Greek – this article brings together histories of migration and histories of settler colonial thinking about Aboriginal people. Although, as we show, the pessimistic racialist views he expressed in them were largely consistent with the view that Aboriginal people were in a state of racial decline, his views also shifted, we argue, under the influence of a Marxist analysis of colonialism and his fleeting encounters with Aboriginal people. Doukas' writings show how the dominant story of Aboriginal racial decline could be learnt, confirmed, revised, and at times idiosyncratically interpreted by non-Anglo migrants living in Australia.