White Aborigines

Abstract

This essay explores the way ideas about Aboriginality informed right-wing nationalist projects in Australia in the 1930s. Focusing on the publication by the proto-fascist Publicist group of Xavier Herbert's classic anti-racist protest novel of the Australian frontier, Capricornia, I unpack the unlikely logic by which a deep identification with Aboriginality and with the political struggle for Aboriginal rights is at the core of a set of fantasies about white Australian ethnicity and the great Australian novel. Recent scholarship on race and Australian nationalism ties nationalist investments in a traditional Aboriginal presence to the dismantling of the white Australia policy and the rise of the liberal multicultural state. Attending to the earlier history of Aboriginal appropriation reveals the unstable place of the Aboriginal figure on the political right. I argue that Herbert's novel stages the relationship between a white father and his mixed-race Aboriginal son as the potential site of legitimate white Australian belonging. Ultimately, however, the Aboriginal woman carries the violence of Herbert's attempt to turn the white colonizer into a national indigene.