ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the moves in contemporary non-indigenous Australian women’s writing to begin a dialogue with indigenous issues that can be conducted on a level of greater equality and understanding than that which characterised the position of the ‘maternal imperialist’. On the one hand, early twentieth-century white women writers were much more interested than their male counterparts in facing up to issues of Aboriginal dispossession and suffering (as in Katharine Susannah Prichard’s novel, Coonardoo); on the other, much of their writing was still caught up in the discourses of Social Darwinism that, while bemoaning the fate of the perceived ‘dying race’ of Aborigines in Australia, simultaneously engaged in the racist discourses that allowed institutional racist practices to go unchallenged. Thus, for example, the ‘half-caste’ child of Coonardoo and Hugh in Prichard’s Coonardoo would, in real life, have been forcibly taken from her care under the policies that removed such children to white institutions, yet Prichard does not address this possibility at all in her narrative. Indeed, it is only recently that this issue of the Stolen Generations is being addressed, and these narrative gaps are being filled, as in indigenous writer Doris Pilkington Ganimara’s novel/memoir, Follow the Rabbit-proof Fence, and the film entitled Rabbit-proof Fence that is based on it, both, incidentally, set around the same time as Prichard’s novel.1 Sympathetic identification by white women writers with indigenous peoples, then, has often been silent about the very processes that have enabled the unequal power relations between them to exist, exposing the ‘complicity of white women in Indigenous women’s oppression’ (Moreton-Robinson 2000: 174) and the investment of white women in Australia’s racist policies. This chapter will outline the problematic notion of ‘indigenisation’ before briefly surveying some early twentieth-century women writers’ representations of indigeneity as a context for contemporary reworkings of such negotiations, in the form of Jo Dutton’s novel, On the Edge of Red (1998), and Heather Grace’s earlier Heart of Light (1992).
