White Vanishing: Rethinking Australia’s Lost-in-the-Bush Myth by Elspeth Tilley (review)

If you take this book to heart, you will begin to find colonialist discourse in every Australian cultural artefact you encounter. Elspeth Tilley’s argument—and she seems to forget at times that it is an argument—is that a white colonialist agenda informs most Australian writing, not just that of the nineteenth century, but contemporary texts as well. She uses the Lost-in-the-Bush Myth, a trope that she labels white vanishing, as her key example supporting this assertion.

The book is well researched and thorough in its survey of the literature in and about the topic. It is densely written and full of its own special jargon: “white vanishing” (1 and “passim”), “black vanishing” (48), “white reverse-vanishing” (291), “vanished and unvanished white characters” (99), “white presencing” (154), “heterochronic nexus points” (167), and so on. Tilley’s methodology is hyper clear (to use one of her favourite prefixes): “there are four principal forms of textual imagery that constitute black displacements in white vanishing texts” (56). She takes the literature and looks in turn at the representation of indigenes, white people, time, and space. She defines an indigene as a “white-constructed Aboriginalist image” (19), and you could say that she thereby assures her conclusions about the hidden, obstinate, justificatory aspect of white Australian writing. A question one might ask in passing is why is there no theorised white equivalent to the indigene, a representational medium carrying the freight of white fantasy creation?

There appears to be another theoretical problem at the core of Tilley’s argument, one she never fully confronts—that is, the actual vanishing of the white child or adult into the Australian bush. What can this loss or disappearance mean? Surely a number of interpretations are possible—a whole range, from white ineptitude to metaphysical desire for death/union with nature, awe in the face of the Australian “sublime,” guilt about or punishment for hubristic white occupation. One could even mount an argument for a view of this trope as anarchic rather than normative or conservative. And somewhere in that range are the “meta-discourses of white Australian colonialism” (155). Tilley is impatient with any alternative discourse, however, and at times her monocular, literal cast of mind verges on the parodic. Of the lost white she says: “Or they may be lost forever, either because their body is never found, or they are found dead and are therefore unable to be restored to their white community” (100).

Tilley is stronger in her analysis of nineteenth-century texts. Their piety and apparent lack of self-awareness—she uses the terms “apparently-innocent” (1), even “disingenuous” (42)—are grist to the mill of her analysis. Her treatment of the “washing metaphor,” whereby the found child is symbolically brought back to whiteness, is perceptive and shaming (109–10); her political understanding of obfuscatory renditions of white victimhood are also excellent, as is her description of the gendering of the land (255–56). One of the best sections of the book theorises that “ignorance is also power” (324) and intriguingly discusses white narcissism, “egology” (Robert Young’s term), and white strategies of disguising “conquest as non-conquest” (324).

However, as text after text is deconstructed in the same manner and with the same conclusions, the colonialist case begins to suffer from overstatement and insistence. Legitimate and interesting insights are marginalised by a relentless repetition of the thesis. The problem with this sort of juggernaut approach is that it cannot allow any deviations to occur. The terms of critical description become absolute: “unavoidably” (299), “invariably” (23), “ultimately” (154) and “always” (154, 274, 321).

Any critic (such as Peter Pierce, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Susan Dermody) who dwells on resistance, alterity, or ambivalence is given short shrift. Even where Tilley allows that these counter interpretations are “not inaccurate,” still she maintains that they “obscure recognition” of the colonialism of texts (178). At times she appears to contort her...