Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in the United States and Australia, 1887-1937

7. White Women Married to Aboriginal Men

7. White Women Married to Aboriginal Men In 1900 an Australian book of marital advice reminded its white, middle -class readers about the importance of carefully selecting a husband. “A young woman in search of a partner in life,” the author declared, “if she is the worthy, prospective wife and mother to whom these pages are specifically dedicated . . . is not likely to mate herself with a member of a lower race.” In case readers were in any doubt about whom the author had in mind, he added: “A Negro, a Hindoo, and a Chinaman, although all civilised after a fashion, would no more be her husband than would an Australian black.”1 In this passage a sentiment that Australian colonial society rarely openly expressed was made explicit. Marriages between middle-class white women and Aborigines were unthinkable. Aboriginal people were not just one of many undesirable marriage partners. They were at the bottom of the scale, the extreme by which other interracial marriages were measured. When an educated white woman and an acculturated Native American man married in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was a place for them in American society. They were examples of assimilation at work, living proof that the color of a person’s skin could, for some, be in some ways less important than their way of life. An ideological framework made up of humanitarian belief in equality, rhetoric of instantaneous improvement, and the transformative power of education made the couples discussed in chapters 3 and 4 unusual but not complete outsiders. By contrast, when white women and Aboriginal men married, they struggled to find a place for themselves in any strata of the 150 | white women married to aboriginal men Australian class system. They were never doctors or lawyers, they had not attended a university, and they were rarely in the position to write letters, let alone create a persona based on the ideologies of the day in speeches, articles, or books. For this reason, this chapter deals with patchier evidence than the stories told in earlier chapters. Stories about poor, ill-educated white women and Aboriginal men who were not able to engage in the middle-class pastime of authorship or even letter-writing left behind little evidence of their lives, except when appearing in someone else’s narrative. Their own words are few and far between, but there is much to learn about Australian ideas of assimilation from the way they were perceived. Perhaps most important, the idea of white women as “angels of civilization” was rarely applied, even to those humanitarian-minded women who fitted the image. Instead, the white community could react in one of two ways to white women married to Aboriginal men. The couple , especially the wife, could be dismissed as eccentric and harmless, or they could be seen as threatening to the status quo. Revealingly, the latter reaction was reserved for those couples who attempted to accept the “promise” of assimilation and thereby transgressed the role assigned by white Australians to Aborigines outside mainstream society. In 1937 journalist Ernestine Hill published a collection of her journalistic writings under the title The Great Australian Loneliness. One chapter was devoted to the “strange case of Mrs. Witchetty,” a patronizing account of Hill’s visit with a white woman who had been married to an Adnyamathanha man and who, with her two sons, still resided with his people after his death. The chapter was also published as a sensationalized article on the front page of the Sunday Guardian Sun on December 18, 1932. Hill presented the story as “the most amazing document in the annals of the Australian outback,” but despite her condescending tone she seemed more interested in presenting the case as an oddity rather than as an unacceptable breach of social mores, still less as a story of assimilation gone “right.” Much of Hill’s story is substantiated by the marriage certificate of Jack Forbes and Rebecca Castledine, who were married on January 17, 1914, at the registrar’s office in Bourke. The patronizing and sensationalist tone of Hill’s writing, however, suggests the extent to which she 15. In the newspaper version of the story, Rebecca Forbes’s pseudonym was changed to “Mrs. Widgety.” Perhaps the editors felt that “Mrs. Witchetty,” which evoked an indigenous foodstuff known to white Australians as a witchetty grub, was too offensive. From Sunday Guardian Sun...