Indigeneity and Narrative Strategies: Ideology in Contemporary Non-indigenous Australian Prose Fiction

Representations of Otherness are inevitably ideologically charged. Early white representations of indigenous Australians in travelogues and newspapers, for instance, are largely based on stereotypes that served the propaganda purposes of the British colonizers. Examples are the animal-like creatures in William Dampier's 1699 account A New Voyage Round the World (Dampier 1927: 312–13); the noble savages in James Cook's The Voyage of the Endeavour: 1768–1771 (Cook 1995: 399); the violent savages in E. Lloyd's A Visit to the Antipodes: with Some Reminiscences of a Sojourn to Australia (Lloyd 1846: 125); and the ignoble (i.e., ugly and comic) savages in The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, the colony's first newspaper, launched in 1803 (Wilde and Headon 1994: 2).

Early fictional representations are hardly more favorable.¹ Before 1900, different indigenous communities are lumped together as "fierce member[s] of a horde of savages, without individuality or humanity" or "appear as an extension of the dangers of frontier life" (Richardson 969: 1). Charles Rowcroft's novels Tales of the Colonies: Or, The Adventures of an Emigrant (1843) and The Bushranger of Van Diemen's Land (1846), for example, construct indigenous Australians as a natural hazard for the settlers, and through excessive images of bloodshed they reproduce the violent savage stereotype. In other cases, indigenous characters are represented as flat and static assistants to heroic settlers, government officials, the police, frontiersmen, or courageous white women (see Daniel 1981; Hodge and Mishra 1990: 27; Wilde and Headon 1994; Rodoreda 2012: 99). These images are hardly surprising: the invasion and subsequent colonization of Australia was based on colonialist ideology, according to which indigenous Australians were "primitive," "uncivilized," and without property; and these ideas were "supported by Eurocentric notions of superiority and advancement," which "gave initial settlement its legitimacy" (Gooder and Jacobs 2000: 233).²

My focus here lies elsewhere. I zoom in on the negotiation of indigeneity in post-Mabo novels written by white Australian authors.³ I am particularly interested in writers who acknowledge the facts around invasion, colonization, and attempted extermination (Heiss 2003: 36) and who sympathize with indigenous Australians. More specifically, I address the ideological ramifications of the narrative techniques used to approach indigeneity in David Malouf 's Remembering Babylon (1993), Andrew McGahan's The White Earth (2004), and Gail Jones's Sorry (2007). I have chosen these novels because their authors see their narratives as expressing respect for indigenous Australian worldviews.

Methodologically speaking, I follow Roy Sommer's ideas concerning the development of a postcolonial narratology. For Sommer, the primary goal of such a narratology is "the exploration of relationships between narrative structures and the core concepts of postcolonial studies" (2007: 68). The used strategies may still be imbued with neo-colonialist discourse; or they can be classified as being postcolonial; or they might (and this is the most likely option) be located on a scale somewhere between these two poles. In the first case the representations work in such a way that "the former masters continue to act in a colonialist manner towards formerly colonized states" (Young 2001: 45), whereas in the second case they actively try to get "past colonialism's own narratives and ideologies" (Williams 2005: 451).

Non-indigenous fiction is "a complex archive for reading settler culture's ways of grappling with . . . the history of settler invasion and Aboriginal dispossession" (McGonegal 2009a: 73). The novels of my corpus all face what Dominick LaCapra calls "the problem for beneficiaries of earlier oppression," namely, "how to recognize and mourn the losses of former victims" (2001: 45). If white authors deal with indigenous Australians, how can or perhaps should they do it? According to Dolores Herrero, "it is undeniable that silence—even respectful silence—can become a form of erasure" (2011: 287). At the same time, however, it is "clear that the opposite reaction can inevitably entail some kind of illegitimate appropriation" (287). The narratives of my corpus gravitate toward the former solution. In Sorry, Jones represents a few minor indigenous characters; in Malouf 's Remembering Babylon, Aboriginal figures only...