Thread by @msmisrule

I'm still working on the section of my thesis dedicated to Nan Chauncy's 1960 time slip novel, Tangara, and have am writing about a scene in which she explicitly marks Whiteness as dangerous to Aboriginal people.

Chauncy describes the white faces of two convicts looking down on a group of Aboriginal people in a gully. Chauncy explicitly contrasts their white faces with the "terrified brown faces" of the Aboriginal people who the convicts will shortly slaughter for food.

Now, the choice of the perpetrators of massacre being escaped convicts as opposed to the nice white family who live on the stolen Aboriginal land where its people are about to be murdered is not incidental, & yet it's striking how Chauncy explicitly describes their skin colour...

as the source of the Aboriginal people's terror, not in an ignorant, Noble Savage, "we've never seen White people before" (they have) way, but in simply marking Whiteness as Other. The book elsewhere also explicitly describes the Settler Colonials as the cause of the destruction

of the Palawa (Tasmanian Aboriginal people). Chauncy, along with most non-Aboriginal Australians in the 50s, accepted the "Last of Her Tribe" myth of a total Tasmanian genocide.

Nevertheless, the book is extremely sympathetic towards the fate of the Palawa at the hands of Settler Colonials.

Anyway, so it got me thinking: can anyone think of any other Australian books, especially children's books, and especially of the last century (but any will do)...

that explicitly marks Whiteness as dangerous and destructive? I would really love some other examples to compare. eg I am going to be rereading The Rocks of Honey at some point soon, and while it too is more sympathetic to Aboriginal people than we might expect of the time,

I'd bet the Nargun to the Stars that Wrightson doesn't mark Whiteness in this way.

Thanks in advance for any egs you might come up with. It's a bit of a side issue to my main thesis (which is on the nature of Australian children's fantasy), but I do love me a rabbit hole!

@threadreaderapp please unroll