Research Catalog

Title

Dreams and nightmares of a white Australia : representing aboriginal assimilation in the mid-twentieth century / Catriona Elder.

Author

Elder, Catriona

Publication

New York : Peter Lang, c2009.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

257 p. : col. ill.; 23 cm.

Summary

• 'By the mid twentieth century the various Australian states began changing their approaches to Aboriginal peoples from one of exclusion to assimilation. These policy changes meant that Aboriginal people, particularly those identified as being of mixed heritage, were to be encouraged to become part of the dominant non-Aboriginal community - the Australian nation. This book explores tis significant policy change from a cultural perspective, considering the ways in which assimilation was imagined in literary fiction of the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing on novels from a range of genres - the Gothic, historical romance, the western and family melodrama - it analyses how these texts tell their assimilation stories' -- back cover.
• Analysis of the assimilation issues and race relations in five novels from the 1950s and 1960s and three non-fiction and texts that were produced in academic and government circles regarding the 'half caste problem' in the 1930s and 1940s; includes overview of assimilation in Australia and definitions of assimilation; management of race relations in Australia; eugenic politics; Aboriginality; 1937 Aboriginal welfare conference; Citizenship for the Aborigines (1944); Australia's Colours Minority: Its place in the community (1947).

Series Statement

Studies in Asia-Pacific "mixed race,", 1661-6839 ; vol. 3

Uniform Title

Studies in Asia-Pacific "mixed race" vol. 3.

Subject

• 1900-1999
• Australian fiction > 20th century > History and criticism
• Aboriginal Australians in literature
• Assimilation (Sociology) in literature
• Race relations in literature
• Aboriginal Australians > Government policy
• Aboriginal Australians > Cultural assimilation
• Aboriginal Australians, Treatment of
• Australia > Race relations

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Note

• Based on the author's dissertation (PhD).

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 241-257).

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Writing a story of mixed-race relations in 'white Australia' -- Mapping a 'white Australia': political and government responses to the 'half-caste' problem -- Blood: elimination, assimilation and the white Australian nation in E.V. Timms' The Scarlet Frontier -- Making families white: indigenous mothers, families and children in Gwen Meredith's Blue Hills: the Ternna-Boolla Story -- Haunted homes: children, desire and dispossession in Helen Heney's The Leaping Blaze -- Scopic pleasure and fantasy: visualising assimilation and the half-caste in Leonard Mann's Venus Half-Caste -- Dead centre: frontier relations in Olaf Fuhen's Naked Under Capricorn.

ISBN

• 9783039117222 (pbk. : alk. paper)
• 303911722X (pbk. : alk. paper)

OCLC

• 298470729
• SCSB-11476742

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library