New Labours, Older Nativisms? Australian Critical Whiteness Studies, Indigeneity and David Malouf’s Harland’s Half Acre

Abstract

This article assesses the "new" labours of Australian critical whiteness studies and "older" fantasies of white indigeneity. Nativist "turns" on the creation of a white indigeneity, exemplifi ed in David Malouf's Harland's Half Acre, are revisited in the language and rhetorical gestures of whiteness studies, which may suggest both the debt and stranglehold of nativism. Whiteness studies' preoccupation with an ever more self-questioning and constantly shifting whiteness, are prefi gured in Malouf's novel and his quest for a settled white indigene. If an embodied white indigeneity represents, for Malouf, relief from ghostly non-belongings associated with an unsettled settler culture, for whiteness studies it represents the possible derailment of its ethical intentions, destabilized by the prospect of an embodied, uncontrolled and monstrously reproducing whiteness. However, recognition of the incommensurability of indigenous and nonindigenous understandings of sovereignty in whiteness studies and the commitment to reworking the grounds of non-indigenous investments in sovereignty suggests departure from earlier nativisms.

Unsettling Australia: Disturbing White Settler Homemaking in Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang

“…Proceeding from Australia's specific situation as a settler colony, I will address the ambivalences and fissures of settler subjectivity that shape both collective and individual processes of homemaking. I argue that settler homemaking depends on the disturbance of Indigenous Australians' homelands via dispossession, exclusion, and genocide, but that it equally depends upon the creation of a white settler subject presented as innocent, entitled, and, ultimately, truly belonging to what has been called "white indigeneity" (Lawson 2004, p. 157; see also Mullaney 2007). 1 At first glance, these two premises seem mutually exclusive, but myths of settlement and nation-making show that "seizing a continent and alternately destroying and governing its original people shaped how white Australians came to see themselves as independent citizens" (Curthoys and Mitchell 2018, p. i).…”