Issue Details: First known date: 2013... 2013 The Passing of the Half-Castes : Gavin Casey, Leonard Mann and the Postwar ‘Half-Caste’ Novel
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'The two decades following the end of the Second World War marked a historically significant shift in mainstream Australians’ attitudes toward what had previously been thought of as the ‘Aboriginal problem,’ culminating in the famous referendum of 1967 that for the first time endorsed federal empowerment over Aboriginal affairs. Not coincidentally, it was in that period that an unprecedented number of narratives appeared that focused upon Indigenous Australians, especially the so-called ‘half-castes.’ Most of the texts that registered that shift, and perhaps helped to accelerate it, have since been ignored or regarded dismissively by literary scholars and cultural commentators. Among them were some remarkably observant and well crafted novels that are, as such, worthy of reclamation from obscurity; several repay close analytical readings. Of greater interest still, perhaps, is their collective importance as a genre that signified the change that was occurring in the social milieu that produced them. This discussion focuses upon two of the most interesting of the postwar “half-caste” novels: Gavin Casey’s Snowball (1958) and Leonard Mann’s Venus Half-Caste (1963). It argues that both of these now largely forgotten works, in aspiring to present the postwar social world to mainstream readers as though through Aboriginal eyes, were not only rewardingly complex works of fiction, but of considerable cultural significance in a time when Australia was revisiting longstanding assumptions about the position of its most oppressed minority. Ultimately, it further suggests, these and other narratives focusing on mixed-descent Australians may well have contributed to the demise of the very notion of the now antiquated and distinctively offensive term ‘half-caste’—as well as to the major shift in mainstream opinion registered in the 1967 federal referendum by a vote that overwhelmingly endorsed the incorporation of Indigenous people within the national community.' (Publication abstract)

Notes

  • Epigraph:

    KEEP THE BREED PURE. The half-caste usually inherits the vices of both races and the virtues of neither. Do you want Australia to be a community of mongrels?

    The Bulletin (1901)

    I did what I set out to do—to make their passing easier and to keep the dreaded half-caste menace from our shores.

    Daisy Bates, The Passing of the Aborigines (1944, 37)

    The old-fashioned term ‘halfcaste ,’as applied to persons of mixed Aboriginal and European descent, is going into the discard.

    Frank Clune, The Fortune Hunters (1957, 119)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon JASAL vol. 13 no. 3 2013 7219068 2013 periodical issue 2013
Last amended 19 Jan 2017 09:22:20
http://nla.gov.au/nla.arc-63067-20150114-1144-www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/view/2558/3874.html The Passing of the Half-Castes : Gavin Casey, Leonard Mann and the Postwar ‘Half-Caste’ Novelsmall AustLit logo JASAL
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