Making Families White : Melodrama, Desire and Colour in Gwen Meredith's 'Beyond Blue Hills : the Ternna-Boolla Story' extract   thesis  
Issue Details: First known date: 1999... 1999 Making Families White : Melodrama, Desire and Colour in Gwen Meredith's 'Beyond Blue Hills : the Ternna-Boolla Story'
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    y separately published work icon Dreams and Nightmares of a 'White Australia' : The Discourse of Assimilation in Selected Works of Fiction from the 1950s and 1960s Catriona Elder , Canberra : 1999 Z1301412 1999 single work thesis This thesis is an analysis of the production of assimilation discourse, in terms of Aboriginal people's and white people's social relations, in a small selection of popular fiction texts from the 1950s and 1960s. I situate these novels in the broader context of assimilation by also undertaking a reading of three official texts from a slightly earlier period. These texts together produce the ambivalent white Australian story of assimilation. They illuminate some of the key sites of anxiety in assimilation discourses: inter-racial sexual relationships, the white family, and children and young adults of mixed heritage and land ownership. The crux of my argument is that in the 1950s and early 1960s the dominant cultural imagining of Australia was as a white nation. In white discourses of assimilation to fulfil the dream of whiteness, the Aboriginal people - the not-white - had to be included in or eliminated from this imagined white community. Fictional stories of assimilation were a key site for the representation of this process, that is, they produced discourses of 'assimilation colonization'. The focus for this process were Aboriginal people of mixed ancestry, who came to be represented as 'the half-caste' in assimilation discourse. The novels I analyse work as 'conduct books'. They aim to shape white reactions to the inclusion of Aboriginal people, in particular the half-caste, into 'white Australia'. This inclusion, assimilation, was an ambivalent project - both pleasurable and unsettling - pleasurable because it worked to legitimate white colonization (Aboriginal presence as erased) and unsettling because it challenged the idea of a pure 'white Australia'. (Author abstract from Australian Digital Thesis Program) Canberra : 1999 pg. 117-152
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Related Works

y separately published work icon Beyond Blue Hills : The Ternna-Boolla Story Gwen Meredith , Sydney : Angus and Robertson , 1953 Z1062941 1953 single work novel Taken from the famous ABC Country Hour radio serial, Blue Hills, this novel takes the story a stage further to the coming of Ted and Emmie Lawson to Ternna-Boola and Nahweenah, to their first taste of sheep-station life in the back country, and to the ugly fact of colour prejudice. (Publisher's blurb)
Making A Nation White : Representations of Assimilation in Gwen Meredith's Beyond Blue Hills : The Ternna-Boolla Story Catriona Elder , 2001 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Studies , Winter vol. 16 no. 2 2001; (p. 151-170)
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Last amended 12 Aug 2009 09:08:53
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