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Fiona Probyn Fiona Probyn i(A18142 works by) (a.k.a. Fiona Probyn-Rapsey)
Gender: Female
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Works By

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1 5 y separately published work icon Made to Matter : White Fathers, Stolen Generations Fiona Probyn , Sydney : Sydney University Press , 2013 8366037 2013 multi chapter work criticism

'Most members of the Stolen Generations had white fathers or grandfathers. Who were these white men? This book analyses the stories of white fathers, men who were positioned as key players in the plans to assimilate Aboriginal people by 'breeding out the colour'. The plan to 'breed out the colour' ascribed enormous power to white sperm and white paternity; to 'elevate', 'uplift' and disperse Aboriginality in whiteness, to blank out, to aid cultural forgetting. The policy was a cruel failure, not least because it conflated skin colour with culture and assumed that Aboriginal women and their children would acquiesce to produce 'future whites'. It also assumed that white men would comply as ready appendages, administering 'whiteness' through marriage or white sperm. This book attempts to put textual flesh on the bodies of these white fathers, and in doing so, builds on and complicates the view of white fathers in this history, and the histories of whiteness to which they are biopolitically related.' (Publication summary)
1 White Closets, Jangling Nerves and the Biopolitics of the Public Secret Fiona Probyn , 2011 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , June vol. 26 no. 2 2011; (p. 57-75) 'This essay attempts to outline the relationship between the 'raw nerves' that Denis Byrne describes in the epigraph above, and the cultivation of 'indifference' that Stanner identifies as being characteristic of 'European life' in Australia. Here I situate indifference as numbing the 'jangling' of 'raw nerves' and as cultivated, disseminated and feeding specific forms of public secrecy. How did the white men who enforces segregation by day and pursued Aboriginal women by night manage their 'jangling nerves, if indeed they did jangle? How did they manage to be seen and known and have their secrets kept for them, as much as by them. How did this contradiction of segregation and sexual intimacy, if indeed it is a contradiction, work, My hope is that if we can understand how the white men (and those around them), regulated these jangling nerves, then we might be able to understand the relationship between indifference, public secrecy and the biopolitical forms that Australian whiteness took in the twentieth century, and specifically in the period of assimilation, extending from the 1930s to, roughly, the end of the 1960s.' (Author's introduction p. 57)
1 Complicity, Critique and Methodology: Australian Con/texts Fiona Probyn , 2010 single work criticism
— Appears in: Modern Australian Criticism and Theory 2010; (p. 218-228)
1 'No Last Words' : Postcolonial Witnessing in Jackson's Track and Jackson's Track Revisited Fiona Probyn , 2008 single work criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , December vol. 22 no. 2 2008; (p. 123-128)
1 Kin-fused Reconciliation : Bringing Them Home, Bringing Us Home Fiona Probyn , 2007 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Humanities Review , August no. 42 2007; 'Fiona Probyn-Rapsey discusses the biopolitical management of Indigenous people within the contemporary nation through an analysis of white liberal discourse on Reconciliation. She looks specifically at the image of the nation as family and the pedagogic nationalist argument for extending the "white" family to include Aboriginal kin and to "bind Aboriginality to whiteness". She analyses how a wide range of Indigenous life narratives (including those by Morgan, Russell, Pilkington-Garimara, Lalor, Scott and Brown, Kinnane, Simon and Randall) describe familial relations between white and Indigenous family members. She argues, in her formulation of the phrase "kin-fused Reconciliation", that a liberal "extended family" model of the Nation is potentially assimilationist' (Anne Brewster and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, Introduction).
1 Paternalism and Complicity : Or How Not to Atone for the 'Sins of the Father' Fiona Probyn , 2007 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , May vol. 23 no. 1 2007; (p. 92-103) This article critiques the complex relationship with and presentation of, paternalism in Mary Ellen Jordan's autobiographical work.
1 1 Some Whites Are Whiter Than Others: The Whitefella Skin Politics of Xavier Herbert and Cecil Cook Fiona Probyn , 2007 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , Special Issue 2007; (p. 157-173) Fiona Probyn-Rapsey investigates reports that Dr Cecil Cook, Chief Medical Officer and Chief Protector of Aborigines from 1927 to 1939 in the Northern Territory, was an albino. Her research leads her to conclude 'that Cook's "albinism" is possibly a fiction of Herbert's or it is an association built upon an image of extreme or excessive whiteness that inhabits Herbert's fiction, politics and letters. While the attribution of albinism to Cook's body is, I believe, a misreading, it is also instructive and revealing, because it inadvertently capitalises on (or makes literal or corporeal) Herbert's interests in securing Australia for a certain kind of whiteness - one that did not lack "colour', by which is meant, more accurately, indigeneity.
1 An Ethics of Following and the No Road Film: Trackers, Followers and Fanatics Fiona Probyn , 2005 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Humanities Review , December no. 37 2005; 'Fiona Probyn analyses filmic treatments of the Aboriginal tracker and their implications for conceptions of sovereignty, ownership and reconciliation.' (Editor's note) Probyn takes as her case studies Rolf de Heer's The Tracker and Stephen Muecke's No Road : Bitumen All the Way.
1 Towards 'a Postcolonial Practice of Writing' Margaret Somerville , Fiona Probyn , 2004 single work interview
— Appears in: Hecate , vol. 30 no. 1 2004; (p. 56-71) This 'interview' is a dialogue 'woven together after a few months of email exchanges with Margaret Somerville in 2002' (p.56). In the discussion Somerville 'elaborates on her navigation through feminist, postcolonial and poststructuralist connections and disconnections, as well as her strategies for achieving an embodied sense of belonging in the Australian landscape.' (p.56)
1 Untitled Fiona Probyn , 2004 single work review
— Appears in: JAS Review of Books , March no. 22 2004;
— Review of Shadow Lines Stephen Kinnane , 2003 single work biography
1 "This Land is Mine/ This Land is Me" : Reconciling Harmonies in One Night the Moon Fiona Probyn , Catherine Simpson , 2002 single work criticism
— Appears in: Senses of Cinema , March-April no. 19 2002;
1 A Poetics of Failure Is No Bad Thing : Stephen Muecke and Margaret Somerville's White Writing Fiona Probyn , 2002 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Australian Studies , no. 75 2002; (p. 17-26, notes 176-178)
1 1 How Does the Settler Belong? Fiona Probyn , 2002 single work criticism
— Appears in: Westerly , November vol. 47 no. 2002; (p. 75-95)
1 Untitled Fiona Probyn , 2001-2002 single work review
— Appears in: JAS Review of Books , December-January no. 4 2001-2002;
— Review of The Australian Fiance Simone Lazaroo , 2000 single work novel
1 Adam Aitken : 'Second Degree Native Informant' Fiona Probyn (interviewer), 2001 single work interview
— Appears in: Meanjin : Fine Writing & Provocative Ideas , vol. 60 no. 2 2001; (p. 131-142)
1 y separately published work icon Unsettling Postcolonial Representations of the White Woman Fiona Probyn , 1999 Z941103 1999 single work thesis
1 Interview with Liam Davison, Author of 'The White Woman' Fiona Probyn (interviewer), 1996 single work interview
— Appears in: New Literatures Review , Winter no. 32 1996; (p. 59-70)
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