AustLit

'Philip Morrissey discusses the function of the child in Phillip Noyce's film The Rabbit Proof Fence and its return from exile by socio-political strategies of whiteness and ethnocidal processes of colonisation. He places this film in the context of other films featuring child characters such as To Kill a Mockingbird, The Night of the Hunter and The Sound of Music and in the context of various writers' (such as Daisy Bates) depictions and summations of the removal of half-caste Indigenous children from their families. He characterises the figure of the child as simultaneously helpless and powerful and argues that the Indigenous child actors in The Rabbit Proof Fence have a theurgical function in "delivering half-caste children from the netherworld to which Australia once tried to exile them" ' (Introduction, Anne Brewster and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey).

'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).

'From within literary studies, Alison Ravenscroft puts the notion of whiteness under pressure by asking whether the "white" subject isn't fantasmatic. Perhaps there is no white subject as such but only a subject-who-desires-whiteness, "with all the violent material effects of that desire". This subject will seek to stabilise an "I" as "white" through the reiteration of practices intelligible as white within a particular discursive context. Reading is one such moment of reiteration. Rather than the so-called white reader being "before" the text, forming meanings through reading, this subject might instead be thought of as a reading-effect. He or she is made and made again in such textual processes. In particular, Ravenscroft asks whether "settler" readers might make themselves intelligible as white by fantasising themselves as the "white" spectators of an unseeing "black" other in a scene of their own imagining' (Anne Brewster and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, Introduction).

Helen Hewitt compares 'Conversation Piece' in Drusilla Modjeska's Stravinsky's Lunch with American Joseph Wiesenfarth's Ford Madox Ford and the Regiment of Women (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005).

'The exhibition "A SIGN OF THE CRIMES" that was held at the Mori Gallery in Sydney in May 2006 proved a splendid confrontation of Australian whiteness and the impact of continuing colonial oppression of Australia's Indigenous people. The Indigenous artist Adam Hill is an exemplar of the urban black: his early years in the outer western suburbs of Sydney led him to a developed political consciousness and deep understanding of the dynamics of Australian society around race, class and whiteness. This political and social consciousness is reflected in his art. I had a conversation with Adam Hill about the development of his indigenous identity, his life experiences, his art and the role of 'whiteness' within it.' (Publication introduction)