Abstract
Scholars of early Australian drama have over-emphasized the stylistic relationship between Aboriginal characters in early Australian drama and blackface characters in early American drama. Focusing on stylistic connections between early US and Australian theatre potentially overlooks the complex ideological similarities in representations of race on the American and Australian stage. This article provides a close reading of two of Australia’s first plays — David Burn’s “The Bushrangers” and Henry Melville’s “The Bushrangers; or, Norwood Vale” — in order to nuance the critical record exploring the influence of American drama on Australian drama around 1830. Looking beyond formal connections between early US and Australian theatre can reveal an ideology of white spatial control underpinning early representations of Aboriginality and blackness in Australian and American drama.
On the American stage between 1828 and 1834, characters such as Zip Coon, Jim Crow, Sambo, and Cuffee — trickster slaves and buffoonish dandies – became favourites of white working-class audiences from New York to New Orleans (Cockrell, 1997: 96). In Australia during the same period, authors such as David Burn and Henry Melville were beginning to explore local themes and characters, leading to some of the first representations of Aboriginality in Australian plays. Theatre historian Margaret Williams has suggested that the Aboriginal characters in Burn’s “The Bushrangers” were “crudely drawn ‘Sambo’ figures” (1983: 10). Terry Goldie analyses Melville’s “Norwood Vale” and concludes “the stage conventions established by the American popular theatre seemed applicable to the Aborigine in Australia” (1989: 176). This article will provide a close reading of the Aboriginal characters in Burn’s “The Bushrangers” (1829) and Melville’s “Norwood Vale” (1834) to suggest a need to refine statements about the influence of American theatre on early representations of Aboriginality. Where Williams (1983) and Goldie (1989) focus on what might be called a formal influence of early American theatre on Australian drama, where performance elements (costume, make-up, lingo, and so on) used in the crude representations of African American characters in early American blackface entertainment are also used in portrayals of Aboriginal characters in Australia, the analysis in this article suggests the need to widen the critical discussion of early Australian drama to consider shared ideological underpinnings in representations of blackness and indigeneity in early American and Australian drama. For example, early Australian blackface performances of Aboriginal characters drew on myths of the “last Indian” popular in the US at the time, creating localized representations of indigenous people and national spaces reinforced by a shared ideology justifying white sovereignty. Further, early Australian performances of Aboriginality referenced symbols of a racialized US class system, entrenching localized versions of racial discourses privileging whiteness on each side of the Pacific. Between 1828 and 1834, Australian playwrights and performers creating Aboriginal characters appear not to have been influenced simply by the performance styles of popular American blackface actors, melodists, and dancers; instead, there was a more elaborate connection between early American and Australian drama including a shared ideology that places white authors, audiences, and characters in a position of control over their real and imagined non-white counterparts. While this ideology of control was enacted through theatrical fictions, it reflected and supported actual discrimination against non-white people in many spheres of US and Australian life, from legal, industrial, educational, and economic disadvantages, to social and spatial restrictions. Analyzing the underlying ideologies in colonial theatre can highlight how drama and fiction of the time were not simply adaptations of various forms to local conditions, but discourses participating in the colonization of indigenous peoples in Australia and the US.
Cultural texts and political discourses about otherness often reveal ideologies of white control that can be read as a complex relationship between race, space, and power. Race and space are intertwined according to Ien Ang, who suggests that political discourses about race are often “not just about ‘race’ but, in a more complex and profound way, about space” (2003: 53). Ang goes on to argue that the version of the “Australian way of life” privileged in political discourse represents a “culture of space, [a] space for culture” where cultural conformity and assimilation are explicitly idealized as being for the good of the nation while operating covertly to maintain white control over national space (2003: 65). For Ghassan Hage, the impulse to control national spaces is present in both multicultural and anti-racist discourses, which view the “nation as a space structured around a White culture, where Aboriginal people and non-White ‘ethnics’ are merely national objects to be moved or removed according to the White national will” (1998: 18). For Hage, such discourses are fantasies of control, imaginings that can appear to offer support for, or challenges to, racism while, in effect, always practising white spatial control. In literature and theatre such controlling impulses are played out both metaphorically, as characters discuss the fate of non-white characters or entire races, and literally, as authors and directors control the action of actors and as characters move, and move one another, around or off a stage or setting. The metaphorical and literal control of space by white characters in fiction derives from the same ideology supporting the actual control of indigenous people that was occurring through such means as colonial legislation defining indigenous peoples and their (lack of) rights, discriminatory practices preventing indigenous people from participating in education, commerce and social life, physical removal of indigenous peoples from their lands, and restrictions placed on where indigenous people can live or travel. While Ang (2003) and Hage (1998) both focus on twenty-first-century political discourses, Ang acknowledges that the foundation of such fantasies extend back to pre-national (pre-1901) Australia, specifically to the values supporting various immigration restriction acts that came to be known as the White Australia policy (2003: 54). A clearer understanding of how modern ideologies of race were prefigured in colonial texts can help reveal the insidious effects of discourses of white spatial control today.
In both American and Australian studies, pre-national texts have been read as pre-cursory representations of modern ideologies supporting white privilege. For example, Valerie Babb suggests that early American texts are some of the “most instructive in American cultural history for observing the construction of whiteness as an ideology, a system of beliefs privileging those with white skin” (1998: 47). She interprets early American maps as revealing a gradual “shift in perception, from seeing the land as inhabited by unknown indigenous elements, made familiar only by their approximation to elements of past discovery, to […] a growing sense of European entitlement” (1998: 49–50). In other words, one of the earliest features of American whiteness was the approximation of indigeneity into representations that justified European spatial entitlement: in short, discourses of whiteness justified, for colonists, a presumptive ownership of land. In examining colonial theatre in Australia, specifically the representation of Aboriginality in pre-colonial texts, Maryrose Casey identifies a similar pattern of approximation, claiming authors and audiences interpreted “performances and performers to fit the narrative of colonization from the myth of the doomed race to framing them as savages lower on the Social Darwinian hierarchy of cultures and peoples” (2013: 64). For Babb (1998) and Casey (2013), representations of indigeneity in colonial texts reflect the changing beliefs about indigeneity at the time and often work to justify white superintendence of the land and non-white others. While the specific nature of such beliefs might be different in different locations and times, the constant, this article suggests, was that colonial texts provided a site of articulation for a politics of indigeneity that ultimately reinforced the fantasy of white spatial control. An examination of the earliest representations of Aboriginality in Australian theatre will show this to be a point of connection between US and Australian theatre unacknowledged in comparisons focused on formal aspects of theatrical representations of otherness.
Aboriginal characters appeared sporadically in early Australian theatre. Margaret Williams has called “The Bushrangers”, written in 1829 by David Burn, the “first play written out of a direct experience of Australian life” (1983: 3). Eric Irvin reveals that, in fact, three plays with Australian themes had been written by 1830: “The first, in 1821, was J. Amherst’s Michael Howe, the Terror of Van Diemen’s Land; the second, David Burn’s The Bushrangers, produced in 1829, and the third W. T. Moncrieff’s Van Diemen’s Land; or, Settlers and Natives, produced in 1830” (1969: 18–19). As one of the first plays written in Australia, “The Bushrangers” was written at a time of strict censorship of theatrical works with “local” content and prior to the establishment of the first legitimate (officially licensed) theatre in 1832 (Waterhouse, 1990: 22). To overcome such obstacles, Burn took his play to his hometown of Edinburgh where it was performed at the Caledonian Theatre in 1829. Despite this literary endeavour, Burn was not a noted or prolific literary author. Although he published a small collection Plays, and Fugitive Pieces in Verse in 1842 (that did not contain “The Bushrangers”), he became better known as editor of several periodicals and newspapers in Auckland, where he moved in 1847 after the property he and his mother managed became insolvent. D. H. Borchardt states that Burn’s longer writings are overly ornate and his writing is “at his best in brief journalistic accounts” (1966: 182). Slightly longer than a brief journalistic account, though aimed at capturing some local characters and stories, “The Bushrangers” documents some important perceptions of early Australian life.
“The Bushrangers” fictionalizes the life of the notorious Tasmanian bushranger Matthew Brady, who was hanged in May 1826. With several scenes involving Aboriginal characters, the play reveals early perceptions of the country’s indigenous people.
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In a remote setting during Act II a white family, including Jemmy and Peggy, come into contact with a group of local Aboriginal people. The Aboriginal people, through their “Chief” Tom and his wife Sal, request bread, tea, and sugar from the family. Jemmy, the man of the family, obliges in his thick accent: Yes. Peggy, do’ee fetch some bread an’ tea Iss. An’ leetel shuggy shugger? An’ back-a-na? Break my neck! What’s that? De poff-poff. (Imitates smoking.) Och, then, an’ isn’t he a black dandy. Sure it’s aither a seegar or baccy he manes. Iss. White fello gin hab right. Iss—baccy. Him murry large goot nice. Well, Peggy, fetch a fig or two o’ Negro head. (Burn, 1971: 30)
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The characters here are set up to be humorous: with misunderstanding and the corruption of the English language (by all characters) the vehicle of the joke. Further, the relationship between Tom and tobacco is revealing. The linking in this play of Aboriginal people to tobacco (and, in a later scene, rum) represents the earliest representation of Aboriginal people as substance-addicted beggars (which, as Fiona Nicoll [2012] argues, continues in popular discourse today). In Burn’s play this trope energizes a powerful myth of white superiority. The act of begging for basic provisions like bread and tea suggests simultaneously that Western provisions are desirable and that Aboriginal people cannot provide for themselves. In other words, the scene enacts a conceit of white superiority as well as an imagined justification for the inferiority of Aboriginal people. Concocting such fantasies overwrites the complex ways colonialism affected Aboriginal agriculture. Following recent re-readings of early European journals that reveal the complexity of indigenous farming practices — Gammage’s The Biggest Estate on Earth (2011), for example, and Pascoe’s Dark Emu, Black Seed (2014) — it can be argued that the incursion of European invaders upon Aboriginal lands and the introduction of foreign species (plant and animal) destroyed the food sources of both Aboriginal people and the animals they hunted. Further, such incursions were supported by a belief in a justified European spatial control over the people and territories of the “new world”. In Burn’s account, Aboriginal people are not represented as the victims of colonization, but of an imagined disposition to begging; needless to say, for white audiences at the time such racial fictions would have displaced much guilt and anxiety about occupying and controlling Aboriginal people and lands.
Further, the reference to “Negro head” tobacco in the above quotation reinforces the imagined superiority of whiteness. “Negro head” tobacco was an American tobacco which “was dried, then mixed with molasses and pressed into cakes, or ‘plugs,’ making it particularly resistant to heat and humidity and thus especially well-suited for export to places like Australia” (Freedgood, 2002: 27). Nineteenth-century advertisements for “Negro head” tobacco included images of black African American slaves working in tobacco fields while white plantation owners lounge in the background smoking pipes (Freedgood, 2002: 32). In her reading of the significance of “Negro head” tobacco in Dickens’ Great Expectations (1860), Elaine Freedgood shows that, in name and associated images, the tobacco “actually calls to mind the suffering and death that made the cultivation of tobacco possible in the first place” (2002: 32–3). It almost goes without saying that such images of production were racially loaded and added to an ideation of race that supported the guiltless ease with which white people could enjoy the fruits of black labour. Reading Great Expectations as the story of a fortune made in colonial Australia, Freedgood suggests that references to “Negro head” tobacco in the novel act as symbols of oppression that preclude the need for contemplation about the racial fictions that enable slave labour to produce such commodities. For Freedgood, the allusion to the violent institution of American slavery in the context of a story about fortunes built in Australia reveals an amnesic similarity in the racial ideologies shared by both nations: “the presence of ‘Negro head’ tobacco symbolizes the crime of Aboriginal genocide, without requiring conscious acknowledgement of it, and that therefore there is no need to deny, repress, or oppose the fact of genocide” (Freedgood, 2002: 27). Such an argument is transferable to Burn’s play, where the appearance of “Negro head” onstage in “The Bushrangers” reveals something of the racial ideology informing Burn’s representation of Aboriginality. Consciously or not, Burn summons the imagined relationships of human worth and labour inherent in the imagery and production history of “Negro head” tobacco when Jemmy, the owner of such a commodity, gifts Tom and Sal “a fig or two o’ Negro head” (32). Extending the ideas of Casey, the transnational context of such a racial discourse indicates that early Australian Aboriginal characters were not simply interpreted to “fit the narrative of colonisation” (2013: 64), but they were contextualized in ways that invited audiences to read such characters within a narrative of transnational white privilege. Not only are Tom and Sal — like the slave representations in “Negro head” iconography — reduced to objectified bodies enabling white leisure, entertainment and profit, they are bodies to be governed by white people. Be it the playwright, actor, audience, or the characters Jemmy and Peggy, white people aspire to a governmental position that superintends Aboriginality.
The racial ideology activated by a reference to tobacco works alongside caricatures of Aboriginal culture to foreshadow (and fore-ease) the presumed inevitable doom of the Aboriginal characters. While Peggy has exited to retrieve the tobacco, bread, sugar and tea, there is an interlude performance by the black characters. The interlude, intended to present a faux anthropological spectacle, includes Aboriginal characters cooking a kangaroo on a fire and eating it while “gabbling” (30). The stage directions describe the actions of the Aboriginal characters during this interlude: “When they have done, they all exclaim, ‘Corobbora — Corobbora!’ They then start up and perform a rude dance in which they go spinning round and round and throwing their arms about in an extravagant manner and singing” (30). This perverse mimicry of Aboriginal custom may itself be seen in hindsight as a comic cultural misunderstanding on Burn’s part, but that is to understate the serious implications and consequences of such performances. Offered to contemporary audiences as comic interludes, such dances — most likely performed by white actors in black woollen body-suits, with blackened hands and faces — serve to re-enact white misunderstandings of (or the unwillingness to attempt to understand) Aboriginal culture while reinforcing the fiction of pre-contact Australia as a place without recognizable law, society, culture, or religion. Such a representation supports the myth of terra nullius, defined by Deborah Bird Rose and Richard Davis as the principle that “Australia was uninhabited or at best inhabited by peoples who had no systems of social organization and property ownership that compelled colonial recognition, [which] gave exclusive radical title of Australian lands to the Crown” (2005: 13). By rendering comic something that is essentially a complex religious, spiritual, legal, and cultural ceremony, Burn’s play enacts terra nullius. It strips Aboriginal culture of meaning and meaningful relationships to place, and in doing so transforms the theatrical into the material as the Crown becomes the rightful inheritor of the supposedly empty continent. The importance of re-reading such fictions cannot be understated: revealing how the doctrine of terra nullius was based not on reality but on a blackface reality should unsettle any attempt to claim that the theft of indigenous land was justified. And yet, for audiences of such representations at the time, if they hadn’t bought into the fiction of a superior whiteness after the reference to “Negro head” tobacco, the crude, belittling dance that strips the Aboriginal characters of culture and dignity would certainly reinforce the fiction of terra nullius, displaying a “growing sense of European entitlement” to land and space (Babb 1998: 50) that is reminiscent of early American texts.
Theatrically the dehumanization of Aboriginality in the play extends the presumption of white land ownership by imagining the violent extermination of an Aboriginal presence. As the Aboriginal characters resume their begging and bargaining, one scene escalates to violence. Tom threatens Jemmy with death if he doesn’t provide the Aboriginal camp with rum as a panicked Peggy retrieves Jemmy’s rifle and hands it to him: Kill me, will you? You mun digest a couple o’ radical pills first. Parawa! Parawa! You gun no goot, you dam white fello. (Music. The My gun no good, beant it? Too good for you, matta, I reckon. (31–2)
The reference here to “radical pills” is likely a reference to the radical nationalist movement of the period, where, in its most utopian incantation, it was argued that the land should be unlocked so that it would be available for purchase and occupation by all classes of colonist. Tellingly, the radical nationalism that Jemmy represents had a devastating effect on the Aboriginal people who occupied the lands in question. For the audience, the shock that might normally accompany a scene of mass murder has been foreshadowed and allayed by the ideology of Aboriginality that precedes the gunfight. The Aboriginal characters, through their relationship to addiction, cultural nonsense, and slavery, have been sufficiently dehumanized to allow for their murder and dispersal. The extra gunfire to aid this eradication came, of course, from the escaped convicts turned bushrangers heroicized in the play. One specifically Australian icon — the Aboriginal — has been eradicated to make way for another two, compounded in the figure of Brady: the wrongly accused convict and the heroic bushranger. Reading “The Bushrangers” in this way suggests that, from its very beginnings, the discourse of Aboriginality has been distorted into a cultural fabrication that creates a sense of white spatial control and eases white anxieties about Aboriginal dispossession and the violence committed against Aboriginal people.
In 1834 another play named “The Bushrangers” was performed on the Australian stage. “The Bushrangers; or, Norwood Vale” (henceforth called “Norwood Vale” to avoid confusion with Burn’s play), written by Henry Melville, presented a satirical view of indigenous/non-indigenous relationships at the time. Melville had arrived in Hobart in 1828. Over the next six years he acquired magazines such as the Colonial Times (1830) — through which he published the first Australian novel, Quintus Servinton (1830) — the Tasmanian (1831), and Hobart Town Magazine (1833). To the latter Melville contributed articles, and “Norwood Vale” was also published within its pages. Melville was a rebellious author who published criticism of the government and even spent a short period of time in jail for “contempt of court” over an article criticizing a Supreme Court case relating to cattle-stealing (Flinn, 1967: 221). His history of Tasmania, which was highly critical of the colonial government, was finished while he was in jail, and he smuggled his manuscript to London to have it published. He experienced financial troubles in the late 1840s and returned to London in 1849, spending the next 24 years of his life there.
“Norwood Vale” is by no means the most accomplished of Melville’s works, but it holds the title as his most significant: the first play to be written, published, and performed in Australia (no doubt aided by his virtual monopoly of the Tasmanian press). Of the actors who performed in the play’s debut, only one went on to have a career of note. Performing in the role of the “outlaw and would-be rapist” Harry Fawkes, J. H. S. Lee went on to become “one of the major comedians of the 1830s and 1840s, introducing dog acts and blackface routines in several colonies” (Fotheringham, 2006: 10). Even though Lee would go on from “Norwood Vale” to become a performer of grotesque blackface characters, the hero of “Norwood Vale”, an Aboriginal character named Murrahwa, is not in the mould of early American blackface entertainment. In fact, the representation of Aboriginality in “Norwood Vale” can be read as an extension of Melville’s subversive politics.
Melville’s opinions as to the state of Aboriginal affairs are clear in his The Present State of Australia, published in 1851, which contains a chapter on “The Aborigines of Van Diemen’s Land”. The chapter ridicules the various approaches taken by the colonial government to exterminate Aboriginal people from Tasmania. Melville describes the “black line” of 1830, where colonists, convicts, and soldiers attempted to create an organized front that could move across the country and murder indigenous people. While describing some horrific scenes of violence, Melville states: “[t]he whole scheme proved a complete failure, as any reasonable man might have anticipated […] His Excellency, however, to finish the comedy in all due form, issued a Government order, thanking the colonists for their exertions” (1851: 369). Melville goes on to state that by 1848 the numbers of Aboriginal Tasmanians “are so reduced, and their habits so changed, that terrible as they formerly were in the estimation of the inhabitants, they are now only regarded with compassion” (1851: 370). There is an important distinction here: the Aboriginal people are not said to be actually terrible, but terrible “in the estimation of the inhabitants”. That is, Melville saw the negative figuration of Aboriginal people as a fiction within the minds of colonists. Arguably, Melville had staged this nuanced reading of Aboriginality 16 years earlier in “Norwood Vale”.
In “Norwood Vale” the bushrangers — Fellows, Fawkes, and Hoodwink — are villains. The other main characters are Norwood (a property owner), his daughter Marian, her suitor Frederick, and Murrahwa. Prior to the action of the play, Norwood had reported the bushrangers to the police but the bushrangers escaped the police (and a certain hanging). In their first appearance in the play, the bushrangers plan their revenge: to kill both Norwood and his daughter. They then abduct the heroine, Marian. Norwood, unaware that two of the bushrangers are coming to murder him, waits at home while Frederick and Murrahwa search for Marian. The play then leads to two rescues: first, Frederick’s rescue of Marian, who is being guarded by Fawkes (who eludes the rescuers to join the other bushrangers in their assassination attempt on Norwood); and second, the rescue of Norwood from the bushrangers. Murrahwa (variously referred to in the script by name or as “Native” or “Native Chief”) is involved in both of these rescues.
The first time Murrahwa is seen in the play, he asks Norwood’s servant Ellen for “baccy and bredly” (Melville, 2006: 18).
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The beggarly stereotype seen in Burn’s play appears to have drawn on widely held beliefs. Murrahwa is only granted his request after he “sings and dances a corroberee [sic]” (18). Exactly what the dance involves is not clear, but presumably it would have involved a similarly crude portrayal as in “The bushrangers”. Melville, however, goes further in highlighting the apparent crudeness of a corroboree by juxtaposing the song and dance with a song by Ellen. In this way the play almost functions as a space where cultural artefacts intertwine and are exchanged between an Aboriginal character and a white character. However, the privileging of one culture over another in the pre-national space of white Australia is obvious as the “Native” sings for basic rations and blankets (it is a system he is addicted to via “baccy”/tobacco, much to the benefit of white settlers), while Ellen sings for her own leisure and entertainment. Further, the Aboriginal song is likely to have been improvised (it is not included in the script) whereas Ellen’s song is transcribed into the script — elevated to the status of written language. It then becomes apparent that, just as the bread and tobacco are Murrahwa’s “payment” for his performance, Ellen’s song is not for free: There now, will you promise not to send begging here, any of your gins and piccaninnies […] I don’t know which is worst, the bushrangers or you natives — the one obtain from us what they want without leave, whilst the other ask permission first — there, take your bread and tobacco, I have got no blanket for you. (19)
The payment demanded by Ellen, then, is the disappearance not just of Aboriginal people but also of any responsibility toward Aboriginal people. Ellen’s command that Murrahwa leave is the equivalent of Jemmy’s homicide in “The Bushrangers”. In both cases, it is the representation of Aboriginal people as beggarly and uncultured that evacuates the land culturally and physically to make it available for white occupation. However, Melville’s representation is somewhat more complex.
In contrast to Burn’s play, the remarkable thing about “Norwood Vale” is just how conscious Melville appears to have been about the injustice of Aboriginal dispossession. Not only does Murrahwa remain onstage to defy Ellen’s order to leave but he also responds to Ellen’s comparison of Aboriginal people and bushrangers with a significant protest. Murrahwa declares that any ill feeling between Aboriginal people and white people is the result of the murder of Aboriginal women and children by white men: Bushranger rob, steal, kill, murder — little make them savage — black native love white man, till murder wife, piccaninny. Come be off, here comes a stranger […] (To NATIVE.) Be off, I tell you. (NATIVE remains.) (19–20)
Melville’s characterization of Murrahwa in this scene seems to be intended to juxtapose the treatment of Aboriginal people by white women (who wish not to see Aboriginal people) and white men (who are responsible for the actual extermination of Aboriginal people). Between Ellen and the murdering white men, Murrahwa might well wonder which is worse. Further, the stubborn presence of Murrahwa, who remains onstage, symbolizes unwanted, lingering questions colonists might have about personal responsibility for their inhumane treatment of Aboriginal people. In being forced to recognize the ongoing presence of Murrahwa, audience members are also forced to consider their relationship to Aboriginal people and their own role in the attempt to obliterate Aboriginality from the Australian landscape. The bushrangers’ actual violence against Murrahwa and his family, and Ellen’s demand that Murrawha leave, are not entirely disparate actions: both centre Aboriginal people as objects of non-Aboriginal control, and, perhaps more importantly in the context of Melville’s argument, both attempt to eradicate an Aboriginal presence and fail. Leaving aside Melville’s overarching control of the scene as playwright, such a theatrical moment onstage problematizes the fantasy of white spatial control, creating dramatic tension for the audience by momentarily suggesting the possible inability of whiteness to maintain control over the pre-national space.
In the following scene Melville continues to unsettle representations of Aboriginality such as those contained in Burn’s play. With Murrahwa still in the background, Marian — the heroine — meets her suitor, Frederick. At the sight of Marian and Frederick in each other’s arms, Murrahwa is seen in the background sobbing. Ellen’s response is harsh: (To the BLACK) I say, you black ugly fellow, be off with you, don’t be piping there like a child, because you can’t get a blanket. [… FREDERICK and MARIAN exit] You big, black fool, I say, be off. Whilst I could cry to see my mistress so happy, you — you unfeeling, black, ugly mug, are blubbering about an old blanket. Me no cry lady, for blanket. Me cry for me once love like mistress — me made prisoner — me separated long time — me met like mistress — Oh! Happy — me all happy, had wife — had piccaninnies — when white men came, hunted kangaroo — hunted wife, and murdered piccaninnies — No, lady, me great man ‘mong black natives — me no cry for blanket — me cry for poor mistress — for poor gemmen, bushranger murder them. (21)
Initially, Ellen misunderstands Murrahwa to comic effect. However, the revelation of her misunderstanding allows Murrahwa the space to voice grievances against Aboriginal containment, the treatment of Aboriginal people as animals (hunted like kangaroos), and to mourn the death of his wife and children. This act of mourning serves at least four purposes. First, it establishes Murrahwa’s relationship to his former wife as a mirror to Frederick and Marian’s relationship, thereby foreshadowing the impending separation of Frederick and Marian caused by the bushrangers. Second, the audience’s knowledge that the bushrangers have murdered Murrahwa’s family will intensify the terror they feel upon Marian’s abduction. Third, because Murrahwa reveals his family was not murdered by just any white men, but by bushrangers, the audience is relieved from feeling complicit in the murder of the Aboriginal character’s family. And fourth, the explanation of Murrawha’s grief allows Ellen to make amends for her misunderstandings, not only coming to sympathize with Murrahwa, but also acknowledging that he has a “soul” trapped in his “black skin”: Poor fellow! You make me pity you. (Eyeing him.) What a sad thing it is your skin is black — you have a good soul — I will get you a blanket off my own bed. No, lady, me no blanket. (Exeunt) (21)
Thus, Murrahwa, in the opening scenes of “Norwood Vale”, is represented momentarily (for the equivalent of ten minutes or so, in stage time) as a troubling character for white audience members — accusing bushrangers of murder, defying orders, and setting white women up as comic figures. There is a correlation between the way Murrahwa is treated during these short scenes and Melville’s description — quoted above — of the failed policy of the “black line”. In both texts there are failed, though devastating, attempts to clear the landscape of an Aboriginal presence, and the remaining Aboriginal people are treated with pity. Such a version of Aboriginality in a play about villains also allowed Melville to contrast Aboriginality with the black villainy of the bushrangers.
It is clear from the first scenes involving the bushrangers that they are clichéd villains. Fawkes is exposed as a hypocrite, first saying he does not believe in murder before it is revealed that he is the murderer of Murrahwa’s family. When he is accused of hypocrisy by Hoodwink, he attempts to defend himself by distinguishing between white people, whom it is morally wrong to murder, and Aboriginal people, whose murder is apparently justified: I’m talking of whites, not of blacks — those blacks have no more feeling than dogs, they are only men and women in shape, nothing more — but what’s use talking […] Good luck to you, Fawkes, dream of the black woman and her piccaninnies. (22)
Melville has created a rebellious conundrum here by using Fawkes as a straw man. To agree with him is to be aligned with a villain. In this way, the text invites audiences to associate more closely with those who sympathize with Aboriginal people rather than with the violent colonists justifying their morally devoid actions with fallacious theories about Aboriginal people being a subhuman environmental pest.
The next scene sees the bushrangers awake from the nightmares that inevitably trouble such villains. Fellows wakes, screaming: “I did not your Honor — I am not guilty! — Oh! (awakes and laughs.) Ah! It’s only the customary dream which troubles me” (24). While Fellows’ crime is not named, Fawkes’ true nature is revealed as he wakes shouting “It’s only a black thief; shoot him — he has no soul!” (25). These two awakenings are juxtaposed for dramatic effect. While Fellows can only claim his innocence by denying whatever crime he has been dreaming of, Fawkes does not deny his crime because he genuinely believes it is justified by the “fact” that his black victim is apparently soulless. Not only is Fawkes’ hypocrisy reiterated to the audience, who would remember Ellen just minutes earlier recognizing Murrahwa’s soul despite his blackness, but, immediately preceding the awakening, Hoodwink has robbed Fawkes in his sleep. Thus Fawkes’ dream about a black thief refers simultaneously to Murrahwa and Hoodwink. The slippage here invites the audience to distinguish between the character of bushrangers and that of Murrawha, with Murrawha’s good soul (endorsed by Ellen) likely to be the audience’s favourite.
To emphasize this point, Melville juxtaposes the bushrangers with Murrahwa several more times in the play. During the abduction of Marian, Fellows attempts to kiss her. Marian gasps: “Monster! rather let me be shot than polluted with a kiss from such a horrid wretch” (27). This protest recalls Ellen’s earlier sarcastic observation of Murrahwa: “you would make a charming suitor for a pretty girl […] fancy him kissing one! oh!” (18). These juxtapositions foreshadow the final climax, as Murrahwa and Fawkes come into direct conflict. Marian has been rescued by Murrahwa and Frederick, but the three bushrangers are in Norwood’s house about to murder him. In the melee that follows, Murrahwa kills Fawkes with his waddy and Norwood shoots and kills Fellows, while Hoodwink surrenders. In the final tableau, Murrahwa is kneeling beside Fawkes’ body “glorying in his revenge” and says “No more murder gin — no more murder piccaninny”, while the lovers embrace and Ellen concludes: “Happiness to the inhabitants of Norwood Vale” (38). All appears to be resolved, including any reason for Murrahwa to be angered about the horrors of colonization. Problematically, perhaps, Murrawha’s initial time on stage had proved troubling for the non-indigenous characters but, in his heroic return as an assistant to the victory over the bushrangers and the reunion of Marian and Frederick, he becomes a clichéd noble savage. By the play’s conclusion there is little doubt that it is the bushrangers who are blackened with vice (along with anyone who simply assumes that Aboriginal people are soulless), and Murrahwa is a noble hero with a good soul. Order is restored as Murrahwa slips back into a familiar noble savage stereotype, to be pitied while (even perhaps because) he alleviates white guilt.
Stereotypes of noble savagery do not necessarily run counter to theories that justify white occupation of the land. Maryrose Casey has argued in Creating Frames that nineteenth-century constructions of Aboriginality changed in line with colonial beliefs and theories about Aboriginal people, but always in ways that endorsed a racial/cultural hierarchy that privileged whiteness (2004: 11). 4 For example, ideologies of noble savagery could exist simultaneously with theories of Aboriginal people as a “doomed race”. In the 1830s, according to historian Russell McGregor, colonists believed that Aboriginal people were the “debased remnants of a formerly civilised people”, and would inevitably (naturally) deteriorate to extinction (1997: 14). Another narrative based the inevitable extinction of all Aboriginal people on Aboriginal women’s (mystical) lack of fertility after sexual encounters with white men (McGregor, 1997: 16). Such theories, based solely on opinion not reflecting actual facts, developed and reiterated by colonists, conveniently justified the white occupation of Australia (a right that would alleviate any guilt over the violence actually being committed against Aboriginal people). Whether Melville was relying on any of these theories, Murrahwa was, no doubt, less menacing to the audience because, despite his nobility, he and the culture he represented were thought to be doomed to extinction. While it is certainly significant that Murrahwa can (nobly) survive, he ultimately provides little threat to the future (given that his wife and children have been murdered), and little threat to the audience’s position at the apex of the racial and cultural heirarchy. Murrahwa represents (one way or another) a noble, but doomed, race.
Murrahwa can be read as an Australian version of the doomed-race, or last-of-their-kind, characters popular in American culture around 1830. Eugene Jones, in Native Americans as Shown on Stage, identifies what he calls “the Last Indian Syndrome”, where plays such as “The Last of the Serpent Tribe” and stage versions of Cooper’s “Last of the Mohicans” imagined an end to indigenous occupancy by creating noble, doomed, childless characters with the last authentic indigenous claim to spatial entitlement (1988: 63–83). Such plays were cultural manifestations of political discourses that were active at the time. The timing of the premiere of one of the nineteenth century’s most popular “last Indian” plays, “Metamora; or the last of the Wampanoags”, coincided with the US President Andrew Jackson’s presentation of an Indian removal policy to Congress in December 1829 (Stanciu, 2006: 28). The racial ideologies informing representations of race were not contained to theatre and literature, as Cristina Stanciu articulates: “artistic and political coincidences suggest a multiplicity of venues for appropriating the so-called Indian problem for aesthetic, material, or political capital by dominant cultural and ideological apparatuses in the United States” (2006: 28). Later in the nineteenth century, “the Last Indian Syndrome” had taken hold in Australia, being revised and adapted in Australian literature to apply to Aboriginal characters. Patrick Brantlinger cites William Sharp’s 1884 poem “The Last Aboriginal” — “Wild-eyed, alone, | Amidst gaunt, spectral, moonlit gums; | He waits for death” — to suggest a common ideology of race in Australia and the US that justified white ownership of land: for Brantlinger, the Indian characters in Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (182611) “are, like Australian aborigines according to the rescinded legal doctrine of terra nullius, prehistoric inhabitants of otherwise empty land that belongs to nobody” (1998: 22). An important distinction to make is that these characters, like the doctrine of terra nullius, were imagined into being, figures revealing a white fantasy of control and ownership rather than any true aspect of indigenous culture.
Similar to the way that blackface entertainment in America represented fictions about African Americans and Native Americans, the set of cultural myths about Aboriginal people presented on the early Australian stage enacted a rhetoric of race that justified white privilege and sovereignty. Even though Tom and Murrahwa may seem like dichotomies (one beggarly and barbaric, the other noble and doomed), they both introduce and resolve white anxieties about land occupation, the control of indigenous people in the colonies, and the abuse of human rights. When Aboriginal culture, religion, and spirituality are imagined to be meaningless — as when whites in blackface perform demeaning, comic corroborees, or when noble characters are imagined to be the last of their race — the doctrine of terra nullius is made defensible (as there is no structured, meaningful society seen to be utilizing the land). As Aboriginal people are imagined to be soulless, uncultured, and dehumanized savages, murder and genocide are imagined to be warranted. As a justification for terra nullius and acts of colonial violence, the blackfaced portrayal of Aboriginality in these plays adapts American techniques to reinforce an ideology of white spatial control. Characters are murdered with “radical pills” (the bullets representing an ideological commitment to white occupation of the land), or they join the last of their dying race in avenging a genocide committed by other white characters (a whiteness necessarily distinct from the whiteness of playwrights and audiences).
It would be inaccurate and reductive to claim that these Aboriginal characters are simply carbon copies of the burnt cork jesters and melodists popular in the US during the early 1830s; in fact, the above discussion has shown that Aboriginal characters had as much in common with representations of Native Americans as they did with representations of African Americans. Further, the ideological connections between portrayals of Aboriginal, African American, and Native American characters reveals a relationship between early US and Australian theatre that is more intricate than analyses focused on stylistic similarities suggest. While characters such as Jim Crow, Zip Coon, and Sambo sang about American slavery, white working-class society and politics, manly sexual exploits, and the changing racial constitution of American society (see Lhamon, 1998; Lott, 1993), blackface characters on the Australian stage at this time were made to justify Australian colonialism, to dehumanize Aboriginal people, and to strip educational, spiritual, and legal significance from Aboriginal culture. And yet Margaret Williams, who was quoted above as reading early dramatic representations of Aboriginality in line with English “Sambo” characters, focuses on stylistic influences of American theatre on early representations of Aboriginality by authors such as Melville: “[t]he Aboriginal is […] grotesquely attired in hand-me-downs and with a good deal of the caricatured quality of stage American black-face types […] in something of the style of the minstrel show” (1983: 267). When discussing early Australian blackface it is historically inaccurate to claim that the characters were in the mould of blackface minstrels given blackface minstrelsy did not develop in the US until the mid-1840s (see Cockrell, 1997; Mahar, 1999). The history of early blackface theatre in Australia and the US in the 1830s is impossible to reduce to one or two tropes. Individual authors and performers added their own political voice to characters, and the characteristics of those they portrayed were largely dependent on the context of the performance. Even characters of the same name singing the same tune would be performed differently in New York, Louisiana, California, Britain, and Tasmania.
More nuanced readings of nineteenth-century Australian–American transnational cultural networks are possible, especially following the work of Richard Waterhouse (1998). Waterhouse follows Williams’ (1983) and Goldie’s (1989) suggestions about a connection between American and Australian blackface in the 1830s, although he is more cautious in reading American theatre’s influence on nineteenth-century representations of Aboriginality. In his reading of “Norwood Vale”, Waterhouse states that Murrahwa’s strength and bravery are distinctively Australian additions to “an American Stage stereotype” that “could not encompass the full or even partial range of Aboriginal characters or their experiences” (1998: 50). Emphasizing the local adaptations of international dramatic conventions, Waterhouse’s argument about the nature of American–Australian networks of representation can be read as typically transnational (though he doesn’t use this term): The manner in which the playwrights added strength and bravery to Aboriginal characters [… reveals] the complexity of the cultural processes that were taking place in late nineteenth-century Australia and the manner in which American influence was both direct and obvious but also sometimes piecemeal and less visible. (1998: 50)
Waterhouse’s reading of transnational complexity is invaluable, but there is a slight problem with his incorporation of Melville’s work into his reading of late nineteenth-century American–Australian cultural relationships. “Norwood Vale” was published in 1834 and should not be read in the same manner as later cultural productions of Aboriginality in Australia. While Tom and Murrahwa were undoubtedly performed in blackface, they were not the perfect equivalent of early American blackface characters and certainly not, given that they predate the Virginia Minstrels by a decade and draw on emerging stereotypes of Native American characters, anything like blackface minstrels. But, following Waterhouse (1998), there may be connections between early Australian and US performances that are “less visible”. In other words, while Jim Crow, Zip Coon, Sambo, Tom, Murrawha, and other “Native Chief” characters might not look exactly the same, sing the same tunes, dance the same steps, or outwardly discuss the same political issues, such characters might be read as products of a transnational ideology of white spatial governance and white control over public discourses of identity. While this article has not conducted a complete analysis and comparison of early US and Australian theatre, it has sought to open a discussion about the shared ideological underpinnings of early US and Australian theatre and begins the work of articulating the various incarnations of a trans-pacific ideology of race as represented in Australian drama. In early Australian drama the discourse of slavery and racialized class relations were activated through references to the US tobacco industry, and beliefs such as the doomed race were promulgated through “last of the tribe”-style narratives that had been popularized in the US. These ideologies served to justify the theft of indigenous lands and the control of indigenous people for white enterprise and entertainment. Further work may examine the ways other US and Australian plays entrenched these ideologies, and articulate the manifestation of other shared concerns in early US and Australian theatre.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.