Writing Bennelong: The cultural impact of early Australian biofictions

Abstract

In 1941 Ernestine Hill published My Love Must Wait, a biographical novel based on the life of navigator Matthew Flinders. In the same year, Eleanor Dark published The Timeless Land, imagining the arrival of European settlers in the Sydney region from the perspectives of multiple historical figures. In this article we examine how each author represents the important figure of Bennelong, a man of the Wangal people who was kidnapped by Governor Phillip and who later travelled to England with him. While both works can be criticized as essentialist, paternalist or racist, there are significant differences in the ways each author portrays him. We argue that Dark’s decision to narrate some of her novel from the point of view of Bennelong and other Indigenous people enabled different understandings of Australian history for both historians and fiction writers. Dark’s “imaginative leap”, as critic Tom Griffiths has termed it, catalysed a new way of thinking about the 1788 invasion and early decades of the colonization of Australia. The unfinished cultural work undertaken by these novels continues today, as demonstrated by subsequent Australian novels which revisit encounters between Indigenous inhabitants and European colonists, including Thomas Keneally’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972), Richard Flanagan’s Wanting (2008), and Rohan Wilson’s The Roving Party (2011). Like Dark, these authors situate parts of their novels within the consciousness of Indigenous figures from the historical record. We analyse the diverse challenges and possibilities presented by these literary heirs of Eleanor Dark.

Introduction

In Australia in 1941, Eleanor Dark’s The Timeless Land and Ernestine Hill’s My Love Must Wait were published, two novels which fictionalized early engagements between Australia’s Indigenous inhabitants and European colonists. As these novels locate their narratives predominantly within the perspectives of named historical figures, they can be described as early examples of Australian biofiction, following Michael Lackey’s definition of the genre as “literature that names its protagonist after an actual biographical figure” (Lackey, 2016: 3). Both novels were incredibly popular at the time of publication but have since been criticized by scholars such as Helen Daniel (1981) and Carole Ferrier (1998) for their part in an emerging nationalism that positioned Indigenous cultures as other. My Love Must Wait and The Timeless Land differ significantly, however, in their treatment of the key figure of Bennelong, a senior Wangal man of the Eora nation. In this article we trace the differences between these two imagined Bennelongs, and more generally the symbolic fictionalization of historical Indigenous lives. In so doing, we analyse the cultural work undertaken by Dark’s and Hill’s early biofictions, in particular their involvement in literature’s ongoing project of creating, affirming, or challenging national identities through white writers’ representations of Indigenous historical figures. We further examine the influence of these approaches on later biofictional renderings of colonial cultural encounters: Richard Flanagan’s Wanting (2012/2008); Thomas Keneally’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (2004/1972); and Rohan Wilson’s The Roving Party (2014/2011).

Publication and reception of My Love Must Wait and The Timeless Land

Ernestine Hill’s My Love Must Wait (2013/1941) traces the life of scientist, navigator, explorer, and cartographer Matthew Flinders, famous for his monumental circumnavigation and charting of Australia (1801–1803). The novel is a third-person chronological narrative drawn from Flinders’ diaries, letters, and log books, as well as from his A Voyage to Terra Australis, published the day after he died, penniless, in London (Morgan, 2016). Hill’s book was enormously popular upon publication, with several reprints selling out immediately (Adelaide, 2013: ix-x).

Eleanor Dark’s The Timeless Land was published the same year as Hill’s novel, the first in a trilogy later completed by Storm of Time (2013/1948) and No Barrier (2013/1954). The novel offers a kaleidoscopic perspective of the arrival of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove in 1788, the establishment of the penal colony, and the gradual expansion of white settlement in New South Wales. These events are recounted in the third person from several perspectives. Some of the focalizers are fictional, but most of these characters are real people who played a significant role in the life of the new colony. They include the colony’s first Governor, Arthur Phillip, Marines officers Watkin Tench and William Dawes, and Bennelong, who was kidnapped by Governor Phillip and later travelled with him to England. Barbara Brooks and Judith Clark (1998: 360) call the novel Dark’s “great success”, with high-volume sales, both in Australia and internationally, frequent reviews and recommendations, and a place on school text lists for many years (Brooks and Clark, 1998: 356–64).

The novels were published at a time of crisis, with fascism ascendant in Europe and Australian forces deeply engaged in the Second World War. Late in 1941, Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor, and Australia faced the prospect of another invasion. Other domestic tensions stirred. The 1938 sesquicentenary of the landing of the First Fleet highlighted the very real legacies of British colonization. Celebrations in Sydney were extensive and included a re-enactment of the landing, with an actor playing Phillip stating “we should turn our minds to the purpose underlying this enterprise, which is to plant a fresh sprig of Empire in this new and vast land” (Sydney Morning Herald, 1938a: 6). These contrasted starkly with the Aboriginal Progressive Association’s call for a “day of mourning and protest” against “the callous treatment of our people by the white men during the past 150 years”, alongside an “appeal for new laws for the education and care of aborigines”, and “a new policy which would raise aborigines to full citizens” (Sydney Morning Herald, 1938b: 6).

For Dark the sesquicentenary was “sickening” (Griffiths, 2016: 31), sparking her desire to tell a different story of the landing. Her approach reflected wider shifts in conceptions of Australian nationhood, the country’s relationship to the UK, and the position of its Indigenous inhabitants. When Dark’s The Timeless Land and Hill’s My Love Must Wait were reviewed in tandem by The Bulletin, the publication suggested that these two authors were “trying to create a nation as well as a novel” (qtd. in Brooks and Clark, 1998: 359). Despite their differences, the two narratives were “understood as parallel projects, seeking to express the Australian nation in the form of the historical novel” (Gall, 2014: 46). At the same time, the non-Indigenous Jindyworobak poets were involved in an ongoing nationalist project of Aboriginalism — “a perfect example of the appropriation of Indigenous culture (in this case language) to construct a unique Australian identity” (Furphy, 2002: 68). These examples mark a key moment in the early development of a national literature. Gall claims that Dark and Hill “can be seen as both contributing to and responding critically to this emergent historical culture” (Gall, 2014: 47).

Widely read, The Timeless Land and My Love Must Wait became part of the country’s national story, enjoying renewed popularity in later decades as part of further waves of cultural identity creation (Adelaide, 2013: x), with The Timeless Land adapted as an ABC television mini-series in 1980. As Susan Sheridan has noted,

Popular understandings of the “national story” matter because they live on in popular memory, because they are the versions that are repeated in the media, taught in schools and represented in public commemorations. (Sheridan, 2011: 7)

These popular fictions of early contact between Indigenous peoples and colonists, then, can reaffirm stories we already know as public history, but have the ability to challenge or reconfigure officially sanctioned stories.

Hill and Dark: Writing biofiction

Hill describes her approach to biofiction in the final chapter of the novel, which abruptly switches to a self-conscious narrative voice:

I hoped […] to write the story never yet told in full — not in stark biographical form, but that Australia might see it in living character, and hear the spoken word in voices from the dead. […] Scenes and situations are created from written records. Not in any instance have I played with history. Logs, journals, letters and treasured private diaries are my authority. Dialogue is founded on fact. (Hill, 2013/1941: 520)

Here, Hill claims a unique insight into the life of her biofictional subject, Matthew Flinders, whose story has allegedly “never yet [been] told in full”: this is a dramatic and not entirely justified claim, given that Flinders’ own detailed version of events is available, and that Hill’s novel is based on Ernest Scott’s 1914 biography of Flinders (Gall, 2014: 52).

Dark, for her part, outlines her own ethos and methodology in her “Acknowledgements” and “Preface” sections of The Timeless Land. Like Hill, she worked closely with existing archival materials: “This book has borrowed so much from history”, writes Dark, “that it seems advisable to remind readers that it is fiction” (Dark, 1988/1941: 7). Also, like Hill, she acknowledges her debt to the written record: “Where letters have been used they are quotations from genuine documents” (Dark, 1988/1941: 9). For her portrayals of Indigenous characters, Dark also undertook extensive research, but acknowledged her “abysmal ignorance” even after completing this task (Dark, 1988/1941: 8). Her methods involved gathering material on myths, customs, and language from accounts of various Aboriginal language groups to create a composite image of the Eora nation of Sydney: “I have borrowed shamelessly from other tribes, often far distant” (Dark, 1988/1941: 7). The justification she gives for this is twofold. Firstly, in her view, clans of the Eora were “the first to mingle with the invaders, they were the first to disintegrate and die out” (Dark, 1988/1941: 7), so consequently “less is known [of them] than of almost any other tribes” (Dark, 1988/1941: 7). Secondly, “these people were all of one race, and it is the quality of that race which I have tried to suggest, without regard to minor tribal differences” (Dark, 1988/1941: 7). For this amalgamation, she is “not really very repentant” (Dark,1988/1941: 7), in spite of the fact that it trivializes the cultural and linguistic diversity among Indigenous people — there are 29 clans in four different language groups in the Sydney area alone.

While Hill emphasizes the “authority” of the archives (Hill, 2013/1941: 520), Dark has a more nuanced position on the relationship between historical accounts and fact, and indeed fact and fiction. She recognizes, for instance, that readers will reach different conclusions about the use of archival materials in the construction of historical figures. She acknowledges that there is no guarantee of accuracy or objectivity in this, even when reading first-hand accounts:

The characters of many of the officers are to be discovered between the lines of their journals and letters; I have tried to portray them as I found them there, realising that another student of these same documents might find quite different men. (Dark, 1988/1941: 9)

Dark is wary of the ways in which Indigenous lives were recorded by First Fleet diarists such as Watkin Tench: “one is bound to regard some of their statements with suspicion. That they recorded faithfully what they saw cannot be questioned; that they placed the correct interpretation on it is not so certain” (Dark, 1988/1941: 7). The writer highlights the possibility that at times the colonists might have “had their legs frequently and diligently pulled” by the local people (Dark, 1988/1941: 7). In her “Preface” she also acknowledges her novelist’s right to adjust “facts” as needed: “I make no claim to strict historical accuracy either in my dealings with the white men or the black” (Dark, 1988/1941: 7).

These differences in approach to the research process and the cultural work of writing about the past become even more noticeable when we consider the ways each author represents the traditional owners of the country that became known as Sydney Cove, and other coastal regions of Australia, New Guinea, and the Pacific Islands.

Representations of early contact

Hill’s portrayals of Indigenous peoples are frankly racist, ventriloquizing the worldview of Flinders’ contemporaries, and at the same time reflecting 1940s policies advocating White Australia and Hill’s own Social Darwinist belief that Indigenous people would soon disappear (Gall, 2013: 198). In the following passage, the author and her fictionalized protagonist reveal their attitudes toward people of the Torres Strait Islands:

Woollyheaded beauties swung their grass skirts and lured with the betel-nut smiles. The men, with their seared, angry faces, wore nothing but a pearl shell. With the inferiority of the human race since time began, they covered only what was creative of their own human kind. (Hill, 2013/1941: 82)

Meaghan Morris has labelled Hill an “imperialist, white supremacist and a patriot” (Morris, 1993: 35), and indeed these descriptions are markedly more vicious than those recorded by Flinders himself in his A Voyage to Terra Australis (1814). Throughout her version of Flinders’ voyages, Hill describes first-contact moments with people who are “Neanderthal” (Hill, 2013/1941: 190), women who are sexualized, or ugly, and, above all, other:

Their straight, black bodies were rank with fish oil. The offal of years was festooned in their beards and clogged in their matted hair. They had the hunter’s trick of glancing suspiciously left and right under bushy brows without moving their heads. It conveyed the impression of craft and ferocity. (Hill, 2013/1941: 165)

Dark’s work, too, has been criticized in recent years as essentialist, paternalistic, or simplistic (see McQueen, 2013/1990). The writer frequently compares Australia’s Indigenous inhabitants to children or animals. When the colonists arrive, “the black men, their nostrils twitching, looked at each other uneasily, smelling danger as an animal smells it, mistrusting the unknown” (Dark, 1988/1941: 45). Later in the book, the comparisons with animals and children are blended:

They were like the children of the human family, having the gaiety, the monkey-like inquisitiveness, the monkey-like lack of application of the very young. They had, as children have, a deeply rooted sense of justice; like children they were generous, devoid of rancour or suspicion, driven by the impulse of the moment, vain, inveterate actors and mimics. (Dark, 1988/1941: 151)

It may surprise the modern reader to see a left-wing author using such familiar racist tropes, particularly in a project consciously attempting to redress offensive representations of Aboriginal people. A somewhat similar comment might apply to one of Dark’s most influential legacies, namely her portrayal of Sydney’s First People’s relationship to time as a simple one, attuned to the natural world: “Here life was marooned, and Time, like a slowly turning wheel, was only night and day, night and day, summer and winter, birth and death, the ebb and swell of tides. Nothing showed for the passing of the ages but a minutely changing coastline” (Dark, 1988/1941: 21). Given this relationship to time, the people are seen to be unchanging, unable to adapt to a world in transformation, silent, and irrational. In what Maureen Perkins has described as a “romantic eulogy of indigenous timelessness” (1998: 340), Dark’s lyrical prose suggests the kind of Othering embodied by the Jindyworobak poets and their paeans to a mythical “Dreamtime” knowledge, described as wordless and non-human: “The black man’s awareness of it [the quiet land] was like the awareness of a seed for the changing season, of a cicada for the breaking heat of day, of the shell-fish, sensitive to the wash of sea-water over its rock pool” (Dark, 1988/1941: 22).

Again, this makes for unsettling reading to contemporary eyes. It is hardly surprising, then, that The Timeless Land is one of the problematic texts described by Carole Ferrier as “quaint” in its approach to race (1988: 166):

While these “white” representations of race that these women novelists offer are “progressive” for their time, they can nonetheless not be separated from what whiteness means — although to some extent they tried to revision this. (Ferrier, 1988: 171)

Unlike Hill, however, Dark tries to combine these typical colonialist attitudes with challenges to entrenched views of the period, for example by encouraging readers to try to imagine what it was like for the Eora to stand on the shore and watch the English fleet arrive.

The impact of Dark’s narrative choices was extraordinary — previous accounts of the First Fleet and early contact had only been told from the colonist perspective. For Brooks and Clark, writing “from the Aboriginal point of view, Eleanor changed the perspective completely” (Brooks and Clark, 1998: 354). The debate around this legacy is ongoing. In historian Tom Griffiths’ words:

It was a stunning imaginative leap from the ships to shore, to the view from the edge of the trees, and it probably became the most widely read text of Australian history in the twentieth century […]. Yet it had been the freedom of her fiction that had allowed her to write into a great silence. (Griffiths, 2009: 74.4)

For Griffiths, “Dark was decades ahead of Australia’s historians in realising that the big story about British colonisation at Port Jackson was that of the encounter between settlers and Aborigines” (Griffiths, 2015: 4). Similarly, Susan Sheridan emphasizes Dark’s progressive stance when she argues that the writer “significantly redefined the issues around convictism and Aboriginal dispossession” (Sheridan, 2011: 8).

This sense of invasion and dispossession is heightened by Dark’s portrayal of a number of the British colonists as ill at ease or alien in the land. For example, when Watkin Tench looks out over the country, he sees “the glimmer of a fire” and understands “that the darkness is inhabited”, thinking “I have never felt more of an intruder in my life!” (Dark, 1988/1941: 67) — a direct challenge to the concept of Terra Nullius (“land without owners”) used to justify the occupation without treaty. Later, when the settlers venture further inland, Phillip looks out over the far peaks, which he has named Carmarthen Hills, realizing uneasily that “[t]hey must have their names already” (Dark, 1988/1941: 143).

With this narrative shift from ship to shore and the questioning of the certainty of white settlers, 1940s readers of Dark’s novel found their preconceptions challenged or presented in parallel with other ways of conceiving settler–Indigenous relations.

This attempt at revision, alongside Dark’s portrayals of Aboriginal communities as part of a mystical, doomed race, made her perspective more complex and more radical than prevailing views of her generation, her readers, and many of her contemporaries such as Hill.

Depictions of Bennelong

The two novelists’ different portrayals of Bennelong reflect their approaches to encounters between colonists and Indigenous inhabitants. Woollarawarre Bennelong (spelled Bennilong by Dark) was, according to Penny van Toorn, “an important agent and medium of interaction between the British colonists and the Indigenous clans around Port Jackson” (van Toorn, 2006: 96). Captured by order of Governor Phillip in 1789, he escaped after several months but later resumed contact with the governor and the colony, travelling with him to England in 1792 and returning home in 1795 (van Toorn, 2006: 19, 20). He continued his role as an advisor to the new Governor Hunter and as an elder of the Wangal people, and died in 1813. The location of his hut, built for him by Phillip, is now called Bennelong Point, the site of the Sydney Opera House (Heiss, 2013: n.p.). Bennelong’s prominent presence is preserved in historical memory through many places bearing his name. What is less widely known is that “Bennelong’s letter of 1796 was the first piece of writing authored by an Indigenous Australian” (van Toorn, 2006: 19).

In My Love Must Wait, Hill takes up the story of Bennelong on his return from London aboard HMS Reliance with Matthew Flinders and the newly appointed Governor Hunter:

The black man waited, clothes flapping on a scarecrow frame, gibbering in the chill wind, convulsed by a racking cough. He was Bennelong, one of Phillip’s two souvenirs of a newly-discovered black race […] the poor creature crawled under one of the gun carriages and stayed there like a sick dog. (Hill, 2013/1941: 146)

On his arrival home, after years on the other side of the globe and a journey many others did not survive, Hill dismisses him as a child-like figure of fun:

Bennelong, the dude of St James, Beau Brummel of Botany Bay! Twirling his gold-headed stick, he minced along the landing stage in a claret-coloured tailcoat most elegant to see […] his always vague black countenance was lost in a wide white grin. (Hill, 2013/1941: 153)

Hill’s portrayal here reflects the racism of both her time and Flinders’, with no attempt to represent Bennelong’s inner identity (or, indeed, his humanity). He is often described as an animal or bird: “gibbering”, or “his fine feathers moulting”; and his family members, who have not seen him for years and thought him dead, are merely “a bedraggled little tribe on the outskirts making for him in a welter of yelping dogs” (Hill, 2013/1941: 150, 169, 153).

Dark’s approach is very different. In her “Preface” she writes about the “Australian Aboriginal” of whom the “race is nearly gone” (Dark, 1988/1941: 9). She continues: “I do believe that we […] might have learned much from a people who, whatever they may have lacked in technique, had developed that art [of living] to a very high degree” (Dark, 1988/1941: 9). Like Hill, Dark believes Indigenous people will become extinct, but her position is more sympathetic. This influences her fictional treatment of Bennelong. In a 1937 letter to her publisher, she described the work-in-progress that would go on to become The Timeless Land: “At present I have one historical character, a blackfellow, and the idea of Australia” (qtd. in Brooks and Clark, 1998: 336). In a letter written after the novel’s publication, she stated,

I was reading up a lot of early historical material and scattered throughout many books I found allusions to the man Bennelong. From them all the personality of the man emerged and gripped me. He became a living person to me. So much so that I collected all the items and began to weave a story around him. (qtd. in Brooks and Clark, 1998: 341)

The Timeless Land famously opens from the point of view of Bennilong and his father, Wunbala, watching for the return of the “boat with wings”: “Bennilong and his father had come down to the cliffs again, alone” (Dark, 1988/1941: 15, 14). Bennilong here is only six, and readers are invited to share a moment of sensory access to the child’s world, where he was “conscious of the world, and conscious of himself as a part of it, fitting into it, belonging to it, drawing strength and joy and existence from it” (Dark, 1988/1941: 14). The moment foreshadows the sense that his destiny is connected to the magical boat that had visited his country for just a few days. This impression is reinforced years later as he watches the First Fleet anchor in what will become Sydney Harbour: “Wunbula began to perceive that between Bennilong and the boat with wings there stretched a thread of contact — frail, invisible, intangible, not to be too inquisitively considered. […] Bennilong and the boat with wings would come together” (Dark, 1988/1941: 25).

When Phillip and his men arrive, an awareness of this connective thread makes Bennilong hang back: “Here was something which was to draw him into an alien world and hold him there even after death, a lonely, comical, tragic and immortal figure” (Dark, 1988/1941: 49). Bennilong’s sense of foreboding may have a metafictional and historiographic function, creating sympathy (if not empathy) in the readers, and prompting them to consider the impact of that newly arrived alien force on the intelligent young man they have already come to know.

The novel ends with a scene from Bennilong’s perspective, when he is drunk and spiritually lost, attempting to scratch out his father’s rock carving of the winged ship:

What was he now? He had no shape, no colour. His outline was blurred, his features defaced. His mind was hidden and his heart divided. His mind was confused and his heart was torn because he knew what he must believe. […] He knelt very still, feeling an exhausting and unendurable sense of loss sweep over him. Here, in this place with the echoes of childhood all about him, he had tried to recapture the eternal dreamtime, but it eluded him, and there was nothing in his grasp but a stark and isolated today. (Dark, 1988/1941: 543)

It is a moment of great pathos and, being the last engagement the reader has with the work, one of great narrative and cultural significance. With those words, including the reference to the Dreamtime, Dark helped establish one of the most persistent forms of representation of Indigenous characters: the tragic individual who represents all of the complex, diverse, and vibrant Indigenous communities of Australia.

Dark’s legacy

The Timeless Land was hailed by some critics as embodying a new form, blending — as Barbara Brooks (2013: 3) notes in her introduction to the new edition — fact and fiction. Dark’s novel was not alone in this, but it particularly influenced the ways in which generations of readers, and indeed historians, considered the pivotal moment of the colony’s establishment. Tom Griffiths (2015) and Mark McKenna (2011) have both noted the influence of the novel on the narrative approach of Manning Clark’s monumental A History of Australia (1962). Dark’s artistic decision seems to have made possible the attempt to imagine the devastating events and effects of colonization from an Indigenous perspective, for historians, but also for subsequent fiction writers.

The cultural evolution of Dark’s narrative decision can be seen in three later works by white writers who have also chosen to inhabit the consciousness of Indigenous figures from the historical record: Thomas Keneally’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972); Richard Flanagan’s Wanting (2008); and Rohan Wilson’s The Roving Party (2011). Like the novels by Hill and Dark, these works have been popular and were also critically acclaimed. Commenting on The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Hodge and Mishra go as far as saying that “Keneally’s novel has to be taken seriously as a cultural phenomenon” (Hodge and Mishra, 1990: 59). It was indeed shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won awards from the Sydney Morning Herald and the Royal Society of Literature in 1973 (see Keneally, 2004/1972: 6). In 1978 it was also adapted into a film by Fred Schepisi, which went on to win three Australian Film Institute awards (Keneally, 2004/1972: 6). Over 40 years since its publication, the book is still frequently included on high-school literature curricula. Flanagan’s and Wilson’s novels, too, have won numerous awards in Australia, both at regional and at national levels.

Examining the trajectory of these works from Dark to Wilson, we notice recurrent imagery and concerns, as well as some key differences. Threads that these novels share with Dark include the choice to write from the point of view of Indigenous historical figures, the use of an individual to represent experiences of colonization and dispossession, and the representation of these characters as caught between two worlds. Like Dark’s novel, these representations fluctuate between perpetuating and challenging colonial ideologies, as we will now demonstrate.

Writing Indigenous characters

Brooks and Clark write about the complexity of Dark’s decision to write from the perspective of Indigenous characters: “What Eleanor did is not something a white novelist would do easily now” (1998: 365). Yet the decades between Dark’s novel and the present have seen several white writers do just that. Like Dark’s work, all three novels we analyse in this section feature the representation of an Indigenous person from history, either using their name directly or a slightly altered name. ¹

Thomas Keneally’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith is based on the life of Jimmy Governor (1875–1901), who killed nine people and was executed for his crimes (Walsh, 1983: n.p.). Even if the novel does not fit into a strict definition of biofiction in its use of an amended name for its protagonist, the book establishes clear links to the historical personage who inspired it. Like The Timeless Land, Keneally’s work is written from a third-person perspective. While it does include the experiences of some other characters (and a few notable interjections from the contemporary narrator), it stays predominantly within the point of view of the Aboriginal man, Jimmie. Despite the novel’s more focused perspective there is often a critical distance between readers and Jimmie, particularly at moments of crisis such as the murders. His death is not directly mentioned, as readers are only told that the hangman, who was also a butcher, “was away three days in all, and his fine boys could cope with the customers” (Keneally, 2004/1972: 178).

Keneally’s novel outlines the racism and discrimination which trigger in Jimmie an explosion of rage and violence against European settlers, ending in murder and grief. This is a radical shift in both content and mood from Dark’s work. In The Timeless Land, similarly powerful emotions are dispersed between Bennilong and others in his clan, but in Keneally’s book this apparently unstoppable force of fury is concentrated in one man. In other ways, the novel replicates some of the tendencies obvious in Dark’s work, such as the portrayal of Jimmie as childlike. As Maureen Clark has written, Keneally’s novel reflects the prejudices of the time in which he was writing alongside those of the Victorian era in which the book is set:

The desire for whiteness the author’s protagonist voices rests cheek by jowl with negative signifiers of otherness and an essentialized notion of racial identity. Archetypal notions of colonized peoples as childlike and easily “duped” emerge when Keneally says that “It baffled Jimmie, with his simple hopes, that [whites] should all be such dedicated haters.” (Clark, 2015: 31)

Richard Flanagan’s Wanting is formally closer to Dark’s novel than Keneally’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith in that it moves between multiple points of view, in the third person, including Van Diemen’s Land Governor Sir John Franklin and his wife Lady Jane Franklin; British author Charles Dickens; Chief Protector of Aborigines George Augustus Robinson; and Mathinna, a young Indigenous girl. Readers first encounter her running bare-footed through wallaby grass (Flanagan, 2012/2008: 9–10). The novel’s last scene poignantly harks back to this moment — readers’ final vision is of Mathinna dead, “her dirty feet jolting over the sled’s back as the ox took up its burden, their light-coloured soles disappearing into the longest night” (Flanagan, 2012/2008: 252). In the intervening years Mathinna has been adopted by the Franklins, and forced to become part of a social experiment: “She will be shod and she will be civilised” (Flanagan, 2012/2008: 117). When the Franklins return to England, Mathinna is left behind and sent to an orphanage, afterwards spiralling to her death at the novel’s end. Like Bennilong and Jimmie Blacksmith, Mathinna is devastated by her contact with colonist society, and tragedy is positioned as inevitable.

Rohan Wilson’s The Roving Party also uses a mobile third-person perspective which moves between an external, omniscient point of view and the inner lives of multiple characters; however, most of the novel is focalized through the real-life figures of Black Bill (William Ponsonby) and colonist John Batman (later a founder of the city of Melbourne) during the Tasmanian “Black War”, in which 1000 people were killed and the surviving Aboriginal people exiled to Flinders Island. Bill is an Indigenous man who has been raised by whites since childhood, and he works with Batman to capture or kill clansmen. In the novel’s main action, Bill, along with two Dharug men and some ragged convicts seeking their freedom, is tracking the warrior Manalargena. The group’s quest takes on a personal note for Bill when it seems the warrior has cursed his unborn child, who is later born deformed and dies (Wilson, 2014/2011: 233). Like Bennilong, Bill survives to the end of the narrative, but is not a doomed, tragic figure: while grieving his son, he has a strong relationship with his wife, and he is better able to navigate the movements between cultures, and on his own terms, than Dark’s version of Bennilong or Flanagan’s Mathinna.

Between two worlds

A key aspect of these representations is that the central Indigenous characters are portrayed as placed in or between two worlds — and that one of those worlds is vanishing. Penny van Toorn notes a feature of the historical Bennelong’s dictated letter — it shifts rapidly from formal to more familiar language — and remarks that “[t]he instability of Bennelong’s tone shows his struggle to negotiate a position in two social orders simultaneously” (van Toorn, 2006: 108). This is reflected in Dark’s work. Her Bennilong has grown up in a traditional community, but his father’s stories of the boat with wings, and his connection to this, seem to mark him as different. Managing the two worlds proves impossible, and the novel closes with him drunk and desolate. In Hill’s text, this man who is trapped between two cultures and whose life has been ruptured beyond recognition is a figure of fun, the “darling of London and Bath society” with nosegay and “modish Chippendale bow” (Hill, 2013/1941: 154), appalled at the sight of his own people. Inevitably, in My Love Must Wait, Bennelong is treated with pity and derision by both narrator and colony governor, without either taking responsibility for the impact on his life of the arrival of the Fleet, his kidnapping, and the expansion of the colony. Even Hill renders his situation with some pathos:

First of the New Hollanders to submit to civilization, he was killed by kindness and wrecked in rum. The whites called him a black man, and the blacks called him a white man. Nobody wanted him now. […] Whimpering, he told his tale of woe. […] Blubbering like a baby, he left the table and came back in a hurry for his after-dinner port. (Hill, 2013/1941: 169–70)

This tragic narrative of Indigenous people trapped between two worlds and part of neither is continued in the more recent novels. Jimmie Blacksmith is encouraged by the Nevilles to marry “a nice girl off a farm” so that his children “would only be quarter-caste then”, the grandchildren “one-eighth caste, scarcely black at all” (Keneally, 2004/1972: 7). He is further described as “[s]uspended between the living tribal life and the European rapture from on high called falling in love” (Keneally, 2004/1972: 27). In a pivotal scene in Wanting, Mathinna performs a quadrille that she has worked hard to learn, but as the dance progresses she begins to improvise with panache. Finally, she gets lost in the music and performs a dance from her own culture, “moving to something more fundamental” (Flanagan, 2012/2008: 150), to the horror of onlookers. The audience’s inability to see “some truth of herself” means Mathinna’s dance creates “a strange rupture” in her life, and in the onlookers’ view of her (Flanagan, 2012/2008: 150–51), from which terrible events follow. In Wilson’s The Roving Party, Bill is brought up by whites. He is treated as white by a number of other Indigenous characters and considered “as good as white” by one of the clan leaders (Wilson, 2014/2011: 3), but settlers generally see him as Aboriginal. In an essay discussing the writing of his novel, Wilson comments:

Here was an Aborigine alienated from his birth culture, raised in the ways of hatred so common among frontier whites. An outsider, but a participant nonetheless. He had an ambiguity that was immediately compelling. (Wilson, 2012: n.p.)

For all the Indigenous characters discussed above, restitution or return to the old life or identity is impossible. When the schoolteacher McCreadie directs Jimmie Blacksmith to a sacred space, he finds it desecrated and impossible to fix: “‘It ain’t no use’, he told McCreadie. ‘It’s buggered an’ no help fer it’” (Keneally, 2004/1972: 150). For Hodge and Mishra, “in his [Keneally’s] account Jimmie is excluded in important ways from Aboriginality” (Hodge and Mishra, 1990: 61). After the dance, Mathinna is “slovenly and withdrawn” (Flanagan, 2012/2008: 174), “she [can] feel nothing” and speaks “in a manner that was neither white nor black, […] that made no sense to anyone” (Flanagan, 2012/2008: 213). Wilson’s Bill seems the most positive of these representations, in the sense that he seems to be living in both worlds on his own terms. He is allied with Batman against his own people for reasons that he (and the text) does not reveal, but he uses what he remembers of his cultural practices. In an interview, Wilson describes Bill as a man who is “fluent and comfortable in various cultures” (Dalley, 2014: 145–46). But Bill does not seem entirely “fluent and comfortable”: when his child dies, he “erected a pyre of stones and branches in rough accordance with the Panninher ritual, this custom almost lost to him” (Wilson, 2014/2011: 233). In fact, having “almost lost” his memory of an important cultural practice creates a sense of disconnection from his community — Bill’s fluency lies in successfully navigating the European world. Like Dark, these three authors construct their Indigenous characters as positioned partway between cultures and not quite settled in either: emblematic, perhaps, of two cultures that have not yet reconciled their past and present experiences of each other.

Conclusion

In the 70 years between the publication of The Timeless Land in 1941 and The Roving Party in 2011, both writers and readers came to understand that the extinction of Australia’s Indigenous peoples was not inevitable, as conveyed by Hill or Dark, and literary representations of Aboriginal lives largely moved beyond the racist caricatures found in My Love Must Wait. Dark’s sympathetic characterization of Bennelong paved the way for more nuanced characters such as Jimmie, Mathinna, and Bill. But two tendencies remain clear in these biofictions by more recent white writers, even as approaches have changed: the presentation of these historical individuals as characters caught between cultures, one of which is in decline or inaccessible; and the use of a single Indigenous character to represent the diverse cultures, languages, and experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, and to symbolize their violent dispossession during the early years of white colonization. What Helen Daniel argued several decades ago is still a concern often raised about current portrayals of Indigenous people:

There is a movement, I think, that is not so much from stereotype to fully realized individuals, but from stereotype to archetype […]. However, as an archetype [the Aboriginal character] is still drained of individuality just as much as a stereotype. (Daniel, 1981: 60)

For Terry Threadgold, writing about Keneally’s novel and its film adaptation, “These rewritings, then, are partially successful in making white racism visible but they leave a good deal intact” (1997: 183). Alexis Wright (2016) argues strongly for a deeper consideration of how Indigenous Australians are portrayed: “I think it would be fair to say that we [Aboriginal people] are the country’s troubling conscience and managed by its most powerful power brokers through a national narrative” (2016, n.p.). While Wright’s discussion relates more to media representations, it is equally useful to apply it to fiction, prompting readers to interrogate the purposes of such representations and how they play into or draw power from existing cultural narratives.

What these representations by white authors lack is a strong sense of the resistance, resilience, and continuity of Indigenous cultures in Australia. One hopeful corrective to this tendency lies in the fact that fiction by Indigenous authors is flourishing, and many popular and awarded works deal with historical events, if not, as yet, key Indigenous historical figures in biofiction. Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance (2010), for example, represents encounters between European colonists and the Nyoongar people of Western Australia.

The “tragic biographical mode” (Griffiths, 2016: n.p.), when used in representations of Indigenous people, is also regularly and dramatically challenged by scholars such as Grace Karskens, who writes in The Colony: A History of Early Sydney: “the space between cultures was not a void. It was full of possibilities” (Karskens, 2009: 425). Again, the different versions of Bennelong’s life are instructive. Karskens and other historians such as Emma Dortins (2009) and Keith Vincent Smith (2009) have revisited the archival material to look beyond the official narratives of the First Fleet, and pieced together a new story of Bennelong, a man who did not die drunk, despairing, and alone, but rather as a revered elder. In 2017, Woollarawarre Bennelong was brought back to life on stage, in a dance work by the acclaimed Indigenous company Bangarra Dance Theatre. Bennelong was performed at the Sydney Opera House, on the spit of land that bears his name. Jill Sykes, the dance critic for The Sydney Morning Herald, wrote that, fittingly, the “benchmark” performance piece “sums up yesterday, today and perhaps tomorrow” (2017: n.p.). As Bennelong’s father muses in The Timeless Land,

For this […] was the purpose of legends — to bind the past securely to the present; for this new tales were made — to project the present forward into the future. (Dark, 1988/1941: 24)

The trajectory of these representations of early encounters between Europeans and Indigenous peoples indicates that the processes of colonization and decolonization, the ways in which real people are portrayed, and Australia’s quest for reconciliation with its violent pasts, continue to be central to the stories and future of the country. Yet, the question still remains — whose stories and whose future?