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Journal of Postcolonial Writing

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Humour and the defamiliarization

of whiteness in the short fiction of
Australian indigenous writer Alf Taylor
a
Anne Brewster
a
School of English, Media and Performing Arts , University of New
South Wales , Sydney, Australia
Published online: 10 Nov 2008.

To cite this article: Anne Brewster (2008) Humour and the defamiliarization of whiteness in the
short fiction of Australian indigenous writer Alf Taylor, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 44:4,
427-438, DOI: 10.1080/17449850802410564

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449850802410564

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 Journal of Postcolonial Writing
Vol. 44, No. 4, December 2008, 427–438

Humour and the defamiliarization of whiteness in the short fiction of

Australian indigenous writer Alf Taylor
Anne Brewster*

School of English, Media and Performing Arts, University of New South Wales,
Sydney, Australia
Journal
10.1080/17449850802410564
RJPW_A_341224.sgm
1744-9855
Original
Taylor
402008
44
a.brewster@unsw.edu.au
AnneBrewster
00000December
and
&ofArticle
Francis
Postcolonial
(print)/1744-9863
Francis2008 Writing
(online)

This article investigates how critical whiteness theory might complement the work of
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postcolonial studies to reconceptualize and reorient our study of Australian indigenous

literature. Based on the premise that reading is an intercultural process in which raced
and non-raced identities are negotiated, it examines how the act of reading indigenous
texts constitutes an intercultural encounter for the white reader. The work of a Western
Australian Nyoongah writer, Alf Taylor, is examined as an exemplary case. Taylor was
born in the late 1940s and grew up in the Spanish Benedictine Mission at New Norcia,
in Western Australia. He has published two books of poetry and a collection of stories.
In this article I will focus on his collection Long Time Now (2001), to show how the
stories destabilize white readers’ assumptions about the authority and entitlements of
whiteness. I argue that one of the prime textual vehicles which destabilizes whiteness in
these stories is their humour.
Keywords: Alf Taylor; critical whiteness theory; indigenous literature; Australia; inter-
racial identities

In Australia, indigenous literature has been developing into a significant visible presence
since the 1970s. Like indigenous sports heroes, indigenous writers have had a high profile
in contemporary Australia and their writing has made a significant impact on the Australian
public, one which is in fact disproportional to the size of the indigenous population (approx-
imately 2% of the total). Books such as Sally Morgan’s life story My Place (1987) and
Philip Noyce’s film version of Doris Pilkington’s life story Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence
(2000) have had wide public appeal. Indigenous literature is where most white Australians
are likely to “meet” indigenous people, their beliefs, cultural practices and politics. In a
society in which racial divisions often prevent daily social interactions between white and
indigenous people, literary texts are an important site for the negotiation of inter-racial
identities.
Indigenous narrators taking up the subject position in literary texts have had major
ramifications for the Australian literary tradition and the certainty of white self-presence in
Australia. Given the rapid growth of Australian indigenous literature since the 1970s, a
central question, I suggest, should be: what impact has the development of indigenous
literature had on our understanding of whiteness in contemporary Australia? I seek
answers by examining how whiteness is negotiated, resisted or entrenched in white
readings of indigenous literatures, and in this process I draw on some of the main issues
taken up by critical whiteness theory.

*Email: a.brewster@unsw.edu.au

ISSN 1744-9855 print/ISSN 1744-9863 online

© 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17449850802410564
http://www.informaworld.com
 428 A. Brewster

Critical whiteness studies

To date, postcolonial theory has dominated the critical vocabularies of Australian literary
criticism. Debates about representing the “other” have been central to the study of Australian
indigenous literature (and postcolonial literature in general) since the 1980s. The recent
emergence of the field of critical whiteness studies in Australia has brought a new perspec-
tive to bear upon such issues which have occupied postcolonial literary studies over the last
three decades. In this article I investigate how critical whiteness theory might complement
the work of postcolonial studies to reconceptualize and reorient our study of Australian
indigenous literature. The emergent field of critical whiteness studies is part of a trajectory
in the humanities and social sciences from the 1980s of an interest in developing new ethical
practices in cross-cultural investigations of minority groups. One aim is to investigate
whether whiteness studies can provide us with the tools to advance the discussion of how
critical analyses of indigenous literature have occluded whiteness. “Race”, it is argued, has
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conventionally been a descriptor that is applied only to indigenous texts and writers.
However, as the indigenous Australian theorist of whiteness studies Aileen Moreton-
Robinson suggests, “as long as whiteness remains invisible in analyses[,] ‘race’ is the prison
reserved for the ‘Other’” (xix).
This article investigates the idea that the act of reading indigenous texts constitutes an
intercultural encounter for the white reader. It suggests that there is a two-way dialogue
between indigenous literature and whiteness. While the ways in which indigenous literature
has been shaped and defined by hegemonic white liberalism have been explored across a
wide spectrum of texts (see, for example, Muecke), this article maps the effects of indige-
nous literature on the white reader. My primary interest lies in examining how the public
sphere of racialized intersubjectivity that indigenous literature convenes in Australia has
wider ramifications for national identities. This article is based on the premise that reading
is an intercultural process in which raced and non-raced identities are negotiated. To
explore how the white subject is formed and negotiated through reading, I borrow from
Michael Warner’s study of the formation of publics. Warner makes the important point that
publics are always mediated by texts – that they come into being only through texts and
their circulation. I extend Warner’s discussion by suggesting that literature is an exemplary
vehicle for convening a cross-cultural public. In this article I analyse the cross-racial
relations which occur when white people read indigenous literature, taking the short fiction
of indigenous writer Alf Taylor as an example.

Cross-cultural reading
Michael Warner defines a public as a relation among strangers. It is a social space
created by the circulation of discourse. Publics, Warner argues, are text based; they are
brought into being by virtue of being addressed by a text. A public convokes a collection
of people who are identified primarily through their participation in reading. A public,
therefore, does not exist apart from the discourse that addresses it. Warner is interested in
the way a particular public is bounded or defined; that is, how a particular subject
position is occupied or animated for the duration of the “attention” that characterizes the
convening of that public. Belonging to a specific public is not a permanent state of being.
Warner makes the point that it involves only minimal participation; publics produce a
relation among strangers who are united temporarily by participation alone. He describes
texts as elaborating “intimate life among publics of strangers” (Warner 57). We can
apply this idea to an analysis of the cross-racial relations generated when white people
read indigenous literature.
 Journal of Postcolonial Writing 429

Indigenous texts produce a range of publics. As I have argued elsewhere, many indige-
nous texts have important archival and pedagogic significance for indigenous readers and
communities (Brewster, Literary Formations). This is one audience that indigenous litera-
ture addresses. Another audience is that constituted by white readers. In my use of the term
“public” I aim to bypass the distinction between public and private, that is, personal and
collective identities. Warner makes the point that the address of public speech is both
personal and impersonal. If, as he argues, publics are not, strictly speaking, persons (58), I
would suggest that the intimate address of literature nonetheless interpellates readers as indi-
viduals. As Christopher Fynsk notes in the Foreword to Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative
Community, literature addresses an anonymous collective, but it convokes us as singular
beings (xxviii). Warner’s concept of publics, if applied to the white readership of indigenous
literature, can give us a glimpse into the scene of white readers engaged in very intimate
relations with their racial others, a constituency they may rarely “meet” other than through
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this textually generated public. The concept of cross-racial publics as virtual assemblies that
consist of strangers allows us to think about how indigenous literature shapes the formation
of racialized identifications and disavowals. These intersubjective relations resonate on a
broader scale as national collectivities and identities. The concept of publics, I suggest, gives
us a framework to theorize the volatile intersubjectivity, interaffectivity and intercorporeal-
ity of cross-racial relations in Australia. My direction here also comes from Brian Massumi
and other theorists who insist that relationality precedes the discreteness of the component
subjects, that our differentiated, raced and non-raced (white) identities are determined by
and inseparable from the connectedness of raced and non-raced people. As Massumi puts
it, participation is ontologically prior to the participants (“Too Blue” 197).
I would like to emphasize at this point Warner’s characterization of a public as a mode
of attention as this allows us to conceive of how collective identifications (e.g. whiteness)
are constituted. I characterize the act of white people reading indigenous literature as a zone
of inter-racial animation. Where the notion of subjects or identities implies the fullness,
coherence and complexity of selves, the notion of the impermanent and partial modes of
attention that publics convene accommodates the very volatile, intense, fluid, fragmentary,
contradictory and multiply-inflected identifications that characterize individuals and
national or global collectives at any one historical or social moment.

Alf Taylor’s short fiction

This article, then, explores the shaping of cross-racial identities within the publics that the
reading of indigenous literature generates. My argument is based on the assumption that
race relationality is at the heart of and determines national identities; that race is not
supplementary or contradictory to liberal discourses of modernity, democracy and multi-
culturalism. Rather, I proceed from the idea that the race contract is foundational to the
formation of the settler nation1 and that the idea of race is central to state ideology and to
the formation of settler national identities. I take the short fiction of a Western Australian
Nyoongah writer, Alf Taylor, as an exemplary case in order to investigate how indigenous
literature rhetorically positions and acts upon the white reader. Taylor represents an older
generation of writers who are members of the “Stolen Generations”.
Taylor was born in the late 1940s and grew up in the Spanish Benedictine Mission at
New Norcia, 250 kilometres north of Perth in Western Australia. His work spans several
literary genres and features two books of poetry, Singer Songwriter (1992) and Winds
(1994). His poetry has been anthologized in the collection of poetry Rimfire (2000). Taylor
has also published a book of short stories, Long Time Now (2001), and has recently
 430 A. Brewster

completed his life story of growing up in New Norcia Mission, excerpts of which have been
published in the anthology of indigenous writing entitled Those Who Remain Will Always
Remember (2001) and the literary journal Westerly, volumes 48 (2003) and 50 (2005).2
Despite the fact that Taylor is one of the most productive indigenous writers and has been
translated into Spanish,3 he has received little critical attention to date. In this article I will
focus on short stories published in his collection Long Time Now; these are based on a range
of colourful and engaging characters and infused with a playful and ironic, storytelling,
narrative voice. I select two exemplary stories, “The Last Drop” and “Charlie”, to examine
the complex nature of their mischievous characters and the way in which “yarning” or story-
telling engages a white readership. I demonstrate how the humour of the stories destabilizes
whiteness.
In borrowing Warner’s notion of publics, I hope to think differently about the work that
cross-cultural reading does. In moving away from the notion of a humanist reader and a
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universalized reading position and away from an analysis of texts as representation, I want
to focus on the way in which reading fashions identifications, both at the level of the
individual and the national collective. Rather than describe those identities per se, I intend
to discuss reading as a highly charged zone of interaction in which cross- or inter-racial rela-
tions shift and change. As I have suggested, in considering the inter-dependency of racial-
ized and non-racialized identities, and the very volatile nature of the “attention” that reading
generates, I aim to focus not on subjects or subjectivity so much as the subjection (in the
Foucauldian sense) of readers in the process of reading. The incorporation in recent years
of sometimes troubling and sometimes celebratory indigenous and immigrant histories into
narratives of the nation indicates that Australians are obsessed with the past, in a range of
very different culturally inflected ways. I argue that Taylor’s stories take white readers into
the haunted, phantasmagorical imaginary of the postcolonial nation – what Fanon (183)
calls the “zone of occult instability where the people dwell” – and the anxious reproduction
of whiteness at its heart. It is a virtual world where opposites and contradictions co-exist and
coalesce, jostling and interacting with each other in infinitesimal movements which can
rapidly produce systemic or qualitative – that is, cultural – change.
I will look first at the story “The Last Drop” and trace the liminal zone of relationality
it figures in the affective trope of “forlorn hope” (Long Time 123, 135). “The Last Drop” is
a story about Old Tommy Toothpick and Billy Jangles, his “old watjella mate”,4 who drink
and yarn together. This account of the friendship between Old Tommy and Billy is the scene
of several other stories or yarns, embedded in the main narrative. The subjects of these yarns,
to which I shall return, are Captain Cook and Elvis Presley. “The Last Drop” is framed at
its opening and closing by Tommy’s meditations on the statue of Yagan, an early Nyoongah
resistance fighter who was decapitated by the colonists of the Swan River area around Perth.
Tommy and Billy drink under the statue on Heirisson Island, near Perth. Both the age and
ill health of these two “elderly gentlemen” and the poignant image of Yagan looking out
over the remains of his lost “paradise” (130) predispose the reader to conceiving of this as
a tragic story. Indeed, this collection of stories as a whole bears ample evidence of the shock-
ing effects of dispossession on indigenous people. The stories are raw, sometimes melodra-
matic and often marked by pathos. They portray the effects of alcoholism, separation from
family members, grief and the loss of land on the everyday life of the Aboriginal characters.
Many figure the passing of this older generation of “parkies” (indigenous people who drink
together in metropolitan parks), whom Taylor describes elsewhere as “the underdogs that
both black and white look upon as scum of society” (“God, the Devil” 258) and who fail to
receive any kind of reparation for or recognition of their dispossession. The characters have
little sense of enfranchisement within the wider context of the nation. National futures do
 Journal of Postcolonial Writing 431

not seen to be available to them (as they are not for other cultural minorities), as the narrator
of “The Last Drop” attests. Many characters are poised on the brink of death. Tommy Tooth-
pick and the other indigenous people drinking in the park exist for the present; they have
little agency in impacting on a nationally recognized and ratified future: “they didn’t belong
to tomorrow” (Long Time 129). The businessmen in the streets where Tommy and Billy
walk regard them with “contempt and disgust” (125). The pathos of this story is
compounded by the overt homology between Old Tommy and Yagan, as I discuss below.
The title of the story itself suggests a sombre eschatological vision; on the literal level it
refers to the death of an old man which is linked to alcohol.5
This tragic vision is endorsed in Yagan’s and Tommy’s looks of “forlorn hope”. The
oxymoronic phrase, however, carries a suggestion of the opposite to this tragic vision,
namely hope and a sense of agency and entitlement. Australian sociologist Ghassan Hage
discusses the availability, circulation and exchange of hope across the various constituen-
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cies of the Australian nation. He argues that there is an unequal distribution of dignity and
social hope in relation to minority constituencies and that access to hope is seen as a white
entitlement. If social hope allows people to imagine a future for themselves, the withholding
of the right to hope from minority constituencies in effect denies them a participatory role
in imagining the future of the nation. I argue that Taylor’s fiction restores dignity and social
hope to indigenous imaginaries. The prime vehicle for elaborating hope in the story is the
humour mobilized in the service of yarning. The comedy is burlesque, bawdy, farcical. It is
sharp and biting but often affectionate. The objects of the humour are various and include
Old Tommy himself, who imagines a commemorative statue of himself atop the Flinders
Ranges in South Australia, holding “a flagon” (a burlesque imitation of Yagan who holds a
spear) (Long Time 128). Essentially, the humour of yarning inheres in a seductive game of
simultaneously courting and flouting the reader’s belief in the truth of the yarns. It can be
seen as challenging the limits of fictional realism. While the teller of the yarn appears to
insist upon the verisimilitude of his story, there is always an inherent tongue-in-cheek
playfulness in the telling. The humour is double-edged and I’d like to suggest that within
the scene of cross-racial reading this edginess functions to destabilize and defamiliarize
whiteness which is also a target of the stories’ humour.

Yarning
I will now examine the ostensible truth effects of the yarns and their impact upon the read-
ing process. Firstly, I turn to the story about the evening that Elvis appears to Old Tommy.
“The Last Drop” is set on the Australia Day bicentennial, 26 January 1988, and takes on a
particular meaning in this context. Old Tommy has been wandering among the crowds of
revellers trying unsuccessfully to raise the money for a drink. Suffering the effects of
alcohol withdrawal he retreats to a park where he can be alone. Elvis appears to him in his
hour of need and brings him a packet of cigarettes and a flagon of wine. Old Tommy’s story
starts with the fact of his unreliable status as a narrator: in his story Elvis appears to him just
as he (Tommy) was undergoing alcohol withdrawal and hallucination. But he also seems to
require of his listeners in the story that they believe his yarn: “no, no, dus true”, he insists
in the face of their incredulity, to which one of his listeners responds: “You lyin’ old, black
cunt” and another: “You talkin’ outta your hole” (Long Time 135). The yarn engages its
audience, then, through its claims to truth which are simultaneously undermined by the
playful unreliability of the narrator. I propose that these bizarre, ostensibly (im)possible
happenings work to destabilize our sense of reality; there is more to a simple story, they
suggest, than we might initially think. They hint, for example, that history is not necessarily
 432 A. Brewster

what it appears. As mentioned above, the yarn is set on Australia Day, and in this context
the phantasmatic figure of Elvis takes on a new significance.
Before returning to this issue, I turn to another yarn that addresses the issue of history
and turns on the scene of the celebrated landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, the
foundational event of Australia Day:
The yarns they’d tell [ … ] like the day Captain Cook got lost in his ship and landed in this
country. He was that pissed from all the rum he’d been drinking, that on seeing land, he told
his convicts to put a dinghy down. He staggered into the boat with some flag and when he
touched land he put this flag out to steady himself and the fuckin’ thing stuck in the ground,
[him] thereby claiming this country while asleep under the flag. (Long Time 125–26)
This version of James Cook’s landing in Australia depicts the famous arrival and the
claiming of territory as happenstance. The reversal here problematizes the triumphalist,
teleological narratives of settlement, discovery and nationhood. The heroic sequence of
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cause-and-effect events that characterizes the various settler and discovery myths which
underwrite the status of whiteness sovereignty are seen in this context to be as phantasma-
gorical and trenchant as the somewhat silly myths of Elvis being alive. Old Tommy experi-
ences incredulity over his audience’s belief in Elvis: “looking at his audience with
amazement and disbelief, Old Tommy thought to himself, to dees mob, dat Presley not
dead yet” (131). The juxtaposition of Cook and Elvis in “The Last Drop” renders the
foundational moment of the nation as fragile and insubstantial as the myths of Elvis’s
longevity. The carnivalesque reversal of Captain Cook also functions to turn the tables on
the process of blaming and demonizing indigenous people: alcohol abuse – so visible in
this collection of stories – is cast not as an Aboriginal problem but a white problem, which
we read as coterminous with invasion and dispossession.
Old Tommy’s yarning winds up with the death of his watjella mate and interlocutor,
Old Billy, under the statue of Yagan. In fact, not only Billy but another watjella dies – an
anonymous jogger who happens to be passing by. The story ends on a sombre and slightly
chilling note. The statue of Yagan seems differently animated at this point. The story picks
up the hint of Yagan’s capacity as a warrior, introduced at the beginning, where Old
Tommy imagines Yagan “kill um watjella mans an’ robbin’ um an’ turn ‘round an’ munji
dere watjella womans” (Long Time 123).6 The end of the story confirms Yagan’s status as
a powerful avenger who takes watjellas – “strangers” and “friends” – alike. But do we
believe in the statue’s power? The oscillation of the narrative register from realism to the
fable troubles our sense of the real, of the boundary between possible and impossible, the
past and the present (does this deceased Nyoongah warrior have power in the present?).
This simple story is also a decolonizing parable. We become aware that one of the targets
of the yarning is the self-evident, autotelic myth of white sovereignty. In the strange
account of Captain Cook, for example, is the narrator laughing with us or at us? The
humour of yarning is unsettling and pivots on a sense of undecidability: it points to the
volatile world of racialized relations and intertwined histories and futures. We recognize
the possibility that the origins of whiteness might be more unstable and aleatory than heroic
foundational myths of nation allow. This recognition enables us to see whiteness as first
and foremost contingent and relational. With this troubling defamiliarizing of whiteness
emerges a recognition of indigenous agency.
Taylor has commented in an interview that there is a parallel between Tommy and
Yagan and even, by analogy, between Yagan and himself as an indigenous writer:
Tommy Toothpick and Yagan … they would have to be identical in structure. Not in height,
build or anything like that, but in their roles in society. And Yagan … I guess, he had
 Journal of Postcolonial Writing 433

that [power] with him – he carried that all his life until they cut his head off. And I guess,
Aboriginal people who, today, want to make a contribution to society – I think they feel the
same. For me, I can still contribute through my stories. Now I’m in a position with my writing
… it has given me more power [ … ] I find when I write, that the pencil, pen, biro or whatever
is my weapon. (Brewster, “’That Child is My Hero’” 175).

If Yagan is a figure of indigenous agency and sovereignty, Tommy’s life as a colonized

subaltern is “structurally” homologous to Yagan’s, a man who suffered the full violent
impact of colonial invasion and dispossession. However, Yagan’s retention of power and
dignity is synecdochic of the “survival” of indigenous people in Australia. Taylor’s cultural
production as a writer is also an index of the persistence of indigenous agency. If indigenous
agency is sustained and sustainable, then positive content for the term “hope” is possible.
At the end of the story we revisit the phrase “forlorn hope” (Long Time 135). If a heroic
indigenous past does persist and have effect in the present, then the potential for indigenous
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futures opens up. “The Last Drop” takes us into a zone of a different kind of temporality
where the past persists in the present. It challenges the evolutionary time of social Darwinism
which relegates racial others to an archaic, pre-modern past. In late liberal culture indigenous
subjects have been called on to perform a traditional authenticity which provides the alibi
for white modernity. As putatively static and fixed, indigenous culture is figured as fragile
and endangered and as that which can only deliquesce. Aboriginal subjects and cultures are
positioned in the ancient past outside modernity and divested of futurity.
Contemporary indigenous cultural production, however, and the development of an
indigenous literary subjectivity, has challenged the normalized dichotomy of indigenous
and modern. The development of fiction in the 18th century paralleled the rise of the
modern subject. If the modern subject has been characterized by a private realm of contem-
plation and feeling, the literary rhetoric of internal complexity has been reproduced as the
exclusive domain of a white subjectivity. The concept of the expressive individual, which
has become central to western literature, can be seen, from a critical whiteness theory
perspective, as a mark of the “possessive investment” (Lipsitz 369) of the white, European
subject. However, the development of indigenous literary subjectivities challenges the
chronological hierarchy of social Darwinism and attests to the coevality of indigenous and
white cultures. Indigenous cultures are co-evolutionary with white culture and have been
entangled with and have shaped Australian modernity since the days of first contact. My
interest in this article is to investigate whiteness as a product of this entanglement. In
analysing the impact of indigenous literature on our understanding of whiteness in contem-
porary Australia I suggest that one effect of indigenous literature is to defamiliarize white-
ness by foregrounding its relationality to indigeneity. Once we understand the contiguity of
white (non-raced) and indigenous (racialized) subjectivities, whiteness as an inherent, self-
identical category is no longer viable.
I turn now to “Charlie”, another story in Long Time Now. The eponymous character,
like Old Tommy, is a trickster or clown; a man of self-deprecating humour who could
“talk a snake into biting itself” (141). But like Old Tommy he is resourceful, wise and has
the last laugh. The story is set in Kalgoorlie in the goldfields region of Western Australia.
It opens with Charlie dozing in the sunshine in a park. He overhears a radio playing a
popular song from the 1960s, “My Boomerang Won’t Come Back”. In this song, popular-
ized by the British comedian and singer Charlie Drake, Drake’s voice imitates that of an
indigenous man who is trying to throw a boomerang. The chorus, impersonating the voice
of an indigenous man, laments the fact that he cannot get the boomerang he throws to
return – his boomerang won’t come back – and that he turns black in the face through his
efforts.
 434 A. Brewster

Because he is in need of cash Charlie hits upon the idea of persuading two “full-
blooded” Wongi7 men to sing in the Wongi language this popular song and other well-
known songs in a pub. He tells the publican, who pays them handsomely, that the men
can’t speak English. The white crowd is delighted, presumably among other things, at the
spectacle of indigenous authenticity, and the mimicry of the Drake song. Afterwards
Charlie, a Nyoongah who does not understand the Wongi language, asks the men what
they were saying in their language. They tell him that they were singing the line “go to the
shithouse and stick a spear up your bum” (Long Time 145). Once again yarning is playful
and ironic but has a sting to it; the last laugh is on the white crowd who were paying, in
effect, to be insulted.

Humour and defamiliarization

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I’d like to focus on mimicry and the reversals of black and white in this story. In it we find
almost every combination of mimicry, including white mimicking black. The Drake song
introduces this theme. Charlie, the protagonist of Taylor’s story, has his own interpretation
of the song. He’s not convinced by the logic of the song and by Drake’s imitation of an
indigenous man:

the more he listened to the words of the song, the more evident it became that it was a watjella
trying to throw that boomerang. How in the hell can a blackfella go black in the face trying to
throw that thing? (Long Time 139)

There are further levels of mimicry in Taylor’s story: blacks mimicking black (the Wongi
men imitating the white notion of black authenticity); and blacks appropriating white songs.
The layers of imitation proliferate. In their appropriation of the Charlie Drake song, for
example, the Wongi men are mimicking a white man mimicking a black man.
The mimicry foregrounds the performativity of race: the Wongi men entertaining the
white crowd at the pub are a great success; Charlie is pleased and amused with the
thought that they are “natural performers” (143). The notion of their authenticity is, of
course, shot through with irony: after all, they are singing (in language) country and
western songs, hymns and even the Australian national anthem. The whites at first sight
seem less adept at mimicking blackness. Charlie takes great pleasure in his own interpre-
tation of the Charlie Drake song which would imply that he imagines that whiteness is an
unstable, phantasmagoric category. In an inverted version of a first-contact story, he imag-
ines that blackness is an originary condition and that whiteness is the result of a loss of
blackness: “Maybe Captain Cook was a blackfella when he left England and when he saw
the blackfellas here to welcome him, he turned white with fright” (139). Here whiteness
as the default position of humankind, installed by colonization, is reversed; indigeneity
becomes the “natural” and sovereign condition of human beings. Whiteness is an aberra-
tion, a marked category of alteration from the norm. And indeed, picking up on the theme
of colonial othering, Charlie feels that the Wongi men are such accomplished performers
that they would feel relaxed and comfortable enough to perform at “Buckingham Palace”
(142). Here, the diasporic condition of white Australians (in contradistinction to the idea
of white sovereignty) is underscored; these indigenous men are such consummate
exemplars of indigeneity that they would outperform all originary fantasies of them as
racial others.
The reverberating levels of imitation in this story highlight the instability of white and
raced identities – their openness to appropriation and mimicry. The oscillations of blacks
 Journal of Postcolonial Writing 435

and whites imitating each other underscore the endless cycles – of reversal and repetition,
of identification and disavowal – through which subjects are constituted. They put the
notion of origins under erasure and foreground the self-authorizing fiction of whiteness.
The boomerang is emblematic here of the mise-en-abyme action of the binary and supple-
mentary logic of black/white. A recognition of the interdependence of the categories black/
white foregrounds the fact that processes of othering and racialization are tethered to invest-
ments in whiteness as a non-raced norm. I would suggest that there is one turn that is not
reproduced in this story: that of whites imitating whites. This imitation would point to the
unmentionable absence at the centre of colonial authority, the secret of whiteness: that it is
a masquerade.
It is precisely the performativity of whiteness that is foregrounded for the white reader
in the reading of indigenous literature. The process of recognition, of “witnessing” white-
ness, occurs in the intersubjective zone of reading. This recognition, as I have argued, is
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facilitated through the various yarns and their parody of white authority. The humour of
“The Last Drop” is slightly uncomfortable; at times I am not sure what or who I am
laughing at. It is a double-edged, defamiliarizing and destabilizing whiteness. The yarn
fundamentally problematizes the appearances of reality: Charlie is, after all, in a fix and
needing money because he has been arrested for assaulting a statue which he mistook as a
person. If the engagements and mimicries depicted in the story problematize the putative
naturalness of the border between whiteness and indigeneity, Charlie’s failure to distin-
guish between human being and statue intensifies the irony. He is thus also a figure of fun
and ridicule; the humour of this yarn is at once self-deprecating and affirming of the
savvy and dexterity of the central character and his two cohorts. Charlie is the middle-
man, a man of “intelligence” and verbal acuity. Like his namesake, Charlie Drake, he
probably couldn’t throw a boomerang, and he’s almost as unfamiliar with the Wongi
language as the white publican. Yet he is knowing about what white audiences expect
from the performance of indigeneity. All the performances are hoaxes in “Charlie”, and
everyone apparently goes away happy. Except perhaps the white reader who may find the
story unsettling or even challenging, as the participants of various seminars on this story
have reported to me.

White relationality
To conclude, in this article I have taken up Alastair Bonnett’s recommendation that the
proper enterprise of contemporary anti-racist work is to focus on “the racialisation process
that produces Whiteness” (183). My particular focus is on understanding otherness and
whiteness, not as inherent, self-evident categories but as relational and contingent. Each
term in the binary colonizer/colonized confronts and transforms the other. I argue that one
of the main effects of indigenous literature is to “confront” whiteness; the question as to
whether whiteness can be “transformed” is more complex. We can at least resignify and
complicate whiteness as variable, interdependent, uncertain, unstable and liminal. In consid-
ering the scene of cross-racial reading as a performance of this liminality, we can trace the
intimate forms of recognition in textually mediated forms of address between raced and
non-raced strangers. These forms of recognition in turn generate personal and collective
identifications.
Elizabeth Povinelli argues that liberalism wants to develop a politics of recognition
without subjecting itself to the throes of contestation and opposition that multicultural
nations inevitably experience across their minority constituencies (16–17). An examination
of the process of reading involves precisely these moments of the recognition of proximity,
 436 A. Brewster

of the volatility and intensity of racialized relations. Reading with attention to whiteness is
not only a process of making whiteness visible for critical inspection but also a witnessing
of the various affective dispositions of whiteness. In an era when race continues as the
administrative category of white governmentality par excellence, often subsuming the
categories of class and gender, for example, under that of race, responsible citizenship is
increasingly a white prerogative. Discourses of race have always been founded on the
renunciation of any ethical relation with the state’s others. An anti-racist ethics and politics
of recognition, I would argue, to revise Povinelli, has to start with the recognition of
whiteness.
I do not want to suggest that Australia’s cultural history is reducible to an indigenous–
white binary. Australia’s ethno-racial history is complex and multiply-inflected, produced
episodically and unevenly through the ongoing interplay of local and global conditions. I
figure whiteness as one community of descent within this scene of ethno-racial conver-
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gences and divergences and foreground its particular performative history. I want to high-
light the fact that whiteness is not a static or self-sufficient category; that it is the product of
a dialectic of intimacies and counter-intimacies. I am mindful of the fact that this dialectic
is not positioned within a level playing field; that white and non-white relations are infused
and structured by power asymmetries.
By focusing on whiteness as a relational category I intend not to particularize it or invest
its mobility with a redemptive possibility. This would be to obscure the continual reconfig-
uring of its authority and the safeguarding of its entitlements and privileges. In tracking
whiteness as a volatile intersubjective and intercorporeal racialized identification and
identity, and in foregrounding the dependence of whiteness on its ethno-racialized others, I
want to avoid the closure of discourses such as multiculturalism and anti-racism which
anticipate the erasure of race hierarchies and the establishment of a benign harmony of
racial difference. These discourses are products of a white diasporic liberalism which imag-
ines that the inequities of racial difference can be renovated or resolved through mutual
understanding (Povinelli 12)
In characterizing whiteness as the product of a dynamic interaction between peoples I
want to foreground the agency and impact of indigenous literature. I suggest that indige-
nous literary subjectivity engages whiteness precisely at its intersubjective juncture. The
dominance of the trope of assimilation in discussions of indigenous literature has
obscured the “two-way” interaction in the micropolitics of race as they are engaged in
literary publics. This is not to deny the genocidal rubric and effects of the discourse of
assimilation and of the governmental policies which dominated the federal management
of indigenous populations in the mid-20th century. Nor is it to claim a redemptive power
for a renovated post-assimilationist whiteness. What I aim to highlight here is the one-
directional vector of assimilation and the fact that arguments centred on assimilation/
resistance have not generally foregrounded the constitutive relationality of whiteness – its
instability and its anxieties.
I would argue that the effects of indigenous literature such as Taylor’s are twofold; it
both reinstalls indigenous knowledges, dignity and hope, and it analyses and critiques the
reproduction of whiteness. In its reversals and humour, Taylor’s fiction can be seen to
contribute to what Walter Mignolo describes as the undoing of “the coloniality of
knowledge” (391) which has systematically stripped indigenous people of their dignity and
hope. And it must be said that, alongside the dark picture of Aboriginal dispossession, both
the deeply engaging humour and the sentiment of all these stories offer a radiant picture of
the care, compassion and tenderness of Aboriginal families and communities and their
enduring resilience, inventiveness and power.
 Journal of Postcolonial Writing 437

Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Lyn Vellins and Mandy Swann for their research assistance.

Notes
1. The first substantial piece of legislation passed by the parliament of the newly established
Commonwealth of Australia in 1901 was the Immigration Restriction Act which inaugurated
what has come to be known as the White Australia policy (Hirst 285).
2. The first Westerly publication won the Patricia Hackett Prize (2003).
3. The Spanish translation of Long Time Now was published by Takusan Ediciones in 2006.
4. The word “wadjella” is a Nyoogah word meaning “white person”.
5. If there is a sense of tragedy about these figures, they are not to be seen as being entirely without
agency. Prominent indigenous activist and writer Kevin Gilbert, in his important political treatise
Because a White Man’ll Never do It, quotes an activist of the 1970s who argues that indigenous
drinking in some sense is a form of resistance: “why a lot of the gooms [indigenous homeless alco-
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holics] drink is because they won’t cop [accept] white society. They just refuse to accept it. So
they stay outside it. And their way of expressing this resistance is by drinking metho [methylated
spirit]. Because they just won’t be assimilated” (156, original emphasis).
6. “Killing white men and robbing them and turning around and having sex with their white women.”
7. The Wongi are the indigenous people of the south-western part of the desert region of Western
Australia.

Notes on contributor
Anne Brewster teaches at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Her books
include Reading Aboriginal Women’s Autobiography (1996) and Literary Formations (1995). She
co-edited, with Angeline O’Neill and Rosemary van den Berg, an anthology of Australian indigenous
writing entitled Those Who Remain Will Always Remember (2000).

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