Australian National University
A. D. Hope Conference Room (Building 14)
2011-06-06, 16:16-17:30 (Local TIme)
Rich Pascal, Visiting Fellow
School of Cultural Inquiry
Australian National University
By the turn of the Twentieth Century, and increasingly in the decades that followed, areas located literally on the fringes of many Australian towns were populated by people consigned figuratively to a conceptual limbo. Australians who were mostly of mixed Aboriginal and European ancestry congregated in slumlike camps and reserves. As the century wore on, the mainstream society’s widespread belief that the so-called “tribal” Aboriginals were passing into extinction had come to be shadowed by a perception that these so-called “half-castes” and “fringe dwellers” were now the dark Others whose endurance threatened the dream of an all-white Australia. They were, to borrow Henry Reynolds’ apt phrase, Australia’s “nowhere people.”
Mostly unsighted, they were in the literal sense commonly unremarked by mainstream Australians. And the society’s chronic inclination to render the marginalised social group translucent was nowhere more apparent than in the sphere of literary and popular narratives. In the novels, stories, and memoirs of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries their near invisibility registers as an almost total absence. It wasn’t until the two decades following the end of the Second World War that some memoirs, novels and stories that featured them prominently were presented to the reading public. The first book length narrative to set itself the challenge of subjectively rendering the experience of Indigenous nowhereness was FB Vickers’ The Mirage (1955), a novel that has not been well remembered. Although well received by reviewers of the time, it was not a popular success and it was rarely mentioned in later histories of Australian literature; it has never been studied in any depth or detail. This discussion constitutes an effort to redress the latter omission, and advances as well an argument for the book’s sociocultural importance with regard to subsequent efforts, literary and otherwise, to include the nowhere people within the national identity.