Mixed Race Studies

The legend of Merle

The Age
Docklands, Victoria, Australia
2002-08-21

Merle Oberon (1943)

She was one of the most glamorous stars of the 1930s and ’40s. A screen siren with smouldering looks, exotic features and almond-shaped eyes. Merle Oberon was described as graceful and hauntingly beautiful.

On her ascent, in 1939, she captivated the world in the box office Hollywood hit, Wuthering Heights, playing Cathy opposite Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff.

From the other side of the globe, Tasmanians glowed with pride. Oberon, according to a biography that read like a Hollywood film script, had been born in Hobart, the daughter of an upper-class white colonial family. She left Tasmania for India after her distinguished father died in a hunting accident, and was raised there by aristocratic godparents.

If Errol Flynn was the island state’s favourite son, Merle Oberon was its treasured daughter. In 1978, the Hobart Town Hall hosted a function attended by well-known local identities to welcome her back. Decades later, Tasmanians proudly recount stories and anecdotes about the hometown girl who blazed her way to Hollywood. Only Oberon wasn’t born in Tasmania. She was Anglo-Indian…

Read the entire article here.

Ronnie: Tasmanian Songman

Magabala Books
January 2009
164 pages
240 x 165
Paperback ISBN: 9781921248108

Helen Gee and Ronnie Summers

Musician, storyteller and craftsman, Ronnie Summers recalls the freedom of growing up on Cape Barren Island and how the island’s music shaped his life. He draws on a childhood working the muttonbird islands, a ‘kangaroo court’ prison term as a bewildered teenager, and then turning to alcohol after the death of his baby son. Born an ‘Islander’—not Aboriginal, not white—Ronnie Summers was without race. This story documents his struggle for a place in his own country and echoes that of the Tasmanian Aboriginal community. Includes a CD featuring Cape Barren Island music—a unique blend of Cajun, blues, country and folk.

Racial Ambiguity and Whiteness in Brian Castro’s Drift

Journal of the European Association of Studies on Australia
Volume 2, Number 2, 2009
pages 113-126
ISSN 2013-6897

Marilyne Brun, Lecturer in Postcolonia Studies
Université Nancy 2

This article focuses on Drift, the fifth novel of contemporary Australian writer, Brian Castro, and concentrates on the ambiguous racial inscriptions of some of its characters. While white experimental British writer B.S. Johnson progressively becomes darker in the novel, his desire to escape his whiteness is complicated by another extreme, the albinism of Tasmanian Aboriginal Thomas McGann. This article discusses one essential aspect of these surprising fictional representations: the critique of whiteness that they articulate. The racial ambiguity of the two main characters offers a subtle reflection on Tasmania’s colonial legacy. Yet beyond Castro’s exploration of the contingencies of the Tasmanian context, the characters‟ racial ambivalence destabilises conventional representations of whiteness. The novel both exposes the metonymic nature of whiteness and critiques the specific modes of reading the body that are involved in preoccupations with whiteness.

Read the entire article here.