Margins of acceptability

Frontiers, 2002 by Ellinghaus, Katherine

It could not be supposed that he suddenly became a raging lunatic for nothing. Mrs. Mawbey and Miss Kerz wheeled round on him and laughed and sneered, and Miss Kerz said, "Pooh, you black rubbish, you ought to be shot for marrying a white woman." That was the turning point; when those words were spoken to him the sudden passion rose. . . . The savage heart, tainted with the thirst of blood, burst through reason and one of the foulest of crimes was committed. . . . The statement of Miss Kerz touched Jimmy Governor on two spots which were susceptible-that of his colour and that of his wife.60

Boyce's legal argument, however, should be seen for what it is: an attempt to twist a series of events to win a sensational and unwinnable case.

Other historians of this well-known case have argued that Jimmy's actions were provoked by the futility of his efforts to assimilate,61 or stemmed from a "background of racial political discontent."62 In a recent analysis Marilyn Wood uses the work of Frantz Fanon to argue that the murders were "not so much . . . an isolated and meaningless outbreak of violence, but . . . an intelligible reaction to perceived racial and cultural discrimination and the continuous experiences of oppression within a colonial context."63 In interviews published in the press, both Jimmy and Ethel gave several explanations as to why Jimmy committed the murders, including Jimmy's desire to become a bushranger, an argument the couple had had just before the killings, and a dispute between Jimmy and Mrs. Mawbey over the payment of some rations. If Jimmy's violence was a reaction to his anger at the rejection of his marriage by the Gulgong community, then it should be noted that this rejection was not always consistent. If the testimony given at the trial by Ethel is discounted, there is very little evidence of blatant discrimination against the couple. Boyce praised Jimmy's efforts to emulate the white work ethic, never suggesting that he had gone too far by marrying a white woman. His disapproval was reserved for those who voiced a negative view of the Governor marriage. Although they were married in the rectory rather than the church at Gulgong, Ethel's father was present and gave his permission for the marriage to take place.64 The couple remained in the same district in which they were married, and Jimmy seemed to have little trouble finding work. Truly negative reactions to the marriage only became conspicuous after Jimmy had committed the murders. The Mudgee Guardian, a local newspaper that sensationalized the murders and reported the resulting manhunt at length, expressed a strong view of the Governors' marriage, calling it "very, very funny, and . . . more or less blasphemous," and later "an extremely unpleasant topic to touch upon, for it is another terrible proof that civilization is a failure."65

It is significant that the conflict that ostensibly caused the murders centered around issues of employment. It seems that the tensions caused by the Governors were not caused, initially, by the marriage itself. Instead, Jimmy's attempts to take up the "promise" of assimilation and support himself proved threatening to the white community. In the aftermath of the affair, the Governor case prompted a number of diatribes against giving Aboriginal people any chance at being educated at all, as it only made them "cunning . . . and more dangerous." Jimmy Governor was held up, according to a teacher at the time, as "a glaring example of the evils of education."66 Perhaps if Ethel had gone to live with the Wollar community on government rations the tragedy would never have happened. Jimmy and Ethel's most serious mistake was to attempt to live independently of the state. As Barry Morris has argued, the New South Wales government at this time operated according to policies that aimed at the "dependency" (in which Aborigines' lives were supposed to be completely controlled by the state) and the "domesticity" (in which Aborigines were slowly supposed to learn to live as whites) of the Aboriginal population.67 By asserting his independence (first by marrying a white woman, then through insisting on proper payment, and then by using violence to protest his treatment), Jimmy Governor experimented with, and then got caught in, the various competing demands of the ideology of assimilation that existed in Australia at this time. The "Breelong Murders," as the case was popularly known, had its beginnings in the resistance of the white community to indigenous assimilation.