Margins of acceptability

Frontiers, 2002 by Ellinghaus, Katherine

TWO AUSTRALIAN MARRIAGES: FINDING A PLACE IN THE WORKING CLASS

Assumptions about class underlay much of the rhetoric about assimilation in Australia, although there was some disagreement about exactly where assimilated Aborigines would fit in Australian society. As historian Henry Reynolds has documented, those in power, the educated, and the colonial elite "assumed that the Aborigines would be absorbed into the working class . . . [as] landless wage labourers." Their views, however, were not shared by the white working classes, who did not wish to see Aboriginal people as their equals. Threatened by the prospect of cheap labor and attempting to cling to their own uncertain status, people of the working classes emphasized the differences between themselves and indigenous people. As Reynolds has argued, "Despite the fine words about civilisation and Christianity the reality was that all Europeans offered to the Aborigines was the life of the poor and powerless at the bottom of the 'scale of graduated classes' with virtually no chance of social mobility or of the 'improvement' which well-meaning whites talked so much about."39 In a sense what Reynolds has called a "promise" of assimilation was made to Aboriginal people: By acculturating themselves they would improve their status, live more comfortably, and be treated with more respect.40 This promise, however, was not kept. Unlike Native Americans Australian Aborigines had little opportunity for education and therefore next to no chance to raise themselves to middle-class status. Instead they teetered between the lowest rung of the working class, providing sporadic, low-paid labor to white employers (when they could get work) and a separate, segregated group living and working on reserves, receiving minimal government support.41 It was the latter status, which reflected their oppression both economically and racially, that white Australians were most comfortable with.

When whites and Aborigines did marry (which was rare), it was despite the rhetoric of assimilation. It seems the reactions to these unions depended on the extent to which the couple transgressed the strict ideas of where white Australians saw Aborigines as belonging. Indeed, when couples did not attempt to take up the "promise" of assimilation, their marriages were treated with far less anxiety. In 1937 journalist Ernestine Hill published a collection of her writings under the title The Great Australian Loneliness. One chapter was devoted to the "strange case of Mrs. Witchetty," a patronizing account of Hill's visit with a white woman who had been married to an Aboriginal man and after his death still resided with his people with her two mixed-descent sons. The chapter was first published as a sensationalized article on the front page of the Sunday Guardian Sun in 1932.42 Hill presented the story as "the most amazing document in the annals of the Australian outback," but notwithstanding her condescending tone seemed more interested in presenting the case as an oddity rather than as an unacceptable breach of social mores.43