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Belinda McKay
Director, Queensland Studies Centre, Griffith University
'A lovely land…by shadows dark untainted'?: whiteness and early Queensland women's writing
The work of early white women writers in Queensland reveals an intense and ongoing preoccupation with race, whether expressed as glorification of the writers' own northern European racial origins or as a focus on racial Others who raise anxieties about miscegenation and colonisation. This paper looks back at the formative but largely forgotten years of white women's writing, from the establishment of the colony of Queensland in 1859 to 1939. It examines whiteness in this body of literature as a discourse that both draws upon and shapes the experience of women writers and readers as members of a recently established white colony. An ideology of whiteness underpins this work, but its formulation is neither monolithic nor static: from the beginning there are divergent tendencies, and significant new trends emerge in the 1920s as the assimilation project begins to take hold of the literary imagination. This literature tells us very little about the racial Others with which it is so preoccupied, but a great deal about the lived experience of whiteness by women in early Queensland, as well as the ways in which literary culture articulated whiteness as the centrally cohesive factor in constructing a new white nation in the Antipodes.
Bio:
Belinda McKay is Director of the Queensland Studies Centre at Griffith University, where she also teaches in the School of Arts, Media and Culture. She is editor of Queensland Review.
<B.McKay@griffith.edu.au>