反抗与服从-《边缘住民》中土著女性形象之解读

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Chapter 1 Introduction

From the perspectives of post-colonialism and feminism, the thesis is built upon a

thorough research on two Indigenous female images in the novel The Fringe Dwellers

written by Nene Gare in 1961. Through an in-depth exploration of the discrepancies

displayed in the personalities and psychological elements of the two protagonists of the

novel, outcome several meaningful and thought provoking findings: Representing two

typical types of Indigenous women, the two sisters hold opposite attitudes towards

racial prejudice—rebellion versus obedience. Accordingly, their responses and actions

against racial discrimination or even racial oppression also separate far off from each

other. Hence, they take quite different life roads, which virtually mirror the life of the

Australian Indigenous Women in general. The research is not only supposed to

showcase the Australian Indigenous Women in the particular historical context indicated

in the novel, but is also expected to shed some light on the future research of Australian

Indigenous Women.

As a member of Australia Study Centre in USST, I have successfully obtained the

fund from ACC (Australia China Council) to do the field research in ECU (Edith

Cowan University) located in Perth, West Australia. Motivated and exhilarated, I begin

to write the thesis with my witness in Perth, including the written material I get from the

library and the oral interview with some scholars.

Although the study of Nene Gare and her representative work The Fringe Dwellers

is prevalent both in Australia and in other western countries, its research in China is still

in its embryonic stage. In the western world, the influence of the novel is far-reaching

and epoch-making. However, it has little impact in respect of Australia literature study

in China. In the process of doing my literature review, I only find one paper refer to

Nene Gare in Journal of Anhui University. The author Chen Zhengfa introduces many

Australian women writers and their fiction, among whom he mentions that Nene Gare

in her writings always shows her concern on Aboriginal people’s lives. It is a bit

regretful that I could only find the above general statement about Nene Gare. In this

sense, it is a creative and even challenging job for me to explore this field, via which

one more Australian writer and her works can be better known in China. So in the

following part I would like to brief the writer Nene Gare and her works respectively.

An Interpretation of Indigenous Female Images in The Fringe Dwellers

1.1 Nene Gare and her Works

Nene Gare (1919-1994), one of Australia’s unique female white writers, was born

in Doris Violet May Wadham, the daughter of John Henry Wadham and Mary Wadham.

She was deeply influenced by her family education and actually she grew up in an

extended family, just as the protagonist Triby did in her novel The Fringe Dwellers. She

was brought up in Adelaide and educated at Adelaide Art School and Perth Technical

School. As a white girl, although the family was not very rich, she accepted good

education at her time. After graduation, Gare worked as a typist in Adelaide from 1938

to 1939. The year 1939 saw her love with Frank Ellis Gare when she was on a visit to

Perth and they married two years later. The happy marriage and harmonious relations

with her husband created good atmosphere for her independent work and the later

composition. Between 1939 and 1942 she worked as a typist with H.V. McKay Massey

Harris Pty Ltd. in Perth. From 1946 on, Gare accompanied her husband to Salamaua,

Papua New Guinea, where he was employed as a patrol officer. After that they moved to

Carnarvon, West Australia, where they operated a banana plantation.

From her experience, we can see that she has a relatively smooth path not only in

school but also in her following career. As we know, she lives in the white society and

accepts good education. Then what stimulates her to write a novel on Aboriginal people?

The later incident can give us the answer. From 1952 to 1954 Frank Gare was employed

as District Officer with the Native Welfare Department in Carnarvon, and in Geraldton

from 1954 to 1962. This decade cultivated her to be a prolific novelist. It was in

Geraldton, where many Aboriginal people lived, that she witnessed the Aboriginal

people’s living condition, their talking, their behavior, their living style, their happiness

and sadness. Another hotbed for her writing inspiration came from her husband, Frank

Gare, who was Regional Officer of Native Welfare in Geraldton. The Fringe Dwellers,

was, in fact, triggered by the shock of experience and observation of both European and

Aboriginal communities in Geraldton. “I heard of a councilor and a man in quite a high

position in Geraldton who were going regularly to the reserve to try to make the

Aboriginal girls sleep with them. In fact, I wrote a little play Never Go Quietly about it.”

This is Gare’s personal feeling when she was interviewed by Marion Campbell

(published in Fremantle Arts Review). That is to say; only through her own eyewitness

and experience in Geraldton can she display numerous vivid characters before us.

Chapter 1 Introduction

While Nene Gare’s first novel was Green Gold, her first published novel was the

one I am going to discuss, The Fringe Dwellers (1961) which depicted the interaction of

Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities in Geraldton. This novel was also filmed

by the director Bruce Beresford in 1986. I will talk about this in the next section. Later

novels involved a strong biographical feature including her first novel Green Gold

(1963) which based on her experiences when the couple managed their banana

plantation in Carnarvon, A House with Verandahs (1980) relating to her childhood in

Adelaide, and An Island Away (1981), on the life of a patrol officer's wife in Papua New

Guinea. All the novels provided a key to unlock the different aspects and stages of her

life.

Besides, Gare wrote numerous short stories, some of which were published in

Bend to the wind (1978). Working as a column writer, she also composed stories and

reviews for the Bulletin,Meanjin,the West Australian and the Canberra Times.

Not only being a novelist, Gare worked as an artist and was awarded prizes in the

Canning Art Awards for 1971, 1972, 1976 and 1978. She also participated in the

organization of People for Nuclear Disarmament and was Programme Chair for the

Geraldton Branch of the Business and Professional Women's Association.

For Nene Gare, being “hard after the truth” is the essence of her writer’s

commitment. The following quotation from an interview of her by Marion Campbell

serves as a good evidence to reveal the influence of her own outlook on her writing:

I think I’m very conscious of there always being an upper and a lower

and I object to that strenuously. The people up here always look down

on the people down here and I can’t stand it because it’s only because

they’ve been born into that particular sphere. I feel antagonistic with

people who don’t see all of a person, who will describe a person as

being just like this without the round part: humor and kindliness.

(Campbell 4).

From her own words, it’s not difficult for us to understand why she has the

determination and dedication to complete a novel based on Aboriginal people. Nene

Gare often says, “If enough people care, we will change things.” It is her endeavor,

enthusiasm, and endurance that make her a leading figure in dealing with Aboriginal

issues on behalf of most silent Aboriginal people. A white writer as she is, she could

speak, think and write for love, for justice, for equality, and for peace from the

perspective of the minority group: Aboriginal people. This kind of frankness and

fraternity could move most of her readers including me. In return, the success of the

An Interpretation of Indigenous Female Images in The Fringe Dwellers

novel itself and the later adapted featured movie both give her applause and

appreciation.

1.2 The Fringe Dwellers

The Fringe Dwellers is undoubtedly Nene Gare’s major work. It certainly gains

wide critical acclaim from both the non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal communities.

Compared with her biographical novel A House with Verandahs, which is essentially

about her own life and family when she is growing up, this work, is a useful and

important novel to compare the upbringing of white children with that of the Indigenous

children. In my thesis I will not compare these two novels, though for Nene Gare herself,

it’s a meaningful and magnificent job to expose, from a white perspective, the truth of

Aboriginal life to readers. As a matter of fact, she has her own explanation towards

writing the novel. When discussing The Fringe Dwellers in the interview with Marion

Campbell, published in Fremantle Arts Review in 1986, Gare says:

I couldn’t have done it if I’d been brought up in a very wealthy

household, I couldn’t have understood. I did understand because I was

brought up in more or less the same way (Campbell 5).

Here “more or less the same way” only refers to the same extent of lack of material

possession, rather than the spiritual treatment, for the Indigenous children are vulnerable

to be looked down upon by the society. Yet, to the spiritual level, they live totally

different lives. When asked about the motivation to write the novel, Gare answers like

this:

I wrote about another culture because nobody else had and I was

shocked at the attitude of white people to part-Aboriginals. I had a

desire to let people know what was happening to the Aboriginal

population in my small town, the awful treatment by most whites of

black people. In my memory I hear Aboriginal people talking. I hear it

and I type what I hear. I wrote about incidents I knew had happened. I

simply sat down and wrote about the people I knew. Every character is

one I know personally. (ibid. 5).

It is because Nene Gare makes a breakthrough in 1961 with her first published

novel The Fringe Dwellers that she says she is the first person to write another culture.

Actually earlier novelists like Katherine Susannah Prichard in Coonardoo (1929),

Xavier Herbert in Capricornia (1938), and Donald Stuart in Yandy (1959) all have ever

introduced Aboriginal themes and characters in outback settings (Mattingley 23).

Chapter 1 Introduction

Different from them, Gare confronts readers with the situation of urban Aboriginal

people, which lays a solid foundation for the development of her story. This also

explains why the title of the novel is named The Fringe Dwellers, because they try to

escape from the reserve and do successfully live in the township with the urban people

as their neighbour, although finally they have to return to the state of fringe dwelling.

The Fringe Dwellers draws on knowledge gained from the Aboriginal community

when Gare lives in Geraldton (as previously stated) between 1954 and 1962, after her

husband is stationed there as District Officer for Native Welfare. Gare’s empathy for the

disadvantaged in society is reflected in her dedication to promote understanding of

Aboriginal people’s attitudes through her writing. When interviewed by Giulia Giuffre

in 1985, later published in A Writing Life in 1990, she says:

Everyone has a job, don’t you think? Mine has been such a little job:

making poorer people known to anyone who reads me and trying to

make them understand what it’s like to be poor and what it’s like to be

Aboriginal (Giuffre 16).

The Fringe Dwellers, published in 1961, is set in Geraldton in order to portray the

lives of the Aboriginal people whom Gare knows to be then living on the fringes of

country towns. The novel is based on a number of Aboriginal people she has met and

becomes friendly with in Geraldton. This has been confirmed by Frank Gare in an

interview on 29 June 1997. He says then that it is while he is District Officer for the

Native Welfare Department in Geraldton, between 1954 and 1962, that his wife writes

The Fringe Dwellers. It is during this period that his wife becomes acquainted with a lot

of Aboriginal men and women: “They had to pass our house to reach the town from the

reserve where they lived. And it was not unusual for me to arrive home from work to

find Nene entertaining her Aboriginal friends, while they were enjoying the inevitable

cup of hot tea” (Squarcini 108).

It is seen that the truthfulness of the novel makes it more reasonable and readable

both in the eyes of non-Aborigines and Aborigines. The Fringe Dwellers is centered on

one Aboriginal family: the Comeaways Family. It initiates the story with two

part-Aboriginal sisters, Noonah and Trilby, who return from the mission life to rejoin

their parents living on a reserve on the outskirts of a Western Australian country town.

Their younger siblings, Stella and Bartie, still remain at the mission, although later they

also come back and rejoin the family. The Comeaways stands for an Aboriginal family

who fight to preserve their togetherness at a time in history when young children in the

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Chapter1Introduction1Chapter1IntroductionFromtheperspectivesofpost-colonialismandfeminism,thethesisisbuiltuponathoroughresearchontwoIndigenousfemaleimagesinthenovelTheFringeDwellerswrittenbyNeneGarein1961.Throughanin-depthexplorationofthediscrepanciesdisplayedinthepersonalitiesandpsychologicalelemen...

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