Abstract
Concluding his brief account of castaway James Murrells’s (also spelled Morrill) return to Australian settler society in 1863 after living with Aborigines for 17 years, popular colonial chronicler James Bonwick notes that this man’s insight into Aboriginal life rendered him surprisingly ineffectual as a mediating influence between Aboriginal Australians and British colonial settlers. Bonwick writes, “The blacks mistrust the deserter of their camp fires; and the whites threaten him already with deadly hostility for supposed confederation with the natives to the injury of the flocks.”1 Bonwick admits his regret over the failed connection. Nevertheless, first-hand accounts of lost-and-found travelers like Murrells become, despite their failure at promoting cultural negotiation, the basis for Bonwick’s subsequent ethnographic account of Aboriginal manners and customs. For Bonwick, the preservation of such ethnographic insights offers a response to what was believed to be the imminent disappearance of Aboriginal peoples.
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Notes
James Bonwick, The Wild White Man and the Blacks of Victoria (Melbourne: Fergusson and Morre, 1863), 17.
Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 176, 177.
Edmund Gregory, Narrative of James Murrells’ (“Jemmy Morrill”) Seventeen Years’ Exile among the Wild Blacks of North Queensland and His Life and Shipwreck and Terrible Adventures among Savage Tribes; Their Manners, Customs, Languages, and Superstitions; also Murrells’ Rescue and Return to Civilization (Brisbane: Printed by Edmund Gregory, 1896). The narrative was originally published in 1863. This 1896 revised edition is the one to which I will refer in this essay unless otherwise noted.
Henry Reynolds, Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers, and Land (New South Wales: Allen and Unwin, 1996), 104, 108. See also Chapter 4, where Reynolds details opposition to frontier abuses of Aboriginal people.
Samuel Sidney, The Three Colonies of Australia: New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia; Their Pastures, Copper Mines, and Gold Fields (London: Ingram, 1852), viii–ix.
Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 122, 130, 137.
See also Mary Louise Pratt, “Scratches on the Face of the Country; or, What Mr. Barrow saw in the land of the Bushmen,” in Defining Travel: Diverse Visions, ed. Susan L. Roberson (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 132–152, 133. Pratt discusses how ethnographers’ language of manners and customs serves as “a normalizing discourse, whose work is to codify difference, to fix the Other in a timeless present” that is unaffected by the observing eye of the explorer. Under the weight of this discourse, difference and distance become fixed and stable concepts.
Charles Barrett, White Black Fellows: The Strange Adventures of Europeans Who Lived among Savages (Melbourne: Hallcraft Publishing Co., 1948), 39.
Gregory refers to: James Morrill, Sketch of a Residence among the Aboriginals of Northern Queensland for Seventeen Years: Being a Narrative of My Life, Shipwreck, Landing, on the Coast, Residence among the Aboriginals, with an Account of Their Manners and Customs, and Mode of Living; together with Notices of Many of the Natural Productions, and of the Nature of the Country/by James Morrill (Brisbane: Courier General Printing Office, 1863).
Michael Titlestad and Mike Kissack, “The persistent castaway in South African writing,” Postcolonial Studies 10.2 (2007), 191–218, 192, 197.
Kay Schaffer, In the Wake of First Contact: The Eliza Fraser Stories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 49, 50.
James Morrill, 17 Years Wandering among the Aboriginals (Australia: David Welch, 2006). This edition contains a reprint of the original 1864 edition of Sketch of a Residence among the Aboriginals of Northern Queensland for Seventeen Years by James Morrill.
Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 66.
Simon Ryan, The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 137.
David Malouf, Remembering Babylon (New York: Vintage, 1993), 43.
Penelope Ingram, “Racializing Babylon: Settler Whiteness and the ‘New Racism’”: New Literary History 32 (2001), 157–176, 159, 161.
Nikos Papastergiadis, “David Malouf and Languages for Landscape: An Interview,” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 25.3 (July 1994), 83–94, 92.
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© 2015 Robert T. Tally Jr.
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Kelly, K. (2015). Dangerous Insight: (Not) Seeing Australian Aborigines in the Narrative of James Murrells . In: Tally, R.T. (eds) The Geocritical Legacies of Edward W. Said. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137487209_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137487209_9
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