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'This essay attempts to outline the relationship between the 'raw nerves' that Denis Byrne describes in the epigraph above, and the cultivation of 'indifference' that Stanner identifies as being characteristic of 'European life' in Australia. Here I situate indifference as numbing the 'jangling' of 'raw nerves' and as cultivated, disseminated and feeding specific forms of public secrecy. How did the white men who enforces segregation by day and pursued Aboriginal women by night manage their 'jangling nerves, if indeed they did jangle? How did they manage to be seen and known and have their secrets kept for them, as much as by them. How did this contradiction of segregation and sexual intimacy, if indeed it is a contradiction, work, My hope is that if we can understand how the white men (and those around them), regulated these jangling nerves, then we might be able to understand the relationship between indifference, public secrecy and the biopolitical forms that Australian whiteness took in the twentieth century, and specifically in the period of assimilation, extending from the 1930s to, roughly, the end of the 1960s.' (Author's introduction p. 57)
Notes
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Epigraph:
Some of the white men in country towns who would specially discriminate against Aborigines by day, under the cover of darkness would slip out to the Aboriginal Reserve or fringe camp looking for sex with Aboriginal women...This ambivalence, the jangling of coexistence with the same individuals of Aversion and attraction, desire and repulsion, itself constitutes one of the raw nerves of race relations. (Byrne 185)
[O]ne cannot make full human sense of the development of European life in Australia without reference to the structure of racial relations and the persistent indifference to the fate of Aborigines. (Stanner 118)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Last amended 2 Mar 2012 12:47:11
57-75
White Closets, Jangling Nerves and the Biopolitics of the Public Secret
Australian Literary Studies
Subjects:
- Freedom Ride : A Freedom Rider Remembers 2002 single work autobiography
- My Place 1990 extract autobiography
- Recasting Sally Morgan's My Place : the Dictionality of Identity and the Phenomenology of the Converso 1998 single work criticism
- Wongi Wongi : To Speak 2001 single work autobiography
- Isabel Flick : The Many Lives of an Extraordinary Aboriginal Woman 2004 single work autobiography
- Sister Girl : The Writings of Aboriginal Activist and Historian Jackie Huggins 1998 selected work prose interview essay biography
- Wherever I Go : Myles Lalor's 'Oral History' 2000 single work autobiography
- Born in the Cattle : Aborigines in Cattle Country 1987 single work prose
- Journey to the Stone Country 2002 single work novel
- Talkin' Up to the White Woman : Aboriginal Women and Feminism 2000 single work criticism
- From Diggers to Drag Queens : Configurations of Australian National Identity 2001 single work criticism
- Some Whites Are Whiter Than Others: The Whitefella Skin Politics of Xavier Herbert and Cecil Cook 2007 single work criticism
- Through My Eyes 1978 single work life story
- Nowhere People : How International Race Thinking Shaped Australia's Identity 2005 single work autobiography
- The Dreaming and Other Essays 2009 selected work criticism
- Boss Drover : Stories Related to the Author by Matt Savage 1971 single work prose
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