AustLit

'This thesis examines the different ways in which representations of A. O. Neville—Chief Protector of Aborigines / Commissioner of Native Affairs in Western Australia from 1915 to 1940—operate in a select group of texts. I argue that Neville is a highly charged synecdochic figure who stands in, discursively, for all white, bureaucratic administrators, in order to distil changing anxieties about Australia and its past. I examine key texts from Neville’s own writing to a range of more recent, fictional texts. I utilise a postcolonial approach in my analysis of the figure of Neville, through a reading of his continuing incarnations in Australian literature and culture. This project seeks to do with A.O. Neville what Kay Schaffer’s In the Wake of First Contact: The Eliza Fraser Stories did with Eliza Fraser.'  (Publication abstract)