AustLit

Author's abstract: George Augustus Robinson, the 'Great Conciliator', conducted one of the most high profile and subsequently notorious experiments with indigenous people in the nineteenth-century British Empire. His 'removal' of Tasmanian Aborigines from the settler-dominated main island was well known at the time: celebrated by many as the most efficacious resolution to frontier conflict, even as it was criticized by (some) liberal commentators. Robinson was acutely aware of himself as an actor on the imperial stage, boasting in his diary on 3 September 1832 that, 'By taking the whole [group of Aborigines] I gain not only the reward but also celebrity' (Friendly Mission). As Patrick Brantlinger argues, colonial, American, European and British commentators were acutely interested in the fate of indigenous peoples when they encountered white, Western civilization: the Tasmanian genocide (as it was known) 'offered a moral and political lesson in how the progress of empire and civilization could be badly botched'. Ideas about Robinson and his 'mission' to the Tasmanian Aborigines have circulated in popular culture and art since the 1830s. A variety of mechanisms have kept Robinson in the popular imagination. Benjamin Duterrau's portrait of Robinson in 'The Conciliation' memorably pictures a soft-faced Briton surrounded by his Aboriginal 'charges', but colonial and imperial commentators positioned Robinson equally often within the racial science of high imperialism. Alongside such representations, Robinson and the Tasmanian Aborigines were envisioned by popular newspapers, pamphleteers and writers in the Victorian economy's commodification of Empire. These imaginings of Robinson were as vigorous in the imperial centres as in the colonies, and have continued to be so. Twentieth-century authors - from Robert Drewe, to Mudrooroo, to Matthew Kneale, to Stephen Scheding and Nicholas Shakespeare - seem compelled to re-imagine Robinson's story. This paper examines Robinson's colonial celebrity and its postcolonial aftermath through theories of mass media and celebrity.

Author's abstract: Within the international field of contemporary Anglophone travel writing Bruce Chatwin looms large as a celebrity traveller and writer. This paper tracks Chatwin's celebrity through various fields, examining his most enduring and controversial book The Songlines (1987) to analyse how its representation of Aboriginality contributes to the mythologization of the author. The essay makes two claims. The first is that the discourses through which Songlines values Aboriginality coincide with those employed to represent its narrator and author, and consequently contribute to the celebrity persona of 'Bruce Chatwin'. Moreover, the representation of Aboriginality and celebrity in Songlines is compatible with a discourse within contemporary consumer culture that putatively eschews consumerism and gestures nostalgically to romantic notions of self and other even as it exploits the exotic manifestations of Aboriginality as cultural commodity. The second and related claim is that Chatwin's celebrity performs a specific function within the context of the postcolonial field of cultural production. Chatwin's celebrity functions to resolve the dissonance created by competing regimes of value through which Aboriginality as a symbolic commodity is defined. In this regard, Chatwin, as celebrity traveller, performs a role akin to that Pierre Bourdieu ascribes to cultural intermediaries. As such, Chatwin does not necessarily provide non-Aboriginal readers with 'knowledge' about Aboriginal culture; rather, his public persona provides his readers with an example of how to manage the conflicting values attributed to Aboriginality within national and transnational postcolonial public spheres.