[In the following excerpt, Healy presents a brief overview of nineteenth-century literary works that represent white Australian contact with Aborigines, and goes on to assess this process in regard to James Tucker's novel Ralph Rashleigh.]

Literature is concerned with the problems of meaning and reality. There are sub-forms of literature whose major purpose is entertainment and where the energies of the writer move toward the distortion of meaning and the subversion of reality. Australia had a rash of romantic fictions from the 1830s on. The historian and novelist Marjorie Barnard appropriately described them as “onlooker books”.¹ The recipe for an Australian novel, according to Mrs R. Lee's Adventures in Australia (1851), was a quick read through Stokes, Grey, Sturt, and Eyre, followed by a visit to the Royal Gardens at Kew for a review of Australian plant life.² Frank Fowler in Southern Lights and Shadows welcomed the novels of William Howitt and Charles Reade and the occasional reference to Australia in Dickens: “Our fictionists have fallen upon the soil of Australia, like so many industrious diggers,” he wrote, “and, though merely scratching and fossicking on the surface, have turned up much precious and malleable stuff.”³ It was pleasant “to find Romance thus transmuting the land of sharp and sheer Reality”.⁴ The Aborigine was part of the malleable stuff of this sub-literature, but the whole output was void of seriousness.

The early literature of Australia tried to perform the same function that literature performed in a metropolitan country: to discover some meaning in the world around it. Literature is a search for meaning by an individual, which becomes meaning for the writer and his society. The Austrian social philosopher Alfred Schutz has made a helpful observation:

Meaning … is not a quality inherent in certain experiences emerging within our stream of consciousness but the result of an interpretation of a past experience looked at from the present Now with a reflective attitude. As long as I live in my acts, directed toward the objects of these acts, the acts do not have any meaning. They become meaningful if I grasp them as well-circumscribed experiences of the past and, therefore, in retrospection. Only experiences which can be recollected beyond their actuality and which can be questioned about their constitution are, therefore, subjectively meaningful.⁵

Most of the contact experiences we have described between Aborigines and white men in the first half-century did not contain meaning in Schutz's sense of the term. The reflective attitude was absent. Even when Lloyd remembers an experience it yields no meaning to him. There are considerable difficulties in handling the materials dealing with early contact. It is often difficult to achieve focus or continuity. Most of the men with relevant experience were, in Schutz's words, living in their acts, directed toward the objects of these acts, acts that do not have any meaning. The Myall Creek massacre trials were a good example of this process; the debate on the Protectorate was another. The Pinjarra massacre, like many others on the continent, has remained silent, at the level of act. Governor Stirling lived in his actions of destruction; whatever meaning might have emerged from Pinjarra was stifled.⁶

Schutz has clarified the process by which experience is made subjectively meaningful: experience, reflection, reconstitution. The issue is one of bringing one's experience of a specific object, or event, to a degree of focused consciousness and of working that consciousness up to a distinct reality. Charles Harpur provides an example of this process:

The following abstract from a song that was popular amongst certain of the inhabitants of Windsor during the author's boyhood is humorously illustrative of this particular. The song itself was a rather lugubrious description of the unpleasant surprises experienced by some newly arrived convict during the first week or so of his assignment,

Next morning as I lay a-bed,
A thinking of my woe,
I hears a something near the crib
                    Begin to ha and hoo;
By jingo! what is that? says I
                    It gave me such a shock!
Why, laughing answered an old chum,
That 'eres the Settler's Clock.

Singularly enough, it was the above rude and vulgar stanzas that more forceably than anything else impressed upon me the fact, that to make any matter, of what kind so ever, the subject of set or artistic thought, is not only to exalt, but in some degree to cleanse it—to lift it into both a higher and a purer state of being; and that in this one fact itself we come upon the underlying or fundamental charm of all poetry, and indeed, of all that is properly called literature.⁷

Literature, for Harpur, was the construction of an important reality, the transformation of experience by the discovery of meaning in it. Although “The Settler's Clock” seems to contradict it, Harpur was sceptical of the popular song as a serious form. In his manuscript notes he quoted an Irish song of the period, and dismissed it as “the slap rhyming of an illiterate Pindar … If any direct meaning does happen to result from the slap dashery, it is well; if not, meaning—actual meaning is an element in the affair that was by no means bargained for.”⁸

The distinction Harpur sought to make was important in nineteenth-century Australia, where the popular ballad became a dominant cultural form. Harpur did not resent the ballad or the popular song; he simply felt obliged to defend his own kind of poetry. Toward the end of the century Joseph Furphy found himself in a similar argument, which revolved around the figure of Robert Burns. Furphy argued for the primacy of a moral sense in Burns: an individual power “which enables the possessor to see through traditional usage, early training, recognizing the primary truth thereby hidden from his contemporaries. … And on this impregnable foundation rests Burns's title to the name of poet. The minstrel is good in his place; the poet is better, and the poet's place is co-extensive with human habitation.”⁹

The perception of truth, for Furphy, established the fundamental humanity of man. What man means is tied up with how man sees. The poet, in Blake's words, cleanses the doors of perception. “The morality of poetry”, said Harpur, “is exactly correspondent to its integrity.”¹⁰ The morality and integrity of literature were most seriously tested in nineteenth-century Australia by the Aborigines, Malinowski's “third cultural reality”. The meaning of that particular reality was a vexed question. It can only be understood by a sense of what is involved in meaning as the reflection and reconstitution of experience. Meaning, in this context, is not a Platonic or transcendent entity. It is, essentially, the sum of meanings which the Aborigines had for specific Australians, at specific times, in specific works.

To the extent that meaning has a reflective character, it is not surprising that it has a retrospective and an individual character. In all cases, in the nineteenth century, the authentic literature dealing with European experience of the Aborigine was written after the moment of contact. This was inevitable.

The problem of meaning is associated with the problem of reality. The question to resolve is not that of reality itself, but of how certain experiences take on the character of the real for the person who undergoes them. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, in their book The Social Construction of Reality, are helpful in this matter. Everyday reality, they point out, is a set of recurring and unquestioned procedures for most people. This kind of reality becomes visible only when it becomes problematic. Even then, many problems can be handled inside a conventional rubric. It is those situations which go beyond the boundaries of accommodation that cause trouble.¹¹ Race has, traditionally, been a boundary, and hence a problematic phenomenon, in most modern societies. The fact and values of the Aborigine constituted a disruption of ordinary reality in nineteenth-century Australia.

A situation that triggers off consciousness becomes, by definition, the subject of that consciousness. A person in this predicament falls into a stance toward everyday reality that transforms it into something different, more abbreviated, and in subsequent interrogation, more profound. Berger and Luckmann make a distinction: everyday reality they describe as the paramount reality; other realities exist as enclaves inside it and are characterized as finite provinces of meaning.¹² One is interested in the term finite province of meaning, because it gathers up what Schutz and Harpur were interested in—meaning—and attaches to it the terms finite and province. “All finite provinces of meaning are characterized by a turning away of attention from the reality of everyday life, and one of the important jobs of the writer is to interpret the co-existence of this reality with the reality enclaves into which they have ventured.”¹³ W. H. Auden called these provinces of meaning secondary worlds. “Present in every human being are two desires, a desire to know the truth about the primary world, the given world outside ourselves in which we are born, live, love, hate and die, and the desire to make new secondary worlds of our own or, if we cannot make them ourselves, to share the secondary worlds of those who can.”¹⁴ The creation of secondary worlds is profoundly important for those who construct them. It is a desire which is a compulsion. There are different intensities of engagement and consciousness possible with these secondary worlds. In a Proust, a Joyce, or a Mallarmé, the fabric of consciousness itself has become problematic; in the case of a Rolf Boldrewood or a James Tucker, only intermittent aspects of reality at intermittent points in time become problematic. Consequently, there is often a flawed interplay between primary and secondary worlds in these Australian writers which would not be smoothed out in Australia until the twentieth century and the advent of a novelist like Patrick White.

This discussion of meaning and reality in relation to literature has importance for a discussion of the Aborigine. George Taplin in his book The Narrinyeri (1874) spent a number of pages giving reminiscences of the Aborigines of South Australia. “I have related these anecdotes of the Narrinyeri,” he wrote, “because I want to enable the reader to have some idea of the people whose customs we describe hereafter. I wish to make them live in his imagination.”¹⁵ His abbreviated anecdotes do momentarily bring the Narrinyeri to life, but the Aborigines would only adequately live in the Australian imagination inside those imaginative structures which, in opening up to the Aborigine, would find the Aborigine opening up to them.

The Aborigine is experienced in a context which disturbs conventional assumption; he is isolated as a subject of reflection; in the case of a writer, this is artistic reflection, which enables the writer to re-create the meaning of that experience. The interrogation of the meaning takes place in, and through, a work of art, which is its attempt to guarantee the reality of that experience to that writer.

The relevant examples from nineteenth-century Australia can be outlined; Harpur was present at the Myall Creek executions and returns to the massacre in his poetry; the convict novelist James Tucker projected the Aborigine into his escapist fantasies in Ralph Rashleigh; Rolf Boldrewood attempted to articulate, in his novels, his experiences with the Aborigines of Western Victoria in the forties; Rosa Campbell Praed was present, as a child, at the tribal preparations for the Fraser massacre at Hornet Bank station in 1857, returning to this traumatic event again and again in her novels; George Gordon McCrae was haunted by childhood memories of the tribes around Arthur's Seat and spent a lifetime trying to reach into the imaginative world of Aboriginal mythology; Henry Kendall oscillated between sentimentality and dismissal; James Brunton Stephens, the new chum at Tamrookam station near Brisbane, created, out of his displacement, poems of casual viciousness about detribalized Aborigines; Joseph Furphy threw his mind back to his childhood and his parents' memories to grasp the historical meaning of contact in Melbourne of the forties. These were the main attempts of white Australia to understand the Aborigine in the nineteenth century. Strictly speaking, of course, what was to be understood was not the Aborigine himself, but diverse white experiences of the Aborigine. If this had been done with integrity, a genuine understanding of the Aborigine himself might have been attained.

It is not difficult to trace those attempts which sought to attribute meaning to the Aborigine without reality, and those which registered a reality without meaning. Alfred Dudley (1830) and G. W. Rusden's Moyarra (1851), are examples of the first. A Mother's Offering to Her Children (1841) is an instance of the second.

A Mother's Offering to Her Children, written by “A Lady Long Resident in New South Wales”, was supposed to be the first children's book published in the colonies. It is a naïve work. The section “Anecdotes of the Aborigines of New South Wales” is a list of Gothic horrors, but even in its silliness it represents a kind of explanation and a way of perceiving what was happening to the Aborgine:

MRS. S:
—“Little Sally, the black child has been accidentally killed.”
CLARA:
—“Oh! Mamma, do you know how?”
MRS. S:
—“She was playing in the barn, which is only a temporary one; and pulled down a heavy prop of wood upon herself. It fell on her temple; and killed her immediately.”
EMMA:
—“Do you not think her mother will be very sorry, when she hears of it?”
MRS. S:
—“Alas! my dear children, her mother also met with an untimely death. These poor uncivilized people, most frequently meet with some deplorable end, through giving away to unrestrained passions.”
JULIUS:
—“Oh! do tell all you know about little Sally and her mother; if you please, Mamma? It will make the evening pass so pleasantly; and I will be drawing plenty of animals, to fill the little menagerie I am making.”(16)

Mrs S. goes on to regale the children with an account of mother and child confined to death, destruction, burials, and disinterments. A couple of sample beginnings illustrate the lady's turn of mind:

The son of a cottager residing at Wingebo, saw the ground had been lately dug up in the bush, not far from where they lived; curiosity led him to examine into the cause; when he found the body of a little black infant; he ran home with it, saying “Look mother, I have found a little black baby.” His mother made him take it back instantly; and bury it as it was before. …¹⁷

Dr. F. wanted one of the blacks to dig up the bones of a black. …¹⁸

The brutal consequence of European intrusion for the Aborigine comes through these anecdotes strongly, as does the triviality of Mrs S's response. A reality, albeit a grotesque, refracted one, filters through this account; meaning, comprehension of this reality, is totally absent.

The converse is true in the case of Alfred Dudley. This anonymous novel was heavily dependent on Robert Dawson's Present State of Australia, the account by the agent of the Australian Company at Port Stephens in the 1820s. It is unlikely, however, that Dawson wrote Alfred Dudley. The tone of the two books is different, and Dawson's experience of the Aborigines is nowhere manifested in the novel. Alfred Dudley is a didactic work, and Dawson's observations are absorbed into a thesis. The thesis is that England has degenerated. Overpopulation, poverty, and an exploiting class of the new rich have destroyed the country. Alfred Dudley is the son of a benevolent squire destroyed by a grasping banker friend. Dudley Park, with its contented peasantry and established Church, is destroyed. The contrived plot sends Alfred to Australia to recoup family fortunes. He does so, earns a title, and resolves to bring out to Australia the intact, salvaged community of Dudley Park. The result is a grafting of Edmund Burke's conservatism and Edmund Gibbon Wakefield's pragmatic visions:

About a mile from their own habitation—now stood a large and busy town, containing many thriving trades and manufactures, and peopled with a happy population. Midway the spire of the village church was seen, near to which was the picturesque dwelling of Henry Carlton. A little distance from this was the school, in which the white and black children were, without any distinction, admitted. On one side, in a sloping valley, was the neatly built village peculiarly appropriated to the natives.¹⁹

The structure of the plot and the shaping of its emphases attaches Alfred Dudley to those other Anglo-Australian novels, of which The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn (1859) remains the exemplar, in which Australia offers a residential hospitality to the nostalgic dreams of a displaced gentleman class, caught in the pressures of industrial England. It represented the play of a genuine consciousness around an idea of what Australia might become, and is of interest to the extent that its idyll accommodated the Aborigine and his children with a squirarchal dignity. Alfred Dudley gives us imposed meaning drained of any reality. Its value is that it reveals the strength to be gained from a stabilized sense of society and history.

G. W. Rusden's Moyarra is a poem; it was written in Australia as early as 1841, by a young man who would have a distinguished career in the colony. The touchstone of reality was more available to Rusden than to the author of Alfred Dudley, but the meaning he brought to bear on his experiences was remarkably similar.

Rusden had been brought to Australia in 1834, when his father, a clergyman, settled with his family in Maitland. At twenty-two he was managing Charles Nicholson's property at Mingay, near Gundagai; from the Murrumbidgee he moved to the Lachlan, from there to the Goulburn district.²⁰ He was sympathetic to the Aborigines he met, and spoke an Aboriginal language. Moyarra was written at odd moments at night camps. A glimpse of this world may be found in a note he wrote in the flyleaf of a copy of Threlkeld's An Australian Grammar (1834), which he bought in London in 1883:

This book came into my hands. I once had a copy which was burned with all my possessions in a hut when I was a boy. I was away and the hut was burned in order to murder the overseer who slept in the hut (in the hills) during my absence.

That attempt failed, but he was murdered shortly afterwards and eventually the chief accomplice was hanged.²¹

Moyarra is a simple narrative. The hero, Moyarra, is a young man who falls in love with Mytah. Since she is betrothed to another man, the match is against tribal law. Moyarra and Mytah elope. They are tracked down and killed. Rusden's expressed motive was to record the primitive life of the Aborigine, something unknown to the majority of white men. What emerges is a little different. Moyarra is a representative of love and nobility; he is destroyed by society. He is an Australian Adam dying in an Australian Eden, and his passing is connected to the passing of his people. This is not entirely consistent, and one begins to recognize what is happening when, toward the end of the poem, Rusden switches from the nostalgia of Moyarra's death to a more personal nostalgia:

Thus far have I essayed to trace
The lives, the loves, of that dark race.
(Chequered the tale, and frought with ill.
For frail is bliss, life human still.)
Heirs of the land where I must pine
Reflecting that it is not mine.(22)

Both Moyarra and Rusden are “strangers in the land”. Moyarra has been forced from his land, as Rusden has been from his. Rusden extended his footnote annotation of this theme in the 1891 edition of the poem. The serpent that has fallen on England, to which Rusden cannot return, is reform and democracy. He is giving us a whiff of Disraeli's Two Englands, in which the working class is replaced, in the Australian context, by the Aborigine. The Aborigine and the Gentleman become the outcasts of Australia Felix inside a momentary fantasy.

The reverie of Alfred Dudley, which placed the Aborigine on the periphery of an organic community, was the nostalgic reflex action of the disappointed gentry of the twenties; the reverie which brought Rusden and Moyarra together in “An Australian Legend” on the Lachlan, in the forties, was a similar negative impulse. There was an important difference. What the author of Alfred Dudley saw, with clarity, as a social phenomenon, was fractured into something personal and heavily psychological in Rusden. This transition makes more sense in the context of English social history than in Australian history,²³ with the result that Moyarra is a stranded, anachronistic work. The Aborigine was drawn into the backward glances of an English gentleman class and given a privileged, paternalistic place in its view of society. Rusden was a representative of this impulse in Australia. One has the impression of a young man at his night camps, with his Aboriginal companions, reflective on his exile, not yet reconciled to Australia, feeling that the odd men out in the colonial environment were the Aborigines, as the authentic inhabitants, and himself, as a young Englishman abroad in New South Wales, with a Tory temperament and Australianist sympathies. Reflection in Moyarra was a difficult ritual of placement, in which the Aborigine was clasped in a momentary, ideological embrace.

Rusden, like the author of Alfred Dudley, took his terms of order from the defined limits of English society. One can detect, in Moyarra, the urbane presence of Rusden's father's sermons, the classical culture of an English gentleman, and the engaged experience of a man who knew his way around the bush. The first two influences banished the third to the notes of the poem. Reality was displaced; whatever meaning was salvaged was, to take advantage of David Riesman's term, otherderived.

The first serious attempt to derive meaning from the reality with which it was engaged occurred in the work of James Tucker. His novel, Ralph Rashleigh, was his attempt to find order in his experience, to salvage some meaning from his convict existence. Tucker's novel is clearly a sustained secondary world, it satisfies Berger and Luckmann's conception of a finite province of meaning, and in it we can see that “interpretation of a past experience looked at from the present Now with a reflective attitude”, of which Schutz spoke. The procedure of this study will be to examine the meaning which the Aborigine came to have inside the finite worlds of various Australian fictions. This is likely to give us a close picture of the kind of consciousness that the Australian imagination has had of the Aborigine.

James Tucker arrived in Australia as a convict in 1827. He died in the Liverpool asylum in 1866. His life in New South Wales was one of trivial misdemeanours which frequently cost him his tickets of leave. When he completed the manuscript of Ralph Rashleigh on 31 December 1845, he was storekeeper to the superintendent at Port Macquarie. Colin Roderick summed up his situation: “The establishment there was a tottering relic of a vanishing system. Its convict personnel of a few hundred lost souls contained only 30 men sound in wind and limb.”²⁴ It was a depressing environment, but it gave Tucker a chance to write. His three-year stay at Port Macquarie was an oasis of peace, after twenty years of ups and downs in New South Wales. He pulled the threads of his scattered existence together in Ralph Rashleigh, and in doing so, became the historian and the psychologist of convictism.

Convicts had contact with the Aborigines. The white blackfellow was usually an escaped convict. The relations between the two groups, however, was complex. From the beginning the Aborigines looked upon the convicts as a kind of white slave. The brutality of the more violent convicts appalled them. The convicts, especially in places of secondary punishment, like Moreton Bay and Newcastle, looked at the Aborigine with a mixture of envy and hatred. James Roche, in his life of John Boyle O'Reilly, caught an aspect of this response in Western Australia:

The scum of civilization amid which O'Reilly was anchored lay just above the depths of primitive savagery; there was no intermediate layer. But there was one immeasurable gulf between the naked savage and the branded outcast of civilization. The savage was free. The white man envied him, as one who drowns may envy him who swims in the dangerous waves. The savage was free, because he could live in the bush.²⁵

Tucker made a statement about Rashleigh that is likely to have been true of himself: “Our adventurer, in the course of his rambles in New South Wales, had not omitted to satisfy his curiosity by enquiring of all whom he thought competent to afford information upon the various manners and customs of the nomadic races of Australia.”²⁶ There is a descriptive phase of the novel which offers a general account of the customs of the Aboriginal tribe in which Rashleigh finds himself as a white blackfellow. The balance that Tucker brought to this part of the novel reflected a genuine interest in the subject itself as part of an informed, overall fascination with Australia and its history. This aspect of Tucker has attracted little attention. His play on the Rum Rebellion, his adaptation of “Billy Barlow”, his keen eye for physical and psychological detail, reveal an awareness deeply engaged in comprehension of the world into which he had been thrown. By 1845 he had spent half of his thirty-seven years in New South Wales. In the process, he had developed a shy, spectatorial irony, a historical imagination, and a sense of place, which allowed him to penetrate the realities of colonial life more than most men. His deprivation gave him access to the most profound and extensive realities of European experience on that continent. By virtue of being educated at both Stonyhurst College, Lancashire, and the agricultural training establishment at Emu Plains, he occupied a unique position: he had the ability to understand the temper of the men who ran the colony, from Gipps in Sydney to John Price at Norfolk Island; those who worked it as free immigrants, like his friend, Alexander Burnett; the convicts who carried much of it on their backs; as well as the bushrangers who terrorized it. His understanding of men and of social systems made his a privileged point of view. His account of Aboriginal customs gained considerable balance in the third part of Ralph Rashleigh from this perspective.

Colin Roderick has suggested that the bushranging and the Aboriginal sections of the novel are, on the whole, imaginary concoctions. Certainly, most writers on Australia at that time included a descriptive ethnographic account of the Aborigines, and there is internal evidence that Tucker consulted Sir Thomas Mitchell's Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia during the writing of Ralph Rashleigh. But Roderick himself entertains the undocumented possibility that Tucker may have accompanied a road party under one of Mitchell's assistant surveyors in 1830-31,²⁶ and everyone is in agreement that the most important friendship Tucker formed between 1830 and 1845 was with Alexander Burnett, who had been with Mitchell on all three of these expeditions. Tucker and Burnett saw a good deal of each other, and the subject of the Aborigines must have been a recurrent topic of conversation. This would have been especially so in 1838 when the issue of Aboriginal-white relations was agitating Sydney with an intensity unmatched before or since. The Myall Creek massacre; the activities of Major J. W. Nunn, who conducted another massacre of Aborigines in 1838 with a force of volunteer mounted police; and closer to Burnett, the Executive Council's inquiry into the punitive actions Mitchell had initiated against a group of Aborigines at Mount Dispersion in 1836; the Aborigine was at the forefront of colonial attention in an unprecedented manner. Emotions were strong; memories, nourished by conscience and indignation, were, for those with direct involvement, crisp and clear. And Alexander Burnett was directly involved.

He was Mitchell's overseer on two of the expeditions and, apart from Mitchell himself, had more direct dealings with the Aborigines than any other member of the group. It was often his job to go ahead of the party to establish formal and friendly contact. He was obliged to do this with as much self-control as he could muster, not an easy task when his earlier contacts had been dangerous. During the 1835 expedition, after a futile search for the botanist Richard Cunningham, whom everyone sensed had been killed, Burnett was surprised, near Mount Hopeless, by an Aborigine who had been surprised by him. This is Mitchell's account:

The overseer came up to me limping, and stated, that, on approaching that pond with his gun, looking for ducks, this native was there alone, sitting with his dog at a small fire; that, as soon as he saw Burnett, he yelled hideously, and running in a furious manner up the bank, immediately threw a fire-stick and one of his bommerangs, the latter of which struck Burnett on the leg, the other having passed close over his shoulders. The native still coming forward upon him with a bommerang, he discharged his piece at him in his own defence, alarmed as any man must have been under such circumstances.²⁸

Alarm of this kind accompanied the exploring party, and reached a peak on 27 May 1836, at Mount Dispersion. On that day, driven to irritation by the large number of Aborigines who were following his party, and yielding to a pervasive mixture of fear and exasperation that had seeped into his men, Mitchell sent an ambush party aside under Burnett's leadership. The Aborigines were caught between Burnett and Mitchell, one of Burnett's party opened fire, firing became general, and a number of Aborigines were killed and many wounded. Mitchell tried to argue his way out of a piece of planned strategy by blaming his convict companions and by emphasizing the malevolent intentions of the Aborigines. The culprit was probably the tension that the whole group, including Mitchell, lived under day after day, in hostile country. This tension was probably akin to the fear of the Perth lawyers in Lyon's account. However one explains this skirmish, Burnett was central to it, and that centre, for him, was an emotional one.

At the inquiry Burnett said that he had recognized individual Aborigines at Mount Dispersion from an earlier confrontation at Menindee during the second expedition of 1835. One of them had only one eye; another had extensive scars from burns. Mitchell had his own conspiracy theory to the effect that the Menindee Aborigines had crossed wide tracts of country to attack him. Again, whatever may be said on this issue, the sense of terror and immediacy is what comes through from Burnett's evidence, especially concerning the old Aborigine with one eye, who became a symbol of primordial evil for Mitchell, of genuine fear for Burnett.

The atmosphere of these events, which became at times a tangible, physical entity, found its way into Ralph Rashleigh. The one-eyed carandjie clearly did, becoming the point of fearful entry into an Aboriginal world.

We do, therefore, get an objective account of Aboriginal life and customs from Tucker, but it is an objectivity heavily tinged with the subjective texture of Burnett's recollections. It is, at this level, a mediated and personalized objectivity, malleable, capable of being pressured, under the right conditions, into the service of Tucker's own subjectivity.

These conditions emerged during the months he was writing Ralph Rashleigh. The novel, then, carries ample evidence of Tucker's objective intelligence. But, on the whole, it bears the greater pressure of his subjectivity. It is an argument, a meditation, and an apologia. Tucker was not a free agent. His adult life had been squandered; his future looked bleak. The construction of the novel reflected this. It has three sections: the first deals with his youth in England; the second with the convict world of New South Wales; the third with a four-year sojourn among the Aborigines. By 1845, the first two stages had been lived through. The third section was projective. In carrying his hopes and his uncertainties, the third section oscillates between confidence and anxiety.

The outline of this part of the novel tells us little. Rashleigh leaves white society, joins an Aboriginal tribe, and returns to white society again. The interesting moments are those concerning his exit from and re-entry into white society. At a personal and a social level, the freedom which Aboriginal society stands for in relation to the cruelty of convictism, as a representative extreme of European civilization, beckons to Rashleigh. There was no primitivism, however, about Tucker's examination of Aboriginal existence as an alternative society. The entry of Rashleigh into that society was reluctant and traumatic.

The relevant episodes begin with Rashleigh leading an escape from Newcastle. When the convicts are chased, they put into land and head for Torres Strait. Under pressure from the Aborigines a number of them are killed, and factions spring up. Tucker divides the convict party into forces of good and evil, in which Rashleigh becomes the centre, and the recording consciousness, of the good. He is the figure of honest humanity, placed in the middle of treacherous associates, and vicious behaviour. Apart from a friend, Roberts, he is opposed by McClashin, who has betrayed four other convicts to the noose, and by Phelim Hennessy:

This man used often to boast of his achievements prior to his exile in the most exulting terms, speaking of the most sanguinary deeds with a cool gusto that showed the bloodthirsty temperament of the man. He had been violently suspected since he came to the Colony of no less than three murders. …

The remaining four men, whose names were Perkins, Shaw, Hanlan, and Owens, were remarkable in no way as being either better or worse than the usual run of convicts.²⁹

Hennessy's evil is total. He expresses it toward black as well as white. At one point the group is attacked by Aborigines: “The instant that he saw their assailants retreating, [he] began to mangle the wounded wretches with his clasp-knife, as it seemed to our adventurer, needlessly prolonging their torture, until the latter and Roberts commiserated them, and put an end to their sufferings.”³⁰

This whole sequence has a dream-like quality similar to the nightmarish experience of the squatter E. Lloyd. Rashleigh, subsequently, kills Hennessy, and is left alone with a wounded Roberts. He is treated to a sight that O'Halloran would have interpreted. The Aborigines have just buried their dead after a skirmish with the Rashleigh party. “On every one of the graves also lay some part of a white man's corpse, other portions of which were strewn about in all directions, so that it appeared these revengeful savages had wreaked that vengeance upon the dead which they had been prevented from doing to the living.”³¹ Tucker has taken Rashleigh to the edge of human experience where the attempt to live one's full humanity is defeated by the brutality and indifference of white society and the violence of savage society.

The resolution of Rashleigh's impotence is sudden. Roberts and he are working on a raft one day: “the sun obscured by a yellow haze, while all nature seemed completely hushed into a state of unnatural stillness”.

“What's that dreadful noise, Roberts?” asked Ralph, looking wildly at his companion.

“Only distant thunder,” was the reply.

“Thunder!” repeated Rashleigh, gazing round at the sky. “And not a cloud to be seen!”

At this instant his eye rested upon the bend of the river just above him, and who shall attempt to analyze or describe his feelings when he saw sweeping down towards them, silently save for that moaning noise which he now too well understood, a mighty mountain of rushing waters, that stretched from bank to bank of the stream, and whose height seen from the level at which the fugitives stood was equal to that of the loftiest tree of the forest!

Short was the time permitted him to gaze upon this awful sight. Before Rashleigh could communicate his alarm to his companion, the vast volume of water was upon them like a destroying angel. Roberts was torn from the canoe, which, bursting its fastenings as though they were threads, was hurled over the falls in an instant. The crash of its parting timbers announced its destruction; and Rashleigh became insensible.³²

He recovers to find himself surrounded by Aborigines. An old man approaches. “One of his organs of vision had been utterly extinguished, leaving in its room only a raw and bloody cavity. His other eye appeared to be more than half obscured by rheum. His body was emaciated by sickness until it scarcely possessed more substance than a shadow.”³³ For a moment, his dream fears of Hennessy and of the bushranger, Foxley, crowd back on him. The carandjie peers at him, but he is not killed. The fear recedes. “All became so still and hushed around that the falling of a single leaf might with ease have been heard. The savages, as if surprised, suspended their weapons in the air.” Rashleigh enters his paradise regained as a white backfellow. The change in his physical appearance is brought about by pigments and suet, “so much that Ralph Rashleigh, though naturally of a ruddy complexion, now really differed but little in colour from any of the sable sons of the forest among whom his lot appeared to be cast”.³⁴ The mental adjustment is voluntary. “He prepared to end his days with the blacks.”³⁵

Rashleigh spends four years with the Aborigines. Tucker obviously has little to say about the texture of this exile. When he needs to get the plot of the narrative moving again he does so with a minimum of fuss, and without any of the psychological tension that characterized his initiation into the tribe. Rashleigh becomes the “adventurer” again. The situation leading to his expulsion is simple and sudden. Rashleigh's foster-father, the carandjie, dies, and he inherits his wives. He is challenged for this inheritance by the new chief. When he refuses, Terrewelo, the chief, challenges him to a fight, which Rashleigh wins. Terrewelo tries to murder him, fails, and is himself killed. Rashleigh leaves the tribe, and in the disguise of a carandjie, travels north towards Cape York with his two women, Tita and Enee. He spends six months wandering in this company until he stumbles upon a wreck from which he rescues two women and a child. They spend eight months waiting for a passing ship, which comes, is attacked by Aborigines, saved by Rashleigh, and everyone arrives back in Sydney.

The major part of this phase of the novel is orthodox narrative, without the tension of the convict section. It balances the opening chapters which have a similar contrived innocence of event about them. The whole episode surrounding the wreck reads very much like Defoe, and Tucker was yielding to a pervasive orthodoxy at this point. The mood of the tale has eased to a point where he can think leisurely of a literary model.³⁶ In rescuing the women from the ship Tucker portrays Rashleigh as an imitation Robinson Crusoe. In this scheme, Tita and Enee become his Friday. Their companionship and fidelity are welcomed, but they come to have a reduced value in his eyes. The knowledge and sympathy with Aboriginal ways begin to detach themselves from the world of the Aborigine. It becomes apparent that Tucker is disengaging Rashleigh from the life he entered into on the death of Roberts. The disengagement is worked out gradually, and inside the Crusoe paradigm, redolent as that paradigm is with norms of race. The “adventurer” who was projected by fate away from society into “exile” has reverted to an “adventurer” seeking a return to society. Rashleigh has eight months to normalize his relationships with the world that convicted him, in the process of which he must dissociate himself from the black world that harboured him. Disguised as a black man, placed between a domestic establishment of black and white, living in a cave under a reversed Union Jack, Rashleigh is placed into a situation of ethnocentric bad faith. It is all part of the flotsam of contradiction that Tucker fell into when he succumbed to the white blackfellow option-reverie.

Inside the innocence of event, therefore, there is a shaping urge, some of which may be attributed to the complex psychological relationship of Tucker to his material, and some of which may have emerged from the paradigmatic use to which he put Defoe. The scenario and the style belong to Defoe; the pattern and the occasional pleading voice belong very much to Tucker. The dialogue with himself, which gives Ralph Rashleigh such sinew and authenticity, is crossed ambiguously by a dialogue with an outside world made up of a convict administration, which it is to be hoped in its most enlightened aspects reflected the values of respectable England. This ambiguity, which splits itself into the separate figures of Foxley and Roberts when it confronts the convicts, plays havoc with the Aborigines. They are warped into contradiction by the contextual psychological demands of various parts of the novel. This warping persists to the last page of the book.

While he is living in his transitional cave, Rashleigh undergoes a reorientation of values. He is now “the sham carandjie”, “the disguised white man”. The commander of the rescuing ship is foolish to think that he could “purchase the goodwill of these treacherous savages”.³⁷ He even points out to the treacherous savages the unwisdom of opposing the whites. Yet, he is finally caught in the irony of his own disguises and subterfuges. The white women he has saved, and who save him back in Sydney, disown the end product. The sedulous application of nitrous ether gives him back his white skin, but, says Mrs Marley: “I shall always think of my preserver as a black man, such is the power of habit.”³⁸ Tita and Enee also reject him:

His attempts to enter into conversation in the native tongue with either were ever after repulsed with distant respect, and though he saw them repeatedly in subsequent years and sometimes playfully addressed them in aboriginal terms of endearment, they would resist all his attempts to lead them into any lengthened converse, generally saying, “You white gentleman now. No more blackfellow.”³⁹

Tucker's imaginative interlude with the Aborigines in Ralph Rashleigh was a final symbolic attempt of a psychologically oppressed convict to project, into the realm of fiction, his anxious questioning of the limits and contexts of freedom. We can imagine Tucker coming to the same conclusion about the Aborigines that Charles Griffith expressed in the same year as Ralph Rashleigh, 1845.

The subject itself is one full of interest, as exhibiting to us not merely a picture of life in its simplest state, and society under its rudest form, but opening a retrospect through which, as through a vista, one may see in shadowy perspective, a succession of countless generations, varying but little in habits or customs from the time of the first great dispersion of mankind. Many persons who entertain overwrought ideas of the evils of civilization, and who feel a lurking attachment for the state “when wild in woods the noble savage ran,” may feel disappointed at the by no means flattering picture which I have drawn of this mode of life, as presented by the Australian savage. It may appear a paradox, but in my opinion a state of nature (as it is so called) is not the state natural to man.⁴⁰

There was ample reason for Tucker to “entertain overwrought ideas of the evils of civilization”, but even though he was familiar with Griffith's paradox he was still impelled to examine it. His formal rejection of it, however, placed him back once more in that asylum of aged and broken convicthood at Port Macquarie. This was the contingent reality to which all fantasy and vision had to return. The desert had nothing to offer to the rejected of the city. So Tucker brings Ralph Rashleigh to a close with the only closure that scepticism and knowledge could accept. Rashleigh is given the job of superintendent on Captain Marly's sheep station in the recently opened pastoral country in New England. One day in 1844, when he and another man are pursuing some Aborigines who have just killed a shepherd, Rashleigh is caught in a volley of spears.

His companion galloped off to the nearest station and returned as quickly as possible to the spot; but the unhappy Ralph had long been dead, his remains having been cruelly maltreated by these bloodthirsty barbarians, whom the mock philanthropy of the age characterises as inoffensive and injured beings.⁴¹

It was sad. Tucker gave his protagonist and surrogate self one paragraph of respectability and freedom, before he was killed. That paragraph briefly touched on a world which was, from the records and memories of men, the typical world of colonial Australia. It was a world conspicuously absent from the experience and reveries of Tucker. He joined it for a few moments, but joined it so totally that he surrendered his memories, his detachment, and the hopes he had built around the Aborigine, to the brutal realpolitik of the frontier squatter. It was a perverse price for his dignity, for his freedom, and for the momentary community of his countrymen.

Notes

1. Marjorie Barnard, “Our Literature”, in Fellowship of Australian Writers, Australian Writers Speak (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1942), p. 99.

2. Mrs R. Lee, Adventures in Australia (London: Grant and Griffith, 1851), p. iv.

3. Frank Fowler, Southern Lights and Shadows (London: Sampson Low, 1859), p. 2.

4. Ibid.

5. Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, 3 vols. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 1:210.

6. Twelve station hands from Henry Dangar's Myall Creek station were tried for the murder of about twenty-eight Aborigines on 9 June 1838. Seven were hanged in Sydney in December 1838. See Brian W. Harrison, “The Myall Creek Massacre and Its Significance in the Controversy over the Aborigines during Australia's Early Squatting Period” (BA thesis, University of New England, 1966).

   For information on the Protectorate, see Edmund J. B. Foxcroft, Australian Native Policy (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1941).

   For details of Pinjarra, see Mrs E. S. Ilberg, Mrs Jane Grose, and J. S. Battye, “The Battle of Pinjarra 1834”, West Australian Historical Society Journal and Proceedings, vol. 1 (1927), pt. 1, pp. 24-37.

7. Charles Harpur, “Discourse on Poetry”, ML DOC. A87-1, p. 25, Mitchell Library, Sydney.

8. Ibid., p. 18.

9. “Tom Collins”, Bulletin, Red Page, 12 March 1898.

10. Harpur, “The Kangaroo Hunt”, p. 27.

11. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (New York: Doubleday, 1966), p. 149ff.

12. Ibid., p. 25.

13. Ibid., p. 26.

14. W. H. Auden, Secondary Worlds (London: Faber, 1968), p. 49.

15. George Taplin, The Narrinyeri, An Account of the Tribes of South Australian Aborigines Inhabiting the Country around the Lake Alexandrina, Albert and Coorong, and the Lower Part of the River Murray (Adelaide: J. J. Shawyer, 1874), p. 6.

16. “A Lady Long Resident in New South Wales”, A Mother's Offering to Her Children (Sydney: The Gazette Office, 1841), p. 197.

17. Ibid., p. 207.

18. Ibid., p. 213.

19. “Anon.”, Alfred Dudley; or the Australian Settler (London: Harvey and Darton, 1830), p. 190.

20. A. G. Austin, George William Rusden and National Education in Australia, 1849-1862 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1958), pp. 7-8.

21. I am indebted to Miss Rusden, the librarian in charge of the Leeper Library, Trinity College, University of Melbourne, for bringing this item to my attention.

22. “Yittadairn”, [G. W. Rusden], Moyarra: An Australian Legend in Two Cantos (London: Petherick, 1891), p. 84.

23. See Raymond Williams, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (London: Chatto and Windus, 1971), pp. 9-27.

24. Colin Roderick, ed., Jemmy Green in Australia (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1955), p. x. Harold J. Boehm, “The Date of Composition of Ralph Rashleigh”, Australian Literary Studies 6, no. 4 (October 1974): 428-30, has suggested 1850 rather than 1845 as the appropriate year of completion. His argument is suggestive, and could very well turn out to be true. Uncertainty about the date of the novel does not, I think, reopen the question of its authorship by James Tucker.

25. James Roche, John Boyle O'Reilly: His Life, Poems and Speeches (New York: Cassell, 1891), p. 74.

26. James Tucker, Ralph Rashleigh (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1952), p. 258.

27. Ibid., p. viii.

28. Major T. L. Mitchell, Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, 2 vols. (London: T, & W. Boone, 1838), 1: 204.

29. Tucker, Ralph Rashleigh, p. 239.

30. Ibid., p. 246.

31. Ibid., p. 254.

32. Ibid., pp. 255-56.

33. Ibid., p. 257.

34. Ibid., p. 263.

35. Ibid., p. 269.

36. Throughout nineteenth-century Australian considerations of the Aborigine, the names of Defoe and James Fenimore Cooper recur. Neither writer could be entertained for long in face of an Aboriginal culture which was quite different from the natives of Robinson Crusoe or of the Leatherstocking Series. Boldrewood and Charles de Boos in Fifty Years Ago (Sydney: Gordon and Gotch, 1867) inclined toward Cooper; a non-writing, English middle class inclined toward Defoe. The Mitchell Library has a copy of William Carron's Narrative of an Expedition Undertaken under the Direction of the Late Mr. Assistant Surveyor E. B. Kennedy (1849) with an inset letter from Thomas Holz (?) to S. A. Donaldson, colonial secretary for New South Wales: “I advised Carron to send you a copy of his narrative, which I am sure would interest you. What a splendid novel Defoe would have made out of such materials as Carron's narrative (verbal as well as written) would furnish!—far superior and more popular I think than that of Alexander Selkirk, as Robinson Crusoe.” Next to this one could place Mrs Edward Millet's observation from Western Australia in 1872: “The curiosity that is felt with regard to ‘natives’ dates, probably, with most persons, from their first reading of Robinson Crusoe” (An Australian Parsonage, or the Settler and the Savage in Western Australia [1872], p. 71).

37. Tucker, Ralph Rashleigh, p. 290.

38. Ibid., p. 302.

39. Ibid.

40. Charles Griffith, The Present State and Prospects of the Port Phillip District of New South Wales (Dublin: William Curry, Jun., 1845), p. 166.

41. Tucker, Ralph Rashleigh, p. 303.