{"id":14323,"date":"2011-06-21T01:23:14","date_gmt":"2011-06-21T01:23:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=14323"},"modified":"2011-06-21T01:23:14","modified_gmt":"2011-06-21T01:23:14","slug":"school-of-cultural-inquiry-seminar-series-narrating-the-nowhere-people-fb-vickers-the-mirage-and-half-caste-aboriginals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=14323","title":{"rendered":"School of Cultural Inquiry Seminar Series – Narrating the Nowhere People: FB Vickers’ The Mirage and “Half-Caste” Aboriginals"},"content":{"rendered":"

School of Cultural Inquiry Seminar Series – Narrating the Nowhere People: FB Vickers’ The Mirage and “Half-Caste” Aboriginals<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Australian National University
\nA. D. Hope Conference Room (Building 14)
\n2011-06-06, 16:16-17:30 (Local TIme)<\/p>\n

Rich Pascal<\/a><\/strong>, Visiting Fellow
\nSchool of Cultural Inquiry
\nAustralian National University<\/em><\/p>\n

By the turn of the Twentieth Century, and increasingly in the decades that followed, areas located literally on the fringes of many Australian<\/a> towns were populated by people consigned figuratively to a conceptual limbo.\u00a0 Australians who were mostly of mixed Aboriginal and European ancestry congregated in slumlike camps and reserves.\u00a0 As the century wore on, the mainstream society\u2019s widespread belief that the so-called \u201ctribal\u201d Aboriginals<\/a> were passing into extinction had come to be shadowed by a perception that these so-called \u201chalf-castes<\/a>\u201d and \u201cfringe dwellers\u201d were now the dark Others whose endurance threatened the dream of an all-white Australia.\u00a0 They were, to borrow Henry Reynolds\u2019<\/a> apt phrase, Australia\u2019s \u201cnowhere people.\u201d\u00a0
\n\u00a0
\nMostly unsighted, they were in the literal sense commonly unremarked by mainstream Australians.\u00a0 And the society\u2019s chronic inclination to render the marginalised social group translucent was nowhere more apparent than in the sphere of literary and popular narratives.\u00a0 In the novels, stories, and memoirs of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries their near invisibility registers as an almost total absence.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t until the two decades following the end of the Second World War<\/a> that some memoirs, novels and stories that featured them prominently were presented to the reading public.\u00a0 The first book length narrative to set itself the challenge of subjectively rendering the experience of Indigenous nowhereness was FB Vickers\u2019<\/a> The Mirage<\/em> (1955), a novel that has not been well remembered.\u00a0 Although well received by reviewers of the time, it was not a popular success and it was rarely mentioned in later histories of Australian literature; it has never been studied in any depth or detail.\u00a0 This discussion constitutes an effort to redress the latter omission, and advances as well an argument for the book\u2019s sociocultural importance with regard to subsequent efforts, literary and otherwise, to include the nowhere people within the national identity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

School of Cultural Inquiry Seminar Series – Narrating the Nowhere People: FB Vickers’ The Mirage and “Half-Caste” Aboriginals Australian National University A. D. Hope Conference Room (Building 14) 2011-06-06, 16:16-17:30 (Local TIme) Rich Pascal, Visiting Fellow School of Cultural Inquiry Australian National University By the turn of the Twentieth Century, and increasingly in the decades […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1196,13,8,4405,14],"tags":[6612,6611],"class_list":["post-14323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-criticism","category-liveevents","category-media-archive","category-oceania","category-papers","tag-f-b-vickers","tag-rich-pascal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14323"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14323\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}