The child as mediator of racial ambivalence in Australia: ‘Egg Boy’ and the racist girl

ABSTRACT

In white settler-colonial Australian imagination, ‘the child’ historically has both signalled the colony’s flourishing and is charged with anxiety about belonging and identity. This article analyses a set of events in which children were the occasion through which Australians managed racial violence and/or publicly distanced the mainstream from endemic racism. Differences between the mediating power of ‘white’ childhood versus Indigenous childhood are analysed, with a view to exploring how children are either problematized or positioned as figures of redemption, through processes of racialization.

KEYWORDS:

• Childhood
• whiteness
• settler-colonialism
• racism
• racialization
• Australia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Examples of local enactments of racism include on public transport systems and in employment relations (Lentin 2016), under the health system (Bastos et al. 2018), through racialised welfare (Doel-Mackaway 2017, Smith et al. 2017, Vincent 2019), and through the use of hate speech (Gelber and McNamara 2016).

2 Xenophobia today is especially played out through discourse and policy concerning refugees.

3 The Stolen Generations refers to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who, as children, were separated from their parents in accordance with state policies. The text of the apology may be viewed at https://www.aph.gov.au/Visit_Parliament/Whats_On/Exhibitions/Custom_Media/Apology_to_Australias_Indigenous_Peoples [Accessed 10 Jun 2021].

4 As Jay Daniel Thompson has pointed out, ‘the fantasy of childhood innocence depends on the fantasy that whiteness equals innocence’ (Thompson 2018, p. 287). The signifiers ‘whiteness’ and ‘childhood innocence’ thus reinforce one another's social and emotional effects.

5 ‘Black Pete’ is a comical character, dressed in ‘gollywog’ style blackface who accompanies Saint Nicolas; a figure of mockery but also violence, both as its recipient and as punisher of naughty children.

6 Wekker notes that, although the Dutch frequently point to the pagan past of Zwarte Piet and claim that his skin is only black from chimney soot in order to distance this figure from Dutch racism, it is first represented in a picture book in 1850, ‘thirteen years before the abolition of slavery, while debates are going on in society and in parliament about the sustainability of slavery’ (Wekker 2016, p. 163). This, coupled with the ritualised spectacle of degradation that is inflicted upon Black Pete, leads her to connect this representation to a working through of melancholia and guilt particular to the history of Dutch colonialism.

7 That is, classical patriarchy that saw children as chattel, Augustinian notions of original sin, and the modern invention of original innocence.

8 ‘See, I not blackfella. I not white fella either. The white fellas call me mixed-blood … half-caste, Yea! Creamy … I belong no one’ (Luhrmann 2008).

9 Notably, the blood-quantum is less salient to irrelevant for Aboriginal communities as a measure of belonging, but has resurfaced in culture wars in the twenty-first century, where First People’s identification as Aboriginal is questioned (by settler colonisers) where they also share a European heritage and are light skinned. In the context of the ways and means of colonisation, this rhetoric furthers the eradication of Aboriginality in Australia.

10 Bundjalung First Nations poet Evelyn Araluen discusses the relation between settler and tourist, in discussion with Elizabeth Kulas (2021) on ABC Radio National, as an anxious relation that is parsed through the use of Shiboleths like ‘drop bear,’ a made-up creature, a joke on the visitor, that tells the difference between the local White and the tourist. The coloniser marks the provisional status of the ‘tourist’ in this way to affirm the permanency and legitimacy of the coloniser’s claim to the land.

11 Supporters had raised funds through crowdfunding pages to contribute to his legal costs, and to ‘buy more eggs’, but Connolly donated these funds to victims of the Christchurch massacre (Schladebeck 2019, Green 2020, p. 13). At the time of writing one crowdfunding website still exists at https://au.gofundme.com/f/money-for-eggboi [Accessed 15 Sep 2021]. Eggboy has since fallen out of favour with progressives after he came out as Covid-19 denier (see https://twitter.com/Hypothepod/status/1419843952077721602?s=20).

12 My thanks to Dylan Voller for giving permission to include this discussion here.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council's Discovery Program Future Fellowships funding scheme (project FT170100210). The views expressed herein are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Australian Government or Australian Research Council.

Notes on contributors

Joanne Faulkner

Joanne Faulkner is an ARC Future Fellow in Cultural Studies at Macquarie University. Her most recent book is Young and Free: [Post]colonial Ontologies of Childhood, Memory and History in Australia (2016). She is currently writing a book manuscript titled Representing Aboriginal Childhood: The Politics of Memory and Forgetting in Australia.