Research

Indigenous Encounters in Colonial Periodical Fiction, 1840s-1890s

Image: ‘Early Effort – Art in Australia’ by Robert Dowling, c. 1860. Oil on canvas on board. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Felton Bequest, 1934 (218-4).

Dr Sarah Galletly (UCD)

This case study challenges the critical assumption that Indigenous cultures are rarely represented in the popular fiction of colonial Australia. This assumption largely derives from the study of novels, but it does not hold true of periodical fiction. In her recent study, A World of Fiction (2018), Katherine Bode drew attention to a surprisingly large collection of stories featuring Aboriginal characters in nineteenth-century Australian periodicals, arguing that in nineteenth-century periodical fiction ‘the unsettled colonial condition is evoked by depicting, not repressing, the Aboriginal presence’ (2018, 177). These findings identify a large body of periodical fiction featuring Indigenous characters that has yet to be examined by scholars for the ways settler writers and readers imagined notions of otherness, co-habitation, and belonging.

This case study focuses on the settler imaginary of the Indigene in the popular print culture of nineteenth-century Australia. Using Bode’s “To Be Continued” database of periodical fiction as a starting point, I will assemble a varied but broadly representative corpus of colonial periodical fiction in order to examine literary encounters and engagements with Aboriginal Australians, Maori, and Pacific Islander peoples and cultures. Such a study will offer new insight into how colonisation was imagined and discursively enacted by white settlers and work to undermine the scholarly narrative of Aboriginal invisibility in early Australian print cultures. It will also consider whether the local audience for colonial periodical fiction invited more regionally specific depictions of Aboriginal and other Indigenous cultures, and to what extent, if any, these periodical stories credited and ascribed cultural value to the long history of Indigenous cultures and cultural production pre-colonisation.

Publications and Presentations:

• Galletly, Sarah, ‘Aboriginal Mobilities & Colonial Serial Fiction’, in Australian Literary Studies 36.1 (2021): 1-18.
• Galletly, Sarah, Katherine Bode, and Carol Hetherington, ‘Beyond Britain and the Book: The Nineteenth-Century Australian Novel Unbounded/ed’, The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel, ed. David Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2022/23).
• Galletly, Sarah, ‘Aboriginal Disruption and Seriality in The Queenslander’, JASAL (under review).