Quote:
Originally Posted by Bookpossum
I can't agree with you about the early colonists not being racist, Caleb. They not only feared the Aboriginal people, but they killed them, mostly with impunity. Remember the reference to a "dispersal" (page 196 of my paperback copy) in the last chapter - "Too slight an affair to be called a massacre". If you read the history of early settlement, there are many references to "dispersals", the code word for killing groups of people.
They were a threat and not considered to be human, so could be killed without concern.
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I didn't say they weren't racists, I said that the racism wasn't one-dimensional in the story. It's much more interesting that way. Instead of focusing on racism, which would have been pretty boring (early white settlers were racist - DUH), Malouf focused on where some of it was coming from. I liked this look into the psyche of early settlers and how that fear of something "other" affected them in more than just the most obvious ways. I think the fear of the indigenous people, the fear of Gemmy and the fear of Jock, shows the strange mutation of fear like some bizarre collateral damage.
Then the fear of Janet, the German(?), and then Lachlan was like this repeating history of fear, such that you believe nothing has really changed. And we just keep moving on letting that fear of difference play the same record.