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sixth-light · 5 years

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Miss Fisher’s Terra Nullius

Posted this on DW, manually reblogging it here because I’m too lazy to set up auto-reposting, it makes sense in my head.

I have now read all but the last of the Phryne Fisher books, and in general liked them very much; they fall exactly into that niche of cosy British(-adjacent) murder mystery I like so well, with lots of food and clothes porn to boot. Even more so than the TV series, Phryne is a wish-fulfillment character that women almost never get to be, she's wealthy and gorgeous and bangs attractive men whenever she wants to (and not if she doesn't), and looks out for other women and creates her own found family with them. I could stand to read a lot more Golden Age-set detective novels about women like Phryne. As I said, though, these books are British-adjacent, not British; they're set in Australia and Phryne is the Australian-born child of a British family who has chosen to immigrate permanently. They are also books which are set in a deeply racist (and sexist, and homophobic, etc) time and place. Overall they do their best to portray that thoughtfully and spend time with people from Melbourne's immigrant communities, particularly the Chinese and Jewish communities; the challenges and realities of women's daily lives permeate every book; the queer community tend to be dead or evil a lot in early books, but there's evolution in action and by the latter half of the series Phryne is positioned firmly as an ally to the queer community and her lesbian sister is a major recurring character. But. But. We're in Australia. And there's a hole in the backdrop of this series that starts out minor and becomes....not.

From the outset of these books, white Australians - some recent immigrants, some with long roots - make comments about Australia being an escape from the war and horror of Europe, a place to start afresh. In the context of the 1920s, where almost everyone was touched by the First World War (Phryne was an ambulance driver herself), these comments are historically accurate portrayals of white attitudes. But unlike attitudes of the time about women or Chinese immigrants or queer people, they go unchallenged. Once or twice didn't surprise me, but it happens again and again; people tell Phryne that Australia is a fresh new place and she says nothing. Nobody ever says anything. The only time we meet an Indigenous Australian in nineteen books is a man who was taken from his parents and whose white wife's parents have cut off contact with her because she's married him. We see him in one scene (his wife's death turns out to be suicide linked to post-natal depression, not murder) and never again. Otherwise, the only potrayal of Indigenous Australians is through the eyes of anthropologists and textbooks. They are described as existing only in the Northern Territory; they are discussed as curiosities to be studied. In an early book, a man tells Phryne he loves living in the high country of Victoria because there are no people, and it is helping him recover from his war-induced PTSD. He talks about doing things 'like the Aborigines did'. It's 1929. The genocide of Aboriginal/Indigenous Australians is currently ongoing. It's talked about like history. This comes to an ugly head in the eighteenth book in the series, when Phryne and her family rent a house from an anthropologist who is away in the Northern Territory and discover a locked room contains bones and skulls of Indigenous Australians. One comment is made to the effect that it might not be very civilised to take the bones of people's ancestors, but then they proceed merrily to use the bones to create a fake pirate trove (it makes sense in context) - oh, but not the skulls! Their nice anthropologist friend needs the skulls. There are ‘comedy’ lines where the dog gets into the room and has to be stopped from chewing on them. Given the history of how human remains from indigenous groups often came into the hands of white anthropologists (HINT: NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE DONATING THEIR BODIES TO SCIENCE), this is...*stares into the camera like she's on The Office.gif* It's historically true that Victoria was one of the states where the indigenous population was massacred and forced off their land early in settlement, and even by the time the books are set there were very few Indigenous/Aboriginal Australians there. It's not out of the question that a rich white woman could live in Melbourne in 1929 and never knowingly encounter an Indigenous Australian. I just find it really hard to grasp that a series which works really hard to recharacterise early Chinese immigration to Australia and present Chinese Australians as everyday people suffering from racism, which looks unflinchingly at domestic violence and homophobia and is kind to their victims, is so absent of any empathy for Indigenous Australians. Māori get a much better showing, in some ways; Phryne spends a whole book on a New Zealand cruise ship and visits a marae as a tourist. However, even in this instance the bulk of information about Māori culture is presented via the character of a Pākehā anthropologist, who is portrayed as an expert in Māori tikanga and culture such that even the Māori characters regard her as having the final say. There's also a notable insistence on the idea of Māori as cannibals - a Māori bouncer in Melbourne, a student at the law school, has "sharpened his teeth" and makes jokes about eating people. So maybe Indigenous Australians are getting off lightly not being portrayed at all - I can only imagine how it would go. Ultimately, as much as I love the Phryne Fisher series, it's alarming how much it silently endorses and accepts the doctrine of terra nullius, the idea that Australia was near-empty when white Europeans arrived, that its settlement was peaceful and not an act of genocide, that in the Australia of 1929 Indigenous Australians functionally didn't exist. It's not obviously racist in a way that's easy to see. It's the much worse silent horror of Indigenous Australians being history in their own land - when people from other countries (who don't threaten Australian notions about their country) get measured and thoughtful portrayals. TL;DR I still love some things about these books but holy shit I wouldn't blame an Indigenous person for throwing them at a wall. And I want to emphasise that the book with all the desecration of human remains (!!!!!) was written and published WITHIN THE LAST TEN YEARS.

#phryne fisher #australia #representation #indigenous australians #the show at least has ONE (1) episode with an Aboriginal character #I thought that was bad at the time but I HAD NOT REALISED

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