THE PASSING OF THE HALF-CASTES: GAVIN CASEY, LEONARD MANN AND THE POSTWAR 'HALF-CASTE' NOVEL

Clearly the shiftthat has occurred in mainstream Australia's racial policies, practices, and attitudes in recent times renders the genetic determinism inherent in the notion of the 'half-caste' untenable, along with its traditional implication that the people it designates are inferior to both whites and so-called 'tribal Aboriginals' or 'full bloods.' [...]persons of mixed descent have been, since at least the late 1960s, increasingly inclined to embrace their Aboriginal heritage openly even as they also aspire to be accepted fully as members of the wider Australian society. In the two decades that followed the War, however, beginning with Bill Harney's Brimming Billabongs (1947), book length narratives that focused primarily upon Aboriginal subjects became a modest but nonetheless noteworthy publishing phenomenon.2 The emergence of such texts in these years attests to a growing inclination on the part of the mainstream society, or at least of a considerable proportion of its citizens, to challenge or revise longstanding racial stereotypes and assumptions. For as most commentators on race relations have noted, it was less the supposedly doomed traditional Aboriginals than their betwixt and between relations who had, in the earlier decades of the twentieth century, most bedeviled white Australia's effort to legislate and imagine itself into a purely Caucasian future.3 The postwar public's acceptance of the fact that 'half caste' and 'fringe dwelling' Australians would not and should not be legislatively discriminated against constituted a crucial turning point in Australian social history. Torn as he is between identifying with the dark-skinned people less fortunate than himself and mentally incarcerating them within the society's reigning racial stereotypes, he is made to seem too emotionally fraught to be dismissively regarded. Because he is thus disturbed, a reader's inclination to stereotype him is itself unsettled: he is no Snowball.