Gendered Identities in Post-Colonial Literature of Australia

In post-colonial studies, an important area of study is the inner colonialism that continues to
function and marginalize several sections of the once colonized country. In nations like Canada,
Australia, Africa and New Zealand, the land was turned into a new colonized land wherein after
independence, the colonizers assumed the governance and administration of the free land. In this
sense, post-colonialism addresses those voices that have been twice colonized, once by the
British Crown which took over the land and then by the White Settlers who stayed behind.

Noonuccal emerged as a land activist and along with Mahmoud Darwish, she tried to raise
awareness about European colonialism and how land, culture, heritage and way of life had been
taken away from the First Nations all across the world. Bernadette Hall comes from Irish stock
and a sense of divided identity can be seen in her work. She taught Latin and Classical studies
before she began writing full-time and the influence of her academic interests are very clear in
her works.

The poems by Noonuccal and Hall are not just feminist poems, rather they represent feminism in
the post-colonial context. This intersectional feminism takes into account various other factors
which might also go into the shaping of gender roles such as caste, religion, ethnicity, minority
status and socio-economic position.

Noonuccal explores gendered identities in the post-colonial context by examining the process of
nation building, imperialism and colonization. ‘The Great Australian Silence’ was a term coined
in 1968 by a famous Australian anthropologist W E H Stanner. This term subsequently came to
represent the silence that surrounded the Aboriginal history within Australian society. He talked
about how the Aboriginals have remained the unspeakable quantity and how White colonial
history has systematically silenced that part of history as something for which any kind of
utterance is not required. It is within this context that we come to another level of silencing and
marginalization that has taken place within the Australian society, that is of the Australian
Aboriginal woman. In ‘Leda at the Billabong’, the position of women, patriarchy and toxic
masculinity that is reinforced through colonial and sexual dominance is brought out using the
idea of art and how it is used to represent violence. Hall refers to a specific painting which also
forms the title, ‘Leda and the Swan’ to illustrate the gendered roles in a post-colonial context.
Leda was a figure in Greek mythology who was seduced and raped by Zeus in the form of a
swan.

Intersectional feminism as stated before, deals with the idea of being oppressed along multiple
axes but before discussing these various levels of exploitation, it is of significance to understand
the dual sides to this exploitation. On one hand we find Aboriginal women as exploited, violated
and abused in various ways but on the other hand, we also find them as agents of imperialism.
However, it is crucial to understand that they had little choice in this matter. In context of
Noonuccal’s poem, the Frontier Encounter is proof of the fact that the settlement was not
peaceful as White colonial history would like to claim. The Farm Raids allowed the Aboriginals
only two options, serve the colonizer or be left to an uncertain fate because the whole Station
economy drove the survival of the Aboriginal community. Ironically, these Aboriginal women
acted as protectors, riding horses to prevent attackers from seizing the land and yet, they were
violated by the very people they protected. A similar idea is explored in ‘Leda at the Billabong’
with reference to Nicolas Poussin’s ‘The Rape of the Sabine Women’. Historian Livy stated that
Romulus had planned on abducting Sabine women in order to strengthen the new State and
safeguard the resources of his kingdom and in turn, the women were offered civic and property
rights, so they had but little choice. This historic event again presents the same irony because
when war broke out between the Romans and the Sabines, it was these women who threw
themselves in the midst of the war to protect their fathers and brothers as well as their new
husbands who had abducted them.

Noonuccal’s poem gives a very nuanced understanding of the multiple levels of exploitation
faced by Aboriginal women. As farm hands at the station, Aboriginal women had multiple tasks
and roles to play and these allowed for multiple avenues of exploitation and violence. On one
hand, their labor was exploited as they took care of livestock, rode horses to protect the land, fed
cattle and cultivated the land and on the other, they were met with several instances of sexual
violence and exploitation at the ‘big house’. Even in Hall’s poem, the imperialistic attitude that
made women the victims of multiple forms of exploitation are clear.
Some of the important discourses within post-colonial feminism is the examination of how these
crimes were justified by the colonizers, going beyond gender to explore the exploitation and the
question of consent and accountability which interestingly can also be studied in context of
colonization of land. A patent and well-known defense of Aboriginal women’s exploitation is
that in indigenous communities, the Aboriginal women are looked at as polygamous which is
seen as a sign of availability and sanctioned promiscuity. Hall too emphasizes on how a
patriarchal tradition has often portrayed the sexual encounter between Leda and Zeus somewhat
ambiguously, highlighting the violence of rape yet trying to justify or romanticize it. A lot of
how it is portrayed depends on the ‘painter’. In colonial narratives and history, the violence and
abuse encountered by women has been effectively silenced. Hall explores the idea of meta-art
and whether it is a conduit for enjoying something horrific without repulsing us because it is
presented “artistically”.

Intersectional feminism may be seen as a sort of response to a White woman’s experience of

patriarchy and culture. One of the commonly discussed issues about the Frontier Encounter is
how it was not just Aboriginal women who were subjected to violence, but also White women.
However, while the violence committed on White women is seen as a threat to the whole idea of
White nationhood, run by White men, the idea of violence committed on Aboriginal women, is
seen as a necessity which is required for the survival of the same White nation. The hypocrisy
and contradictions of the idea of the White nation and the New World are clear. It ran on ideals
of Christianity and European Civilization on one hand, but it challenged its men to prove their
masculinity and manhood by claiming these vulnerable victims on the other hand. The metaphor
of comparing a man to a hunter and woman to prey is found in Noonuccal and Hall’s poems.
This implied that the violence committed on a woman would be met with retribution and
retaliation depending on what kind of a woman she was. In ‘Leda at the Billabong’ it is made
sufficiently clear that being a woman is enough to warrant abuse, but the poet sarcastically states
how the measurement of the suffering differs based on parameters of beauty and purity such as
being a virgin. This irony of rape culture being excused based on appearance is touched upon by
Noonuccal as Aboriginal women were at times forced to cut off their hair, look unbeautiful and
‘masculine’ which goes to show appearance was not grounds on which Aboriginal women were
attacked. In fact, many post-colonial texts such as Douloti by Mahasweta Devi and The Farmer’s
Wife by Volga speak of this exploitation that goes beyond the woman’s gender.

When considering marginalized women, the question of consent does not even seem to arise.
They are considered as an entity that is thought to be most inferior and would perform what the
greatest of the entities would ask of her and by nature, she is considered to be social property.
The other question of consent is that it was seen as a given privilege to a certain livelihood and
lifestyle whereby the lack of consent would be looked at as haughtiness, foolishness, lack of
civility and decorum; rape became a necessary tool to civilize women. In ‘Leda and the
Billabong’, art depicting violence focuses on sexual imagery such as Leda’s ‘plumpness’, her
‘satin like skin’ and the movement of water down her breasts. Some paintings of this scene
consider Leda to have not been raped but given in to the swan’s seduction and even with regard
to Nicolas Poussin’s painting, the word ‘rape’ was not utilized in the same context as it is today.
In the 1600s, it referred to abduction or kidnapping.

Another important aspect of both these poems in terms of gendered roles is the challenging of
masculinity. Modernist and postmodernists employ popular myths to negotiate certain ideologies
and further certain ideas. In this sense, such renderings and retellings of those myths differ
according to their take on the myth or the position they are expected to communicate. Hall brings
into question and challenges whether Zeus is a God worth worshipping which implies a
challenge to toxic masculinity promoted by imperialism and colonization. The reference to Pilate
in ‘Dark Unmarried Mothers’ is a metaphor used as a European equivalent, a symbol of
exploitation to expose the truth of European civilization. The lines “No blame for the guilty”
speaks of the silent process of normalization and that much of this is to be taken in one’s stride
and the fact that Aboriginal women are like many other objects over which White men have cast
their supremacy. This is also a reference to the horrific result of the Reserves which led to the
Stolen Generation, a product of European paternalistic society and the Dark Unmarried Mothers
which refers to the increasing social phenomenon of Aboriginal teenage pregnancies. Just as
Leda was forgotten after birthing Zeus’s children out of rape, these Dark Unmarried Mothers are
forgotten and cast out. There is nobody to hold an entire legacy of colonial masculinity and
frontier history accountable. One of many examples is the case of a 10-year Aboriginal girl who
was gangraped by station bosses in which the judge ruled that the girl was conscious and aware
of what the act of sex entailed and therefore it is highly possible that she gave her consent and
the men got away easily. This is a nod to how the values of European manhood while trying to
turn the Frontier Encounter into a rhetoric they would call the New World, ironically reflected
the Old World values.

The last stanza of ‘Leda at the Billabong’ presents a nuanced and negotiated refusal. The poet is
inclined to think that the artist himself could not have been a woman because the entire visual
narrative has constructed the male gaze according to which a woman’s depiction in the world
would be from a masculine, heterosexual perspective. The title ‘Dark Unmarried Mothers’
becomes a poignant reminder of what the Frontier Encounter did to the land of the country and
how the body of the Aboriginal women and body of the land became synonymous, on which the
White settler colonizer inscribed his power and manhood.

To conclude, the gendered identities in the post-colonial context encompass a wide range of
social and cultural factors and events. The very conquest of the land using the deceitful laws of
Terra Nullius and Res Nullius started a process of nation building on the backs of a marginalized
community and establishment of a European legacy by stripping of the indigenous of their very
history and culture. Post-colonial studies allow for a very nuanced discourse on these matters as
it looks into how gender intersects with other peripheral thoughts.