For first time in history of the world, everyone united in cheering Spain

There ya go! War drums in full cry.

Depends who you ask. Depends who gets a voice.

You’ve got 65,000 years of success. Or, ‘terra nullius’, proven bullshit, proven warmongers on the warpath, a couple of hundred years of invasion, war, including attempted genocide, and a war mongers favorite weapon, their propaganda machine. Straight out of the playbook of the orange imbecile running the planet.

When you put down the war drums, and have a long hard look at your constitution, lo and behold. And there’s a ton of it out there, getting whitewashed in the media, and pounded away on.

Or you just keep on tucking your steamer legs into your booties, and screaming at all the people buzzing on surfing bombs and bazz’s on twinnies… coz…

‘ YA MITE GAIRT FARKIN’ BANNDUDDED BYE VERE DREEM TEEN EVUN!!!’

‘The recently released book Skin Deep: Settler Impressions of Aboriginal Women is an insightful analysis of the intersections between racism and misogyny in Australian society. As the title suggests, Liz Connor focuses particularly on print representations of Aboriginal women from the first instances of European exploration and settlement.

Skin Deep argues that these representations were based on unfounded hearsay, yet they were circulated and reiterated until they became accepted as truth. In titling this review I took inspiration from one of the books opening lines (27):

[This] is a print history of settler impressions of Aboriginal women situated at that most potent juncture of racism and misogyny. This is a book of lies.

Dr Liz Conor is an ARC Future Fellow at La Trobe University, author of The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s (2004) and editor of the journal Aboriginal History. It took Conor over a decade to write Skin Deep, and this is evident in the wide-ranging subject matter, which spans hundreds of years and the entire Australian continent. In doing so, she hoped to stimulate non-Indigenous readers into reflecting on the insidious history of Europeans in Australia and how pervasive these manufactured “truths” have become. However, Conor is also aware that Indigenous readers may find the content upsetting and takes care to be mindful of the possibility of further “reinscribing trauma” (7).

Conor astutely balances her analysis between racism and misogyny. Today, this is sometimes called misogynoir – a term coined in 2010 by critical race and feminist scholar Moya Bailey to describe the specific brand of misogyny and racism directed towards black women. Skin Deep both illuminates the intense racism to which all Indigenous people have been and are subject, while simultaneously emphasising the dual struggle that Indigenous women faced in dealing with both racism as well as misogyny. Conor uses primary sources to demonstrate how Indigenous women were separated from “normal” Indigenous society, through divisive references made to “natives” and “native women.”

“Aboriginal courtship – carrying off a lubra” (1861), by George Strafford. Image via State Library of Victoria.
“ABORIGINAL COURTSHIP – CARRYING OFF A LUBRA” (1861), BY GEORGE STRAFFORD. IMAGE VIA STATE LIBRARY OF VICTORIA.
As a result, we come to see how women were “othered” by the colonists. Conor describes how white men intentionally fostered this division; they felt more comfortable dealing with the Indigenous population when women were construed as different – brutalised and helpless. This made Indigenous society feel more familiar and less alien to the colonists, due to the strong current of misogyny and assumptions of female weakness in European society. Indigenous people were cast in the role of savage primitives in part due to this perception about the brutal treatment of women.

The tropes of bride capture and wife abuse are constant threads throughout Conor’s analysis. The irony is not lost that the very same white men who raped and murdered Aboriginal women and girls concurrently looked down on Aboriginal men for the alleged mistreatment of women. Indigenous society was also cast as patrilineal, with women entirely disconnected from property rights. As Conor argues, such a representation was less concerned with the realities of Indigenous culture and more concerned with reinforcing the Victorian belief in patrilineal propertied inheritance through arguments about primitive origins. Aboriginal culture was believed to reflect the “primitive” ancestry of “civilised” European society. As such, arguing that Aboriginal society practiced patrilineal inheritance allowed white men to position this as the natural order. Conor uses these examples to powerfully comment on the innate misogyny of European settlers.

Skin Deep examines more specific examples of the misogyny and racism of settler society towards Aboriginal women by analysing several prominent themes: bride capture, polygamy, infanticide, cannibalism, sexual abuse, Aboriginal domesticity, and ageing. As Conor explains, a “feedback loop” existed between scientists and casual observers, creating an uncritical set of truths that were in fact based off token eyewitness accounts (225).

While Conor notes that most of the tales told by settlers about Aboriginal people held a grain of truth, Skin Deep traces the existence of these stories through the colonial archive. It reveals the repetition and exaggeration required to facilitate their preponderance. For example, the original bride capture story was advanced by David Collins in An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales (1798). He wrote that Aboriginal women were

dragged through the woods by one arm…the lover, or rather the ravisher, is regardless of the stones or broken pieces of trees which may lie in his route, being anxious only to convey his prize sadly to his own party, where a scene ensues too shocking to relate.

This was not a first-hand account of events. But, as Conor demonstrates, these sentences were copied almost word for word in countless subsequent reports of male Aboriginal violence against Aboriginal women. Similarly, stories about Aboriginal women committing infanticide and cannibalism were vague but interpreted as reliable facts. Interestingly, Conor notes that some of these accounts may have come from Indigenous people themselves, as grisly tales told by one tribe about another. Due to most settlers’ lack of understanding of Indigenous culture, this distinction was probably missed. The Aboriginal mother, believed to be the perpetrator of these savage crimes, was portrayed in a role of mute but critical importance, whereby she moved her race closer and closer to the point of supposed extinction through her infanticidal tendencies.’