- Title
- 'Fear the bitch who sheds no tears': the cultural depiction of the white female scapegoat in Australian historical drama
- Creator
- Haskins, Victoria
- Relation
- Lilith: A Feminist History Journal , Issue 12, p. 50-64
- Publisher
- Lilith Collective
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2003
- Description
- The recent Oxford Companion to Australian History argued that in the quest for distinctive images of an emerging post-colonial nation, 'the dramatic representation of its history has .. , been a relatively minor matter'. Playwrights, it's asserted, mostly look to contemporary subjects, indeed 'genuine reassessment has been scarcely a theatrical subject at all'. Andrew Bovell's 2001 play Holy Day, an examination of the South Australian frontier of the mid-nineteenth century, is the exception that proves the rule. 'A play set in the past is only useful as far as it illuminates the present', Bovell writes in the foreword on the program. 'While Holy Day takes us into the world of our past, it does so only to invite a consideration of its legacy'. The following article takes this powerful and resonant historical drama as its focus, in exploring the continuity of an Australian cultural depiction of womanhood in the representation of white women's role in colonialism. Set as a mystery, encompassing today's two great contested aspects of Aboriginal history - frontier massacres and the stolen generations - the play is quite explicitly concerned with apportioning blame.
- Subject
- colonialism; drama; Aboriginal women; women's studies
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/929975
- Identifier
- uon:10725
- Identifier
- ISSN:0813-8990
- Language
- eng
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