Born: 12 March 1912, Australia
Died: 28 February 1988
Country most active: Australia
Also known as: Kathleen Tennant
The following is excerpted from The Conversation essay Australia once enshrined white superiority. These 10 trailblazers helped shift our attitudes to race by Angela Woollacott, Australian National University. It is republished under a Creative Commons license.
In early 20th century Australia, Indigenous people were denied citizenship and the nation had a racially exclusive immigration policy. Most people not only accepted the “White Australia” policy but openly identified with its assumption of white supremacy. Popular culture was replete with overtly racist terms and images.
Even after World War II, as Australians began to focus on their region and nearby colonies threw off their imperial rulers, acceptance of “White Australia” continued for many.
Yet from the late 1940s, some Australians began to question the racial inequality on which colonialism relied. By 1975, when the Whitlam government passed the Racial Discrimination Act, racially exclusive immigration had been jettisoned and First Nations people had legal equality, albeit not parity.
Such a profound shift in popular consensus did not occur spontaneously. Here are ten key Australians who prodded the country to question its own thinking on race.
6. Kylie Tennant
Kylie Tennant (1912–1988), one of Australia’s most prominent writers in the mid-20th century, was known especially for her socialist realist portrayals of the hardships of the working class and unemployed – occasionally referred to as Australia’s John Steinbeck.
Tennant was hailed by the Times Literary Supplement and won praise from George Orwell. In the late 1950s, she used her public platform to draw attention to the terrible consequences of colonialism for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the far north. Her books Speak You So Gently and All the Proud Tribesmen sold well nationally and internationally.
Tennant’s determined use of humour as a vehicle to show all of her characters – Indigenous and settler – as individuals with personalities was undergirded by her awareness of racism, not least on the part of some government officials and mining company prospectors. Condemning discrimination and abysmal living conditions, Tennant evoked the richness of Indigenous cultures and community life.
Her travel writing and fiction brought First Nations people in the north to metropolitan attention – as she had done in the 1930s and early 1940s with the unemployed and the very poor.
Angela Woollacott, Distinguished Professor Emerita, History, Australian National University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
