Finding Eliza: Power and Colonial Storytelling

By Larissa Behrendt and Fiona Foley

Aboriginal lawyer, writer and filmmaker Larissa Behrendt has long been fascinated by the story of Eliza Fraser, who was purportedly captured by the Butchulla people after she was shipwrecked on their island off the Queensland coast in 1836. In this deeply personal book, Behrendt uses Eliza' s tale as a starting point to interrogate how Aboriginal people and indigenous people of other countries have been portrayed in their colonisers' stories.Exploring works as diverse as Robinson Crusoe and Coonardoo, Behrendt looks at the stereotypes embedded in these accounts, including the assumption of cannibalism and the myth of the noble savage. Ultimately, Finding Eliza shows how these stories not only reflect the values of their storytellers but also reinforce those values and how, in Australia, this has contributed to a complex racial divide.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Queensland Press
• Release date: Jun 4, 2024
• ISBN: 9780702269820

Book preview

Cover of Finding Eliza by Larissa Behrendt

Larissa Behrendt is the author of three novels: Home, which won the 2002 David Unaipon Award and the regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book; Legacy, which won the 2010 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous Writing; and After Story, which won the 2022 Voss Literary Prize and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and the ABA Booksellers’ Choice Awards, and longlisted for numerous prizes including the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

She received the Human Rights Medal in 2021 from the Australian Human Rights Commission; an Order of Australia in 2020 for her work in Indigenous education, law and the arts; the 2011 NSW Australian of the Year award; and the 2009 NAIDOC Person of the Year award. She has written, directed and produced several short and feature films, including After the Apology and Innocence Betrayed. In 2018 Larissa won the Australian Directors’ Guild Award for Best Direction in a Documentary Feature and in 2020 the AACTA for Best Direction in Nonfiction Television. She is the host of ABC Radio’s Speaking Out and is Distinguished Professor and Laureate Fellow at the Jumbunna Institute at the University of Technology Sydney.

First Nations Classics. Finding Eliza: Power and Colonial Storytelling. Larissa Behrendt. UQP logo.

for

Michael Lavarch

If not for other, there is no self.

If not for self, nothing is apprehended.

Chuang-tzu

Contents

Introduction by Fiona Foley

1 Once Upon a Time

2 The White Woman Captured by Cannibals

3 Methods and Motives

4 The Other Side of the Story

5 Fictionalising Aboriginal Women

6 Cannibalism: Dark Acts on the Frontier

7 Imagining Noble Savages

8 Telling Stories about Colonisation

9 Happily Ever After

Acknowledgements

References

Introduction

by Fiona Foley

I have a deep admiration for Finding Eliza, layered, as it is, with insightful analysis, tropes and racial encounters, imagined or real. Larissa Behrendt’s storytelling ranges across the four corners of the earth and her narratives can be broken down into four pillars: Conquest, Contact, Cunning and Cannibalism.

First there is: Conquest. The single-minded pursuit of conquest is a tenacious driver, with the conqueror using all the tools in his or her repertoire to move forward. The English language is deployed to operate in ways that dominate by dehumanising the subject through fabrication, stealth, fear, exploitation and violence. All conquests linger and permeate multiple strata of the original societies. This is certainly true for Eliza Fraser who still permeates the tales told to tourists who visit K’gari today.

Then comes: Contact. Finding Eliza takes us on an epic odyssey as we traverse high seas, dark continents and fraught ideologies. Running the gauntlet of a historical narrative told through the multiplicity of voices brings us into an ongoing engagement with a colonial presence. In essence, one-half of the story is missing when there is no Butchulla firsthand account of Eliza Fraser’s time on K’gari. Behrendt reminds us that the truth is amorphous certainly in the case of Eliza’s deceptively changing story as it shapeshifts over time. This white woman received notoriety and financial gain through her outlandish tales about the Butchulla people.

When Eliza Fraser survives the Stirling Castle shipwreck, which had been captained by her husband John Fraser, the Butchulla nation would be cast adrift in print and testimony. The largest sand island in the world became known as Fraser Island.

Behrendt weaves these differing accounts together as a credible story from 1836. We see these patterns of storytelling repeated in other literature classics, such as Robinson Crusoe and Heart of Darkness, capturing a popular imagining of first encounters with the ‘savage’. The stereotypes of colonial captivity narratives – slave versus master, fear of cannibals – fed the psyche of these stories that, ‘meander into our value systems and our institutions’ (p.9).

Next is: Cunning. Eliza Fraser was an extraordinarily elusive figure who reframed Butchulla women and tarnished our society from her participatory public musings in seeking financial proceeds. Interspersed was the imagined threat that Eliza could be sexually compromised by a shadowy black man at any point in time while on the island. Behrendt unpacks the framing of the virtuous white woman against her Aboriginal counterpart. This is also done through poring over other literary works in Australia’s historical past, such as We of the Never Never, Coonardoo and The White Woman. All are written through a white lens.

After Eliza’s captivity there are too many gaps to really piece the full story together. In large part what took place over the course of days and weeks is scant in detail. It is telling that the Butchulla as a people are given no name nor is any one individual singled out for mention by name either. They are simply made to seem one homogenous dark race.

Therefore, we can say that no relationship was established between Eliza and the people she lived with or relied upon. What are spoken about are only negative generalisations, which make use of the English language in conjuring up the savage, the cannibal, the cruelty, the lecherous. Behrendt quotes from Davidson who writes, ‘it wasn’t so much lies that shaped our accounts of what went on out there as silence …’ (p.102).

This fanciful story is not what I grew up with as a child. Moreover, Eliza was watched over and came to no harm while with the Butchulla. Unsurprisingly, Eliza’s own culture hindered her ability to read, understand or interpret Butchulla people who set about assisting in her survival.

And finally we come to: Cannibalism. Fact, fantasy and falsehoods circulated in the imaginings of Captain Fraser and many Britishers during the expansion of Empire. This ideology not only hindered Captain Fraser from landing on shore but also kept the crew of the Stirling Castle, along with his wife, adrift in a longboat allegedly for two months. Behrendt categorically writes ‘the Butchulla were not cannibals’ (p.107) and goes on to dissect Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel with the central characters of Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday. The former played the role of master with a god-given authority to hold power in the gradual subjugation over his captive Friday, whose role is slave. The subtext is servitude, to make Man Friday labour during his existence on earth. While the historical backdrop is slavery and British colonialism, the virtue signalling is familiar in that Crusoe teaches Man Friday to speak English and presides over his conversion to Christianity.

We are reminded that stories of cannibalism circulated throughout the 1700s and 1800s. It is a narrative passed down over the centuries, enveloping ‘pathological fear’ (p.120). In these dark places, whether physiological or unexplored terrains, what lay in wait is a binary between civilisation and barbarity. We see this cannibalistic barbarity portrayed in the 2009 film Van Diemen’s Land, directed by Jonathan auf der Heide. The darkness is captured in the panoramic vistas of Tasmania and is based on the true story of convict Alexander Pearce following his escape in 1822 along with seven others.

Throughout academia and the discipline of anthropology claims are made against Indigenous people the world over without substantive evidence. Readers are brought closer to the truth when we learn that ‘virtually no evidence can be found to support the widespread Western belief that the peoples on the fringes of the Empire were cannibals’ (p.122). Which leaves us to contemplate whether the act of cannibalism was, in fact, carried out by white men and not by Aboriginal peoples.

1

Once Upon a Time

Scheherazade’s wedding night was fraught with a particular peril. Convinced that women were unfaithful after a betrayal by his first wife, her new husband, King Shahryar of Persia, had ensured the fidelity of each subsequent bride by executing them the day after the wedding, thereby guaranteeing that they would not stray.

Scheherazade escaped this fate with a very powerful weapon: the art of storytelling. On her wedding night, she enthralled her husband with a story. But she did not conclude the tale. Instead, she left him dangling in suspense as dawn broke. He spared her life because of his deep curiosity about what happened next.

The following evening Scheherazade continued her story. She wove her tale throughout the night and, as the sun once again rose, left her husband craving to know more. She did the same the next night, and the next, and the next. If a story ended, she would begin a new one before the night was over, and the tales of One Thousand and One Nights are now testament to her time-honoured craft of storytelling.

At the end of those thousand and one nights, Shahryar had fallen in love with Scheherazade and she had borne him three sons. He had also grown wiser through the morals woven through her tales. Scheherazade’s stories had not only saved her life but also made her husband a better man – and a better king. I like to think that she enjoyed life to a grand old age.

As a novelist, I am of course seduced by the idea that stories can be so powerful, can take such a hold over the listener and be transformative. But as an avid reader and as a regular visitor to the cinema and theatre, I know how true this is. Few pleasures in life feel more decadent than reading a book from cover to cover simply because you cannot put it down. Those books become like treasures – mine include Blood by Tony Birch, Larry’s Party by Carol Shields, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, True Pleasures: A Memoir of Women in Paris by Lucinda Holdforth, and everything by Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Henry James and Charles Dickens. I can’t imagine not having these books close by in my house; they feel like friends.

If further evidence is needed of the hold on our hearts that stories have, we might simply look at the way our favourite tales from childhood remain with us for the rest of our lives. I still have a copy of Mog the Forgetful Cat, as well as my copies of Enid Blyton’s chronicles of the Famous Five and the Secret Seven. I didn’t part with them when I grew up into the world of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. And I still couldn’t part with them when I moved into the worlds of Mr Rochester, Mr Darcy and Colonel Brandon.

This book is inspired by one story that captured my imagination. It is the tale of Eliza Fraser, a white woman who was shipwrecked on an island off the east coast of Australia in 1836, and who spent a period of several weeks with the local Aboriginal people of that land. Like most stories that have a powerful impact, it is a simple one. A classic ‘fish-out-of-water tale’, as they might call it in the movie business.

I came across Eliza’s story by a circuitous route. I had been aware of it in the vaguest of ways from sources I couldn’t recall, but it came to mind when I was living in the prairies of Canada after finishing graduate school in the United States. In a little bookshop in Saskatoon I came across a copy of Sarah Carter’s Capturing Women: The Manipulation of Cultural Imagery in Canada’s Prairie West. Fresh from my doctoral studies in law, I usually dived into the Cultural Studies section at the bookshop to find something that would spark my interest but often left empty-handed.

But Capturing Women turned out to be a treasure trove. It included accounts of white women who had been living with the Métis in Canada of their own free will but who had found themselves described in newspaper reporting at the time as having been kidnapped. It had suited journalists and politicians to create an image of the Métis as savage and threatening. And getting the population excited and worried about the threat helped sell papers. (Not much has changed in the tactics of the newspaper world, it would seem.) But no amount of protestation from the women themselves altered the way that these stories were told in the popular press. Facts were troublesome when competing with a convenient and titillating fiction.

So I became curious to revisit the story of Eliza Fraser that I remembered as a comparable one of a white woman ‘captured by cannibals’. I was interested to see whether Eliza’s story fitted the model that Sarah Carter had identified. It turned out it didn’t. The tale of Eliza Fraser was far more nuanced and fascinating. She became both a charismatic and an elusive figure. As I traced her through the books that had been written about her, I found her to be more and more intriguing with the discovery of each new layer and interpretation of what had happened to her.

Eventually it was not just Eliza’s own story that would fascinate me. I became interested in the ways in which she had captured the imagination of so many others. She had been the subject of several fanciful accounts of her life and, in 1976, an even more fanciful film – Eliza Fraser was directed by Tim Burstall from a screenplay by David Williamson, and starred Susannah York as Eliza, Noel Ferrier as her husband and Australian icon Abigail as ‘Buxom Girl’. These interpretations tended to highlight the drama of the white woman among savages, as well as the ‘boys’ own adventure’ aspect of her rescue.

Eliza’s story also inspired more thoughtful reflection, though no less romantic. Sidney Nolan had painted her – on all fours crawling through the sandy landscape – and he had managed to intrigue his then close friend Patrick White, who himself was inspired to write a novel, A Fringe of Leaves, based on Eliza’s experiences. White, unsurprisingly, took a more complicated view of Eliza. He

Reviews for Finding Eliza

[pamelad_570511 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Larissa Behrendt is an Aboriginal lawyer, writer and activist. She investigates the story of Eliza Frazer, who was shipwrecked on Frazer Island, the home of the Butchulla people, where she stayed until she was "rescued" by two convicts who had spent many years living in Aboriginal communities. Eliza's story is that she was brutalised by savages. It suited the colonists to describe Australia's indigenous people as barbarians and cannibals to justify dispossessing them of their lands, hunting them down and slaughtering them. The convicts who saved Eliza magnified the danger because they wanted to be pardoned. Eliza herself wanted the public's sympathy and financial support. The oral history passed down by the Butchulla people is quite different. They protected Eliza and found her uncooperative and ungrateful. They date the beginning of their dispossession from Eliza Fraser's arrival.The author branches out from the Eliza Fraser story to consider other colonial narratives, not just in Australia. She talks about cannibalism: many indigenous peoples, all over the world, have been accused of cannibalism, but the evidence is slight. It is anecdotal, multiplying on itself, feeding the colonists' need to believe.Some of the books Behrendt mentions are: [A Fringe of Leaves]; [Coonardoo]; [Kings in Grass Castles]; [Heart of darkness]; [Robinson Crusoe] and, bizarrely, [Mutant Message Down Under], which was a best seller in the US and is a complete fake.Well worth reading. Lots to think about.