ABSTRACT

May Gibbs’s gumnut stories are central to the development of an Australian national imaginary. By connecting the natural ‘bush’ environment to settler-colonial social issues and scenes, Gibbs’s imagery and narrative reimagined the bush as a ‘home’ for colonizers, essentially ‘indigenising’ them in the image of white gumnut babies. The most comprehensive and influential interpretations of Gibbs’s work emphasize its currency to contemporaneous life and cultural trends, and its deft negotiation of sexuality, through the figures of the voluptuous gumnut babies and scrawny bad Banksia Men, who are covered with hair and ‘lips.’ A less prevalent but no less convincing interpretation underscores the dimension of race within Gibbs’s work: the whiteness of the stories’ heroes, and the blackness, even Aboriginality, of their nemeses, the wicked Banksia men. Through the concept of the fetish, this article interprets the banksia as an object produced in an intercultural space, and reproducing (in Gibbs’s stories) a set of racial anxieties about the Other in terms of sex and sexuality. How does race come to be parsed as sex? And what does the confluence of these anxieties reveal about settler representations of Aboriginality and the colonial mindset?

摘要

梅·吉布斯 (May Gibbs) 的橡皮糖故事是澳大利亚民族想象发展的核心。通过将自然的“丛林”环境与定居者-殖民时期的社会问题和场景联系起来，吉布斯的意象和叙述将丛林重新想象为殖民者的“家”，基本上是将他们“本土化”为白色橡皮糖婴儿的形象。对吉布斯作品最全面和最有影响力的诠释强调了它对当代生活和文化趋势的流行，以及通过性感的橡皮糖婴儿和骨瘦如柴的坏班克西亚男人的形象，这些人物被头发和“嘴唇”覆盖。一个不那么普遍但同样令人信服的解释强调了吉布斯作品中的种族维度：故事中英雄的白人，以及他们的敌人，邪恶的班克西亚人的黑人，甚至原住民。通过恋物癖的概念，本文将班克萨解释为在跨文化空间中生产的对象，并再现（在吉布斯的故事中）在性和性方面对他者的一系列种族焦虑。种族是如何被解析为性的？这些焦虑的汇合揭示了关于原住民和殖民心态的定居者表征的什么？