Book Review

White vanishing: Rethinking Australia's lost-in-the-bush myth Book Review

Marilyne Brun

2014

Overview

Tilley's research leads her to identify four main semiotic features for the trope (which are termed \"commodities\" in the work): white vanishing texts invariably displace Indigenous peoples; although such texts seem to deal with white absence, they in fact assert white presence and authority (what Tilley terms \"white presencing\"); their treatment of time further reinforces white presence through the use of discourses of progress and the binary opposition of settler and Indigenous time frames; finally, the spatial politics of white vanishing narratives involve a \"naturalized colonization of Indigenous space\" (53). The concept of naturalization is at the centre of Tilley's argumentation, since she contends that the white vanishing trope as a whole represents a naturalization of Indigenous (physical and psychological) displacement, of settler colonial presence, and of Anglo-Celtic values on \"life, love, family, nurturing, prosperity\" (247). Despite the limits of the analysis which were pointed at above, and although one could deplore the high price of the book, which will probably limit its distribution to university libraries, it will provide academics and students working on non-Indigenous Australian literature and Australian settler colonialism with a clear demonstration of the insidious nature of settler colonial logics.

• Publisher: Société d'Étude des Pays du Commonwealth
• Subject: Bird, David / Discourse analysis, Narrative / Missing children in literature / Missing persons