The consequences of story

The white woman existed as story long before I chose to write of her and I can lay no more claim to her than can all of those who have spoken or written of her before. But no less either. Angus McMillan, self-styled ‘discoverer’ of Gippsland first brought her into being in 1840 with a report of his discovery of a heart cut into the ground near present-day Sale, along with a number of items of women’s clothing, a lock of hair, a broken looking-glass and an open Bible. When he later revealed that he’d also seen a woman being driven unwillingly into the bush by natives, all the elements of romance were there, out of which it was possible to construct her story. She existed. Others saw her, not only in Gippsland but as far afield as Warrnambool in Victoria’s west. Rumours spread as to who she was: someone’s daughter, someone’s wife, a virtuous woman who’d entered holy orders. She entered the public imagination in the same way that American MIAs have entered ours today. Stories circulated through word-of-mouth at first and then through the popular press, until she came to embody all that was good and civilised and noble. The idealised vision of Woman, with all the inevitable religious and mythic trappings. She existed because she needed to exist. She satisfied the need of a fearful and dislocated community for something to defend, and provided a focus for its sense of loss, something against which it could redefine itself. In writing my version of her story, I’m interested in exploring, first, our need to manufacture stories that enable us to accommodate the way we live and then, having created them, our willingness to believe in them absolutely and to live our lives by them. I’m interested in the consequences of stories. Between 1840 and 1846, numerous expeditions under the command of the Native and Border Police were sent out in search of the white woman. Most had disastrous consequences for the Kurnai people of Gippsland. The White Woman Expedition of 1846 which provides the narrative framework for my telling of the story was a privately sponsored expedition organized by the White Woman Committee. The chairman of the White Woman Committee, George Cavenagh, happened also to be editor of the Port Phillip Herald, a paper that claimed exclusive rights to publish regular despatches from the expedition as a serialized version of the continuing search for the elusive white woman. So, even as the search was being carried out, it was operating within the constructs of story with the participants acting out the roles of characters as required by Cavenagh. The modern term, I think, would be ‘beat-up’. By the time I came to work with it, then, the white woman story had an independent existence. Sightings continued to be reported up to ten years after the return of Cavenagh’s expedition; various accounts of her rescue and return to safety were circulated (the desire for the happy ending?); people knew people who had seen her; the story surfaced (and still surfaces) at regular intervals in the popular press. It still has the power to give rise to speculation and debate. A number of works of fiction based on the white woman (mostly romantic tales of adventure charged with high moral purpose) have previously been published, either as novels or as serialisations in popular magazines: Robert Russell’s The Heart ( 1849) and The Captive of Gippsland (1856), Angus McLean’s Lindigo: The Highland Girl’s Captivity Among the Australian Blacks (1866), Mary Howitt’s The Lost White Woman - A Pioneer’s Yarn (1897), George Hermann’s The Broken Honeymoon (1913) to name a few. No doubt other tellings will follow mine. Perhaps the endurance of the story is due not so much to its curio value as to its ability to regenerate itself in new forms, to transcend its particular historical setting and establish new dialogues with the present. The inevitable question of course will be, ‘Was she real? Did she exist?’ Of course she did. She did exist. She does exist. How else could we tell her story?

Liam Davison

From the New Issue

Every Man for Himself and God Against All by Werner Herzog, translated by Michael Hofmann

Only the Astronauts by Ceridwen Dovey

‘Summer Winter’, a new poem by Anna Couani

Hold your nerve

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Collected Stories by Liam Davison