When we think Valentine's Day, we picture heart chocolates, red roses, unrequited yearnings and possibly an embarrassing unwanted advance. As Stan Grant recently reminded us, however, the politics of Australian courtship has a history that is less light and easy.
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In the late 1950s, artist Arthur Boyd illustrated the fraught nature of frontier marriage in his Brides series. Yet, Australia's boundary-crossing lovers are still omitted from the historical memory of the nation. Despite their long-term, cross-generational legacies, these unions virtually became a secret of state.
The violence, rapes and rapaciousness of Australian frontiers are more widely known now, but not so the romances between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. Some of these stories have been told individually, as in Shadow Lines, by Steve Kinnane. He recounts the story of his grandparents: Jessie Argyle, taken from her Aboriginal family at the age of five, and Edward Smith, an Englishman escaping the rigid strictures of London. They fell in love in a society deeply divided on racial lines but why did such couples have to flee like exiles? Possibly it was because their unions threatened to expose a hidden fault-line of Australian colonialism - one whose legacies are with us today.
In places and at times where Aboriginal people still had the power to negotiate marriage law and authority, such courting couples created a "marital middle ground". In earlier times, Aboriginal people incorporated marriage with outsiders as a way to extend their landed authority and to ensure community survival.
These lovers generated families at the core of the cultural and historical interface that became the Australian nation. However, the young coloniser state did not like it.
From Federation until the 1960s, love affairs between Aboriginal people and others were severely restricted across all of northern Australia. Queensland moved rapidly to curb courtship and marriage between white Australian men and Aboriginal women. Western Australia and the Northern Territory followed. That didn't mean that relationships stopped. Love often prevailed.
Australia's anti-miscegenation laws came under the guise of Aboriginal Protection, purportedly to protect Aboriginal women from sexual exploitation by white men. Police and missionary enforcers placed white working class men living with Aboriginal women under sexual surveillance, forcing them to either apply for permits or be arrested. Many were fined or jailed. Magistrates, pastoralists, police and missionaries also fell in love with Aboriginal women.
With black and white parents' unions illicit in the eyes of the coloniser state, the children, too, were treated as illegitimate. Little children were taken away. White men were prohibited from residing on Aboriginal reserves. A father could arrive home to find his wife and children taken away for good.
Australian lovers who were willing to cross these punitive marriage bars showed an uncommon courage. Out of this "illicit love" came new generations who carry on the battles for their ancestors and their communities. Some are the very same people who are required today to justify their Aboriginality because of mixed descent. Until we come to terms with the story of courtship, love and family across the colonising divide as a defining part of Australian history, we cannot move on as a nation.
