SOURCE: Healy, J. J. “The Literature of Contact: Tucker.” In Literature and the Aborigine in Australia 1770-1975, pp. 26-48. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1978.

In the following excerpt, Healy presents a brief overview of nineteenth-century literary works that represent white Australian contact with Aborigines, and goes on to assess this process in regard to James Tucker's novel Ralph Rashleigh.

Literature is concerned with the problems of meaning and reality. There are sub-forms of literature whose major purpose is entertainment and where the energies of the writer move toward the distortion of meaning and the subversion of reality. Australia had a rash of romantic fictions from the 1830s on. The historian and novelist Marjorie Barnard appropriately described them as “onlooker books”.¹ The recipe for an Australian novel, according to Mrs R. Lee's Adventures in Australia (1851), was a quick read through Stokes, Grey, Sturt, and Eyre, followed by a...