Pssst … I wannabe white

By the 60s when I was a teenager, even the first black models out of the States were acceptably European looking in both features and colour. No broad noses or black skins. Heaven forbid! The correctness and mightiness of whiteness saw to that.

My now deceased cousin, Gloria Huggins-Murphy, and I used to joke about not making it into the Surfie Stakes of the 60s. There was no glass ceiling to exclude us from the sand, the surf, the sun, where the blond, bold and beautiful surfie girls and boys played. It was more the stares and glares, as it was elsewhere when people of colour or ‘otherness’ strayed over the line. And, oh yes, despite what feminists would like to believe, white women were implicated too in that they were both the messenger and the message. Just like the blokes. I found, too, that fear, in white women – disguised as smugness – was part of whiteness.

My cousin and I knew intuitively that we were relegated to being Boongie rather than Blondie. We knew that our noses, our hair, our skin, were not quite right … that is, not white. So I never ever got to flaunt my itsy bitsy, teeny weeny, yellow black and red bikini!

And as for the cosmetic counters at the big stores, their darkest foundation, as the white girls behind the counter kindly pointed out, was … well … ‘the darkest they had’. Whiteness acknowledged whiteness even in the cosmetic industry for this so-called ‘darkest shade they had’ was unquestionably light and for white girls. They were apologetic and unnerved as they went on to the next customer, and we coloured girls giggled and moved on … having known beforehand what the response was going to be.

But colour is not just skin deep as whiteness attests to. Whiteness shamed and whiteness blamed. It defined and it delineated. That is, it defined and delineated who could come into the fold and who stayed out. In the spectrum of blackness, whiteness divided and ruled and, as a young girl, I was too boongie even for the local black beauty contests such as the Miss Opal contests. Whiteness saw to that for in the same way that little black girls chose white dolls over black ones, it too had permeated the psyche of the good coloured citizens who chose, consciously or unconsciously, the assimilated and acceptable face of lightness, so that none of the winners were ever too ‘boongie’ looking.

I was beginning to get the message. Who wouldn’t? Who couldn’t? When Whiteness was fortified and glorified even in the realm of blackness.

I thought it must be me, as Whiteness continued to scare me, scar me and jar me. Its tentacles were ever present even through the well-meaning and wonderful whitefellas with rose-coloured glasses who, so they said, ‘never noticed colour’ or stated that ‘I always wanted to be your colour, Lillian’. They oozed saccharin as they purred over and praised my acceptable caramel colouring. The acceptable caramel colouring of an octoroon, a half-caste, a part-Aborigine. But which part, which caste?

Oh the arrogance of whiteness within these well-meaning whitefellas. They exuded decency whilst being in denial. Despite being browned off by these inane remarks, being acceptable Brown in colour versus objectionable Black did have and still does have its advantages. For as the Black Panther saying of the 60s went: ‘If you’re White, that’s all right, if you’re Brown stick around, if you’re Black stay back’.

So, being Brown, it was OK to hang around. And so, in my late teens and early twenties, Whiteness beckoned me further. It even rewarded me as I became one of the very few Aborigines or the first one to do this, or to do that. I was even congratulated by my ‘own people’ as a role model who practised the rituals of whiteness, such as politeness, niceness, cleanliness and Godliness. Or so the theory went!

Whiteness, through whitefellas, some of them my best friends, insidiously seeped into my soul and psyche, without me knowing it. Encountering whitefellas daily as I rose in their ranks meant that I could observe, scrutinise and analyse them, for I was most often a minority of one, be it in the workforce, the shop or the street. Whitefellas both fascinated me and infuriated me, as they still do, today. I wanted to join them and beat them, at the same time.

In the 1960s in my heyday when I first strutted my stuff, this was all very heady and giddy. I was often confused. But then who wasn’t in the sixties? I even became educated. Truly educated in the eyes of whitefellas. I acquired degrees. I was a success and as I ventured down the many meandering corridors of acceptability, whiteness was not necessarily unkind.

But while whiteness welcomed me, it also rejected me. That’s part of its paradox. Being able to drink of the same water but not from the same cup. And speaking of drinking, I was always ‘not like the rest of them’ (meaning my mob) whilst I was clean, sober and toiling, but when I got drunk, I was often just another ‘boozing boong’.