| Popis: |
The novels of English scholar, biologist and amateur anthropologist E. L. Grant Watson (1885-1970) clearly evidence the impact of his genteel albeit unorthodox upbringing and his Cambridge education upon his representation of the Western Australian landscape and its Aboriginal peoples. Based on his travels through the harsh Kimberley region in the company of anthropologists Alfred Radcliffe-Brown and Daisy Bates, Watson chose the novel and short story genres as the site for his experimentation with a variety of knowledges encountered through his interdisciplinary studies in the late nineteenth to mid twentieth centuries. This nexus served him well as a meeting place for his real and imagined, his so-called primitive and civilized, communities; it was a place of previously unimagined and unimaginable border crossings. Yet his previous life continued to haunt him. The resultant works are significant reflections of the philosophical, artistic and scientific ferment of the era, as the young Watson, transported well beyond his intellectual as well as his physical homeland by his Australian experiences, sought to make sense of himself and his cultural origins. With the benefit of hindsight, this essay claims he unsuccessfully sought postcolonial territory. |
