期刊名称：Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature
印刷版ISSN：1447-8986
电子版ISSN：1833-6027
出版年度：2007
卷号：SP
页码：157-173
出版社：Association for the Study of Australian Literature
摘要：It is a striking paradox that the white man credited with inventing the
phrase ¡°breed out the colour¡±, Dr Cecil Cook, Chief Medical Officer
and Chief Protector of Aborigines from 1927 to 1939 in the Northern
Territory, should be represented as an albino. Frances de Groen¡¯s Xavier
Herbert: A Biography introduces Cook (friend and foe to Herbert) as a ¡°tall
albino, conspicuous for his ruddy face, snow-white hair and pale blue eyes
(one of them glass)¡± (59). And in an edition of Herbert¡¯s letters Cook is
presented as a ¡°striking and controversial figure (he was an albino with a
glass eye)¡± (de Groen and Hergenhan 467). When I first came across the
idea that Cook was an albino I thought it strange, funny even, that the man
known for ¡°breed out the colour¡± had no colour himself. It sets in motion
a series of delicious paradoxes, as in: the man who invented the phrase ¡°breed out
the colour¡± had a ¡°problem¡± with whiteness; he needed colour but professed the need to
¡°breed it out¡± of Aboriginal people; he was attempting to ¡°pass as white¡± by dyeing
his hair; his ¡°Englishness¡± (albion/albino) was ¡°un-Australian¡±; his skin epitomised
the unsuitability of the Territory for white Australians; he was the bearer of a genetic
disorder (an excessive corporeal whiteness), while his role was to order, (genetically, socially
and by skin), the future ¡°stock¡± of the Territory as ideologically white; and so on.
