Eliza Fraser.
As the first white woman to meet blackfullahs and to tell her tale, Eliza Fraser’s story was bound to have an impact. It has become a famous, archetypal encounter between a white woman and Australia’s Indigenous people and, from its earliest days, it was a powerful and influential tale that helped generate fear and prejudice about Aborigines and the frontier. Her tale of shipwreck on 21 May 1836, her 52 days with the Ka’bi people and her subsequent ‘rescue’ and return to white settlement on 22 August 1836 became so well known and so thoroughly worked over, that women writing later could not help but be influenced by it.
As an early example of colonial storytelling at work, particularly about white women and Aborigines, Eliza’s story encapsulated the dread of shipwreck and the frightening prospect of travellers falling victim to unknown, though presumably savage, peoples. This fear fostered a vigorous genre of captivity tales during the late eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth centuries, particularly in the United States of America. While usually based on fact, such narratives were written to suit a readership seeking vicarious adventure, and often contained the religious motives of the author or publisher.
Eliza’s story was so popular that her history has been refracted into a collage of tellings and retellings, of contradictions and conflicting interpretations, and through later appropriations into art and literature. It has been transposed from its origins as a story of survival from shipwreck to the status or myth and legend. The women who later wrote of their own encounters could not have been immune to the seduction of its sensationalism.
