Chapter 14 “Born and Nurtured in Darkest Ignorance” 1 : White Imaginings of Aboriginal Maternity Liz Conor In 1893 the United States company Quaker Oats trademarked Aunt Jemima, a matronly Southern slave figure, for American packaged breakfast products. 2 This domesticated “Mammy” figure had derived from a minstrel song of that name and persisted through the popular 1940s radio series The Beulah Show. Across the Pacific, in 1943, the widely read Australian journalist Ernestine Hill described a group of Aboriginal women at Horseshoe Bend on the Northern Territory Finke river as “a bevy of fat, smiling lubras, like American mammies in their bright frocks and kerchiefs.” 3 Whether any of these women actually were mothers was beside the point. In perhaps the first and last likening of Australian aboriginal women to the American Mammy figure, Hill had hoped to evoke their servility in this quaint spectacle of outback domesticity, but she had also reassigned the ostensibly innate maternity of the native woman to white service. The maternity of the starch-aproned and neatly-turbaned figure of the slave Mammy was embodied, not in her relationship with her own children, but in her domestic service to white women and her jovial nurturing of their children. In Australia, the wide scale appropriation of Aboriginal girls and women’s labor as domestic apprentices and indentures in mission and government stations and white homes, does not manifest in the white imagination as a motherly Aboriginal Mammy type except in this one instance given by Hill. Given the other racialised types circulating between the United States and Australia in the 1940s--such as the