Colonial Origins and Audience Collusion: The Merle Oberon Story in 1930s Australia

Colonialism has depended upon the plasticity of class status and racial categories, even as colonial elites sought constantly to shore up the boundaries and markers that sustained their elite status. As Homi Bhabha has helped us to understand, colonialism also fostered subject positions in which the colonized were supposed to emulate the colonizers, only to be mocked for their mimicry of their superiors.¹ For the mixed-race, such as the Anglo-Indian community in late colonial India that Adrian Carton discusses insightfully in the previous chapter, any aspirations to be accepted as fully British were constantly checked by structural exclusion and marginalization. For the young woman who would become mid-twentieth-century film star Merle Oberon, transnational mobility, her imperial access to the metropole, was a way of escaping those constraints and reinventing herself as part of the colonial ruling elite. That she did so through a fabrication of herself as another kind of colonial — Tasmanian — suggests the connections between transnational mobility, fantasy and pretence, as well as the requirement of whiteness for stardom in the early to mid-twentieth century.