Drawing Southerners’ Attention to the Far North: Kylie Tennant’s Mission as a Public Commentator in Mid-Century Australia

Kylie Tennant was one of Australia’s most popular and influential writers in the mid-20th century. Having gained fame in the 1930s and 1940s for her eye-witness accounts of the suffering of the poor and unemployed, in the late 1950s she used her public platform to draw attention to the terrible consequences of colonialism for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the far north. Her books ‘Speak You So Gently’ and ‘All the Proud Tribesmen’ sold well nationally and internationally, fulfilling her aim to promote community co-operatives as a solution. Here I position her as an activist who sought to shift Australian public opinion away from racism. I suggest that we might see her as a transitional figure between Xavier Herbert, who in the 1930s profited from colourful depictions of Aboriginal degradation, and Kath Walker / Oodgeroo Noonuccal, the celebrated Indigenous poet whose works from the 1960s evoked Aboriginal oppression and called for human rights and full citizenship.