Fringe Dwellers

The Fringe Dwellers was first published by Sun Books, Melbourne, in 1961. Unfortunately, like many Australian classics, it is out of print. It tells the story of two part-Aboriginal sisters, teenagers Trilby and Noonah Comeaway. They had been sent to an Aboriginal Mission by their parents in order to get an education, but the story opens as they are about to leave the Mission - and their younger brother and sister - to join their parents in an Aboriginal settlement on the outskirts of Geraldton, WA. The novel highlights their different attitudes to their position as part-Aboriginals in the no-man's-land between black and white society. Noonah wants to become a nurse and to be assimilated into white society. Trilby is a rebel and wants to be accepted on her own terms. Their mother, Mrs Comeaway, is content to remain on the fringes among her own people. The family moves into a new housing estate but they are unable to adapt to the expectations of white society. Various relatives move in with them, their father goes walkabout, the rent is in arrears, and Trilby's illegitimate baby dies in a semi-deliberate accident. Eventually the family is evicted and returns to a one-roomed shack on a ‘native’ reservation. Trilby, once a rebel against the old life, is finally resigned to the squalid card-playing, wine-drinking emptiness that the novel characterises as the existence of the fringe-dwellers. The book was acclaimed at the time as one of the first novels to present an Aboriginal character (Trilby) as the central character, and possibly the first to portray the lives of urban or semi-urban Aboriginals. It is interesting to compare The Fringe Dwellers to Katherine Susannah Prichard's Coonardoo, and also to Sally Morgan's My Place.