Oh my golly
Taboo racist dolls for sale in Tassie
IWAS seriously startled to come face-to-face with a golliwog in a shop in country Tasmania. The large eyes of the taboo rag doll appeared to dart furtively to the side, as if to avoid my gaze. Perhaps the curly-headed lass in the orange dress and avocado-green check apron knew of the world of trouble she may be in if she was recognised by a journalist. Or perhaps her coy look was a figment of my fertile imagination, just like the coquettish smile she seemed to be giving me with her bright red lips.
Then I realised her playful glance was trained not on me but on the smart doll seated beside her, a tall fellow with luxuriant frizzy locks. He was resplendent in a blue shirt with white polka dots, a scarlet bow-tie and matching shoes with white laces.
“He’s seen us,” I imagined the flirtatious gal whispering out the corner of her stitched-on mouth.
“Don’t move,” her companion snaps back, with the nervous grin of a mischievous schoolboy.
These two scallywags seemed to be bursting with a naughty secret.
You see, the last time I heard anything about golliwogs was a year ago when their troublesome kind were displayed at the Royal Adelaide Show in South Australia and brought such an outcry they were abruptly whisked off the shelves.
Golliwogs are racist, according to the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, which lists them among the many disrespectful, hurtful images of dark-skinned people from the 19th century. They are described by the museum as “the least known of the major anti-Black caricatures in the United States”. They create anger worldwide as symbols of oppression.
And there they were smiling and on sale at The Woodcraft Shop in the historic southern Tasmanian Midland town of Richmond. But perhaps not for long. The doll designer who made them, 80-yearold Kate Finn from NSW, told me they were her last batch due to the abusive backlash she had suffered.
“The threats over the past few years have been so unpleasant,” Mrs Finn said, explaining that making the dolls was not worth the drama.
“The PC terrorists were giving us such a hard time. I had one woman tell us she’d destroy us.”
Mrs Finn said retailers who had stocked her golliwogs had been threatened with “bricks through their windows” and “most couldn’t cope with it” and had stopped selling them.
She said The Woodcraft Shop had bought all her remaining stock. Jess Bond, who works in the tiny Richmond craft shop, said they too had copped abuse for the gollies.
“For 99 per cent of people there’s no issue, people love them, but once every few months someone comes in,” she said. “I had a woman call us racist and try to get everybody out of the shop, an older gentleman in his 80s or 90s said much the same thing.”
For the past 20 years, golliwogs have been written out of revised editions of Enid Blyton’s Noddy books because they are deemed racist by the publisher. In the original Here Comes Noddy Again, a golliwog asks the hero to give him a lift to the forest and then steals his car. It has been argued that golliwogs are too often portrayed as bad guys in Blyton’s tales. And, yes, one of Blyton’s storybook golliwogs was turned white by having her face scrubbed clean.
Ten years ago, Blyton’s granddaughter, Sophie Smallwood, a preschool teacher from West Sussex, wrote a new adventure for Noddy but chose not to include golliwogs.
Last year, The Royal Mint canned its plans for a 50-pence coin to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Blyton’s death on the grounds the author “is known to have been a racist, sexist, homophobe”.
In 2016, golliwogs were displayed in a Terry White Chemists’ window in Toowoomba, with a pun for a sign, “Experience a White Christmas”. As a result, Aboriginal activist Stephen Hagan called the Queensland regional hub the nation’s “most racist city”. He had spent years fighting in Australian courts in a related case and in 2003 got a United Nations committee to recommend the name E. S. “Nigger” Brown Stand at Toowoomba’s Clive Berghofer Stadium be changed.
Yet here I was in a quaint little shop in a quiet sandstone town surrounded by the cheery-looking but offending dolls and barely an eyebrow was being raised.
As I stood there, my jaw agape, my dear mum appeared beside me. “Aren’t they beautiful,” she picked up a golliwog and gave it a cuddle. “We all had these as children.” For her, the dolls were a cherished memory of childhood in wartime London and were devoid of racial overtones.
Later I asked a dark-skinned mate and he told me he found the dolls deeply and personally offensive.
Another mate with Tasmanian Aboriginal heritage agreed they were racist but perhaps not as offensive to him as to others because he had not suffered racism as a result of skin tone. A young family member told me that banning golliwogs would whitewash history and that we needed to confront racist symbols to remind us of past wrongs.
Can a word or phrase, a toy or an attitude be offensive when no offence is meant? Who defines what is offensive, the offender or offended? If we know something offends, and we continue to do it, does that change the virtue or merit of our intent?
In 2005, Prince Harry attended a fancy-dress party dressed as a Nazi and was widely condemned and forced to apologise. To many who lost loved ones in the war the swastika, like the golliwog to some who have been racially abused, is offensive and no laughing matter.
This issue is an ethical minefield and the easy way out is to dismiss the whole shebang as political correctness gone mad. But I reckon the only group more boorish and tedious than the self-righteous PC brigade is the anti-PC brigade.
A more challenging and perhaps more virtuous path would be to discuss the issue. After all, it is not going away. Not long after seeing golliwogs at Richmond, I found one for sale in a second-hand shop at Willow Court in New Norfolk.
The chipper little blighters appear to be breeding in the districts.