Oh hey I had a dream last night that Sherlock Holmes was half Aboriginal Australian.
I think it's because of Jacob Geller's video essay on 1984, which covered a lot about Oscar Wilde's childhood as the son of an official in British-occupied India.
In this dream, Sherlock and Mycroft were half-brothers. Their father was working in British-controlled/occupied Australia in the mid-1800s. Mycroft had been conceived with the first wife (white), and Sherlock with an aboriginal woman that was, in this dream, a second wife after the first died, but had questionably consented to the marriage.
And even in the dream, it was heavily indicated that Sherlock was dealing with a LOT of racism for being mixed, even (especially) after the family returned to England (I think without his mom)
So that was. An interesting AU? Maybe? Is this a thing that could lend a new lens through which to play with the characters, or is it conceptually a bit of a nothingburger?
I don't know a whole lot about Colonial Australia or how Aboriginal peoples were treated during that period other than 'presumably not well.'
I don't study colonial Australia, but I do study British India and the relationship between gender and imperialism. When thinking about this AU, I'm mainly influenced by three different texts: Durba Ghosh's Sex and the Family in Colonial India, George Orwell's Burmese Days, and the Philippa Levine-edited volume Gender and Empire. (Of which I'll include discussion beneath the cut.)
The way I see this playing out is that Mycroft is being raised to take on a role within the imperial ecosystem. He is being prepared to go "Home," to a place he's never been before so that he can receive the Oxbridge education that will prepare him to continue in his father's military and/or political career. Sherlock is supposed to stay in Australia and become a missionary, but while they're in Australia, neither half-brother is old enough to understand why they're supposed to have such diverging paths. Their father would have to be managing their educations in Australia, so that they grow up close to each other.
Children were often sent to England at a fairly young age. I feel that in this AU, Mycroft would need to be sent to England later, so that Sherlock could stow himself away in Mycroft's luggage because he does not want to be separated from his half-brother. Arriving in England, their relatives are surprised at the sight of young Sherlock, someone who they may not have known existed, but they have to do something about him until he can be sent back to Australia. Their father ends up returning to bring Sherlock back, but he decides to stay in England, leaving Sherlock's mother in Australia. (He may never communicate with her again. It was not uncommon for mixed-race children sent to England to have no communication with their maternal family after leaving their country, nor was it uncommon for British men to abandon their female partners in their native country.)
Sherlock is supposed to be quiet and stay out of trouble, but he doesn't quite see why Mycroft is supposed to be visible and he isn't. During this period, there were a fair number of mixed-race children of exiled leaders of precolonial states in England (including Maharajah Duleep Singh's eight children); if Sherlock, Mycroft, and their father invent a story about his mother having been of "noble" birth in her Aboriginal community, that would likely open up social avenues for Sherlock to be integrated into white Victorian society. (Textually, Sherlock's family is supposed to be landed gentry, and it was this class that could integrate mixed-race children into white British society, although the most famous examples happened prior to this.)
Sherlock would chafe at the limits imposed on him by his status as an exotic token of Empire and the false past pushed onto him to give him status, but he would also struggle with the isolation from his mother's family and how he's supposed to be representative of a group of people he never got to grow up with (especially if his mother had converted to Christianity before he was born, which would have been a somewhat probable way for her to have met his father). It is possible that he could find some freedom to act in slightly socially unexpected ways by passing it off as an "Aboriginal tradition" in this society obsessed with the exotic. Sherlock may also try to use his detection skills to resolve his feelings of isolation from his Aboriginal family by trying to find his mother and reestablish contact, as Kitty Kirkpatrick had done. (This may also be a way by which he tries to come to terms with the pain his voluntary departure caused him and his mother.)
Another way in which Sherlock might struggle is that he'd have to push back on a social and political perception of him as effeminate. It was a very common imperial and colonial trope to call colonized men effeminate to justify not giving them greater rights in society. If Sherlock is trying to be taken seriously by white society, he may be facing greater pressure to get married and have children to demonstrate that he can be a model patriarch, even if he doesn't want to. He may worry that his relationship with John Watson would place both of them under greater scrutiny on matters of sexuality. This may also complicate his relationship with the women in his life: he may better understand the poor treatment of women in this period, but he may also perpetuate it to show that he is a man by colonial standards. (Another degree of complication comes from how he feels about his mother, and if he is especially empathetic or resentful towards women who remind him of her.)
I think his relationship with Mycroft would become increasingly bitter as they separately try to reconcile their experiences with the colonial system and their differing views of their arrival in England. Mycroft would work within the system of imperial governance; I think that even if he saw the awful things done in the name of the civilizing mission, he would try to justify it all because he thinks Sherlock is an example of the good that could come from imperialism and he loves his brother. He may feel overshadowed by Sherlock's social status (which would entirely come from racialized exoticism). Sherlock may struggle to reconcile his own lived experiences with the imperial idealism Mycroft spouts, especially in the context of reactions to atrocities committed in the Belgian Congo and imperialism as becoming increasingly racialized.
Holy shit you know so much.
If even a fraction of the stuff you know about British India is applicable to the occupation of Oceania (and it sounds like most of it is broadly applicable to non-white colonies), then this is a deep insight into the ways my accidental concept could function as an actual commentary on the original work!
(If, specifically, written by someone who is not me, preferably someone who is themselves of an Aboriginal background.)
@ladybold:
Just a note you can't be half indigenous, either you are or not. If his mum is indigenous than he is too. But look up the Stolen Generations for more information. They would purposely remove lighter skinned indigenous people from their communities and force to integrate so there is a chance depending on how you write it that his mother and him could both "look" white.
