The Troubled Courtship of Gladys and Mick

In 1959, a Northern Territory bureaucrat refused permission for Mick Daly, a non-Aboriginal drover, to marry his Aboriginal girlfriend, Gladys Namagu. Their case sparked a national controversy involving federal and state politicians, academics, the media, and even the United Nations. This article reconstructs the story of Gladys and Mick's romance, comparing their particular corporealities to that conjugal body demanded as the 'proper' subject of matrimony. In their troubled courtship, how was marriage deployed as a regulatory strategy, and how did the specificities of race disrupt or contest the corporeal body politic discursively figured therein? The story of Gladys and Mick is part of a longer work in progress concerning 'the conjugal body politic'-the corporeal, political subjectivities produced and regulated in Australian legislation on marriage and marriage-like relationships. But this reasoning is not in the fashion to choose me a husband. O me, the word 'choose'! I may neither choose who I would nor refuse who I dislike The Merchant of Venice I 2